by Karen White
Sara smiled brightly and reached out her arms for her doll. Earlene stood to tuck the doll back into the crook of Sara’s arm and pull the sheets up. As she leaned over Sara to kiss her forehead, the chain around her neck slid out of the collar of her blouse, and Lillian stopped breathing. The wings of the gold angel charm twirled, teasing Lillian with each twinkle of light it reflected from the window. Her hand reached for her own angel charm, and as her gnarled fingers grasped it, she caught Earlene’s gaze and held it.
Slowly, Earlene sat down, her own hand tucking the charm back out of sight, but it was too late. Lillian had seen it, and along with it saw her own past and the sudden realization that seven decades could be reduced to the blink of an eye, or the reflection of sunlight on the wings of a gold angel.
“Where did you get that?” Lillian asked, her voice sounding horrifyingly normal.
Earlene lifted her chin in a way that was so reminiscent of Annabelle in a stubborn mood that Lillian wanted to laugh at her own stupidity. It had been there the whole time—the familiarity, the unexplained connection she’d felt. The moonflowers. Maybe Lillian had known all along, but like a child opening the door to a darkened closet, she’d been afraid to look inside, not really wanting to know. Because once she saw what was on the other side of the door, she knew what would have to happen next, and she wasn’t at all sure that she was ready.
“My grandmother left it for me when she died.” Earlene’s jaw didn’t waver, but remained set in the endearingly familiar way.
“Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim,” Lillian said slowly, her mouth rusty on the old words. “Do you know what it means?” She still held on to a thread of doubt that maybe she was wrong, that maybe this girl wasn’t who Lillian thought she was.
Earlene’s gaze never shifted as she answered. “ ‘Be patient and strong; someday this pain will be useful to you.’ It’s Ovid.”
Tucker looked from Lillian to Earlene and then back again. “Earlene said that it was a fad when you were younger—that lots of girls had them. Right?”
Lillian found herself staring out the window toward the alley of old trees, the stiff limbs reluctantly shifting in the wind, going where they didn’t want to go. She closed her eyes, felt the ache in her fingers, and knew what it was like. After a deep breath, she said, “There are only three that I know of. And they all say the same thing because they were all engraved at the same time.” She looked back at Earlene, who was studiously avoiding Tucker’s eyes. “Which one is yours?”
Lillian saw the old familiar jut of the chin again. “Annabelle’s. Annabelle O’Hare Mercer was my maternal grandmother.”
Lillian nodded, feeling surprisingly calm as if none of this was news to her. “And your real name is . . .” She found herself unable to say it, the unknown darkness behind the door seeping towards her.
“Piper Mercer Mills.” Her chin wobbled just a little as she said her name, the little movement revealing how hard it had been for her.
This time, Lillian did laugh—great gasping laughs of relief, and of the inevitability of everything. Since receiving Piper’s first letter, she’d known this would happen, regardless of her efforts to the contrary. If she believed in such a thing as karma, she would have agreed that this was it, that all past sins would come back to you regardless of how many hours spanned the commission of the sin and the reckoning. And she laughed with joy, as if having this girl in front of her was like having Annabelle back, and knowing that to find the truth, Annabelle would have done exactly what her granddaughter had done.
Tucker gently disengaged himself from the head of the bed, where the now sleeping Sara had been resting against his chest, and stood. Color flooded his face, and even under the circumstances, Lillian found any emotion besides sorrow there a welcome sight.
“Piper Mills? You’re Piper Mills?” His voice was hard, and Lillian wasn’t sure if he was angrier at Piper for her deception, or at himself for his gullibility.
Piper stood, too, and faced Tucker. She reached a hand up to touch his arm, then dropped it when he flinched. “I’m sorry. I never meant to deceive anyone.”
Tucker’s expression was mocking. “Really? Then what exactly were you trying to accomplish?”
For a moment, Piper looked as if she were unsure of the right answer. “I needed to know about my grandmother. I wrote to Lillian three times—the first two letters were ignored and the third was replied to by you stating that your grandmother was too sickly to meet with me and that she didn’t know who my grandmother was.” She lifted her chin a notch. “And I knew both statements were untrue.”
“So you figured you’d just come here, lie about who you are, and try to get what you wanted.”
Piper clasped her hands together in front of her. “At the time, I couldn’t think of another way to gain access to your grandmother.” She shot an apologetic glance at Lillian.
“You couldn’t or you didn’t bother to find another way?” He shook his head and started to say something else, but his gaze fell on Sara, who had fallen asleep. Quietly he said, “I can’t. . . . I have to go.” Without looking at anyone else, he touched Sara gently on the forehead, then left the room, passing Helen in the doorway.
“Piper?” she asked as she stepped into the room.
“I’m here with your grandmother and Sara.” Piper moved toward Helen, took hold of her arm, and brought her back to her vacated seat.
Before sitting, Helen grabbed Piper by the shoulders. “You told them?”
“Not exactly. Lillian saw my necklace.”
Helen fell inelegantly into her chair. “Oh, wonderful. I told you that you needed to tell them before they found out.”
“You knew about this?” Lillian tried to show her indignation but she wasn’t all that surprised to find out that Helen already knew Piper’s secret. She’d always seen things more clearly than anybody else.
“It doesn’t really matter, Malily. You both weren’t completely truthful, were you? She just wants to ask you about her grandmother, all right? And I know that you know who Annabelle O’Hare was because she’s all over your scrapbook—at least the parts you’ve shared with me.” She leaned toward Lillian. “This whole situation could have been avoided if you’d simply told her yes when she first asked. Annabelle is gone—what harm could it do?”
Lillian thought back to the time when she was eight years old and she’d fallen off her horse and landed on her back, knocking all the air from her lungs. As she’d gasped for air she’d wondered if it were possible to drown on dry land, and found herself wondering the same thing now. A calmness descended on her, making her think of drowning again, and of Susan, and she wondered if this was how Susan had felt after she’d stepped into the cool waters of the Savannah River.
Lillian had the absurd notion to laugh again, as if it were the only normal response to the vagaries of life—as if Sara’s brush with death had been a necessary reminder of how fleeting this life was, and how it could disappear in the same amount of time a moonflower bloom took to close in the bright light of day.
Schooling her face to hide any emotion, as she’d been taught, Lillian said,“If it’s any consolation, I recently told Tucker that I’d changed my mind, that I wanted him to contact Piper. He said that his phone calls to the home number she’d given us went unanswered. He was going to write a letter. I suppose it’s unnecessary now.” She paused to let her words sink in. “I’m not really sure why I changed my mind, only that Annabelle and I used to be friends. I suppose I was curious.” She focused her attention back on Sara. “Not that I think it matters now. I doubt Tucker will want her to stay.”
She fought to control her expression, feeling elated and disappointed at the same time. Her thoughts warred between wanting to free herself from the weight of her memories, and clinging to the Lillian Harrington-Ross she had created, the woman who claimed no regrets.
Feeling much older than her ninety years, Lillian leaned over and kissed Sara’s soft cheek. The
n she stood and straightened her skirt. “This has been an overtaxing afternoon and I need to go lie down for a bit before supper. I don’t know if we’ll speak again, Piper, so I’ll tell you good-bye now.”
Piper just stared at her. “But you didn’t ask . . . why.”
Lillian raised an eyebrow, an expression that had once made people back down. It had never worked on Annabelle and it didn’t seem to have any effect on her granddaughter, either. “I assumed because Annabelle had passed, and because you were feeling guilty that you hadn’t had the time when she was living to discover her story.”
A pink flush flooded Piper’s cheeks. “I didn’t even know she had a story until I was given the letters that she’d written to you here at Asphodel, asking for forgiveness for something she’d done. But you wouldn’t have known that, would you? Because all were marked ‘return to sender.’ ”
Lillian fought the urge to sink back down into her chair but managed to remain standing. “Is that all?”
Piper’s eyes narrowed. “No. I also found torn pages from a scrapbook the two of you shared with a girl named Josie, and a necklace you called Lola. You were best friends, the three of you. Then Tucker wrote back telling me that you didn’t recall knowing my grandmother, and I knew you were lying. I wanted to know why. And I also . . .” She stopped abruptly, her gaze darting away.
“And also what?” Lillian asked, focusing on standing and breathing evenly.
“Nothing,” Piper answered, and their eyes met again in an understanding of secrets kept, the shiny thing seen at the bottom of a well, too dangerous to obtain. “But don’t you want to see Annabelle’s scrapbook pages again? Was she really so unimportant in your life that none of it matters now?”
She was so tired of thinking, of being the keeper of secrets. Of being the last one left. She took a deep breath and met Piper’s gaze. “Annabelle was like a sister to me once. So be careful what you say. And what answers you want to find. You just might discover that you were better off not knowing.”
Lillian touched her granddaughter on the shoulder. “Helen, please help me to my room. I’m so exhausted all of a sudden. Then you can call Emily to come sit with Sara so she doesn’t wake up alone.”
Piper’s voice was even, leaving out the desperateness Lillian knew she felt. “But can I stay?”
Her exhaustion allowed Lillian only a small shrug of her shoulders. Feeling like a coward she said, “It’s not up to me. Speak with Tucker.”
With a final glance at the sleeping Sara, she let Helen take her arm, and the two of them, each helping the other, left Piper standing in the middle of the room looking so much like Annabelle that it made Lillian want to laugh again.
I watched them leave, feeling as if I’d been winding a jack-in-the-box, my emotions fluctuating between excitement and trepidation while I waited for the box to spring open. Yet unlike a child’s toy, I had no idea what was inside the box, and was still unsure of whether I really wanted to find out.
I still remembered my conversation with Lillian the first time I’d come to supper at Asphodel. She’d said that there was nobody left who knew the truth. And I thought again about the blue baby’s sweater and blanket from my grandparents’ house, and how Lillian had lied about remembering my grandmother. The truth. Maybe it was my fear of the truth that had kept me from blurting out my discovery of the newspaper article about the baby found in the river. Or maybe it was because now that I’d found a surrogate family, I wasn’t ready to lose them so soon.
I left the house, aware of the black clouds gathering overhead, and went to the one place I knew Tucker would have gone—the one place I had always been drawn to when I needed a place to think. The stable doors were open on both ends, creating a clear view from one side to the other and I easily spotted Tucker at Captain Wentworth’s stall. I knew he could hear me approach, but he didn’t turn to acknowledge me.
Captain Wentworth nickered softly in greeting, as if to make up for Tucker’s rudeness, and Tucker stepped back as I reached for the horse. “Hey, boy. You being good?” I rubbed his nose and watched his ears twitch like antennae.
Tucker surprised me by speaking first. “It must have been a big joke to you every time I asked you about your riding experience. God, how stupid I must have looked to you.”
I faced him. “No, Tucker. That wasn’t it at all. I felt ashamed, and I wanted to tell you so many times. I did. But I kept on imagining . . . this. How angry everyone would be with me. And I didn’t want to . . . to lose what I’ve found here. A sense of belonging, and of being needed and respected again. I haven’t had that in a very long time.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “But Piper Mills, of all people. Grand Slam champion and Olympic hopeful, for crying out loud.”
Captain Wentworth nudged Tucker’s arm. “Sorry, boy. I don’t have anything for you right now. Maybe later.” He stroked the long neck, but his eyes focused on me. “So why did you do it? Why did you lie?”
I turned away, still unsure of my answer. I looked down at my shoes, now covered in shavings and dust from the stable floor, and breathed in deeply the smells of my childhood and the part of my life before the accident. A life that seemed so distant now that it was hard to imagine it had once been mine. I took a deep breath and faced him again, trying to put into words something I was just beginning to realize myself.
“Because I wanted to wake up. Because I heard the world snapping outside my tiny life and I wanted to be a part of it again. Because I missed jumping insurmountable obstacles and cheating disaster every time I landed. And because there’s more to life than regret but I’d much rather live the rest of my life regretting that I got caught trying to do something stupid rather than regretting that I never even tried.”
Tucker stayed where he was, leaning against Captain Wentworth’s stall. Captain Wentworth had lost interest in our conversation and had returned to his feed bucket, as if deliberately giving us privacy. “The stupid thing is that some small part of me does understand,” he said quietly.
And I knew that he did; it had been almost two years since Susan’s death, yet his former life must have seemed as alien to him as my own was to me. Maybe he’d also heard that snapping, but had been unsure or unable to figure out what to do about it.
“But why now? Your accident was nearly six years ago.”
I took a deep breath, trying to decide what parts I should tell him, and what I should leave out. In the end, I told him everything: about my grandparents’ deaths; about the hidden room and the knitted blanket and sweater; about the letters my grandmother had written to his, asking for forgiveness, that had been returned unopened; and about the torn scrapbook pages and the necklace. And then he moved forward and touched my arm, showing me that he might still be angry and wasn’t sure he’d be able to forgive me, but that he understood with the empathy of someone who’d been stumbling in the dark and would reach for the first glimmer of light regardless of its source.
He drew his head back, his eyes never leaving my face. “There’s something else though, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Why would you say that?”
He raised an eyebrow that reminded me so much of Lillian that I almost smiled. “Because it would take more than just an interest in your grandmother’s story to entice the Piper Mills I’ve read about. Impossibly high jumps, sure, but not a cross rail. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I thought of denying it, and not just because I’d withheld the same knowledge from Lillian. It was more the threat of the unknown—of the certain understanding that my grandmother knew something about that baby, and had maybe had a part in its fate. I met Tucker’s gaze, seeing the boy who’d been afraid of thunderstorms as a child, and how he still wore that vulnerability close to the surface of his skin. It connected him to me, as if reaching out to him could heal the parts of both of us that had once seemed damaged beyond repair.
I took a deep breath. “In my grandmothe
r’s scrapbook, I found a news clipping from nineteen thirty-nine about the body of a black baby boy found in the Savannah River. The scrapbook stops before the date of the article, so there’s nothing in it that might give me a clue about who the baby was or why my grandmother would have kept the newspaper clipping. But there had to be a reason.”
A slow rumble of thunder rolled overhead and I watched as Captain Wentworth stilled, his ears alert.
Tucker’s gaze didn’t move from my face. “Before Susan . . . died, Malily suspected she might have found a letter Malily wrote to Annabelle, apologizing for a lie. I don’t know what it was about—Malily wouldn’t tell me. But it might explain why Susan just . . . changed. Almost overnight. She stopped sleeping, and spent most of her time in the office in the cottage where you’re living now. She started using again; I was sure of it but I couldn’t find any evidence. And she kept poring over papers and Malily’s scrapbook and letters. She was obsessed. In the beginning, when she seemed to be identifying herself with Malily as a younger woman, both her doctor and I initially thought it was a good thing because she seemed to have found something that filled the void that she’d been used to filling with pills. And then . . . something. Something that made her just snap.”
I looked at him in horror. “And you think it could somehow be related.”
He shrugged. “I don’t really know what to think. All I know is what you’ve told me, and what my grandmother told me. What if Susan found whatever it was that linked their stories together; and what if it was bad enough that it sent her over the edge?”
“Like the deliberate death of a child?”
He stared at me for a moment, his eyes cold. A flash of lightning ripped through the sky outside, and the horses shuffled in unison, sensing change like blades of grass in a strong wind. Tucker shot a glance through Captain Wentworth’s stall to the small window, watching the gathering storm.