“What are you doing out there at this hour, babe?” Libby called from our bedroom. She came to me and perched herself in my lap. She hadn’t bothered to put a robe over her see-through nightie.
“Just reading a novel by that lady who got shot.”
“Why do you want to read a book by her?” She rubbed her eyes, ran her hands through her hair—I liked it when she did that, the way she combed it back with her fingers and then gathered it into a thick ponytail. The lamplight gleamed on it, showing the red highlights. Libby gave a yawn, then smiled. At least the fear was gone from her eyes.
She took the book from me and turned it over, looking at the lady’s photo on the back cover. Same photo they’d been flashing on the news for the past day and a half. Miz Bourdillon wearing a light green sweater. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but staring at something in the distance, a half smile on her face.
“She looks nice,” Libby said. “Honest, you know? She looks real.” She handed the book back to me. “Poor lady. They say if she does wake up, she’ll be a vegetable. She won’t be writing any more books.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, don’t stay up too long.”
“I won’t.”
But I needed to do something to keep my mind from racing. That happened when I went off the meds, and then I made mistakes. Was that why I’d missed my shot? No, it wasn’t my fault. The lady moved—no way I could’ve predicted it. But I could predict one thing—we had to have the rest of that money soon. Before the surgery. Didn’t we?
And what if my contact decided that I’d screwed up too bad, and he leaked my name to the press? Would he do that? He said I’d get the rest of the cash four days after the job was completed, just to make sure I didn’t “leave any loose ends,” as he put it. But now, a very long loose end named Josephine Bourdillon had unraveled my plans.
Just die, lady. Just die.
It wasn’t like I offed people every day. This was supposed to be my first and last time. Pa always said, “You gotta do what you gotta do, son, to keep bread on the table.” I was doing my best.
Libby went on back to bed, and I sank deeper into the chair and kept reading. Got swept up in it pretty fast, like I used to in school. The main character in the story was a down-and-outer. Ha! I could relate.
I didn’t go back to bed until almost dawn. By then the voices had calmed, and I’d figured out the next step. Either the lady would pass away or, if not, I’d keep watch from afar. At some point when all the commotion died down, I’d hear from my contact what to do. Or maybe I’d just have one of my own brilliant ideas. Those came a lot more often when I was off my meds.
JOSEPHINE
1969 . . . She put up the bridle and saddle and hurried to feed the horses, thrusting her hands into the thick, sticky molasses and oats. It smelled so sweet that more than once she’d been tempted to try it. The horses nickered as she filled their troughs. But she wanted to hurry, hurry! Before the stories collided and she could not separate them again. Three stories, four, all cantering through her head, galloping, the hoofbeats, a thousand hoofbeats resounding on the dusty path.
She tossed the hay into Scallywag’s stall, then Velvet’s and Freddy’s. She hurried to fill their water buckets. A rat scurried across the barn floor, and she stifled a scream. Josephine didn’t mind the mice, the cute pale gray creatures that skittered across the hayloft. But the rats, big, bloated, deep gray with their shining eyes and their fleshy tails. . . . She shivered whenever she even thought of them.
But even a rat couldn’t scare away the stories. Josephine rushed up the stairs to her room and dug out the spiral notebook and found her pencil. Oh, where was the sharpener? She opened the drawer and rummaged through it. There! The stories, the stories, the stories.
Her nine-year-old scrawl was illegible to anyone but herself. Tomorrow she’d correct it. Tomorrow she’d add the illustrations and the adjectives. But right now she just needed to scratch out the stories quickly, quickly, while they bumped and crowded in her imagination.
She loved riding the horses, she loved talking to Kit as they lay sprawled on their beds at night. But her happiest moments were these, with the spiral notebook sitting on her desk and her imagination spilling out onto the blank page until it filled up with life.
———
She woke up in the dark to loud, awful curse words coming up from below, and it was her father’s voice yelling them! But in such a strange, deep way. And Mommy was shrieking. She had never heard her mother’s voice so high and loud. She tiptoed out of bed to the stairway and stared down through the bannister.
“I know all about her, Dick! How dare you come home in the middle of the night drunk and smelling of her.”
More cursing. Then, “Let go of me! Right now, Dick!” Her father was shaking her mother hard.
Josephine didn’t mean to cry out.
Both of her parents turned startled eyes up to her. She ran back to her room, threw the covers over her head, and sobbed into her pillow. “Please, God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mommy. Please, God. Please.” She waited in the dark for Mommy to come and explain it all. She waited and waited and waited, but no one came.
The next morning at breakfast, her mother still had curlers in her hair, and all around her left eye was dark and bruised. But no one said one word about what Josephine had seen the night before.
CHAPTER
3
SUNDAY
PAIGE
Daddy came home in the middle of the night and found me asleep on the couch in the family room with Milton curled up beside me. I stumbled up to my room, didn’t even undress, just fell into bed.
I slept till nine o’clock, and when I came downstairs Daddy was finishing up his scrambled eggs and toast and coffee. Daddy always made us breakfast. At least that hadn’t changed.
“There’s more eggs and bacon in the skillet. Butter and jelly on the table.” He was wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin, and he was dressed in a dark blue suit with a yellow tie.
“Are you going to church?” I didn’t mean to sound accusatory, but Momma was lying in a coma. Surely church could wait.
“I’m just stopping by to update everyone,” Daddy said, glancing down at his watch. “Then I’m heading back to the ICU so Hannah can come home and get some sleep.”
He didn’t say it, but I knew Daddy needed those people at church, needed their prayers and support. The fridge overflowing with casseroles and soups and the stacks of baked goods on the kitchen counter testified to their love. But he needed to see them in person.
“Okay. Tell everybody thanks. I’ll come to the hospital after lunch, okay?”
He nodded, folded his napkin and placed it on the table. Then he got up and took me in his arms. He still smelled like Daddy, starched shirts and aftershave, but he held on to me a little more tightly than usual, a little longer too, and when I looked up, his eyes were still vacant and red.
Mamie and Papy Bourdillon, my French grandparents, called after Daddy left for church. They lived in Lyon, and it was late afternoon for them. “Paige!” they said in unison.
I loved the way they pronounced my name in French, soft and romantic, rhyming with mirage instead of age.
Just hearing their voices, I got tears in my eyes again. “Mamie! Papy!”
“Comment ça va, ma biche? And Hannah? How is she?”
I assured them that Hannah had arrived safely, and we were both doing as well as could be expected.
“Et comment va notre chère Josephine?”
“Nothing has changed with Maman. Je suis désolée.”
They loved Momma, and as the story went, Mamie’s mother taught my mother how to cook. They enjoyed telling stories of Momma’s floundering French and pitiful attempts in the kitchen, but they told it so lovingly that rather than feeling condemned, Momma laughed right along with them.
And they loved our visits. They didn’t fly. Cars, trains, boats, and public transportation worked just fine for them. They’d on
ly taken a plane twice in their lives—first for Daddy’s graduation and then for Momma and Daddy’s wedding. I wished they would come now.
“And our dear Patrick?” Mamie asked. They both pronounced it as Patreek. “How is he?”
To that, I answered with a bold-faced lie. “He’s being strong for all of us.”
———
Late that morning, after Hannah had slept a little and then pulled herself out of bed, we sat on the floor in Momma’s office, cradling our mugs—hers of coffee, mine of tea. Momma called her office The Chalet, giving it her writerly flair. The Chalet was a wood-paneled room on the third story off the back of the house with rafters that rose in an A—like a Swiss chalet, Momma said—and with a magnificent view of the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond. Momma romanticized most things.
“She’s in her own little world,” Daddy would whisper, and that meant Stay away. Let her create.
Imagination Momma, we sometimes called her, and she’d laugh. We always paid special attention to her laughter—it didn’t come that often.
At that moment, out the window, two bright orange butterflies—or maybe they were particularly colorful moths—were doing a mad jig around each other, twirling and twirling and twirling beside the window box that hung over the wooden porch railing and was filled with yellow and orange marigolds. The butterflies flittered and spiraled down and off toward the woods where the leaves on the hickories had just begun their gradual change from avocado green to sunshine yellow. The view from her window inspired Momma, and when she let me sit at her desk—the one Daddy had made for her from an oak he’d had to cut down—I felt inspired too.
I used to sneak into her office when I was a little girl and lose myself among the smell of old books and Momma’s endless cups of tea—all kinds of exotic brands—and a candle burning with the scent of the season. Autumn pumpkin in the fall and holiday spice in winter, rose bouquet in spring and lavender afternoon in summer. She usually let me stay, curled up in a corner, once I had crossed the threshold.
Momma’s office enchanted me. One bookcase—the one we’d found at a neighborhood garage sale when I was about nine or ten—held all of the novels she’d written, eight to date, published not only in English, but also in several other languages. It intrigued me to compare the covers of the different editions—for instance, a woman’s face and a misty background with a swastika on the English cover, whereas the Dutch cover had a woman seen from the back and the swastika much more prominent.
“I used to love to come in here.” Hannah interrupted my reverie. “It is so much like Momma, so cozy with its disordered order.”
Yes, Momma was cozy in a disordered way.
“And we’re everywhere.” On the wooden walls of The Chalet hung photo after photo of the family: Momma, Daddy, Hannah, and me at varying ages, plus photos of our grandparents on both sides of the family. Also extended family members, and every one of our pets, past and present, as well as many friends, especially Ginnie and Bert and Drake Ellinger. Momma had more friends than anyone I knew.
Photos and every craft we’d made for her since kindergarten also sat on shelves, on top of her filing cabinet, and on the chest of drawers where she stored her office supplies. Momma had no use for fancy—she wanted symbolism. Everything meant something to Momma.
“Yeah. You feel loved in here, don’t you?” I said.
Hannah reached for my hand and grabbed it, holding on with the same intensity with which Daddy had wrapped me in his arms earlier. “It’s unbelievable. Surreal. She’s so pale. She looks dead, the way her skin is all translucent and yellow and her eyes are closed, and that breathing tube in her mouth and her lips sagging, and ten tubes attached to her and all those machines lighting up in red and green numbers. It freaked me out to see her like that.”
We both started crying, really sobbing, at last, which felt like relief, clutching each other in our shock and anguish and dark questionings. After a while Hannah whispered, “I can’t imagine that she’ll ever be normal again—if she lives.”
I got us a box of Kleenex from the bathroom and while we blew our noses, still crying and then smiling at each other through our tears, I went to Momma’s desk and opened her laptop. I waited for the screen to come to life, and the screen saver flashed a photo she’d received only a week ago of Hannah at the flower market in Aix, her face bent over a perfect sunflower.
“Look how content she is, Paige,” Momma had said. “She’s in her element.”
I blinked back the image, blinked back more tears, and could still hear the little squeal of delight Momma had given when Hannah’s photo had zipped through cyberspace and landed in her inbox.
I clicked on her fan mail account and groaned as 2,367 new messages frantically loaded, bringing the total number of messages she’d received since the shooting to just under 7,000.
Hannah peered over my shoulder. “Dear Imagination Momma sure is loved. Have you read any of them?”
“Are you kidding? This is only the second time I’ve even turned the computer on since the shooting. It’s been so overwhelming. Mrs. Swanson, bless her neighborly heart, is the one who has been taking in all the food people bring by. And letting Milton in and out of the house.”
At present Milton lay sprawled beside Momma’s desk, right under my feet. He had a knack for getting in the way, and I respected him for it. I reached down and fluffed his golden coat.
“You know Mrs. Swanson’s loving every minute of it, Paige. She doesn’t have a whole lot else to do. We should ask her to check the mailbox tomorrow if no one is here. I’ll bet Momma will be getting handwritten notes too.”
“Good idea.” I stretched, yawned, and then glanced over at the four clear plastic bins stacked in the back left corner of the office, each filled with fan mail—“from before the internet made sweet letters on beautiful stationery obsolete,” as Momma would say. I lifted the lid off the top bin—in which I stored her most recent snail-mail letters once I answered them—set the lid on the floor, and squatted down.
Hannah plopped down beside me. “Wow. This brings back memories.” She motioned to the other three bins, all the same size. “She still keeps every letter, doesn’t she?”
“Yep. Every email too.”
“Good job organizing them by month and year. Impressive.”
I stuck out my tongue. It was Hannah who had organized Momma’s office before she left for college two years ago, and I, with much more of Momma’s creativity than Daddy’s organization in my blood, had simply tried to keep up.
I found the two letters near the top. Both were handwritten on pink stationery, with big, bold block printing in bright pink Sharpie.
Hannah pored over the first one. “Why, this isn’t threatening. It’s . . . it’s rather harmless.”
I looked over her shoulder. “If you say so. Personally, I think ‘Be careful what you write in the future because there are still plenty of people in this nation who agree with white supremacy and they can be dangerous’ sounds rather menacing.”
“Maybe it’s a kid just mimicking something he heard his parents say. It’s like the letter writer knows someone who’s mad as a hornet about what Momma wrote, but the writer himself isn’t. Let me see the other one.”
She perused it. “Okay, this one’s worse. ‘I’m not kidding. Your book is going to get someone killed if you don’t watch out. Watch out!’ Weird. Well, for sure you need to show these to the police. They’ll be interested.” Holding the two letters as if they were laced with poison, Hannah said, “But who would do this? It’s evil. It’s as if . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But I prodded. “Just say it.”
Hannah turned her cinnamon eyes to me, and in them I read something almost holy and profound. “Momma writes truth in a way that gets into people’s hearts. It’s as if something bigger than just a person doesn’t want her writing truth anymore.”
In our family we had a line—the line of faith. Some had
crossed it. Others hadn’t. Those who believed looked at everything in life through that lens. Like Hannah—beautiful and pure and faith filled. Daddy played life like a game with Jesus as the captain of his team. Momma made everything a lot more symbolic and complicated. And me? I just couldn’t see it. I’d tried. But I couldn’t see it at all.
“Sorry for getting all spiritual on you, Paige.”
“No, it’s fine. I asked. So you think these letters and the assassination attempt have some kind of spiritual implications?”
She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “I think we need a whole army of people to keep praying for Momma.”
“Well, you’ve got that.” For emphasis, I pointed to the laptop with its endless emails and Facebook messages.
“Yeah, but I think I need to set up a CaringBridge site so they can really know how to pray.”
And I knew she didn’t mean it that way, but I felt scolded. So I changed the subject. “Do you have a return flight booked?”
“Daddy insisted I stay only a week. I don’t see how I can help much in that amount of time. Momma’ll probably still be in the exact same shape in a week.”
“But you’re here now, and that’s what counts. And Drake is coming tomorrow, and then it’ll be the three of us again.”
“Just like old times,” she said, with a little catch in her voice, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a sweat shirt and jeans, her hair spilling over her shoulders like moonlight.
I chewed on my lip for a minute and then broached a subject that had kept me awake after I’d finished researching comas in the night. “Hannie, do you think the police will question Daddy?”
“What do you mean? I thought you were both questioned that first night.”
“Yeah, we were, but not in detail. Like, how much money is Momma worth? Does she have a big insurance policy—will they think Daddy had something to do with it?”
Hannah rolled her eyes. “You read way too many crime novels, girl. Put that out of your mind. For right now, let’s get this stuff to the police.”
When I Close My Eyes Page 4