The Treasure Box

by Penelope Stokes

  She was in the kitchen, spooning grounds into the coffee filter, when a voice startled her from her thoughts.

  “Vita?”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

  She turned to find her sister, flanked by the twins, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Her hand went slack, and the coffee scoop fell to the floor, scattering black grounds all over the white vinyl tile at her feet.

  “Vita, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I just—” She blinked hard and shook her head.

  “How did you get in here?”

  Mary Kate held up a ring crowded with an abundance of keys. “I used my key, of course. I rang the doorbell and knocked, but when you didn’t answer, I figured you had gone to run some errands, so I let myself in.”

  She went to the pantry, pulled out a small electric broom, and with a brisk efficiency vacuumed up the spilled coffee grounds. Vita started to object, but her attention was diverted by her niece and nephew, who had her trapped in a rambunctious sandwich hug.

  Little Gordy, the micro-image of his father, with blond hair and magnificent blue eyes. Mary Vita, her namesake, with darker curls and brown eyes. Vita hadn’t seen them since Mother’s funeral, when the children were toddlers . . . and yet here they were, nearly grown, nearly teenagers, hugging her as if they not only knew her but adored her.

  Vita’s mind began to lurch backward as a crack opened in her memory. They did know her, and she knew them. They had been together—often. She could remember their early years, Christmases and birthdays; their first day of school; the baseball game where Gordy broke his arm; searching for Mary Vita’s favorite ice cream—Moose Tracks—when she had her tonsils out. But she could also remember those same years as one long stretch of silence in which she had no contact at all with her sister’s family. Years of alienation, isolation, and solitude.

  “Aunt Vita,” Little Gordon was saying as he tugged on her arm, “Mary V says we’re going to bake cookies. But I want to play catch.” He knelt on the floor, unzipped a small overnight bag, and came up with a ball and two mitts. “Can we, huh? I’ve been working on that curve ball you showed me.”

  “She promised we’d make sugar cakes with frosting,” Mary Vita objected from the other side. “Didn’t you, Aunt Vita?”

  Mary Kate settled herself at the table and smiled indulgently.

  “Hey, you two. If you don’t stop bickering, your Aunt Vita will send you both home with me. Now settle down.”

  The twins grumbled a bit, but they stopped arguing and came to hang on the back of their mother’s chair. “I can’t thank you enough, Sis, for taking them for a few days. Gordon and I really need the time—” She ended abruptly and turned to the children. “Why don’t the two of you get your stuff to your rooms and then go out and play in the yard for a while? I want to talk to Aunt Vita for a few minutes before I leave.”

  “Well, I—” Vita stammered, trying in vain to get her brain to work. “I guess I’d better show them the upstairs, and—”

  “We can do it ourselves.” Mary V retrieved her bag from the doorway and grinned at her brother. “Come on, Gordy. I’ll play catch with you until Mama and Aunt Vita are done.”

  The two of them dashed through the doorway, and Vita could hear them running up the stairs. Yes, they had been here before.

  Gordy slept in the upstairs den, and Mary Vita in the guest room.

  But Vita knew that they had never set foot in her house. Didn’t she? She closed her eyes and tried to get her mind to latch onto what was real. In a minute or two, the footsteps came back downstairs and out the door, and the front screen slammed shut behind them.

  “Whew!” Mary Kate sighed, leaning back in her chair.

  “They’re usually not quite this wired. They’re just excited about staying with you—as usual.” She shook her head. “I ought to be jealous, Sis—they definitely like their Aunt Vita more than they like their Mama.”

  Vita stared at Mary Kate, who sat leaning her elbows on the kitchen table. Her sister had barely changed since the day she competed in the Miss North Carolina pageant. Still stunning, even in blue jeans, with a flawless complexion, natural blonde hair, and eyes the color of chocolate. Another dual memory flashed across her mind, a kind of déjà vu: Mary Kate had been here before, a hundred times, chatting with Vita at this very kitchen table.

  And then again, she hadn’t. They had never really been sisters, certainly not intimate friends. And yet they were.

  Vita turned her back for a minute or two, busying herself with finishing the coffee while she got her bearings. Apparently the twins were staying for a few days. But when had that happened?

  What had Mary Kate said about needing time with Gordon? And since when did Mary Kate call her “Sis”?

  A voice echoed in her head: “Walk the path God sets before you . . .it will lead you where you are meant to go.”

  All right, Vita decided, gathering up every shred of determination she had ever possessed. If she couldn’t discern what was real and what was not, she would simply play the part that unfolded to her. She had no conviction that it would lead her anywhere meaningful, but what else could she do?

  She kept her back turned and waited for the coffee to brew.

  By the time it was done, she had composed herself a little, and she poured two cups and brought them to the table. “How is Gordon?” she forced herself to ask. “When you called the other day, you said he was in the hospital?”

  Mary Kate gave Vita a puzzled frown. “I didn’t say in the hospital. I said at the hospital. He’s fine—he’s just, well—” She put her coffee cup down and rested her forehead on one hand. “I simply don’t know what to do. He says he still loves me, but he keeps on seeing this doctor—”

  “How sick is he, exactly?” Vita interrupted.

  Mary Kate let out a caustic laugh. “Stay with me, Vita.

  Focus. I know it’s terribly confusing, but—”

  Vita sat down at the table. “I’ve had an exhausting few days.

  Refresh my memory, please.”

  “He met her at a party—Dr. Alison Atwell. Some name, huh?

  He swears they’re not having an affair. He says she’s ‘helping him with his research’—something about the evolution of human physiology from prehistoric to modern times—and he meets her at the hospital four or five times a week to ‘assimilate their findings.’

  Right. I’m neither blind nor stupid. I can guess what they’re ‘assimilating.’ And given the problems we’ve been having—” She shook her head. “He’s doing an academic paper on this Iceman— you know, the prehistoric guy they dug up from the snow? I don’t understand it all—the only thing I know is that his relationship with Dr. Alison Atwell, whatever it is, isn’t helping our problems one bit.”

  Vita sipped her coffee and kept silent. She felt as if she were watching her sister from a long way away, through the wrong end of a telescope. Time seemed to stand still.

  “I should have known,” Mary Kate was saying when Vita’s attention returned, “that if he could leave you for me so easily, it might happen again. I just wanted so desperately to believe—”

  Cathleen Woodlea’s face rose up in Vita’s mind. “That it would be different with you.”

  Mary Kate nodded. “Exactly.” She reached out and grasped Vita’s hand. “You’ve never held it against me, marrying Gordon the way I did, without a second thought about how much pain it would cause you.”

  “Gordon and I weren’t right for each other.” Vita heard herself say the words as if someone else, someone outside her own body, had spoken them. “I would have been miserable if I had married him.” It was true, and yet Vita was acutely aware that she hadn’t always felt this way—that she had harbored resentment against her sister. It was one problem among many which had driven them apart.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I should have married him,” Mary Kate went on. “I would give anything for the twins, of course, and I do love him. It’s ju
st that he can’t seem to understand that I need my own life. I’m not the same naive girl he married. I need more than just being an adjunct to his career, a pretty little trophy hostess for his parties and academic conferences. I may not be pretty anymore, but I’m not brainless, either. I’ve changed.

  But he hasn’t.”

  Vita gazed at her sister’s face. “I think you’re pretty,” she said, meaning it. “I’ve always envied your looks.”

  “And I’ve always envied your brains.” Mary Kate laughed.

  “So I guess that makes us even.”

  “You said you needed time with Gordon?” Vita prodded.

  “Yes. He’s finally agreed to counseling. For starters, we’re going on this couples retreat—the counselor calls it ‘Boot Camp.’

  It’s at a lodge up near Grandfather Mountain. Six couples for three days of group and individual therapy.”

  “Sounds intense.”

  “It will be. But I’m hoping it will give us a chance to talk— really talk—about the future of our relationship.” Her eyes fixed on some middle distance, and she sighed. “I’ve been seeing this counselor individually for a while, trying to sort out my own issues. Something she said the other day really struck me, and I want to know what you think about it.”

  “You want my opinion?”

  Mary Kate stared at her. “I always want your perspective.

  You think more deeply than I do about things, and I trust that.

  I always have.”

  Her sister trusted her judgment? Vita’s mind careened around this foreign concept. “OK,” Vita conceded at last. “Let’s hear it.”

  “She said that when people talk about finding God’s will for their lives and relationships, they’re often under the mistaken impression that there is only one path, one future. And that leaves them with only two mutually exclusive options: free will or Divine control. If you believe in free will, you shoulder the unbearable burden of finding the one ‘right way.’ If you believe in Divine control, you become fatalistic, assuming that whatever happens, happens— and you can’t do anything to change it.”

  Vita leaned forward, gripping her hands around her coffee cup until her knuckles turned white. “And this counselor has another idea?”

  Mary Kate’s eyes caught Vita’s gaze and held it. “Yes. She suggested that there might be many futures, many possibilities for a life, but not all of them will come true. Like a computer program that takes you different places depending upon what links you pick. Being outside of linear time, God sees all the options, all the possible outcomes. For humans, limited by time, the actual events of our lives result from the choices and decisions we make. And yet God is in the midst of it all, with challenges and blessings and resolutions we can only guess at.” She looked up, and her eyes blazed with passion. “So both could be true— free will and Divine intervention. They seem mutually exclusive, contradictory, but they’re not.”

  Vita’s mind flashed to Rachel and Cathleen. To Sophie’s untimely death, Cathleen’s betrayal, Rachel’s obsession with finding the Treasure Box, the birth of little Sophia Rose, Rachel’s marriage to Michael McCall. All the sad and tragic turns of their lives, leading them on to a place they couldn’t possibly begin to imagine. Challenges and blessings and resolutions we can only guess at, Mary Kate had said. And for the first time in years, maybe the first time in her adult life, Vita caught a glimpse of the possibility that a power beyond herself—God, perhaps—might be present and involved in human existence without manipulating people like a menacing puppeteer.

  “Many futures,” she mused, “not all of which will come true.”

  “It’s an interesting concept, isn’t it?” Mary Kate said. “I’m not sure I fully understand it, but I think I like it.”

  Vita’s thoughts lingered for a moment on the idea of many futures, and then moved to the more immediate question of Mary Kate. The woman was—well, transformed. No longer a flighty, shallow airhead, but a contemplative, thoughtful person. Someone Vita could sit down and have a productive conversation with. She was actually . . . likable. But just what had changed, Vita wondered—her sister’s personality, or her own perspectives?

  Mary Kate glanced at her watch and jumped to her feet “It’s two-thirty. I have to go, or I’ll be late picking up Gordon.” She retrieved her purse and keys from the kitchen counter and headed for the door.

  Vita followed her to the front porch. Out in the garden, through the open gate, she caught a glimpse of Gordy and Mary V in the backyard.

  “Thanks for taking care of the kids, Sis. You’re a wonder, as always.” Mary Kate gave her a brief, one-armed hug. “I’ll pick them up on Sunday evening around six, if that’s all right.” She waved to the twins and made a dash for the silver Volvo station wagon parked against the curb. Just before she got into the driver’s seat, she leaned over the top of the car and shouted, “Bye, Vita. Love you!”

  “I—I love you, too,” Vita stammered.

  But Mary Kate didn’t hear. She had already revved the engine and pulled out into the street, leaving Vita to stare at the departing taillights and wonder if she was wrong about having a complete nervous breakdown.

  At the moment, it felt more like a second chance.

  22

  BEHIND THE WALLS

  The children had finally turned off the TV and gone to bed, and the house itself seemed to exhale a sigh of relief. Vita sat at the kitchen table with a glass of skim milk and a plateful of leftover cookies, letting her mind take in the events of the afternoon.

  She bit into one of the frosted teacakes. They were surprisingly good—not too sweet, with a nice buttery texture. She hadn’t remembered ever owning what Mary V called “Grandma Kirk’s secret recipe,” but sure enough, the girl knew exactly where to find it and every ingredient it called for. Even Gordy finally broke down and joined in the fun, cutting his portion of the dough into robots and spaceships and frosting several of the plain round cookies to resemble black-and-white soccer balls and orange basketballs and little white baseballs stitched with red.

  She picked up one of the baseball cookies and held it with her thumb and two fingers. Where on earth had she learned to throw a curve? Vita hadn’t the foggiest idea, yet she could not only do it, but teach little Gordy the finer points of the technique as well. While the cookies were cooling, the three of them had played ball in the backyard until Vita slammed a home run over the garden wall, across the alley, and into the neighbor’s flower bed. The man came out into the yard, yelling about his prize-winning begonias, and the three of them had run giggling into the house and sworn each other to secrecy.

  Vita couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun. Or, to be more precise, the last time she’d had any fun at all. She felt like a sleepwalker, an amnesiac, a female version of Rip Van Winkle awakening to a world which looked familiar but was entirely different from anything she had ever known.

  Once or twice during the weekend, she had struggled with a compulsion to leave the twins to their own devices and spend a few hours in the office with the Treasure Box program. For one thing, she was eager to find out what had happened to Rachel and Michael and little Sophia Rose. Their lives had become such an intrinsic part of her own that she felt a little guilty abandoning them.

  But when she took a step back and regarded herself with a critical eye, Vita immediately concluded that reality—in this case, her time with the twins—was infinitely more important than a story, no matter how captivating. She would not become like one of those bored housewives who never let anything divert them from their soap operas. The Treasure Box program could wait.

  And it had waited—until now. She glanced at the clock; it was 9:30, still early. She ate one more cookie, one of Gordy’s spaceships, and drained the glass of milk, then went into her office, intending to turn on the computer. Instead, she picked up the Treasure Box from the table by the windows and dropped into her desk chair.

  Moonlight dappled the expanse of yard in
shades of gray and blue, and one silver ray crept through the glass and lighted on the box Vita held in her hands. She lifted the lid and ran one finger across the inscription underneath: Love Is the Key That Unlocks Every Portal.

  Mary Kate had called her “Sis” and said “Love you” instead of “Good-bye.”

  And Vita had responded, “I love you, too.”

  For a long time, while the moon shifted and the shadows deepened, she sat there—alone, and yet not alone. Wondering, wondering . . .

  “Vita, I can’t tell you what a wonderful weekend this was.” Mary Kate settled herself at the kitchen table, accepted a glass of iced tea, and took one of the remaining sugar cookies from the plate.

  “Does that mean—” Vita looked around to make sure the twins weren’t within earshot, then lowered her voice. “Does that mean you and Gordon are on the road to recovery?”

  Mary Kate let out a little laugh. “Gordon? I don’t know what’s going to happen with Gordon, to tell you the truth. But we did have some profitable conversations during Boot Camp, and he said he’d think about continuing with couples counseling after this weekend.”

  “That sounds promising.” Vita sat in the chair at right angles to her sister and wrestled with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she was happy to see Mary Kate and realized that for two days she had been eagerly anticipating her sister’s return. On the other hand, Mary Kate’s arrival meant that her time with the twins was coming to an end, and Vita felt an unaccountable twinge of regret over the prospect of saying good-bye to them.

  All weekend, as she had “walked the road set before her,” Vita had been aware of two conflicting realities—the isolation she had always thought of as her “real” past, and the “new” memories that assailed her, memories that included a close and loving relationship with her sister and niece and nephew.

  Mary Kate was talking, responding to Vita’s comment.