Elliott rarely mentioned her miscarriage, and Brydie respected that, so of course she didn’t come out and say what worse thing her friend had been through. Brydie truly couldn’t imagine much worse than a miscarriage, to have wanted a baby as much as Elliott and Leo had wanted that baby and then to have heard the words “We can’t find a heartbeat.”
Brydie took another swill of the Pinot. She guessed that Leo and Elliott had wanted her to move out for reasons other than the space she was taking up in their basement. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d made them uncomfortable. They’d wanted to be happy, to be cautiously optimistic, and there was Brydie, acting like a sad sack on their basement sectional. Ordinarily the thought would have upset her, but this time it didn’t. She’d needed to move out. She’d needed to live on her own—even if she was basically living someone else’s life.
No, Brydie thought. I’m living my own life. I’m living my own life for the first time in thirty-four years.
It was the first time in her life she’d lived alone. It was the first time in her life she’d done anything without waiting for someone else’s cue. She stole a look over at the trunk. She had to find a way to get inside of it, if for no other reason than to make sure that whatever was inside was not damaged.
Brydie walked over to the trunk and ran a finger across the lid. There was no way she could open it without the key unless she damaged the lock. She moved around to the back and suddenly had an idea. Maybe she could take the hinges off. With new purpose, she set down the empty glass and grabbed her keys. She kept a small tool kit in her glove box, and she figured a screwdriver would do the trick.
Brydie knelt down and located the hinges on the back of the lid. Then she removed the screws with her screwdriver. Once the hinges were detached, she carefully lifted the back of the cedar chest lid and looked inside.
There was a blanket on top—a thick, lavender-colored wool that Brydie thought might just come apart in her hands. Placing the blanket on the floor beside her, Brydie peered farther down into the trunk. What she saw surprised her. Instead of a hodgepodge of items or more blankets, there were two large Tupperware containers, like what Brydie might have used for storing cookies or cupcakes, sitting neatly at the bottom of the trunk.
Brydie reached inside and picked one of them up. It was heavy, and whatever was inside slid from one side to the other when she pulled it out of the trunk. She sat the box down and got up to pour herself another glass of wine. If she was being honest with herself, she felt guilty for what she was about to do. She didn’t have to look in the containers. She could put them away in the closet until the basement dried out enough for the trunk and all of its contents to be returned to the moldy corner.
Brydie pressed the corkscrew down into an unopened bottle of Merlot and sighed. By now Teddy had jumped down from the bed and waddled into the living room. He sniffed the trunk and then lay down next to it.
“You stink,” Brydie said to him, sitting down crisscross applesauce beside him, careful not to slosh any Merlot from her overfull glass onto the floor. “You smell like a wet dog.”
Teddy looked up at her, indignant for a moment before sneezing onto her bare leg.
Two months ago, any dog sneezing on her would have sent her into fits. She would have been running to take a shower. Now she simply used her free hand to wipe her leg before turning back to the trunk. “Have you ever seen this before?” Brydie asked Teddy, setting down her wineglass and picking up the first plastic tub. She slid two of her fingernails underneath the lid and pulled. With a pop, the lid disconnected with the base and what could only be described as years of dust came flying off and settled on both Teddy and Brydie.
This time, they both sneezed.
When Brydie was able to make her eyes stop watering and the sneezing subsided, she gazed down into the tub. Inside, there were pictures. Old pictures, and as she lifted them out and started to go through them, she realized that they must be the missing pictures from the photo album she’d found during her first trip to the basement. The people were the same, and so were the clothes. There was one of Pauline and her third husband—what was his name? Bill? They were standing next to an older couple, a man and a woman, and Brydie recognized the woman’s fur coat in the picture as the same one Pauline mentioned in the story about the Thanksgiving fire. That must mean that the man and woman standing next to Pauline and Bill were Bill’s parents. Did Pauline take the pictures out of the album because she didn’t like Bill’s mother? Brydie wondered. If that was the case, why keep them at all?
She continued to shuffle through the pictures. About halfway through, she noticed something. The pictures were faded, and the images slightly blurry and yellowed, but it looked like Pauline was gaining weight. Her face had become more rounded. Her dresses had become more flowing. And in one picture, Bill stood beside Pauline, beaming down at her, one hand pressed against her belly.
That’s when it hit Brydie—Pauline had been pregnant. She flipped through the pictures faster, as Pauline’s belly expanded with each faded scene. It didn’t make sense. Hadn’t Pauline told Brydie during her first visit that she didn’t have children? She’d said four husbands . . . four husbands, but no children.
And then Brydie was at the end of the stack of pictures. She turned them over in her hands and then looked back into the plastic tub. There weren’t any more. She held up the last picture, willing it to tell her its secrets. She turned it over, hoping for some sort of notation, anything to explain the mystery baby contained in the trunk—the one Pauline failed to tell her about, the one whose presence had seemingly been erased from the old woman’s life.
Maybe, Brydie thought, they had a falling-out. Maybe they haven’t spoken in decades. Maybe one of them did something so awful to the other that they couldn’t get past it.
Brydie set the stack of photos down and reached for the second tub. As she did so, she thought about all the fights she and her own mother had had. She couldn’t remember a time when they’d actually gotten along. Her father, with his quiet nature, had always acted as the buffer between the two of them. When he died, Brydie felt alone, but worse, she’d felt exposed—left to weather the storm that was her mother without any protection. Still, she couldn’t imagine not ever speaking to her again. She couldn’t imagine something so bad that she wouldn’t eventually return her calls.
Lost in her own thoughts, Brydie pulled the top off the second tub. This one was lighter, and inside she found a white cotton blanket, yellowed with age. Absently, she plucked it from the tub and held it up. It took her a moment to realize that it was a hospital blanket. It had little blue and pink stripes in one corner and the name of the hospital, Memphis Memorial. Beneath the blanket, Brydie found a tiny pink stocking cap and a pink crochet dress with bows at the neck and at the end of each sleeve.
With the blanket and the cap resting in her lap, she held up the dress. It was slightly dingy and the bows were tattered, but Brydie could see that it had once been beautiful, and probably, she mused, handmade. Brydie moved to replace the delicate pieces of clothing and noticed that the tub wasn’t empty. At the bottom of the tub were two sheets of paper. The first one, the top one, was a birth certificate for Elise Elizabeth Forrester, born December 26, 1963, at 2:30 A.M. to William Forrester and Pauline Radcliff.
The second piece of paper, Brydie realized, was much different. As thoughts of her own life, her own parents, faded from her mind, she held the piece of paper closer to her face, willing what she was reading to be different. But no matter how she read it, the death certificate of Elise Elizabeth Forrester read the same way. She’d been born on December 26 at 2:30 A.M., and she’d died less than four hours later, at 6:07 A.M.
Brydie blinked, hard. She hadn’t had that much to drink, but for some reason her stomach had soured, and she felt as if she might be sick. Her head was fuzzy, and she threw the contents of her lap back into the tub and pulled herself up, stumbling toward the bathroom with Teddy at her heels.
&nbs
p; She knelt down at the base of the toilet, her knees pressing hard into the linoleum, and rested her head against the lid. There hadn’t been a falling-out like she’d thought. There hadn’t been anything, except for a short few hours of life. Brydie wished more than anything she hadn’t snooped into the old woman’s secrets to find out. How could she face her on Sunday?
Brydie sat up and scooted herself over to the bathtub. The cool porcelain felt good on her back. She knew that she could never say anything to Pauline, lest she find out that Brydie had violated her privacy in the worst possible way. Clearly, she hadn’t wanted anyone to know, let alone the near stranger living in her house. But all Brydie wanted to do was to hug her and tell her that she was sorry, like she’d done with Elliott.
At the other end of the bathroom, Teddy crept closer to her. He paused for a moment to sniff her bare feet before coming up beside her and resting his paw on her lap. When Brydie reached down to pet him, he jumped up onto her lap and began to lick at the tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t even realized were falling.
Brydie put her forehead up to his and smiled. “You’ve done this before,” she whispered to him. “I’m sorry I’m not her.”
Teddy, for his part, didn’t respond, except to settle himself into her lap and fall asleep, quietly snoring.
CHAPTER 32
BRYDIE TOSSED AND TURNED ALL NIGHT. HER DREAMS were scattered and vivid, waking her up more than once from her fretful sleep, only to be met by darkness and the reminder of what she’d discovered hours before. She dreamt of rainbow babies and lavender-colored blankets only to plummet into a horrible nightmare that she couldn’t remember when she finally pulled herself out of bed the next morning.
What she really wanted to do was stay in bed all day. She was exhausted, but she’d promised Pauline that she would go and get her lunch from Gus’s, and she couldn’t back out, especially now.
By the time she got there, it was 11 A.M. and the place was as crowded as a Beale Street bar during Mardi Gras. She pushed through a line of people and managed to grab one of the last paper menus at the register. She’d thought she could just go up and order fried chicken or maybe even get lucky and go through a drive-thru. Now she was overwhelmed with choices of sides and pieces of chicken as an overworked waitress brushed past her with a tray of glistening chicken held high.
“Can I help you?” came a voice in front of her. “Hey, ma’am?”
Brydie looked up. “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I’ve never been here before. I was just looking at the menu.”
The woman didn’t respond. She simply looked past her at the line and rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling. “Well, everything’s good, so . . .”
“Of course,” Brydie replied, feeling herself blush under the pressure. “Um, I’ll take two of the three-piece all-white-meat dinners, I guess.”
“That’ll be seventeen fifty-six. For here or to go?”
“To go.”
The woman held out her hand to accept Brydie’s money. “What’s your name?”
“Brydie.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “Brydie Benson?”
“Yes?” Brydie’s response came out as more of a question than an answer. “That’s me?”
“Oh, honey.” The woman handed Brydie’s money back to her. “Pauline called this morning and told me to watch out for you. She said you’d probably order the wrong thing.”
“She called you?”
The woman nodded. “She used to be a regular up until a few months ago,” she said. “I’d been worried about her.”
“She had a stroke,” Brydie said, suddenly realizing how very little she knew about Pauline’s medical history. “She’s doing okay. Some days are better than others.”
“Well, a bit of fried chicken ain’t gonna hurt,” the woman replied. “But she’ll want the three pieces of dark, the slaw, and the fried pickles.”
“I’ll take the same thing then,” Brydie replied. “Except I do want white meat.”
“Have a seat on one of the benches over there,” the woman said, waving off Brydie’s money. “It’s on the house for Mrs. Pauline.”
Brydie sat down on the bench as she was told and marveled at Pauline’s foresight. Of course she would have picked the wrong food, and the old woman knew it. However, when the waitress approached her and handed her two plastic bags full of delicious-smelling chicken, Brydie was grateful that Pauline had been a regular customer for so long. Despite the crowd, the service was fast, and she was relieved to step back outside and into the chilly November air.
As she walked toward her car, Brydie marveled at all of the old buildings in downtown Memphis. This was twice in a few days that she’d been downtown in the daytime, but it was the first time she’d actually noticed any of the buildings around her. One of them, a tall, skinny building in the middle of two squat ones, was empty. Brydie crossed the street to look at it, much to the chagrin of a horse-drawn carriage that seemed to come out of nowhere. After she waved her apologies to the harried driver, she jumped up onto the sidewalk and peered inside the window.
The glass was warbled and slightly dusty, but she could see the bare hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. It probably needed a bit of work, like most untended older buildings, but still, it was beautiful. She wondered if there was an apartment upstairs, as most of the buildings of its generation had once boasted. She remembered as a child visiting her grandparents in the nursing home with her mother. Once, after a particularly boring visit where she was forced to recount what happened at her Christmas program no fewer than ten times, her mother took her downtown for lunch at a diner with black-and-white–tiled floors and waitresses in poodle skirts.
Afterward, she and Brydie had taken a walk, Ruth Benson pointing out the old building where her parents had owned their dry cleaning business, Callahan Family Cleaners.
“We lived upstairs,” her mother told her. “On the second floor.”
“You lived here?” Brydie asked, bewildered. She’d always pictured the farm outside the city limits that they’d visited before her grandparents moved to the nursing home as the only home her mother ever had before marrying her father.
Her mother nodded. “We lived here until I was nearly fifteen,” she said. “Until the fire burned the downstairs, and Nanny and Poppy sold it.”
“It doesn’t look like anybody lives here now.”
“Well, people don’t do that much anymore,” her mother replied. “But in the old days, when I was a kid, it was normal for shop owners to live above their businesses.”
Now, as Brydie stood pressed against the runny glass, she thought about how much fun it might be to live above a bakery . . . her bakery.
There was a “For Sale or Lease” sign on the door with the name of the realty company Elliott worked for, and Brydie made a mental note to ask her about it, even though she knew she was nowhere near ready to have another bakery of her own. She likely wouldn’t have the money for a long time, especially given the exorbitant rent prices downtown. Still, she couldn’t help but daydream about what it might be like to have her own place again. Right now, however, it was time for her to find her car and get Pauline’s Sunday dinner to her before the chicken got cold.
CHAPTER 33
BRYDIE WENT HOME BEFORE VISITING PAULINE TO GET Teddy, who was sufficiently annoyed at being left at home. He barked his indignation at her until they got to the car and he smelled the chicken. He spent the drive to the nursing home sniffing into the air and gazing longingly into the backseat, where the plastic bags were nestled on the floor.
“Well, you’ve sure got your hands full,” the receptionist said when she saw Brydie lumbering in with her arms full of chicken and dog. “Do you want some help?”
“No,” Brydie huffed. “I’m all right.” She set Teddy down on the tile. “I don’t know why he refuses to walk in the parking lot.”
“Because he knows you’ll carry him,” the receptionist replied with a wink.
Brydie grinned and s
tarted toward Pauline’s room. As she neared it, she heard a familiar voice wafting down the hallway. When she got to the door, she saw the white coat and curly hair and realized it was Nathan.
He turned around when Brydie released Teddy’s leash and he ran to Pauline and put his paws up on the side of her bed. “Brydie,” he said, giving her a half smile. “Mrs. Neumann and I were just talking about you.”
“You were?”
“I told him I hoped Missy down at Gus’s set you straight about what to order,” Pauline spoke up, motioning for Nathan to lift Teddy up onto the bed. “I was worried you’d order me something ridiculous like chicken strips.”
Brydie held up the plastic bags. “She set me straight, but I hope it hasn’t gotten too cold. I had to run home and get Teddy.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Pauline waved her off. “I had the gals down in the dining room bring up some proper plates.”
Brydie released a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, relieved that Pauline seemed to be in good spirits. She opened her mouth to speak and then the events of Friday night came rushing back to her—the flood, the trunk, the pictures . . . and everything else.
“You okay?” Nathan asked, taking a step closer to her. “You’ve got a weird look on your face.”
“I’m fine,” Brydie replied, turning her attention to the plates on the table by the window. She took a deep breath and turned back around. “But could we talk out in the hallway real quick?”
Nathan shrugged. “Sure.”
“We’ll be right back,” she said to Pauline.
“Take your time,” Pauline replied, her attention fixed on Teddy. “I think you’ve gained some weight,” she said to him. “What’s Brydie been feeding you?”
“Is everything okay?” Nathan asked once they were out of earshot of Pauline. “I tried calling yesterday.”
“It’s fine,” Brydie replied. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. But hey, where’s Dr. Sower?”
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