“Promising, yes. But it remains to be seen what happens now that we’re back in the real world, whether he’ll decide this relationship is worth the time and effort to work on it. In the meantime, I’m going to work on myself.”
Vita regarded her sister with intense curiosity. “What exactly does that mean?”
“It means that I made a decision this weekend, Vita. An important one.” She leaned forward. “I’m going to graduate school.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really. And I have you to thank for it. You’ve always inspired me, Sis. I told you I envied your brains, just as you envied my looks. But looks fade with age. Brains just keep getting stronger. It may be a bit late for me to start exercising mine, but better late than never. I’m going for a master’s in social work, to become a counselor. If my studies end up making me more interesting to my husband, so much the better. But I’m not doing it for him—I’m doing it for myself.”
“You want to be a counselor?”
Mary Kate nodded and bit into another cookie. “Yep. Ever since I started going to counseling, I’ve been fascinated with the process. We’ve done family genograms, childhood memories, dream analysis—”
Vita moved her chair closer. “Dream analysis?”
“Yes, it’s amazing what dreams can reveal. Not all of them, of course—some dreams are just leftover images from a day’s experience, or the result of—”
“‘An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, the fragment of an underdone potato’?”
“Exactly. That’s from Scrooge, right?” Mary Kate laughed.
“Yes, some are just bad pizza, but some are pretty significant.
Call it your subconscious trying to get a message through, or God trying to communicate some truth about your life.”
Vita opened her mouth to lodge an automatic protest against the idea that God might speak through a person’s dreams. But before she could say a word, her mind began to call up memories from her own recent dreams—Sophie in the meadow, her mother becoming a willow tree; the images of red that preceded the midnight slaughter at Benedetti’s restaurant. And the most disturbing ones of all: the joyful dog and the somber, silent baby.
She raised her head to find Mary Kate’s eyes boring into hers. “Did I touch a nerve?”
“No, no.” Vita tried to dismiss the idea. “Just some recent dreams I’ve had—they don’t mean anything.”
“Come on, spill it.” Mary Kate crossed her arms and waited.
Vita hesitated, unsure whether she really wanted to pour out her innermost thoughts in her sister’s presence. But at last she took a deep breath, and in a rush described the Sheltie she had left outside the garden wall and the infant in the crib she had neglected.
“They’re just silly dreams,” she concluded. “Probably subconscious echoes from a computer program I’ve been using lately.”
Mary Kate looked at her. “How did you feel when you woke up? Did you sense that these dream images were important?”
“Yes,” Vita admitted reluctantly. “I got the impression that— well, that somebody was trying to tell me something.”
Her sister nodded. “And you felt—”
“Guilty. As if I had failed to take care of something entrusted to me, something I ought to have . . . loved.”
“Tell me about the dog.”
Vita frowned. “What about the dog? I was inside the garden, he was outside the wall, and there was no gate. I knew I was safe behind the walls, but had forgotten him, left him outside, and I couldn’t get to him.” She focused on the memory of the Sheltie— exuberant, joyous. The word stuck in her mind. “Could he represent joy?”
Mary Kate raised an eyebrow. “Maybe.”
“OK.” Vita took a deep breath. “So I’ve created this safe enclosure, this life with high walls and no gate. I’m protected from being hurt, but I don’t have joy.”
“Does that feel right?”
Vita felt tears sting her eyes. “Yes. But how can I let him in when there’s no gate?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Kate said. “But keep it on the back burner, and you’ll come up with a solution.”
The answer presented itself to Vita’s mind in an instant: Knock down a wall. She thought of the missing padlock on her own garden gate, and shivered.
“Now, what about the child in the darkened room?” Mary Kate prodded.
“Something I’m supposed to care for, that I’ve neglected?”
Vita shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“What did the child look like?”
“Dark hair, huge brown eyes, a thin little face—”
“Like anyone you know?”
Vita felt a small twinge of recognition clutch at her heart.
“Like me.”
“And what was she doing?”
“Nothing. She was just standing there, not crying, not making a sound. Just waiting.”
“ Waiting for you to come and take care of her.”
Vita nodded. “Is it true that a child who is left uncared for finally ceases to cry and simply waits to die?”
“That can happen, yes. You might want to consider, Sis, if there could be something in your life—something important— that you’ve neglected over a long period of time.”
The answer came unbidden, as if dropped whole into her mind. “My inner self,” Vita murmured. “My soul. I’ve neglected my soul and shut joy out of my life.”
“By George, I think she’s got it.” Mary Kate smiled.
Vita shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Now I have to figure out what to do with it.”
“That will come. Give it a while.”
Vita gazed at her sister as if seeing her for the very first time.
“It seems you’ve found your calling. You have a gift for this.”
Mary Kate patted her arm. “You’re an easy case, Sis. It was all right there, waiting for you to see it.” She drained the last of her iced tea and stood up. “I’d better round up my brood and get home.”
Vita stood on the porch watching as the last light faded and the twins piled into the car. Everybody waved good-bye, and Mary Kate promised to call her in a day or so. At last the Volvo’s taillights twinkled out of sight around the corner.
After a while Vita wandered into her office and turned on the desk lamp. Light puddled in a golden oval, illuminating the rich oak finish of the desktop and the stacks of research in her neglected Alaska files. The office felt so peaceful, so quieting. With a sigh of deep satisfaction she leaned back in her leather swivel chair and surveyed her domain. Her eyes swept over the windows facing out into the yard, the bookshelves along two walls, the bulletin board filled with postcards from the places she had written about—
Vita stopped. Something about the board had caught her eye. It looked . . . different. Maybe it was just the light.
She got up and turned on another lamp, then went and stood in front of the framed corkboard that held her collection of postcards. There was the Eiffel Tower, the cottage in the English Cotswolds, and yes, the Biergarten in Munich. But these weren’t just postcards—they were photographs. With actual human beings in the foreground.
She pulled one down and held it closer to the light. It was a scene from Castle Combe, in England—that lovely little riverside village where Rex Harrison’s version of Dr. Doolittle had been filmed. A cottage on the riverbank, built from golden Cotswold stone, with a brilliant swag of pink roses over the door, all set against a backdrop of rolling green hills. Quite a lovely scene, and quite familiar.
She peered at the faces in the photograph. Two women, one with a thin face, brown eyes, long dark hair pulled back at the nape of her neck. The other, shorter and rounder, with sandy hair and a strange puckered look around her mouth. Not unattractive, just distinctive, as if she had suffered scarring acne as a teenager. Like best friends out for a holiday, they were both smiling broadly, each with an arm draped over the other’s shoulder.
Recognition pummeled the air from Vi
ta’s lungs with all the force of a physical blow.
She was looking at herself. Herself, with one arm around the shoulder of . . .
Hattie Parker.
23
THE LABYRINTH
Vita scrutinized the photograph until her vision began to blur. It was Hattie, all right. Upon closer inspection with a magnifying glass, Vita could see faint distortions of the scars from the automobile accident—thin white lines crisscrossing the forehead and cheeks, a slight upward lift at the corner of the right eyebrow, a crook in the nose.
She hadn’t laid eyes on Hattie since that day long ago in the high school parking lot. Hattie had been wearing that hideous black motorcycle jacket with the name “Scarface” embroidered above a skull and crossbones. And yet she could also remember them as friends. Best friends. Both single and unattached, they had traveled together on research trips for Vita’s books. The journey to England had been the first, and one of the best.
She remembered the little place they had rented in the Cotswolds, a thatch-roofed cottage renovated from an old tithe barn. The fourteenth-century pub where they had dined every night on steak and kidney pie and pasty-type sandwiches called baps. The walking trips through the English countryside. The morning they had stumbled upon the ruins of an old Norman church in the verge where a cow pasture met the woods. The energetic rendition of Twelfth Night performed by a local troupe of players at the castle outside the village.
Every minute detail of that holiday came back to Vita in a breathtaking rush. She and Hattie had motored into Wales and spent a rainy afternoon at the ruins of Tintern Abbey, quoting Wordsworth to one another. They had walked along the Avon River from Salisbury Cathedral to the little church in Bemerton where metaphysical poet George Herbert had served as vicar.
During their two days in Stratford, they had made rubbings of Shakespeare’s epitaph and visited Ann Hathaway’s cottage. Later, in London, they had spent three days taking in the British Museum, the Tower, and Westminster Cathedral. They had even managed to get first-row balcony seats for a rousing production of Singing in the Rain starring Tommy Steele.
Vita could remember it all. Most vividly, she could still hear the laughter they had shared, all those chilly nights by the small coal fire in the cottage as they played Scrabble and swapped dreams. And yet, in the midst of such clear and unnerving recollections, Vita could also remember empty, vacant years, years of missing Hattie and wondering whatever happened to her. Years of not knowing if she were dead or alive.
It was as if the fabric of her mind had been ripped at the seam, revealing another reality hidden behind the curtain—a reality, if anything, more real than what she had always known to be true.
Her cynical mind, like the Wizard of Oz vainly attempting to reassert his authority, kept shouting, “Pay no attention to what’s behind the curtain!” But the damage had been done. The curtain had been torn, and Vita couldn’t stop herself from looking.
And there was something else about Hattie . . . what was it?
Letters. Yes. Letters from Atlanta, where Hattie had gone to work for the Centers for Disease Control after college. Dozens of them, wonderful letters full of interesting tales about her career as a researcher.
Vita dropped the photograph into the oval of lamplight on her desk and pressed her fingertips to her temples. If there had been letters—if she and Hattie were still best friends—she might have saved them. Some of them, anyway. The ones which held the most significance for her. Maybe they could help her sort all this out, help her discern what was real. If she could only find them.
She rolled her chair back from the desk and began rummaging in drawers, pulling out file folders and manila envelopes.
Nothing. She went through the small oak cabinet in the corner, and then made her way across the room, systematically searching every cubbyhole and drawer. Nothing there. The only place left to look was in the box on the far bookshelf, where she kept a will and her life insurance policy and other important papers. Vita turned, and as she brushed by the table under the window, the hem of her sweater snagged on the corner of the Treasure Box.
She caught it, upside down, just before it hit the floor. The lid jarred open, and she gritted her teeth, anticipating a nerve-rattling clatter as CDs and computer disks hit the hardwood floor. Instead, a small packet secured with a rubber band fell out at her feet.
Vita set the Treasure Box back in its place and gave it a nervous little pat, then gathered up the packet and returned to her desk.
Her fingers were shaking, and she couldn’t get her eyes to focus. The rubber band broke in her hands as she pulled it off.
There were six envelopes, legal size, in a soft cream color, with her name and address typed neatly on each one. In the upper left-hand corner, in a flourish of raised-ink black lettering, the name:
Harriet E. Parker.
Vita had never seen these letters before . . . and yet she had.
She recognized them, knew—without knowing how she knew— that Hattie’s given name was Harriet, that her middle name was Eleanor, that in her adult professional life everyone called her Harry. But how had the letters come to be here, in her office, in the Treasure Box? She had a vague, transparent, dreamlike memory of putting them there herself, except that— She closed her eyes and exhaled forcefully. If she wasn’t already crazy, she’d drive herself over the edge by trying to figure all of this out. Better just to read the letters, to find out what she’d been missing all these years.
Vita looked at the first one, bearing the earliest postmark, June 3, 1988. Her mind cast back to the late eighties. She would have been twenty-five, just out of graduate school. Mother and Daddy were both still alive. In 1988 Gordon and Mary Kate had been married two years, but he was still writing his dissertation, and she was finishing a B.A. and working as a secretary part-time.
They were planning their family carefully. It would be another two years before the twins came.
Vita opened the letter, smoothed out the pages across the top of her desk, and began to read.
Dear Vita,
By now you’ve probably decided I’d dropped off the face of the earth, and I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you trashed this letter without even reading it. But please don’t. You were always my best friend, and so for the sake of that friendship, please keep on reading.
After my accident in seventh grade, we drifted apart. All my fault, I admit. I was a mess. I wanted to die, and nearly did manage to kill myself on that Harley a couple of times. But I finally grew up, got my act together, and did well in college, although I felt pretty alone and isolated during those years. I ended up in medical research, got a master’s degree in chemistry, and managed to land an entry-level research job at the CDC in Atlanta. I’m now living in a suburb called Stone Mountain—which is a joke to anyone who grew up in the REAL mountains the way we did. Stone Mountain is one big old rock sticking up in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, I’m writing to let you know that, despite our separation, the memory of your friendship has sustained me for a very long time. You said (or intended to say) that you would always be my friend, and when times got difficult, I remembered that—remembered how much we cared about each other once, and remembering gave me hope.
We’re both grown now, and maybe we’ve gone in different directions, but your name is still the one that comes to mind whenever I hear the words “best friend.” I’d like to renew that friendship, if you’re willing—to find out whether or not we have anything in common after all these years. I promise I’ll never turn my back on you again.
Love,
Hattie
The letter began to blur in front of Vita’s face, and she laid it aside and rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She had the unsettling sensation of holding two contradictory memories. On the one hand, she felt as if she were reading this letter for the very first time, getting her first faint glimpse of hope that reconciliation with her best friend from childhood might be possible. On the
other hand, she was aware that the reconciliation had already been accomplished ages ago. Theoretically, Vita believed in the existence of paradox, but she had never faced it except on the safe jousting ground of philosophical discussion. Now the abstract idea confronted her in a much more immediate, more threatening form. Both could not be real—could they?
The curtain inside her head ripped open a little wider, and she recalled how she had debated for three weeks whether or not to answer the letter. But she did answer it, and discovered that the friendship she had cherished as a child was recoverable in adulthood. Although she and Hattie had, indeed, gone in different directions, they still shared vital interests and values in common.
In the end, Vita’s best friend had been returned to her.
As Vita scanned the other letters, additional memories arranged themselves in her mind. The argument that had ensued, years after Mary Kate and Gordon were married, when Hattie confronted Vita with the anger that still seethed under the surface and told her bluntly that she needed to let go of it. The pain Vita felt when she believed her best friend couldn’t understand her. The emotional tension resulting from that fight, and the intense relief Vita had experienced when they finally made up.
Discussions—sometimes quite passionate ones—about life and death, about God and the nature of the universe, about music and art and literature, about ethics and integrity and ambition.
It felt good, this sensation of not being alone, of having someone in her life who had known her for years, seen more than the public face, the image of independence and strength she had worked hard to project. Here was someone who knew her—really knew her—and still loved her.
And Hattie wasn’t the only one. Vita thought of Mary Kate and the twins, and her mind called up fragments of other recollections— times she had been impatient with Gordy and Mary V, occasions when she had let her sister down, and when her sister had been insensitive with her. Squabbles over insignificant differences of opinion, and silly quarrels based in pride or self-centeredness or insecurity. All the various dimensions of family love and dissension. They knew her, too—knew her perhaps even better than she knew herself.
The Treasure Box Page 18