As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  I told Dr. Bellfield that I had decided I was going to do it his way—lay it all on the table, so to speak—but that I wanted a couple days to study case files and practice what I would say to Ursula to get her to open up to me. I think he’s grown tired of my little crusade and he waved me off to indulge in whatever approach I wanted, reminding me, though, that I have other patients.

  But I am ready now. The time is right and I’m well-prepared. Today’s the day.

  • • •

  I take Ursula’s pencil box, wrap it in a cloth napkin I took from the dining room, and head to the solarium, where many of the patients spend the afternoon now that the weather has turned.

  When I step inside, I see Ursula in her usual corner by the window. Conrad Reese is also there, sitting by Sybil in the opposite corner. He appears to be reading to her. He nods hello to me and I return the silent greeting. I make my way to my patient, hoping that I’ve chosen wisely to produce the pencil box when she’s in the solarium with other people about.

  I take the chair next to her, glad that no other patient is too close by. She is alone in her corner. We have a measure of privacy.

  “Hello, Ursula.”

  She looks up at me. “Hello.”

  “How are you feeling today?”

  She lifts and lowers her shoulders. “I don’t know. All right, I suppose.”

  I clear my throat and position the fabric-covered box on my lap so that it is easy to reveal. “I need to ask you something, Ursula. It’s actually fairly important.”

  Her gaze registers interest.

  “I need to ask for your trust. I know we haven’t known each other very long, but I am asking you to trust me.”

  “Trust you for what?” Her tone suggests maybe she has had bad luck trusting people.

  “That my sole desire and aim is for you to be well and happy.”

  “I guess,” she says, sounding dubious.

  I reach out to squeeze her hand in gratitude. I want her to think of it as a handshake—like we’ve agreed on this. She doesn’t flinch, but neither does she show any signs that she and I have struck a deal.

  I take back my hand. “I need to show you something.” I peel back the napkin from around the pencil box.

  Her eyes widen only slightly. “Who gave that to you?”

  “Your roommate, Matilda, happened to know you kept it hidden in your room. She showed it to me.”

  Ursula blinks languidly as she stares at the box, and then she turns her gaze back to the window. “I don’t care that she did. I don’t need it anymore. I don’t need anything inside it. She can have it if she wants.”

  I steel myself for what I will say next and for whatever Ursula will say or do. “Ursula, I spoke to Rita Dabney at the hotel. She told me what happened. I know about your baby brother. I know you think it’s your fault he died.”

  Ursula doesn’t move. She swallows with effort and then two tears track down her face like silver strands of light. “It is my fault.”

  “You were ill. You had the flu and were delirious with fever. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She shakes her head and more tears fall. “You weren’t there.”

  “It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t there. The facts are the facts regardless. Your mother had just died, Ursula. I know you loved her. I saw the photo of you and her in this box. I saw the list of hers that you saved. The necklace. She had just died, and you were very sick with the same thing that killed her. And maybe Leo was sick with it, too. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe you took him to the river because it was just too sad to see his dead body alongside your mother’s. And then your mind created the angel and the brown boat so that you could imagine him safely traveling to heaven.”

  “He wasn’t dead,” she whispers, the tears suddenly falling freely. “He was alive.”

  She makes no move to wipe the tears from her face. I reach into my skirt pocket for a clean handkerchief and offer it to her. But she seems not to see my hand in front of her.

  “I saw the angel in white,” she continues softly, almost as if she is recounting the day to herself, not to me. “I saw the little brown boat in the angel’s arms. I don’t remember going down to the river with Leo. But I remember he was alive in the angel’s arms. He was alive.”

  Her voice falls away.

  “Are you sure he was, Ursula?” I ask, again offering the handkerchief. “Perhaps he wasn’t.”

  “The angel told me I didn’t have to worry, that Leo was safe with her,” Ursula continues, but not to me. She is speaking to her reflection in the window glass. “I saw him crying, reaching up to touch the angel’s face, and I saw the little heart-shaped mark on his stomach as he wriggled in her arms. He was alive.”

  My breath catches hard and cold in my throat. “What did you say?”

  “I tried to follow them,” Ursula says, numbly. “I wanted to go with them to heaven. I tried. The angel was too quick. She flew. I tried to follow them. . . .”

  She continues to weep quietly, but I am barely aware of anything but the bolt of dread hammering its way through me. Ursula’s memories are colliding with my own. No, not colliding. Coming into focus. They are layers of the same truth. Hers. Mine. The same. I see them folding in on themselves to reveal one reality, not two.

  The heart-shaped birthmark.

  Alex.

  The angel in white.

  Maggie wearing Mama’s lace scarf as a mask.

  The little brown boat in the angel’s arms.

  Maggie’s coat bundled to carry the naked, crying infant away in the chilled October air.

  Ursula, struggling to her feet to follow them out of the building. Maggie, walking too fast. Ursula, losing sight of Maggie and the baby in the warren of tumbledown row houses. She ends up at the river, too dazed and fevered to even realize she’s there.

  When the authorities are called in by passersby who see the sick girl wandering about, they figure out who Ursula is and where she lives. They take her home and find a dead mother and an empty cradle. They ask this nine-year-old girl found delirious by the river where the baby is and she tells them about the angel with the little brown boat who took her brother to heaven.

  I’d always known Maggie was lying when she said she couldn’t remember in which row house she’d found Alex. But now I knew why. It was because she had seen Ursula. And Ursula had seen her.

  Alex is Leo.

  For a second I cannot breathe. And then I feel all that I am inside wanting to vomit itself out of me. I let this happen. I am the one who put Ursula in this hospital. I’m the reason she tried to kill herself. Maggie lied about how and where she found Alex. And I knew she had lied. I have always known. I put a hand to my mouth.

  Ursula, in her own private hell, doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Ursula, I need to take care of something,” I say, mechanically. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” I grab the pencil box and rise on shaking feet, wondering where I will go.

  I must get out of this room. Out of this building.

  My first steps away from Ursula are even and measured. But a guttural wail is soon tearing its way to the top of my throat and I quicken my pace as I enter the main corridor. My eyes burn with tears that I simply must not release until I can get out of the hospital and away from the patients and my coworkers. With effort, I swallow the cry that wants to erupt from the core of my being. I insert my key with a trembling hand into the locked door that leads to the hospital’s main lobby and which prevents the patients from wandering away. In my haste, I don’t wait for the door to close behind me. I can barely keep my mouth shut as I cross the foyer. A few people in the waiting area look my way, as does the nurse at the front desk. I disguise my behavior as a bit of a coughing fit, soon to be brought under control by a breath of cool autumn air.

  I burst from the building into the frosted afternoon, and
the tears immediately begin to course down my cheeks. I must find a place to let them have their way, for there will be no reversing them now. The full weight of what Maggie had done—what I let her do—is falling on me heavy as iron and blistering as fire. Ursula Novak’s pitiful existence is because of us. We are to blame for the last seven years of her tormented life. Only us.

  I race for the hospital’s garden shed at the far end of the front lawn. It is set back from the pea-gravel driveway and partially hidden by trees that have lost their leaves. In the spring and summer, the shed disappears into the landscaping. The tools inside are too dangerous for it to be located on the back lawns where the residents are encouraged to spend part of their day.

  I had seen the groundskeeper raking leaves earlier that afternoon, so I am confident the shed will be unlocked. My heels crunch on the frozen grass as I half run, half walk toward it. I throw open the door and pitch forward toward a chest-high shelf loaded with clay pots that have been brought in for the winter.

  I toss the pencil box onto the shelf and release the pent-up sob through clenched teeth. My torso begins to shake with the force of my tears. The image of Ursula Novak slipping the noose over her head, kicking out the stool, and then her anguish wanting to wrench the life out of her plays relentlessly in my head. It is my fault Ursula tried to hang herself and now sits in the asylum wishing she was dead. My fault. I should have demanded that Maggie tell me the truth about where she found Alex. I was the older one. I was the wise one. I was the one who knew she was not telling the whole truth.

  God, help me, I whisper. And it’s a prayer and a confession and a cry for help. I must gain control of myself and return to the solarium. I can’t leave Ursula in the room the way I did. But I have no idea what I will say to her when I go back in. I need to talk to Maggie. I need to know the truth at last.

  In my turmoil, I don’t hear the footsteps behind me. The voice is the first thing that lets me know I am not alone in the garden shed.

  “Miss Bright, are you all right?”

  I spin around, nearly losing my footing. Conrad Reese reaches out to steady me. There is only one explanation for why he is here in the shed, asking me if I am all right. He had been watching me in the solarium as I spoke with Ursula. He had been watching me like I watch him. He had seen that Ursula had said something that upset me. Me, the psychiatrist. The one who is supposed to be in control. The one who is supposed to be listening to the patient and offering wise words in response. He had seen me leave the room with my hand over my mouth. He had followed me down the hall. He must have caught the inner door that I’d failed to secure and trailed me out the front door, across the lawn, and into the garden shed.

  I want to know why he would do that and yet I think I already know why he would do that.

  He takes a step forward. “Miss Bright, what has happened? Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  He has never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment. His gaze, alight with compassion and longing, is tight on mine. He is standing so close to me that I can smell his cologne, the scented pomade in his hair, and the starch in his collar. I fight for the words to tell him that I am fine, I just needed to clear a cough, and that I’m so very sorry to have alarmed him. But those words don’t come.

  “I’ve done something terrible,” I whisper.

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.” His eyes don’t widen even a fraction. He doesn’t believe such a thing to be possible of me.

  He’s been watching me like I’ve been watching him.

  “But it is true. It is!” Fresh tears spill from my eyes and I want him to pull me into his arms and whisper that all will be made right in time. Not to worry. Everything will be made right. You’ll see.

  “We’ve all made mistakes, Miss Bright.” He roots about in his coat and trouser pockets for something. A handkerchief, no doubt. But he doesn’t have one.

  “Not like this.” A fresh vision of Ursula swinging by a rope, her brain causing her legs to jerk and flail, fills my mind. “Not like this.”

  Lacking the handkerchief, Conrad extends his hand tentatively toward my face and catches my tears with his fingertips. “We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t,” he says, so gently.

  I look up at him, in awe and wonder and agony. I see the ache he also carries, the grief at the slow loss of his wife, at the death of the dream he’d had for their life together. We had wanted happiness for our lives. We’d pursued it the way everyone did after the flu and after the war, and we thought we’d caught it. He’d done nothing wrong, though. His pain was different than mine because it was undeserved. I tilt my head into his palm and before I know what I’m doing, I am kissing it. His strong hand is wet with my tears and I taste salt. A second later Conrad’s arms are around me and his lips are on mine, tender and hesitant. It’s as if we both sense that we’re poised above a dam about to burst, and the water could sweep us away if we let it. If we want it to.

  A second later I am returning his kiss, and then his hands are everywhere on my upper body and his lips are finding me in places I have never before been found. Behind my ear, along my jaw, on the chevron between my clavicles. His chest muscles are tight under my fingertips, tensing with desire, and I hear a small voice in my head telling me nothing good can come from continuing this. Nothing. Conrad is married. To my patient. Conrad is married to Sybil. Sybil is his wife. But I cannot hold back the floodwaters. I’m in love with Conrad. I have been for weeks and had refused to admit it. I would do anything for him. Live for him, die for him. I would do anything, including cure his wife, if I could, and if it would make him happy.

  His wife. He is married. Sybil is his wife.

  I pull away. We are both breathing as though we’ve just run through a great stretch of woods. His hair is askew where I’ve run my hands through it. His coat is off and lies at my feet, his vest unbuttoned, and his shirt untucked. Three buttons on the front of my dress are open, and cold air stings my bare flesh.

  Conrad is staring at me with tears in his eyes, and I don’t know if he’s sad that we’d started on each other or that we stopped.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he says a second later, his words cutting across the space between us. “Please forgive me. Please. I’m so sorry.”

  I don’t want him to be sorry. And I can’t utter the words that I forgive him, because I don’t. I can’t forgive him. I’m in love with him.

  Conrad doesn’t know what to make of my silence. He stoops for a second to pick his suit coat up off the dirt floor and then he lays it across his arm. “Are you all right?” He doesn’t look at me. “Are you hurt? Did I hurt you?”

  Hurt me? Has he hurt me? All I feel at this moment is an ache for everything in my life up to this point to have gone differently. I feel anew the scorching loss of Henry, my mother, Gilbert, and even my own innocence at embracing without question Maggie’s deception, year after year after year.

  Conrad raises his head. I am still only partially buttoned and tendrils of my hair have fallen about my face. He looks away from my body for just a second and then returns his gaze, focusing on my eyes only.

  “Please, Miss Bright. Tell me you are all right.”

  I’m not. I’m not all right. Maggie and I have taken a child from his family, have caused his sister years of merciless suffering, and the man I love is married to someone else.

  “Miss Bright?”

  “Evelyn,” I say as new tears rim my eyes.

  “Please. Did I hurt you?” His voice sounds pained.

  “You could never hurt me, Conrad.”

  His intense stare softens as he realizes that I’d wanted him to touch me and kiss me and take me. I wanted him. I want him. I have been watching him like he’s been watching me.

  Conrad closes his eyes at the impossibility of our situation. Then he turns, puts on his suit coat, and tucks his shirt into his trousers. I refa
sten the buttons on my dress and slip the fallen locks of hair back into their hairpins.

  He moves toward the door. “I won’t take advantage of you again, I promise,” he says over his shoulder.

  He takes another step and I rush forward. “Conrad, wait!” I grab his hand, and my fingers touch his wedding ring. We both look down at the circle of gold. He pulls his hand away but then reaches up to touch my face for the merest second before he steps outside.

  I watch him walk across the lawn to the driveway, and to the rows of automobiles parked in front. He climbs into his Buick and drives off slowly. I don’t move until he is gone from view. Before I leave the shed, I retrieve Ursula’s pencil box and I check to make sure that I’ve seen to every detail on my clothes and every hairpin.

  It is only a few minutes after three, but I must find Dr. Bellfield and ask him if I might have the rest of the afternoon to take care of a family matter. I cannot think of Conrad right now or what almost happened in the shed or what did happen in the shed. I must first see that Ursula is all right in the solarium, and then I must talk to Maggie.

  We must tell Alex the truth.

  We must tell everyone the truth.

  CHAPTER 61

  Maggie

  Samples of engraved wedding stationery are splayed across the dining room table, each piece of paper bearing names and details of people who do not exist. Palmer’s mother wants us to decide on a style so that the invitations can be printed next week. November is just around the corner and then it will be December in a blink, so Imogene Towlerton says. My future mother-in-law has stepped in where my mother would have, had she lived to see me marry, securing the wedding chapel at the church for the day after Christmas, ordering a cake, and supplying Palmer with the samples so that we can select the paper and ink for the invitations before he leaves.