A Small Indiscretion

by Jan Ellison

  And my mother? What had she hoped for? What was she feeling now? I don’t know, because she never said. She kept whatever was in her heart locked away, where it couldn’t interfere. She forgave him, I suppose, for so quickly finding someone new to love. And I saw that I would have to forgive him, too. If I expected to be forgiven myself, I would have to forgive indiscriminately from now on.

  I SET OUT for a walk to shake off the news. The sky was bright blue and there were flowers blooming everywhere. I found myself outside the store. The key was still on my key chain. I opened the door and flicked on the lights. There was a stack of mail piled up in a white plastic bin by the door. My bookkeeper had been fishing out the invoices and checks, but the rest of the mail, months and months of it since your accident, lay unopened in the bin. I flipped through it. I came upon an envelope from London, postmarked a month earlier. I pulled a photograph out of the envelope.

  Memory is fallible. Does a photograph tell the truth any better? Or is a photograph an equally unreliable artifact? It was nearly a year ago that I’d received a photo in the mailbox I’d thought was from Patrick and misinterpreted entirely. This one actually was from Patrick.

  It wasn’t just one, I realized, after a minute. It was one, blown up, and a dozen more in the standard size, every single one a photograph of me. In all the photos my hair is in a thick dark ponytail nearly to my waist, half hidden, as is my face, by a wide-brimmed straw hat adorned with a simple black ribbon.

  I thought at first they were the photos Patrick had taken the day we went hat shopping. I could recall no other time I had worn a hat. But he had not taken photos of me in the shop. He had taken them outside, when we were walking in the rain, and I wasn’t wearing a hat then.

  I looked more closely. In the background were clues. Horses. A racetrack. The stands. The white-clothed tables of a dining room. The elegant red-velvet seats of a train compartment.

  There was a note from Patrick, explaining. That fall, before Malcolm’s death, when Patrick was living in the cottage in Richmond, Malcolm had asked to borrow a camera. He’d taken some photos with the camera, not quite a whole roll. He’d returned the camera to Patrick with the roll inside it. Patrick had promised to develop the film, but he never had. Then Malcolm had died, and the roll had been filed away in Patrick’s haphazard filing system, undeveloped all this time.

  Patrick wrote that since he’d seen me last summer, his father had died and left him the house in Howth. He’d sold the gallery and was moving back to Ireland. He was cleaning out his darkroom, purging more than twenty years’ worth of debris, including dozens of rolls of old film. He’d come across a roll labeled MALCOLM CHURCH. Out of curiosity, he’d developed it, and this was what he’d found.

  The photos must have been taken the day Malcolm and I took the train to the races. But where did the hat come from? And where was the posture I remembered myself taking back then—aloof, annoyed, self-absorbed? I couldn’t find any evidence of that sentiment in these photos. Instead, I saw in my shadowed face something startling. I was gazing at the camera, and at the photographer, who can only have been Malcolm, with what appears to have been a look of love. Was it possible I had loved him—Malcolm—after all?

  I closed my eyes. I dragged the memory of that day out of the darkness of time. I stepped through it, in my head, blurred image by blurred image, until finally, I saw it. A shop next to the stands at the races that sold sundries and snacks. Nuts. Gum. Cigars. Sunglasses. And hats. Finally, I located myself.

  I am standing inside the shop, with Malcolm. We are at the counter. He is buying me a hat to keep the sun off my face. He is placing it on my head. He is leaning in to kiss me, and I am not only letting him, I am kissing him back. The hat is falling off. We are laughing, and he is reaching for it, and setting it tenderly, again, on my head.

  THE HAT NEVER made it back to my room in Victoria that night. I must have left it on the train. But how can I be sure? How can I be certain I’m not manufacturing a memory to match the evidence? You can’t rely on memory. You can’t rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely only on the sculpture of your life you carve out of the available material, the one that stands by while you muddle your way into your future.

  Patrick’s note said he thought I might like to have the photographs, so he’d included copies but kept the originals for himself. He wrote that he’d enjoyed our night together more than he ought to have, that he was thinking about me more than he should, but that he certainly understood why I had not been in touch, and he would forgive me if I chose not to communicate with him again. He wrote that he was tempted to tell me he had always loved me, but it wouldn’t be true. “It was the tragic mistake of my younger self,” he closed, “that I did not.”

  He signed with the single loopy P, unchanged all these years.

  I placed the photos and the note back in the envelope and stuck them in my purse. I walked home, flooded with feeling. I pulled down the hatbox and buried the envelope at the very bottom, where I need not find it again.

  Forty

  WHEN YOU FINALLY WOKE from the coma, your memory of the accident was lost. Emme had disappeared. There was nothing to tell us what happened after I closed the door to Polly’s room that night except the evidence left behind. We found your iPhone on top of the sleeping bag on Polly’s bed. There was a cryptic text conversation, initiated by Emme, at 2:19 that morning:

  “Going for a drive.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Need my keys.”

  There was a log of a forty-second call from you to Emme at 2:26.

  Your jacket was still hanging where you’d left it. Your truck was in the driveway. Clearly you had left Polly’s room in a hurry, and had not expected to be gone long.

  The disaster at the store—the tub crashed through the ceiling, the water running for two days, flooding the downstairs—wasn’t discovered until Tuesday, when Michael Moss arrived at his store after the long weekend and noticed water pooling around the door of the Salvaged Light. He tracked down my home number and spoke to my father, who had indeed arrived, having driven straight from Petaluma to our house as soon as his car was repaired. My father drove to the store and waded through the ground floor, then climbed the waterfall of the stairs to the loft and turned off the faucet that was still in the wall and still running. The tub itself had fallen through the floor, taking with it the subfloor, the ceiling and the pine branch with its hooded diamond lights. We were lucky there wasn’t a fire.

  There wasn’t much to learn at the site of the accident. The car was totaled. It was confirmed that the forty-year-old passenger-side seat belt had not malfunctioned, but had ripped at the buckle. There was no evidence of tampering. Emme had been given a blood test on the scene, which showed a zero blood-alcohol level, along with a medical exam at a hospital in Santa Cruz. She was released, uninjured except for a small cut on her forehead that did not even require stitches. Separately, a helicopter had flown you to Stanford and the doctors there had sunk you into unconsciousness, so you could be intubated and your organs could rest. We made our frantic drive. We slept at the Mermaid Inn. We waited. We evaluated our fitness as organ donors. On the afternoon of the fourteenth day of your medically induced coma, your father met privately with Mitch and learned that if an organ was needed, it would have to come from me. On the fifteenth day of your coma, the propofol was tapered, and you were expected to begin to wake up. But you didn’t.

  The days that followed were the worst of our life. I can barely force my fingers to remember them, and set them on the page. I can barely make my mind’s eye watch again as Mitch moved around your hospital bed, then took us aside to tell us that in his opinion, the doctor had made a mistake. I can still feel my heart beating in my chest, like one of Polly’s birds, as Mitch explained the situation and your father mastered his doubt, and I didn’t, and your father nodded his assent, and Mitch sprang to action and saved your life.

  THREE DAY
S AFTER Mitch ordered your medications to be increased, then very slowly tapered, you opened your eyes. The respirator was removed, and you took a breath. The following morning, on your twenty-first birthday, you looked at me and smiled. Within a week, you were transferred from the trauma center to a regular room, officially on the road to an exceptionally rapid recovery. By mid-October you were moved from the medical center to an adjacent rehabilitation center, just a block from the Mermaid Inn.

  We were ecstatic. You, on the other hand, appeared deranged. You were plagued, long after you regained consciousness, by memory loss, and by what we learned were officially termed “coma dreams”—relentlessly vivid dreams experienced not as dreams at all, but as if they were waking encounters. We learned that there is no clear-cut medical explanation for their intensity and tenacity, but they are experienced by the vast majority of coma survivors. It can take weeks, or months, until the feelings associated with these dreams subside and the patient is no longer afraid to fall asleep.

  You didn’t realize you were actually awake for two weeks after you emerged from the coma. You asked me often whether something you were sure had happened the day before had actually happened. Most often it had not. And most things that had in fact happened you didn’t remember at all. You didn’t remember meeting my father for the first time. You didn’t remember a visit from your three roommates from the house in Berkeley. You didn’t remember the belated birthday celebration we held in your hospital room, or the homemade cake on which the girls had frosted an enormous pink smile.

  “Because we’re so happy,” Polly said to you.

  “We’re so happy you woke up,” Clara said.

  “Mommy said it was like your brain got lost,” Polly said. “And then it got found.”

  You can see why we couldn’t bear to tell them, just a few months later, that your brain seemed to have become lost again, taking you with it.

  You screamed out in the night. Sometimes you tried to get up and walk around in your sleep, and an attendant had to sit with you to keep you from injuring yourself. We continued to take turns staying at the Mermaid Inn. When it was my turn, I set my alarm for five, so I would be at your bedside at the rehab center before you woke up. Sometimes, when you opened your eyes, you looked at me blankly, not sure whether I was real or not. It seemed to help if I squeezed your hand. It helped if, instead of asking you about the dreams, which only sent you back inside their terrorizing images, I asked you to name the emotion you were feeling.

  Dread. That was the word you used most often.

  Terror. That was another.

  You told me about the one dream that came again and again.

  “It was the night of the accident. Emme was driving the car along Highway One. We’d just passed Pescadero.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember that night.”

  “I don’t. But my dream does.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Keep going.”

  “Dawn was coming. I could see its hard orange edge hitting the tips of the cliffs to the south. I wanted to pull the car over to watch it. Emme refused. She wanted to drive right toward it—into the center of the sunrise. She started driving very fast. When the sun finally crept over the edge of the mountains, it was so bright I knew we’d made a mistake. We hadn’t driven into the sunrise. We’d driven into the center of a light-source machine. We’d sacrificed ourselves to the synchrotron, and we were about to be burned to ashes by a light ten billion times brighter than the sun.”

  “SADNESS,” YOU SAID, once, on a morning your eyes were puffy and red, as if you’d been crying in your sleep. “I felt so sad in my dream, I thought I was going to die of it.”

  Sad was a word I hadn’t heard you use in years. I felt as I’d felt when you were a child: I wanted to throw myself in front of your pain to stop it. But I couldn’t, because the pain was coming at you while you were asleep.

  Then, during the second week of December, when you’d been at the rehabilitation center for nearly two months, you woke in the morning and I asked you to name your feeling, and you told me you felt normal.

  “What do you mean ‘normal’?”

  “I feel the way I used to feel every morning,” you said. “I feel hopeful.”

  The next day you felt normal again, and the very next day after that, you began to ask us about getting your college education back on track.

  “Sure,” I said. “We could figure out some online courses.”

  “We’ll have to talk to Mitch,” your father said. “But maybe you could even go back to Northwestern this spring. Plenty of excellent doctors in Chicago, after all.”

  “No,” you said. “I mean … not Northwestern. I mean the institutes. As planned. Japan. Then Oxfordshire.”

  I DON’T HAVE to be too detailed about how things went from there, since you were awake, and your memory was working, and once again you were pulling the strings of your own life. You persuaded us to help you make arrangements to travel to Japan. We began the necessary preparations while you were still in the rehabilitation center. You were walking better every day, albeit with a cane. Your concussion had resolved. Your ribs and your lung had healed. Your kidney was functioning at 100 percent, eliminating any need for dialysis, or a transplant. The nightmares, and the waking remnants of your coma dreams, had subsided.

  Mitch was the one to give you a clean bill of health.

  Then it was nearly Christmas, and you came home. We planned a celebration Christmas Eve. My mother and father cooked for days. My mother found my good china, and the good silver, and place mats and candles and the cloth napkins and the gold napkin holders. She and the girls made a centerpiece of pine and fresh flowers. They hung mistletoe. Your Uncle Ryan played the guitar. Your father made a fire. My father kissed my mother. Your father did not kiss me, but I was certain he would forgive me in time, so I didn’t despair. I’d insisted Mitch join us for Christmas Eve. I’d wanted him to share in the joy of your homecoming, since he was the one who’d orchestrated your recovery. He knocked on the door, and presented us with an extravagant bottle of champagne.

  You were upstairs, resting. I called you to come down. You stood at the top of the stairs in a bow tie with your cane in your hand. You cleared your throat. We all looked up. You took a clumsy step down one stair, leaning heavily on the cane, then pitching forward a little as if you were going to fall. Ryan leapt to his feet, ready to catch you, and the guitar that had been in his lap banged to the floor.

  But you’d planned this. You smiled, and spun the cane around and let it drop behind you—a Willie Wonka gesture that delighted the girls—then you walked down the stairs, not even holding on to the railing. We all stood and applauded. I leaned heavily into your father, next to me. I looked over at my mother, who was smiling, and then at my own father, who was crying, same as I was. We all sat down to dinner, and Mitch popped the bottle of champagne.

  After dinner, I managed to arrange everybody in front of the fireplace for a photo. At the last minute Mitch snatched the camera from me and I slid into his place. The photo is there in the hatbox, evidence that all the people I love best in the world were once in the same house, at the same time, healthy and whole, celebrating the season together.

  We sent you off to Japan in January, a little worried because you seemed not quite yourself, but you insisted you were ready to go. We waved goodbye and smiled through our tears as you passed through security at SFO. You arrived safely in Japan. You moved into your room at the institute—and here, on the other side of the world, your father moved out. The girls went to Gold Hill for one weekend, then a second. I began to think about repairing and reopening the store. I returned to the preoccupations that had been shut out by your accident and everything that followed—chief among them the question of how to save my marriage and put our family back together.

  Valentine’s Day came. I’d stashed a box of chocolates in your suitcase before you left. I’d bought the girls stuffed teddy bears with red silk hearts and baskets full of thei
r favorite treats. I’d spent a long time at the drugstore trying to find a card I could give your father. But he did not like Hallmark holidays, as he called them, and there was no card that said what I wanted to say, perhaps because I did not know exactly what that was.

  I opened the mailbox. There was a Valentine’s card for me from my mother. I stood on the lawn and opened it, and the uncomplicated message of love it contained made me cry. Then, at the bottom of the stack, was another smooth white envelope, smaller than the one that had arrived in June, with a return address in Paris I recognized right away. It was not a Valentine card; it was a handwritten letter from an elderly English gentleman I’d never met, but in whose apartment in Paris I’d unwittingly drawn in blood, tissue and bone the map of two families’ futures.

  Forty-one

  7th February 2012

  My dearest Mrs. Gunnlaugsson,

  We have never met, but after much deliberation, I have conceded to the duty of writing to you in the matter of my grandniece, Marguerite Greatrex Church, whom you may know as Daisy Church. You may also know her as Emme Greatrex, a name she adopted in her professional endeavors in New York City.

  Since the tragic and untimely death of her mother, my niece Louise Greatrex Church, in September of 2010, Daisy has not been well. At the time of Louise’s death, Daisy and her mother had been estranged for nine years. The estrangement appears to have compounded Daisy’s grief and has ultimately garnered her a psychiatric diagnosis of “rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.”

  She may have been ill for quite a while. Perhaps since the sudden death, when she was ten, of her beloved father, Malcolm Church. She had been prescribed antidepressants for some years, and took them faithfully, but the diagnosis of depression appears now to have been incorrect, and the medication that had been prescribed likely contributed to the onset of the rapid cycling Daisy suffered under.