Laura got to her feet. “Good morning, honey,” she said. “Did we wake you?”
“What’s wrong?” Emma looked from Laura to Ray and back again.
“Go back to bed, punkin,” Ray said, the anger out of his voice, though not his face.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Laura said. “Daddy and I were just having a very loud discussion. We didn’t mean to wake you up.” She would tell her about Poppa later. She couldn’t get into that now.
Emma’s eyes were on Ray, who had turned away to rinse his mug in the sink.
“Why are you up when it’s still dark out?” Emma asked.
“Come on.” Laura guided her with a hand on her shoulder. “You’re right. It’s too early to be up. Let’s get you back to bed. Maybe we should all go back to bed for an hour or two.”
Emma held Laura’s hand on the stairs, nearly stumbling in her sleepiness. Laura tucked her back into bed, the sheets still warm from Emma’s body.
“Is Daddy mad at me?” Emma asked.
“At you? Of course not.” Laura smoothed her daughter’s satiny hair. Emma did have a way of getting on Ray’s nerves, and he sometimes complained about her disturbing him when he was working on his book. Occasionally he would even yell at her. “He’s not mad at you at all,” Laura reassured her. “He’s just a little frustrated right now. We can talk about it more later, if you like, when it’s time to get up for real.”
“’Kay,” Emma said, shutting her eyes.
Laura leaned over to kiss her, pulling the covers up to her daughter’s chin. She stood up, coming face-to-face with the shelf of Barbie dolls above Emma’s bed. Even in the darkness, she could see that Emma had arranged the dolls in contorted positions, probably pretending they were gymnasts. It put a smile on Laura’s face. The first in a while.
She needed some time to herself before returning to the kitchen and her angry husband. She walked down the hall to her bedroom, where she pulled the broken necklace from her jeans pocket and opened the jewelry box on her dresser. The box held only a few pairs of earrings, a couple of bracelets. She was not much on jewelry. It didn’t fit her lifestyle. Her running-off-to-Brazil-and-traveling-around-the-world-giving-speeches lifestyle. She winced, still stinging from the hostility behind Ray’s words. Where on earth had that come from? Had he been carrying that resentment around inside him all this time?
She studied the necklace in her hand. It was rare for her to see it lying loose, because she wore it all the time. Her father had first fastened it around her neck when she was eight years old. It had belonged to his mother, he’d told her, after whom she’d been named. The pendant was a large gold charm that always made Laura think of a woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat, although different people seemed to see different things in the intricate shape of the gold. Holding the necklace up to her bare throat, she studied her reflection in the dresser mirror, her gaze falling immediately to her gray roots. She hadn’t realized they were so noticeable. The silver lay in neat lines on either side of the part in her hair. She’d gone gray early, and had been masking that fact with her natural golden brown shade ever since her late twenties. Her hair was still long, past her shoulders. It was very good hair, thick and strong, her only concession to vanity, and even that was limited. She was vain enough to dye her hair, but not vain enough to rush to the hairdresser’s when the roots began to show. Or to powder her nose when it began to shine, or to remember to put on lipstick before a speaking engagement. She was a naturally attractive woman, and that was fortunate, since she would always choose peering into a telescope over a makeup mirror.
She should go downstairs to Ray, but instead she sat on the edge of the bed. As long as she’d known Ray, he’d suffered from depression and dark moods, but this anger, this near rage she’d just witnessed in him, was new. The rejections were getting to him. A retired sociology professor and one of the most compassionate human beings Laura had ever known, Ray had been working on a book about the homeless for many years. It was a labor of love for him, about a cause to which he’d devoted much of his life. The book was heart-wrenching, disturbing and beautifully written. A year ago he’d started submitting it to publishers. Since then, the pile of rejection letters on the desk in his home office had grown.
He’d never before criticized her for putting her career before her marriage and her child. She was stretched thin, that was true. She usually took Emma with her when she traveled, though, and she thought Ray liked having the time alone to focus on his book. Perhaps he had liked it, in the past. But a few months ago, while studying the sky from their lake house in the country, Laura discovered the tenth comet of her career. Except for the fifth, which had been a lovely thing with a long, full tail, the comets she’d found had been small and of interest primarily to other astronomers, but this tenth one promised to be spectacular. Although it was currently little more than a fuzzy speck in a good telescope and would not be visible to the naked eye for a year and a half, she’d been immediately deluged with awards, speaking engagements, media attention and offers to fund any research she chose. Meanwhile, Ray was collecting his rejections. Her success, she now feared, was a knife in his side.
She heard Ray climbing the stairs in his slow, measured pace. In a moment, he was in the room and he sat next to her, his arm around her shoulders.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “Forgive me, Laura.”
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ve been caught up in my own life too much lately. I haven’t given enough of my time to you and Emma.”
“No, no,” he protested. “I didn’t mean any of that. I was just—”
“I think you did mean it, Ray. You were angry and your true feelings finally came out. I won’t go to Brazil during the summer.”
“Oh, Laurie, I really didn’t mean for you to make that sort of change in your—”
“I don’t want to go,” she insisted, and she meant it. Ray had compromised his needs for her over the years. It was her turn now. “I’ll take a break after this coming semester. We’ll go to the lake house and just play, all summer, the three of us. All right?”
Ray hesitated. “And you won’t bother with that woman in the retirement home?” he asked finally.
“She won’t take much time,” she said. “I just need to check on her. Make sure she’s all right, like Dad asked me to do.”
His arm fell from her shoulders. “Please don’t.” His dark eyes pleaded with her.
“Ray, I won’t let it interfere with us,” she said. His distress seemed so out of proportion to what she was suggesting. “I know Dad was demanding of me, but he was also my inspiration and my greatest champion, and now he’s gone.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t let him down. I can’t have promised him something, something so simple, and then not follow through on it. You understand that, don’t you?”
He sighed and stood up. “I’m going down to my office,” he said, and she knew he was through with the conversation.
She watched him pad out of the room in his terry-cloth slippers and thought of following him, but exhaustion stopped her. Better to wait awhile, anyway. Maybe later they would both be more rational.
She undressed quietly and got into her side of the bed. It was cold between the sheets, the sort of cold that no amount of covers could relieve, and she felt alone. Her father was gone. She had no family left, except for Emma and Ray. And at that moment, the Ray she had known and loved seemed lost to her as well.
3
EMMA WAS SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF HER ROOM, ABSORBED IN her new tropical fish puzzle, a gift from her teenage baby-sitter, Shelley. Laura hunched down next to her. It had been two weeks since Christmas, yet this was the first time she’d seen Emma play with the puzzle. It was taking her some time to get over Poppa’s death.
“I’m going out for a little while,” Laura said, tucking a strand of Emma’s hair behind the little girl’s ear. “Daddy’s downstairs in his office.” It was good that Emma was so wrapped up in the puzzle. She would
be little bother to Ray.
Emma held up a piece of the puzzle. “I know what this is,” she crowed. “Do you, Mom?”
“Fish scales?” Laura asked as if she weren’t quite sure.
“Right! And it goes right here!” Emma dropped the scales into the picture. “Are you going to work?” she asked, reaching for another piece of the puzzle.
“No. First I’m going to drop off my broken necklace at the jeweler’s. Then I’m going to visit someone.” She stood up. “I won’t be long.”
“This one’s an eye,” Emma said. “I can’t wait till when I have it all done. Can we put paste on it and hang it up like we did with the other one?”
“Sure, if you like. But then you won’t be able to play with it again.”
“That’s okay.” She looked up at Laura. Her eyes were the same color as her pale blue sweater. “Mom?” she asked.
“Honey, I really have to get going.”
“I know, but do you want to look at one of my books with me?”
“Tonight. Before bed.” She bent over to kiss the top of Emma’s head. “I’ll see you in a little while,” she said.
“’Kay,” Emma said, returning her attention easily to her puzzle.
She was an independent child, far more independent than other five-year-olds Laura had encountered. People had been surprised to see her at Poppa’s funeral, but Laura had prepared Emma well for what she would see and hear, and she was certain she’d made the right decision in taking her. Emma finally seemed to understand the permanence of Poppa’s death after attending the service. Her daughter hadn’t cried during the funeral, but she’d put her little arm around her mother in comfort each time Laura began to tear up.
Downstairs, Laura found Ray in his office, his manuscript on the desk in front of him, but his attention focused on something out the window. She put her hands on his shoulders, the gray plaid flannel of his shirt warm beneath her palms.
“I won’t be long,” she said. She looked out the window herself, trying to determine what had caught his eye, but saw nothing other than the row of town houses across the street. Each of them was identical to the house in which they lived, each of their slanted roofs was covered with a thin layer of snow.
“Please don’t go,” Ray said, his gaze still riveted outside, and she knew he was slipping into one of his dark moods. She’d known Ray for ten years and had been married to him for nearly six. During that time, he’d seen several psychiatrists and taken a myriad of antidepressants, but nothing could hold off the darkness for long.
In the two weeks since her father’s death, Ray had apologized repeatedly for his outburst, assuring her he was not upset about her career. Still, the words he’d said that morning echoed in her ears, and she didn’t believe his retraction of them. In his moment of anger, he’d finally spoken the truth. Wanting to honor his feelings, Laura had tried to set her father’s request aside, and she was able to do so with reasonable success until the call from her father’s attorney.
“Who’s this Tolley woman?” the attorney had asked her. He told her that her father had paid the entrance fee for Sarah Tolley to move into Meadow Wood Village five years earlier. Not only had he continued to pay her monthly rent, he’d also left a large sum of money in trust for her so that she would still be taken care of after his death.
“I don’t have a clue,” Laura had told him, but her father’s arrangements left her even more certain that Sarah Tolley had somehow played a significant role in his life. She had to see her. When she told Ray her plans, he grew sullen.
“I’m leaving,” Laura said now, bending over, pressing her cheek to Ray’s temple. “I’ll be back in an hour. I promise I won’t stay longer than that. Emma’s completely absorbed in her fish puzzle, so you should be able to work undisturbed.”
He said nothing, and she removed her hands from his shoulders. He was giving her no support on this. Even in Ray’s blackest moods, it was out of character for him to treat her so coolly. It was almost as though her desire to carry out her father’s last wish had come to symbolize her inattention to him. She wondered if it was all right to leave Emma with him today.
“I’ll be back before you know I’ve gone,” she said, and she turned to leave the room before he had another chance to change her mind.
She dropped her broken necklace off at the jeweler’s, then drove across town to the retirement home.
Meadow Wood Village was a charming place, a large, three-story building that managed to look well-aged and homey despite its relative newness and size. Its siding was a pale blue, the shutters white. An inviting porch ran across the entire front of the building. A place like this could take the fear out of growing old, Laura thought as she walked to the front door.
The building was as warm and inviting inside as it was out, and it smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. The carpets and upholstery were all a soft mauve-and-aqua print. Laura stopped at the front desk, where the receptionist looked up from a stack of paperwork.
“I’m looking for one of your residents,” Laura said. “Sarah Tolley.”
“I’ll call her attendant for you.” The woman motioned toward the lobby. “Have a seat.”
Laura sat on the edge of one of the wing chairs, and in a few minutes, a young, heavyset woman wearing a long floral jacket came into the lobby.
“You’re here to see Sarah?” the woman asked. She looked frankly incredulous.
“Yes,” Laura said. “My name’s Laura Brandon. I don’t actually know her…know Sarah,” she said. “She was a friend of my father’s, and he died recently. He’d asked me to look in on her.”
The woman lowered herself into the chair closest to Laura’s. Everything about her was round: her body, her face, her wire-rimmed glasses, her button nose.
“I’m Carolyn, Sarah’s attendant,” she said, “and I have to say, I’m a little surprised by this. No one ever comes to visit Sarah.”
“My father must have,” Laura said. “Carl Brandon. He was about six feet tall, very slender, eightiesh, and—”
Carolyn interrupted her with a shake of her head. “No one has ever come to see her. I would know.”
“That just doesn’t make sense.” Laura saw her own puzzled reflection in the attendant’s glasses. “Well, can you tell me about her?” she asked. “How old is she?”
“She’s seventy-five. And she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Did you know that?”
Laura sank lower in her chair. “No. I don’t know a thing about her.”
“She’s in excellent shape, physically,” Carolyn said. “She takes the exercise classes in our pool. And the Alzheimer’s is barely apparent, so far.” She sat forward in her chair. “We have three living areas here at Meadow Wood,” she explained. “Independent-living apartments, assisted-living apartments, and then a separate wing for those patients who need round-the-clock care. Until just last week, Sarah was able to live in the independent-living wing, but we had to move her over to assisted-living so she could receive more supervision. You know, no stove, no lock on the door. She got lost a couple of times when she went out for a walk, so we felt it was time to move her. We can’t let her go out by herself any longer.”
Laura nodded. What was she getting herself into?
Carolyn leaned even farther forward in her chair. “You know what would be fantastic?” she asked. “If you could take her out for a walk sometime. When the weather’s warmer, of course. Sarah would love that.”
Laura pictured Ray in the study, stewing in his disappointment that she’d gone to Meadow Wood even this once. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t even met her.”
“The other thing you could do to help her,” Carolyn continued as if Laura hadn’t spoken, “would be to simply listen to her. Let her talk about her old memories. At this point, her primary symptoms are confusion and short-term memory loss. Her mind is still sharp in the past, though, and she loves to talk. But like I said, there’s no one to listen to her, except me, a
nd I have other patients to take care of.”
“I really just wanted to—”
“Even though she’s always up for the bingo games, and she loves movie night,” Carolyn surged ahead, “she still spends too much time in her apartment watching TV. It shouldn’t be like that. I mean, with some patients, that’s okay. That’s enough stimulation. But someone like Sarah needs more.”
“Well—” Laura held up a hand to stop the woman “—as I said, I’ve never even met her. And I have a family of my own as well as a job to attend to. I only wanted to find out how my father knew her. That’s all.” That was not all her father had been asking of her, though, and she knew it.
“All right,” Carolyn stood up, clearly disappointed. “Come with me, then.”
She followed the attendant down a long corridor lined with pale aqua doors, each of them decorated with something different. Some of the doors had photographs taped to them. One had a stuffed teddy bear attached to the knocker. Another, a pair of ballet slippers.
Carolyn stopped at the door bearing a black cutout of a movie projector.
“This is Sarah’s apartment,” she said. “She loves old movies. We put the pictures or whatever on their doors so they know which door is theirs. Sarah’s not that bad yet, though,” she added quickly as she rang the buzzer.
It was a minute before the door was pulled open by an elderly woman, who smiled warmly when she saw Carolyn. “Come in, dear,” she said.
Laura followed the attendant into the small living room, which was furnished in attractive contemporary furniture. Nubby, oatmeal-colored upholstery and oak tables.
“Sarah, this is Laura Brandon,” Carolyn said. “She’s come to visit you.”
“How nice.” Sarah smiled at Laura. She was tall, an inch or two taller than Laura’s five-six. Her silver hair was neatly coiffed, and she bore a slight but unmistakable resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was impeccably dressed: beige skirt, stockings, beige pumps. The only giveaway that she was not entirely lucid was the incorrect buttoning of her beige-and-white-striped blouse. The fabric gapped slightly above the waistband of her skirt. For some reason, that slip in the otherwise noble carriage of the woman put a lump in Laura’s throat.