“You let it get you too upset,” Bobbi said. Bobbi was also upset, but being the older sister and sixteen, she was able to maintain an appearance of calm. She could be the leader for her sister, take care of her in as much as Trude would allow it. Their therapist said they should work on accepting their mother as she was—and if she was crazy, accept her crazy. Without taking on her burdens.
Trude had been taking on her mother’s burdens and recriminations for a long time. That was one of the many reasons she couldn’t eat. She’d hoped if she could be more perfect, her mother would be less crazy. Although she could see the intellectual absurdity of such reasoning, even at her young age, emotionally she was still locked in that behavior pattern. Plus, she felt guilty about refusing to live with her. And Hope was no help. She played on that guilt and anxiety and just got crazier as the years went by.
“I let it get me too upset?” Trude argued. “Look, one of them is just out of prison, one of them looks like she just escaped a concentration camp and then there’s our mother, Hopeless. That Charley might be the only sane one in the group and I’m not real sure about her yet.” Tears came to Trude’s large blue eyes. “I feel like a fucking Barbie doll that she dressed up all the way from Philly to here. I feel stupid and nervous and like I might barf. Please, Bob. Take me home. Please.”
Bobbi put her arms around her little sister, so frail in her embrace. She was anorexic, another reality Hope wouldn’t address. “Leave everything packed for now,” she said. “Let’s go for a little walk outside, check out the lake, have some dinner, then we’ll do what we have to do. When have I ever let you down, huh?”
* * *
Bobbi and Trude sat at the end of the dock, sandals lined up perfectly straight behind them, and dangled their feet in the water. It was five thirty but the sun was a long time from going down. The clinking of dinner plates being placed around the table could be heard from the house; the smells of cooking wafted pleasantly on the breeze.
“It might not be so bad,” Bobbi said.
The creak and groan of the dock boards behind them told of a visitor and they turned to see Krista. “Hey,” she said, moving barefoot down the dock. She wore only some shorts and a Jockey T-shirt through which the pink of her nipples were visible. Both girls’ eyes grew wide at the sight. “Ah, I wanted to talk to you guys for a second, if it’s okay.”
They looked at each other, then back at her. Bobbi nodded.
Krista plunked down on the dock behind them, cross-legged. “Ah...I don’t know anything about talking to kids, okay? So don’t be surprised if I say all the wrong things. Your mom and me—well, we never did get along all that well. You two—it looks like you two are actually pretty close. Me and your mom, we just never were. Your mom and Charley were best friends when they were little, but about the time Charley was...well, sometime in high school, they started wanting different things. And going different ways.
“What I’m trying to say is—your mom had it all wrong about coming to the lake this summer. Megan wanted to open up the lake house one more time. She’s been fighting cancer for years, that’s why she’s so bald and skinny. From the chemotherapy. We haven’t been here together in twenty-seven years. The year Charley and Megan’s little sister Bunny drowned, that was the last time any of us were here. Our mothers pretty much demanded that no one come to the lake again, which was not a real honest and up-front way to deal with the grief, but...we come from a family that isn’t real honest. I wish that weren’t true...
“So, back to your mom. She seems to have some idea about a will, an inheritance, something like that. We don’t know anything about that. We’re all here because Megan wanted to spend the summer here. She just doesn’t have much fight left in her. She might get better or she might not. We’re here for her. And maybe a little bit for each other. To give each other a little moral support, something our family also hasn’t been known for. It’s hard, you know? Being estranged like this all these years, feeling like we have no family, feeling alone...
“But it’s nice to have one more chance, to get people together, to see what kind of family survived all the sadness. Me and your mom, shoot, we don’t understand each other. Never have. I always overreacted to everything, usually by doing something that got me into trouble, like getting drunk or getting in a fight. Your mom? Her way of dealing with crisis was to pretend it wasn’t there and invent some completely fictional scenario around herself. I remember once when our little sister, Beverly, was taken to the hospital and your mom—”
“There’s another sister?” Trude interrupted in a voice that was near panic. It was also the most she had said to anyone besides Bobbi in an entire afternoon. Three whole words.
Krista didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she contemplated these girls. She was inclined to dislike them. They were frilly, they were Hope’s and they were anything but friendly.
“You know what?” Krista said. “It’s good you’re here. Meg brought a million pictures, plus the albums of our families when we were growing up. I doubt your mom was able to give you a detailed biography of the family—she was always on another planet.” Trude’s gaze dropped to her lap as if in embarrassment. “Hey, that’s not the worst place to be! Look where I was!” When Trude’s gaze came up it was hostile. This wasn’t going to be easy, Krista realized. These girls might be as fucked-up as Hope.
Krista got to her feet. “We’ve got a million pictures. You want to know more about your mother’s family, there are plenty of people around to answer your questions truthfully. Also, your grandmother would love to see you.”
“We heard she’s in a nursing home now,” Bobbi said.
“No, she lives in Saint Paul. Your great-grandma Berkey is in a nursing home. She’s eighty-eight but still pretty feisty, considering.”
The girls looked at each other, confused.
“I’m talking about my mother,” Krista said. “Your mother’s mother, Josephine. Josephine Berkey Hempstead? That grandma?”
Bobbi was slow to reply but finally her voice came. Softly. “We...we don’t know too much about her. We only know about Grandma Berkey. The rich one.”
A punch in the gut could not have hurt Krista as much. But why should she be surprised? Hope pretended she had no sisters, since one was homicidal and the other had been suicidal. And Hope had long pretended she had no mother since Jo didn’t meet her expectations.
Well, it was going to be hard not to kill Hope, after all.
During dinner, Krista lost all hope that the summer would be restoring for Meg. It was horrid. Hope prattled on about every expensive trip she’d ever taken with her husband, her country club, her charities, their house on the Cape, her big house in Philly. By itself that kind of grandiose talk could drive a person insane but in addition to that the skinny girl didn’t eat and the heavier one hardly ever made eye contact with anyone. Charley and Meg made a few attempts to draw the girls out a little but it was futile—Hope cut them off and did their talking for them. By the time dinner was over Bobbi and Trude had not uttered a word and simply fled to their loft.
Krista took most of her belongings to Charley’s room, giving her room to Hope. There was no possible way she could share space with her sister.
When the lake house was finally darkened for sleep that night, the sounds came out. There was something about the heating/cooling system that connected all the rooms and brought out every sound. Charley and Krista both remembered that from their childhood. They slept together in the big king-size bed; they looked at each other several times, but never spoke. Hope, alone in Krista’s bedroom on the main floor, was still chattering and humming and laughing to herself. It was so eerie; it was like background music for a movie about a psychiatric hospital. Then came the heartbreaking over-noise of soft crying coming from the loft.
After about an hour of this noise, Megan came into the master bedroom carrying
her pillow and dragging her quilt, like a small child fleeing to her parents’ bed. Without a word Charley moved over and held the blanket back for her to climb in. And there were the three of them, cuddled against the lunacy of the night. Just before they began to drift off to sleep, Krista made the only whispery comment. “And we’re the sanest ones we’ve got? Jesus Christ.”
Chapter Ten
The pounding on the door came at 4:17 in the morning, just a few minutes before Krista was supposed to be getting up for work. It jolted the three women awake like the shock of ice water in the face. Charley was the first to get to the door and ask who was there, even though all she had was one flimsy hook-lock on the screen to keep the bad guys out. “Sheriff Tom Doherty. Is this the Berkey-Hempstead residence?”
“Yes,” Charley answered. “Who are you looking for?”
“Well, anyone who might know the Griffin girls—Bobbi and Trude Griffin? There’s been an accident. A pretty bad one.”
With that Charley swung open the door to find it really was the sheriff and he’d been telling the awful truth.
Charley got just the briefest information about what had happened. Bobbi and Trude had taken Hope’s Mercedes and headed for the Twin Cities. To what purpose was as yet unclear. Out for a spin? Hoping to get in a little party time while their mother slept? Running away? If it was Charley, she’d have been running from that crazy mother. Hell, it had been Charley and she had run away. Sort of. She chose the college as far as she could get from Louise and had to be forced to return for holidays.
Bobbi and Trude hadn’t gotten far. They were just south of Brainerd, entering I-10 South, when a drunk driver traveling in the wrong direction on the interstate hit them head-on. They’d probably be dead if not for seat belts, airbags and the fact Hope’s six-year-old Mercedes was built like a brick shithouse. Even so, Bobbi, the driver, had a possible head injury, possible internal injuries and had been flown by medical helicopter to the county trauma hospital in Saint Paul. Trude, banged up pretty good but not as seriously, had been taken to Brainerd’s sixty-bed Saint Catherine’s. The sheriff said that probably the worst of it for Trude was her hysteria over her sister, who had been taken to a different hospital. She’d had to be sedated.
As the women absorbed the news, Hope was useless. Either she was listening and completely unresponsive or she wasn’t listening at all. They really should have named her Hopeless, Charley thought.
“They need to be together,” Krista said immediately. “Anyone can see how they depend on each other, how they seem to be all they really have. Their father is too busy for them and their mother is crackers.”
“I could pick Trude up at the hospital, if they’ll release her, and take her with us to Saint Paul,” Charley said, thinking out loud.
“I’m no doctor,” the sheriff said, “but it’s my guess she’s not leaving the hospital right now unless it’s AMA.”
“AMA?” Krista asked.
“Against medical advice,” Meg said. “But we can get a doctor to have her transferred to Saint Paul. Hope and Frank are rich—it shouldn’t be a problem even if the insurance won’t cover it.”
Charley flew into action, taking charge in the way she knew best. Networking and giving orders and asking favors. She told Meg to call John. He was on staff at the trauma hospital where Bobbi had been taken. John would do anything for Megan; he’d lasso the moon for her. One call from Meg to John started the ball rolling before anyone even left the lake house to head to Saint Paul. John would make it to the hospital right behind the emergency helicopter. Then he would phone Saint Catherine’s and instruct them to transport his other patient, Trude Griffin. In the interim, Charley called Frank. She tried to get Hope to do it but she could barely come up with the phone number. Hope was trembling, panicked, twittering and asking a million questions, very few of which seemed to have anything to do with the accident.
“It’s too soon to even get the emergency room to grade the injuries,” Charley told Frank. “But my brother-in-law is a doctor and has gone to the hospital to look after them and I’ll be taking Hope there shortly. All I know is that Bobbi was driving, and she was unconscious when she was airlifted. Trude is banged up but not hurt badly, they say, but is hysterical about her sister’s injuries, so my brother-in-law is having her transported to the same hospital. John is a pediatrician with lots of pull in the ER and hell of a great guy besides. His name is Dr. John Crane and he’s expecting to hear from you.” She rattled off the phone number.
“What the hell were they doing out driving in the middle of the night?” Frank asked.
“No one knows. You don’t suppose... Could they have been running away?”
“Oh, Jesus.” He sighed heavily. “I shouldn’t have made them go. I was so optimistic.”
“Optimistic about what?” Charley asked. They hadn’t seemed particularly happy to be there, but forced?
“It’s complicated. I’m coming out immediately. Tell the girls to stay calm. I’ll explain when I get there. How’s Hope?”
Now it was Charley’s turn to sigh deeply. “Not good, Frank. She doesn’t seem to have much aptitude for crisis.”
He laughed into the phone but Charley could tell it was not from humor. “I’ll be there as quickly as I can. Meanwhile, see if you can keep her away from the girls. I imagine their stress and anxiety is enough without their mother’s...well...just keep her away from the girls for now.”
“If I can,” Charley said. She noticed that through all the bad news and planning and networking, Hope walked around in circles, twisting her hands and muttering. She let Charley, Meg, Krista and the sheriff make phone calls and decisions. Eventually Hope was told to get dressed if she wanted to go with Charley to the hospital. It turned out she was pretty good at taking instruction. Charley wondered if she was on something—some kind of tranquilizers or something—she was so out of it.
Charley had a fleeting thought—Louise was always complaining that Josephine was completely incompetent. Compared to Hope, Jo looked like she could run Ford Motor Company. But having to put up with bullshit behavior like this? If that’s what Louise had to deal with with Jo, it could certainly be fodder for a feud.
There was only the one car now—Charley’s. Krista and Meg would stay at the lake together while Charley did what only a saint would do—put Hope in the car to take her to the city. And almost immediately she yelled at her to shut up.
“Now look, I don’t really care how crazy you are, Hope. You are not going to mutter and whine all the way to Saint Paul. If you do, I’ll pull over and shove you out and leave you by the road.”
“I wasn’t talking. I was just asking myself a few questions so I can plan, like will Frank be called and will he come and will he tell them we’re married and do they have clothes for the hospital and are they appropriate and—”
“Hope! Shut up!” Her foot tapped the brake as a warning. Only Hope. Her daughter is unconscious and she’s worried whether her clothes for the hospital are the right clothes? Hope quieted. What was this business about Frank telling them they were married? Hope was not silent, but at least she only mumbled absently, like the hum of new tires on coarse asphalt. Good enough.
“Charley?” Hope asked quietly. Meekly. “Do you think they’re alive?”
Charley frowned. It was so strange to have her ask a question like that without any emotion. “They’re very much alive, Hope. John Crane is a wonderful doctor and he’s gone to the emergency room to see what he can do to help. Frank is on his way. For now you should pray. Very quietly so I can drive.”
“I failed them,” she whispered. “I should have planned better. I thought I had everything worked out but I should have planned better.”
Charley just shook her head. She was dreadfully sorry about the accident but she was grateful there would be an opportunity to put Hope back in Frank’s hands
. He would have to take them all home. He would surely understand this wasn’t good for Megan.
The sun had risen by the time Charley pulled into the hospital parking lot. She had to wake Hope and pull her along by the hand. It had to be drugs. How else could a mother sleep on the way to the hospital? Once inside the emergency room, Charley found a quiet corner and placed Hope, childlike, on a chair and told her to rest while she found the doctor. Hope did as she was told, curling into herself and closing her eyes. Charley backed away from her suspiciously. When she turned, she ran into John. Literally.
“Oh, God, John! You scared me to death!”
He put his arms around her and hugged her. “Charley, how I hate that this has happened but so glad you were there to take care of things.”
She hugged him back. “You’re so sane. How did someone in our family have such a perfectly normal relationship?”
He laughed. “Nothing about my relationship with Meg has been normal for years. How are you?”
“I was doing real well until I was reunited with my cousin Hope.” She jutted her chin over her shoulder toward the sleeping woman. “This was all Megan’s idea, you know. Opening up the lake house, having the family get together.”
He got a sentimental smile. “Why not? She never liked the status quo. How’d she hold up through this crisis?”
“Like a rock. She’s doing okay, I think. Krista will take good care of her while I’m away. Meg maintains a great sense of humor if you have a strong stomach.”
“Yeah, the death jokes.”
She shrugged. She couldn’t talk about that now. “Tell me about the girls.”
“Bobbi Griffin, sixteen, the driver, has a concussion and they want to observe her for a while, but she looks to be okay. Doesn’t appear to have any spinal cord damage but the orthopedic surgeon is looking at her now. She’s had an MRI. She’s had some abdominal pain but it was a negative CT. She’s been worried about her sister, but all in all they’re two very lucky little girls. The little one has gone to have her knee wrapped and that’s all. Lucky.” He looked past Charley. “They haven’t asked for their mother.”