Love, Alice

by Barbara Davis

  “Dovie . . .”

  “I mean, is she trying to prove something? Did some woman from one of her clubs just have a third, and she feels like she has to keep up?”

  “How can you say something like that? Your sister has always wanted a big family, and so has Roger. It isn’t about what anyone else has or does. This is what’s important to Robin—children, a family. Someday you’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?” Dovie grumbled, knowing she was being obtuse.

  “The bond that exists between a mother and her children. It’s like an invisible cord tying your heart to theirs. And it’s a cord that can never be broken, no matter how old they get or how far they roam. Being a mother isn’t something you plan, Dovie. It’s something you are. Your children are a part of you for as long as you live—sometimes the best part. Which is why, from the moment they leave your body, you’ll do anything to keep them safe and happy.” She looked away then and blotted her eyes before checking her watch for what must have been the hundredth time.

  “Mother, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m just—”

  “Let’s just sit quietly, shall we?”

  Dovie slouched back in her chair, hiding behind her coffee cup. “Yes, all right.”

  She had lost all track of time when Dr. Delaney finally appeared in the waiting room in her stork-covered surgical scrubs, the smile on her face confirming what she had come to say. They had performed a C-section, and considering what mother and daughter had been through, both appeared to be doing quite well. Robin would be in recovery for several hours, but as soon as she was settled in a room, she and Baby Grace could have visitors. In the meantime, maybe a bite to eat was a good idea.

  It was Roger who finally came out to tell them Robin was in her room, and ready for visitors. Rowena moved on soft feet as she pushed open the hospital room door and peered inside. Dovie trailed behind, certain that visitors were the absolute last thing Robin would want after being cut open and then sewn up like a Thanksgiving turkey. She was probably groggy, sore, and exhausted.

  But one look at her sister erased that notion. Dovie felt a lump in her throat as she caught her first glimpse of Robin. She was the color of biscuit dough, her usually perfect hair plastered in crazy ringlets to her head, her eyes puffy and ringed with blue-green shadows. And somehow she had never looked more beautiful as she smiled down at the tiny pink face peering up from the tiny bundle of blankets in her arms. She didn’t look exhausted at all. She looked . . . happy. Happy, and glowing, and wildly in love with her new daughter.

  The image blurred, morphing into dozens of watery prisms. Dovie blinked to clear her vision, recalling her mother’s words about the bond between a mother and her children. Like an invisible cord tying your heart to theirs. Not so invisible, she thought, experiencing a bloom of pure joy for her sister that would last long after she returned home from the hospital.

  It was well after nine when Dovie finally kicked off her shoes and tiptoed in to check on Dora. The TV was on but turned way down, an old classic with Jimmy Cagney in spats and pinstripes. She clicked off the set and looked down at Dora, sleeping soundly, the sandwich she had made her before leaving for the hospital untouched, the pills she had carefully laid out exactly where she’d placed them on the nightstand. She had given up. And why not, when there was nothing left to hope for, no way to know the rest of the story—no chance for forgiveness from her daughter?

  Her mother’s words floated into her head. A cord that can never be broken, no matter how old they get or how far they roam. But for Dora that cord had been broken, and she’d been the one to break it, the day she sent her daughter away. It was the hope of absolution that had kept her going. Now even that was gone. If only there’d been some hint of forgiveness in Alice’s final letters, some small glimmer of feeling that Dora could cling to, proof that her daughter hadn’t gone to her grave despising her.

  But maybe there had been. An image suddenly flickered to life, like an old movie projector being switched on: Gemma sitting at Alice’s desk, surrounded by her belongings. Her clothes. Her letters. Her mother’s broken watch.

  Alice had kept it all those years, despite the fact that it didn’t work and hadn’t since the day she left Sennen Cove. And she’d been wearing it the night she met Danny in the parking lot. Why wear a broken watch, if not for sentimental reasons? Until now Dovie hadn’t given the watch’s fate a second thought, but suddenly the question loomed. Was it possible Gemma still had it? That she had disposed of the letters, but kept the watch as a remembrance of a beloved friend?

  Suddenly Dovie was convinced it wasn’t only possible, but probable. And if she was right, she might be able to provide Dora with proof that in spite of what she had written, Alice had never stopped loving her mother. Unfortunately, getting her hands on that proof would require another visit to Gemma’s home, and almost certainly kill any hope of salvaging her already strained relationship with Austin. But if she was right, and it would bring Dora even some small measure of relief, she had to do it.

  Dovie felt a fresh flurry of anxiety as she pulled up Gemma’s brick-paved drive and cut the engine. She’d been rehearsing what she planned to say all morning, determined to avoid anything that might trigger painful memories or awkward questions. She would simply ask for the watch and be on her way, volunteering as little as possible about what she knew, and how she knew it. There was always the possibility that Gemma would refuse her request, or deny even having the watch. She’d have to deal with those possibilities as they arose, but she was counting on Gemma’s maternal instincts to persuade her to do the right thing.

  She pulled in a deep breath as she mounted the front steps and prepared to ring the bell. Austin would be furious if he ever found out she had come, not that it was likely to make a difference at this point. He’d made it pretty clear that there was no place in his life for her—or anyone.

  Her mind was still on Austin when the door swung open. “I didn’t expect you back for hours. Did you forget your—Oh, Dovie.” Gemma stood blinking at her, a pair of florist’s shears in her hand. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Is there something I can do for you?”

  Dovie opened her mouth, but no words came, her mind a complete and disastrous blank. “I’ve come for Dora Tandy’s watch,” she finally blurted.

  For a moment Dovie thought she was about to have the door slammed in her face. Gemma’s smile faltered, then vanished altogether as she took a wary step back.

  “Please, I’m not here to pry or dig up old wounds. I just need the watch, and I’ll go.”

  “How do you know Dora Tandy?”

  “We met at the cemetery. She was there to visit Alice’s grave.”

  “She’s . . . here? In Charleston?”

  “For several weeks now.”

  Gemma stood there, clutching the doorknob, her brown eyes wide and unfocused. Finally, she stepped aside. “I think you’d better come in.”

  Dovie felt a twinge of remorse as she followed Gemma past the half-arranged vase of roses on the foyer table. It didn’t seem fair that in trying to ease one woman’s grief, she should rekindle it in another. And yet the two were entwined somehow, inexplicably linked by the young woman they had each tragically lost.

  In the parlor, Gemma laid down her shears and took a seat on the sofa. “Please,” she said, gesturing to a nearby wingback. “I think we’d better start over. Why are you here?”

  Dovie eased into the chair, letting her tote slide to the floor. “I know this is strange, but I really am just here for the watch. Dora is a friend of mine, and she’s sick. Very sick. I thought it might make her feel better to have something of Alice’s.”

  “If you’re a friend of Dora’s you know about the rift between Alice and her mother.”

  Dovie nodded. “I do. And it’s why I’m here. She blames herself for so much. When she found out she was sick s
he came to Charleston to find her daughter, to beg her forgiveness one last time. She had no idea Alice was dead until she arrived. She’s been torturing herself ever since. That’s why I want the watch, to prove to Dora that Alice never stopped loving her.”

  Gemma’s face was ashen but unreadable. “And you assume I have this watch?”

  “I’m hoping you do, yes.” Dovie scrambled for a plausible explanation but decided she was wasting her time. There was only one way she could know about the watch, and they both knew it. “The letters you left in the cemetery,” Dovie said quietly. “I have them.”

  If possible, Gemma went a shade paler. “How? After all these years, how could you possibly . . .”

  “I have a friend who works at Magnolia Grove. He’s one of the groundskeepers. He found them one day, in the lost and found, and gave them to me.”

  There was a new wariness in Gemma’s eyes as she regarded Dovie. “Why would he—”

  “Because I asked him to. It started the day I first saw Dora in the cemetery. She was so desolate, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. And then she pulled this letter out of her purse and left it on Alice’s grave. When she left, I took it home and read it. It was inexcusable, I know, but I was going through some things. My fiancé committed suicide just before our wedding, and I was trying to figure how I hadn’t seen it coming, what I had or hadn’t done. And here was this woman, leaving a letter to a dead girl. I thought if I read it I might gain some kind of insight. Instead, I found myself obsessed. I had to know Alice’s story. That’s why I went to Josiah. The next thing I knew I had a whole bagful of letters that had turned up in the lost and found. I’ve been reading them to Dora a little at a time. It’s been . . . difficult for her.”

  “I never meant for them to be found.”

  “Why leave them at the cemetery, then?” Dovie asked. “Why not shred them or burn them?”

  Gemma shrugged. When she finally spoke, her voice was thick and weary. “I made a promise to a friend—to Alice—but I couldn’t keep it. I meant to, I just . . . couldn’t. And every time I looked at those letters I was reminded of it. I wanted them gone. Only I couldn’t make myself do it. It seemed wrong to just tear them up, and even worse to burn them, maybe because I knew they weren’t really mine. So I took them to the cemetery and just . . . left them.” She paused, fingers pressed to her lips. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “If this is what was supposed to happen. Fate knew I’d never have the courage to do the right thing, so it took matters into its own hands.”

  “You think Alice’s letters were supposed to end up in the lost and found, so they would eventually find their way into my hands?”

  She smiled, a tight smile that quickly faded. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if life worked like that? If, no matter how badly we botched things, they still ended up working out the way they should. I used to believe it. Maybe some part of me still does.” She looked down at her lap, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her skirt. When she looked up her eyes were moist. “Alice’s mother—you said before that she was sick. Is it . . . bad?”

  “She’s recovering from a bad bout with pneumonia, but that isn’t the worst part. All this time, while we’ve been going through the letters, she’s been clinging to the hope that there might be some word about the child Alice gave up, but there wasn’t. I think it would have helped to know that somewhere out there she had a grandchild who was happy and doing well. She’s taking it so hard, I’m afraid she’s given up. That’s why I came today. Because I thought the watch might help.”

  Gemma sat very still, eyes closed, a hand to her throat. After a moment, she pushed heavily to her feet, as if carrying some invisible weight on her shoulders. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  A short time later, she returned, her face pale and set as she crossed the room and handed Dovie a small satin pouch tied with a lavender ribbon. “Open it,” she said softly.

  Dovie worked the ribbon free, revealing a series of accordioned compartments lined in creamy satin. She’d been expecting the watch, but her breath caught as she teased out the pair of familiar-looking envelopes. She looked at Gemma with a mixture of confusion and wonder. “You kept two.”

  “When you’ve read them you’ll understand. I’d like you to show them to Dora, if you think she’s well enough.”

  Dovie stared at the envelopes. They felt heavy in her palm, ominous and somehow inevitable. She found herself thinking about Gemma’s hypothesis that finding the letters was supposed to happen, a tidy arrangement by the Fates to right a forty-year-old wrong. “You said if she’s well enough. Are they . . . ?”

  “Difficult to read? Yes. I haven’t read them for a long time, but after so many years I know them by heart. Perhaps it would be best if you read them now, before you go. You’ll have questions, I’m sure.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  9 East Battery Street

  Charleston, South Carolina

  December 10, 1969

  Dearest heart,

  I wish there was some easy way to tell you what I’m about to. Heaven knows I’ve searched my heart long and hard before picking up my pen again, wondering if I’m right in what I’m about to do, or if, for your sake, it would be better to leave things alone. I still don’t know. Perhaps it’s only selfishness, this need for you to know the truth, but after all that’s happened, I believe I have the right to be a little selfish. And so I must begin.

  If you have read the letters that came before this, you already know the circumstances of your birth, that I was unmarried, and because I was unmarried you were taken from me. You also know I vowed to find you one day. And now I have, though it has come too late, and in a way I could never have expected. It is of those details that I now write, because I need you to know why I was unable to keep my promise.

  I hadn’t thought before now about where to begin, or how hard it might be to retell such things, but I suppose I should begin with the moment Harley burst into the nursery, where I was doing my best to tidy up. It’s been a week ago now, but I recall every detail like it was yesterday. I thought he had lost his mind. He was sneering as he came toward me, his lips pulled back in something like satisfaction.

  “Well, well, here she is, the tragic English waif, come all the way across the pond to play nanny. Imagine her good fortune when she’s taken under the wing of one of the wealthiest women in Charleston.”

  I didn’t understand what he was saying, or why he was saying it. I only knew I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, with a mixture of malice and glee, like he knew some terrible secret and was savoring the moment before he finally divulged it.

  “You and my wife are pretty chummy, aren’t you? Almost like sisters.”

  “Yes,” I said, steeling myself for whatever was coming.

  “And sisters would never do anything to hurt each other. That’s how it works, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, feeling a prickle of some hidden danger. He has never hidden his dislike for me, but this was different, chilling and almost ominous. He stepped closer then, shoving several rumpled sheets of paper into my hands.

  “Tell me, then, why I’ve just found this in my wife’s dresser.” His eyes glittered as he shoved the papers under my nose. “My supposed son,” he said, sneering. “Not a private adoption like she said, but a mongrel with a whore for a mother, palmed off on her by a bunch of do-gooding Catholics.”

  My stomach lurched when I saw the words “Sacred Heart Children’s Society” printed at the top of one of the pages. For a moment, I thought I might be sick, but my eyes kept moving, the words blurring as I read. “Pleased to inform you . . . application for adoption . . . your preference for a boy.” I shuffled through the remaining pages, desperate for some proof that I was wrong, that there’d been some kind of mistake. And then I saw it—the sheet of plain white paper covered
with careful English schoolgirl script. The room began to spin as I read the line I had penned more than seven years ago.

  “Little one, you don’t know me . . .”

  How had I not known? Not seen? Not felt you right there? I always thought I would know you the moment I saw you, that there would be some sort of connection, a tugging on the maternal cord. And I suppose there was a connection. Yes, of course there was. I just thought it was something else.

  I remember hearing a buzzing sound, like a hive of bees in my head, as I buckled to my knees, and then, from very far away, a sort of keening. It was a terrible sound, the kind a wounded animal might make, shrill and primal, and I suddenly realized it was coming from me, tearing from my throat, echoing off the walls. I didn’t hear Gemma coming until she burst into the room. Her eyes went wide when she saw me on the floor, the letter still clutched in my hand. I wanted to be wrong, wanted there to be some logical explanation, but I had only to look at her face to know it was all true.

  “How?” I sobbed. “How could you do it? When you knew . . .”

  “But I didn’t know! Not at first. You have to believe me. That day, when you came about the job . . . I had no idea.”

  “You had the papers! And the letter they made me write before he was born.”

  “I never read it, Alice. I never read any of it. After I brought Austin home I put those papers away, and that was that. I suppose I planned to go through them someday, but then time passed and there didn’t seem much point.”

  “How long have you known?”

  Her eyes slid from mine, lingering on the carpet. “Almost three years. Just after you got sick that first time and I sent for Dr. Ponder. That’s when I finally went back and read the papers, after learning the rest of your story. Until that moment, I had no idea. You have to believe me.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face but managed to get to my feet, shaking her off when she tried to help me. “Three years . . . You let me go on writing letters to adoption agencies all over the country, torturing myself, and all the time he was right here. My son was right here!”