As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  “Wait, Jamie!” I call out.

  I cross the sitting room to the sofa and lift the rucksack up off the floor. Some of the contents start to spill out the opening and I pause to coax a pair of socks and a shaving brush back inside.

  It’s when I do this that I see them inside the rucksack, tied loosely together with a piece of twine—all the letters I ever wrote to Jamie, from the very first one to the last.

  CHAPTER 57

  Evelyn

  The contents of Ursula’s pencil box are spread out before me. The photograph. The list. The train ticket. Rita’s letter. The key. The coins. Perhaps I ought not to have brought them home with me, but I don’t have the time at the hospital to ponder them like I want to. Like I need to. Downstairs, Willa and Alex are playing some kind of game where she plays a song on the piano and Alex must run around the room tagging things. Maggie is out with Palmer planning her wedding and Papa is at a businessmen’s meeting.

  Another week has gone by, and while I’m now sure I know why Ursula tried to hang herself, I am no closer to having her tell me the reason for it herself. When I brought the pencil box to the hospital from the Prinsens’ and shared with Dr. Bellfield what Rita Dabney had said about Ursula’s baby brother, I asked him what he thought we should do with this information. He, of course, turned the question back on me.

  “What do you advise?” he said.

  “I want her to trust me with her past,” I said, thinking out loud, “so that she will trust me to help her with her future. So I don’t think I should tell her yet that I went into her private space and took her things.”

  “Continue,” he said, giving me no indication if he agreed with me. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Dr. Bellfield is the type to produce the pencil box at a session and see what kind of reaction he gets.

  “I’m thinking I should start with where she last was—at the Prinsens’—and go backward one step at a time, rather than yanking her all the way to the beginning of her troubles and trying to move her forward from there.”

  “And how do you plan to sustain this protracted backward momentum?”

  He asked it nicely enough, but I could see what he was getting at. To keep Ursula taking backward steps to the moment she stood at the river’s edge with her baby brother, I would have to have compelling reasons for her to keep moving.

  “I need to ask the right questions,” I said.

  “And if she does not answer them? What is your plan then?”

  “I . . . I don’t know yet.”

  “I am intrigued by what you have uncovered, Miss Bright. And I will allow you to move ahead as you have suggested—for the time being, anyway. Let’s see how the patient is in two weeks.”

  I knew two weeks would not be enough time. I needed more information to ask better questions. I needed to talk to Rita Dabney myself instead of guessing at what her letter meant. “May I travel to Camden to speak with Ursula’s family?” I’d asked.

  “You told me they did not wish to be contacted.”

  “Yes, that message was passed on to me by Agnes Prinsen, but I did not agree to that request.”

  “I am guessing they will decline to speak to you.”

  “They might.”

  Dr. Bellfield had crinkled his brow. “You have other patients, Miss Bright. You will always have other patients. You cannot become involved to this depth with each one. You will exhaust yourself.”

  “But this is one I think I can help.”

  He had said I could go. I finished with my other duties and then grabbed my coat and umbrella to walk up to the station and catch the next train across the river into New Jersey. A steady rain was falling and I knew despite my umbrella I would likely be soaking wet when I got to the platform, but I didn’t want to wait until a drier day to go to Camden. Dr. Bellfield had given me only fourteen days.

  As I stepped through the front doors, Conrad Reese was coming inside to visit Sybil, and he was shaking the water off his own umbrella.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Bright.” Raindrops glistened on his black wool coat like tiny shards of glass. “You have to go out in this?”

  “I’m afraid so. Not far, though. Just to the train station.”

  “That’s six blocks!”

  I only have two weeks! I wanted to say. “I’ve got an umbrella,” I said instead.

  “Please allow me to drive you to the station. You can’t walk in this. You’ll be drenched before you get to the cross street.”

  His kind offer was so unexpected I fumbled for a response. “That’s . . . that’s too much trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble at all. My car’s right here and I’ve only just arrived.”

  “But you’ve come to see Sybil.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and I could read the unspoken words in that look. Sybil didn’t know he was coming, and she wouldn’t be put out that he’d been detained. She wouldn’t recognize him when he did finally get inside the hospital. And she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Please,” he finally said. “It’s the least I can do. You’ve been so kind to my wife. I see the extra care you give her. It would be a mere token of my gratitude.”

  A minute later I was inside his Buick touring car and we were headed to the station.

  “Where do you need to go, if I may ask?”

  “I must consult with another patient’s family. In Camden.”

  He took his eyes off the road to glance at me. “New Jersey? In this weather? It will take you forty minutes to get there.”

  I shrugged. “I have to go.”

  “I’ll take you across. It’s only eight miles or so. Let me take you.”

  “Mr. Reese! I couldn’t possibly have you do that.”

  “I insist. This is no kind of weather in which to be out.”

  “But I don’t know how long I will be.”

  He turned east in the direction of the Delaware River and the newly constructed bridge to New Jersey. “All the more reason for you not to be out in all this.”

  I could see that he would not be persuaded, and in truth, I didn’t want to spend the next few hours dashing through driving rain onto train platforms. “This is so very kind of you.”

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

  But it wasn’t nothing. Not to me.

  On the way, he told me about the book printing business he owns with his mother, and that he is the oldest of five children but the only son. Three of his four sisters are married, two with small children. The last at home is sixteen. He and Sybil had been married five years, but I already knew this. I knew she had started to drift just a few weeks after their wedding. All this was in Sybil’s file. I told him the names and ages of my sisters and our ward, Alex; about losing my mother and great-uncle to the flu; and my lifelong desire to be a doctor. He shared that he, too, had lost a parent to the flu. His father.

  Conrad was easy to talk to, and it seemed in no time we were pulling up in front of the Franklin Hotel, a four-story building, white brick with green trim, that had seen better days. The striped awning out front sagged with the weight of water and too many years.

  “Shall I just wait right here for you?” Conrad asked.

  I looked up at the tired-looking structure from a rain-streaked window. “I actually may be back out rather quickly.”

  “Oh?”

  I turned to him, feeling a little guilty for not telling him up front that the Dabneys might not give me even five minutes of their time. “I’m not sure how much help this family is going to want to be.”

  He frowned. “Want me to come in with you?”

  “No. It’s not that. They just . . . They don’t want to get too involved. I don’t think I’ll be long. But if you need to get back . . .”

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  I got out of the car and ran through the rain to th
e front door. The foyer inside was carpeted in a floral print that had mellowed to a subtle brown. Two green leather chairs were situated around a table and a coal fire. A woman of ample size with streaks of faint silver in her hair sat behind a desk. Behind her, room keys dangled on a felt-covered peg-board lined with hooks.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “Mrs. Dabney?”

  “Yes.”

  I took a breath. “My name is Evelyn Bright. I am a medical student and one of the care providers for Ursula at the Fairview Hospital. I’d appreciate it very much if I could ask you a few questions about what happened to her and her baby brother.”

  Rita Dabney’s eyes widened a bit. “I told that other lady that we don’t have the money to pay for a mental hospital. I made that very clear!”

  “I’m not here for money, and no one is going to ask you to pay for anything. I just have some questions.”

  “She’s not really our problem, you know. I feel sorry for her. I always have, but she’s not really ours. If you ask me, we’ve been more than kind to her. Especially after what she did. She killed our first grandchild, you know.”

  My hackles rose at the callousness of this woman’s words, but I reined in my indignation and continued with my calm questioning. “Yes, so I’ve heard,” I said. “I just want to know what happened that day her brother died. And then what happened after it.”

  “Well, none of us were there. We were here, and Ines and the children were over the river in Philadelphia.”

  “Ines?”

  “Ursula and Leo’s mother. Cal’s first wife. She and he had that little apartment off South Street in as derelict an area as I’ve ever seen. I told Cal when he was about to be shipped off to the war that Ines and the children should come here to live with us, but Cal and his father weren’t on speaking terms then and he didn’t want any part of that. Maury and I weren’t even invited to the wedding. Cal married this Croatian widow with a five-year-old daughter and we weren’t even consulted or invited.”

  The woman stopped and grimaced angrily, like the offense still stung.

  “And then Ines and Cal had a child?” I asked so that Rita Dabney would go on, even if it was to continue talking about herself when it was Ursula I was asking about. I was beginning to see more and more the dark depths of Ursula’s world.

  “Cal didn’t even tell us she was pregnant until the baby was born, and even then I had to beg to see him. Ines convinced Cal I should at least be able to see the baby. But then he was shipped off to France two weeks after Leo was born. Next thing I know there’s a killing flu all over the face of the earth. I didn’t know Ines had it. And I didn’t know she had given it to Ursula. If I had known I would have come for them no matter what Cal had told her before he left. I didn’t know!”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” I said empathetically.

  “Then I come to find out from the police that Ines is dead and Ursula was found wandering around the river, blood all over her, sick with the flu, and carrying on about an angel coming for Baby Leo in a little brown boat. She tossed him into the river. A helpless baby. She drowned him.”

  Rita Dabney’s eyes had misted over.

  “I’m so very sorry.”

  “The worst of it is, she says she doesn’t hardly remember that day.”

  “I think maybe she does,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve asked her time and again what on earth made her think an angel had come in a little brown boat for that baby, and she could never tell me.”

  “Maybe the baby had died. Their mother was dead. Maybe the trauma of losing both her mother and her brother in the same day was too much. Maybe Ursula’s mind created the image of the angel taking Leo to soften the blow of seeing them both dead.”

  “But she threw him in the river!”

  “If the child was dead already, then she didn’t drown him.”

  “Then why is she the way she is? Why did she try to kill herself? He was alive when she threw him in. If he wasn’t, she wouldn’t be carrying the guilt that she is. She is the way she is because deep down she knows she killed that baby. Probably because she was jealous of him.”

  “She was sick with fever.”

  “But my grandson is dead just the same.”

  I paused for just a moment to collect my thoughts. “You and your husband took her in then?”

  Rita Dabney’s nod was accompanied by a half-concealed snort. “What else could we do? Ines had no other family that we knew of. The city was plumb full of orphans. They didn’t want another one. And I did feel sorry for her. I did. Ursula was the saddest child I’d ever laid eyes on. When Cal came home some months after the war, he didn’t even want to see her. It was several years before he’d even look at her. And he had his own problems from the war. He softened up after a while, but there were times before he met his second wife and she gave him a new baby when he’d get ahold of liquor, and when he did, he always lit into Ursula and blamed her for everything bad in his life. It wasn’t her fault Ines died or that Cal had to see what he did in the war, but he heaped the blame for it all, and Leo’s death, too, on her. I don’t blame her for having left.”

  “Left? Didn’t she run away at fourteen?”

  Rita opened her mouth and then closed it. A second later when she spoke again, I knew we were finished. “She left. You apparently read the note I wrote to her. I told her she always had a home here. But she wanted to go. And now I think it’s time you went.”

  I thanked Rita Dabney for her help and she merely tipped her head to acknowledge she’d heard me.

  It was raining harder as I stepped outside. I ran to Conrad’s automobile, so grateful that he had wanted to wait for me.

  “Did you get what you needed?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb.

  “More or less,” I said.

  He needed to concentrate on the slick street as we made our way back across the bridge into Pennsylvania, and the easy camaraderie that we had on the way to Camden was gone. The silence as he drove seemed to emphasize the fact that we were alone in his car.

  We pulled into the gravel driveway of the hospital some minutes later, just as a break in the clouds appeared.

  “Thank you for taking me,” I said as Conrad set the Buick’s brake. “I so appreciate it.”

  “I’m the grateful one. You’re the only person who has shown any real interest in helping Sybil.”

  “I wish I could do more. I truly do.”

  He had held my gaze from across the seat. “I know you do.”

  I stayed for only a second more. Then I went into the hospital ahead of him, my face warm despite the chill.

  And now, several hours later, I sit with Ursula’s secret possessions lined up on my bureau and the memory of that look Conrad gave me.

  I don’t know what to make of any of it.

  A knock at my door pulls me from these thoughts.

  “It’s Maggie. Can I come in?”

  She opens the door and her face is flushed. I can’t tell if she’s happy or terrified. I haven’t seen much of her since Jamie’s sudden return.

  “Everything all right?” I ask.

  She extends her hand toward me. On the ring finger of her left hand is a shining sapphire rimmed with little diamonds.

  “You said yes.”

  “I did.” Tears glisten in my sister’s eyes. “Two nights ago. But he gave me the ring tonight.”

  “It’s official, then?”

  Maggie exhales nervously. “I suppose it is,” she says.

  “And Papa?”

  “I was there when Palmer asked him. He couldn’t be happier for us. And he understands about Alex. He wants us to take him.” She shudders a bit, as if a frosty gust has just swirled about her. She reaches up with the hand that wears Palmer’s ring to catch a tear that has started to fall. “This is the best
thing for Alex, isn’t it? Taking him?”

  “It’s not always easy to identify the very best thing to do until you do what you think is best,” I tell her, with Ursula’s pencil box in my peripheral vision. “I do know Alex loves you like a son loves his mother. And he is obviously very fond of Palmer.”

  “Then it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

  I’m instantly whisked back in time to the day Mama lay dying and I stood at her door listening as she told Maggie she did the right thing by bringing Alex home. And I wonder, not for the first time, if the right thing to do is always the best thing. When I don’t answer right away, Maggie continues.

  “You’re so busy with your work and studies, and Willa is only fourteen and still in school. Papa can’t take care of Alex by himself. He’ll be having to ask Dora to take Alex during the day, and now that . . . that Jamie is home, she may not want to.”

  I hear the way Maggie says Jamie’s name. I hear the buried wound there. The long-ago yearning for his affections.

  “Please tell me this is the right choice to make, Evie.”

  “Which choice are we talking about?” I ask her. I know my sister well enough to see she is conflicted about other decisions she has made besides the one regarding Alex’s future.

  Maggie holds my gaze for a moment, relieved, I think, that I have seen through her questions.

  “Jamie kept all my letters,” she finally says. “Every one for the last seven years. I saw them in his rucksack. He had hardly anything in it, after all these years away, but he had my letters. He kept them. Why would he do that?”

  The answer is obvious to me. Surely it is to her as well. “You need to ask him, Maggie, if it matters to you that he kept them. You can’t guess or wonder.”

  I can see in her eyes that she knows I am right.

  And now I know, too, what I need to do.

  CHAPTER 58

  Maggie

  It doesn’t take long for news of my engagement to Palmer Towlerton to spread. I told Ruby the day after Palmer gave me the ring so that I could ask her to be my witness, and she told everyone we’d ever known in school, even if they were only acquaintances. In a matter of days, it seems everyone has heard, including the coroner of all people, whom Papa knows on a first-name basis.