Please Remember This (2 page)

She took a breath, hoping that some oxygen would restore her reason. “You can’t possibly care what I am normally like.”

“Oh”—he smiled—”I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

There was nothing smarmy about his smile or anything excessively come-hither in his voice. He was, in fact, probably the most normal-looking person she had seen all day. He had a slightly rounded face with open, Midwestern features. His light brown hair was sun-streaked, and his eyebrows were darker than his hair. He was wearing rumpled khakis and a polo shirt, and he had an alert, intelligent look about him.

“You have been very gracious,” she said firmly. “I appreciate it.”

With that, the conversation was over. She nodded farewell, and he did likewise.

She was ready to leave. Her car was not at the fairgrounds, whose lot had been full when she had arrived. A uniformed Boy Scout had directed her to park in the Kmart south of town. A school bus was shuttling people between locations.

The bus had let passengers out at the fairgrounds’ front gate, but the driver had warned everyone that after two o’clock he would be picking people up by the livestock entrance. Tess had no idea where the livestock gate was. She wasn’t even sure she knew what a livestock gate was.

Whom should she ask? The people around here, while knowing every bend in the fictional Ghyfist River, would probably have no idea how to catch the real-life parking shuttle.

The information table at the main gate was surrounded by people dressed in green elfin garb. They seemed to have no intention of moving. A hand-lettered sign behind the table did say that the parking shuttle was leaving from the livestock gate. An arrow pointed heavenward. Tess did not find that helpful.

She picked her way back through the crowd, assuming that the livestock gate might be on the other side of the fairgrounds. More and more people were sitting on the ground, and it was sometimes hard to move around them. She was starting to lose her bearings when she saw the man whose drink she had spilled. He was obviously manning a table, but no
one was in front of it, so he was leaning back against a tree, his hands in his pockets, looking very sane and normal.

Gratefully she went up to him. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I won’t hurt you, and even if I do, I swear I won’t apologize. But could you tell me where the livestock gate is? I’m supposed to meet the parking bus there.”

“You can apologize all you want,” he said. “But do you really need to leave? I’d be willing to bet that you haven’t had any cotton candy yet … although you’re too late if you want the pink. They’re out of that. You’d have to settle for the blue.”

He was urging her to stay longer. “Thank you, but I don’t think even the pink would tempt me.”

“Do you have a long trip home?”

“Actually, yes. I’m from California.”

“Oh.” He shrugged, acknowledging that there wasn’t much point in getting better acquainted. “In that case, the livestock gate is easy to find. Do you know where Sierra’s table is? It’s right in back of her.”

“That doesn’t help me.” Tess didn’t know whether Sierra was a person, a character in one of Nina Lane’s books, or a mountain range.

“Do you see the water tower? You may have to stand on your toes.”

Tess looked at where he was pointing. “I see it.”

“Then just go in that direction. You’ll have to zig and zag around the buildings, but if you keep heading in that direction, you’ll hit the livestock gate.”

“I can do that.” Tess thanked him. “It would probably be easier if I were a crow, but I can do it.”

“Lots of things would be easier if we were crows, but we’re not. Here, let me give you one of these. It’s still dry.”

It was his brochure. Tess supposed that he was selling something. She looked at it. In large, scrolling typeface were the words
“Western Settler.”
Tess had heard of it. “That’s the riverboat, the one that sank, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “I’m going to dig it up.”

The
Western Settler
was a pre-Civil War steamboat. In 1857, while the boat was en route from St. Louis to Nebraska Territory, an underwater log had pierced her bow, and she had sunk into the Missouri River. Everyone on board had survived, but all the cargo, the personal belongings of the passengers, the settlers’ household goods, and the merchandise intended for the frontier merchants had been lost. The passengers had trudged in their sodden high-buttoned shoes to the nearest town and started life over with nothing.

Nina Lane had been fascinated by the
Western Settler.
The manuscript left unfinished at her death, while set in her fantasy universe, was based on the riverboat’s story.

“You’re going to
dig
the boat up?” Tess asked. “But isn’t it underwater?”

“Not anymore. The river’s changed course over the years. It’s now under a cornfield. So as soon as the crop is in, we’ll start.”

“That should be interesting.” At least it would be real history. He was looking for something that had actually been there, not just something that Nina Lane had imagined. Tess approved of that. She
slipped the brochure into her purse, nodded farewell, and followed his advice, moving toward the water tower. A few minutes later she found herself at a chain-link fence with a gate wide enough for a tractor-trailer truck. The gate was tied open.

“Are you here for the bus?” someone asked. “We just missed it.”

“That happens, doesn’t it?” Tess said lightly. She didn’t mind waiting.

There were benches on either side of the gate. She sat down and looked at the brochure the man had given her. The steamboat had been carrying both freight and passengers. The cargo was merchandise destined for little frontier towns, and the majority of passengers were from the French communities in Louisiana, having transferred from another steamboat in St. Louis. The brochure went on to describe the technology and funding of the new excavation project, providing considerably more detail about its dewatering system than interested Tess. She folded up the brochure. There was still no sign of the bus. So she took out her tatting shuttle and the piece of lace she was working on.

A shadow fell across her work. She looked up. Oh, no. It was that woman from the herb table.

The woman spoke. “You’re making lace?”

Apparently they were about to have another “connection.” Reluctantly Tess spread her work so the woman could see it. “My grandmother taught me.”

“She did? It’s lovely. What do you do with it? Do you wear it?”

Tess shook her head. “I’m not the type.” Tess’s style was too simple for much embellishment. She
loved lace. She loved looking at it, owning it, making it. Its beauty restored her, bringing her serenity, but she didn’t wear it.

“Do you sell it? No”—the woman anticipated Tess’s headshake—”it must be so much work that you can’t think about doing it for money.”

That was true. Tess had to give her credit for the insight.

The woman touched the lace. “Lace—it’s like a metaphor for a woman’s soul, isn’t it? It looks so fragile, yet it is really quite strong, although it gets its strength from tight little knots.” Behind the lens of her glasses, her eyes were intent. “And the patterns are made of holes; it’s beautiful because of the holes.”

Tess did not consider herself, or any other woman she knew, to be “made of holes.” Nor did she think her strength came from tight little knots.

“Think of herbs,” the woman went on, “the way some of the least lovely ones will hold their scents the longest.”

Tess supposed that was a metaphor too.

Tess was a nice person. She knew that about herself. She was an art therapist, working in a retirement home, and the residents liked her. You have to be nice for that to happen. She was also a patient person. People who were in a big rush about things did not make lace. And like most women, she wanted to be liked, she wanted to make a good impression, she didn’t want unnecessary conflict.

But she also had a core of self-reliance that came from being a child raised by grandparents, a child who could never be like the other children. She knew how to be alone; she liked being alone. She looked at
the woman directly. “I know this will sound offensive, but my job keeps me working with people all day long. I was hoping to be alone this afternoon.”

The woman blinked. She looked hurt. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Tess. I had wanted to get to know you.”

Tess didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to feel bad about this. A person has the right to draw lines, to tell other people where they needed to stop. She met the woman’s gaze and gave her head the slightest shake.
This isn’t going to happen.

“I’m sorry,” the other woman said again, and then she turned and left.

Tess let the lace drop to her lap. Why did this woman want to get to know her? Tess had walked over and looked at the quilt covering a table. That was all. Why did the woman feel there was something at stake?

Tess should have known that the day was bound to turn weird. What did she expect, being surrounded by Nina Lane’s fans, by people who were “connected” to Nina Lane, by people fascinated by the grisly details of her death. The fans all seemed to feel as if they had a special relationship with Nina Lane, as if they knew Nina the most, as if they loved her work the most. Tess herself didn’t feel that way about Nina Lane.

And she was probably the one who should.

Because, as much as Tess ignored the fact, as much as she asserted that it really had nothing to do with her—how could it when she had no memories?—she had been born among that little colony of artists and writers, and Nina Lane was her mother.

Chapter 2

 

S
he’d always known that her mother had been a writer. Grandma had kept copies of the trilogy on a shelf in her bedroom, and Tess used to creep in and look at them sometimes, only to become bewildered by the long paragraphs and strangely spelled names.

But she liked the idea that they had been written by her mother. She didn’t brag about it. Grandma had said that good girls didn’t “put themselves forward.” Good girls didn’t “give themselves airs.” So it was her own little secret, something that no one else seemed to know about. Her grandparents had rented their house when she was a baby, and neither of them talked about her mother much, especially to the neighbors.

Her sixth-grade English class began its library-research unit with an assignment to pick a dead person and see what could be found. She chose Nina Lane, and within moments she learned that her mother had committed suicide.

The next thing she remembered, she was sitting in the nurse’s office waiting for her grandmother to come.

It was her grandfather who came. He had left work to pick her up.

He put his arm around her as they walked out to the car. “We should have told you, we know that. But it’s been so hard … it still is.”

Tess didn’t answer. She couldn’t.

“Nina was a handful. We were always baffled. We couldn’t understand her. On one hand, she seemed to hate us, but she couldn’t stand to be alone. Sometimes she even slept in the hall outside our room. And she was stubborn … Lord, how she was stubborn. That’s what we thought, that she was just stubborn and selfish. We tried so hard. Your grandmother was always having to go in and talk to her teachers, begging people to give her a second, third, even fourth chance. We did our best, we really did. Then to have tried so hard, to have done so much, and have her give up on herself when we had never given up on her …”

Tess hadn’t minded having a mother who was dead. That was all she had ever known, but to have a mother who had
chosen
to die, had chosen to leave her, that was different.

Her grandfather was still speaking. “Now they’re saying that she had some kind of sickness in her head. We had no idea, and maybe it would have been different if we had known. You can’t know what it is like, Tess, this feeling that you didn’t do right by your child.”

Tess wasn’t listening to him. Her mother had decided to kill herself. Her mother had chosen to leave her. That was hard to live with.

If I had been adopted, I wouldn’t know about her.

That seemed like an answer. She would pretend
that Nina Lane didn’t exist; Tess would never talk about her, never think about her. That seemed to be what her grandparents did. At the end of the school year they moved again, and none of Tess’s new friends had heard about Nina Lane, and in the new house Grandma didn’t have a bookcase in her bedroom.

Quiet and artistic, Tess had done well in school, and she got a scholarship at Stanford. Then it wasn’t so easy to pretend that Nina Lane didn’t exist. There was an organization—the Nina Lane Enthusiasts Society—and its members knew that Nina’s last name had really been Lanier, they knew that she had had a baby, and they knew how old the baby would be. And it wasn’t long before one of them approached Tess.
Is it possible … are you …

It had been fun at first to be important, especially when it had been so easy to feel lost as a freshman. Everything in the Nina Lane Enthusiasts Society was now done to please Tess. Doughnuts at the meetings, or cookies? An easy decision … which did Tess like? Should they pay extra for colored ink? Tess was an art major; she would like colored ink.

No one expected Tess to stuff envelopes, letter posters, or keep track of the mailing list, even though she was actually very good at that sort of thing. In fact, none of them saw that she was good at behind-the-scenes work, that she could keep things organized … because, she eventually realized, none of them saw anything about her. They weren’t looking at her, Tess Lanier; they cared only about Nina Lane’s daughter.

And Gordon, the one who said he was her boyfriend, he was the worst.

Tess was almost relieved when she had to leave Stanford.

Her grandparents were ill; they needed her help. Tess transferred to a local branch of the state university, taking a very light course load so she could help her grandparents. Doctors’ appointments, prescription refills; low-fat, low-salt, low-fiber diets; the loss of hair, appetite, and bladder control; the paperwork; the decisions—she had taken care of everything, waking up each morning determined to be patient and good-humored and not mind that Grandpa kept the volume on the television painfully loud and Grandma’s eyes would bulge froglike as she struggled to swallow her pills. Her grandparents had raised her, providing the only home she remembered. She had owed this to them.

It was during those years that she learned to love linens and lace. She spent so much time in doctors’ waiting rooms that she craved intricate, time-consuming handiwork, and lace certainly provided that. She couldn’t lose herself in a novel—not with the television on so loud—so she checked out books about textiles. She wanted to give little gifts to her grandparents’ health-care aides; she found that she could buy a dresser scarf or a set of napkins at a flea market. After an hour or two of getting out the stains, starching, and ironing, perhaps embroidering a butterfly in one corner or adding a new trim, she would have an elegant, even rather valuable, gift.

Grandma had died first, and one day after her death, Grandpa had motioned to Tess to turn off the television. “They do this thing in Kansas on Nina’s birthday.”

Tess had been reattaching a filet lace border to a linen table runner. She stopped her work. “I know.”

“I always thought it might be interesting to go. Your grandmother, she didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but I thought it would be interesting.”

Tess knew that her grandparents’ lives were full of things to regret—having to leave their farms in Kansas, never having enough money, bringing up such a difficult child. Her heart twisted at this additional regret.

“So, Tess, would you go? I’d like to think that you were going to go.”

“Yes, Grandpa, of course. If you want me to, of course I will go.”

He had died in March, and it wasn’t possible for Tess to go to Kansas that first May. She had no money, none at all. As soon as the lease was up on her grandparents’ house, she would be moving into an apartment with three young women. She was going to have to take a cash advance on a credit card in order to pay for her share of the security deposit. But since she kept her promises, she did go the following year.

In the intervening twelve months, she had been completely on her own; there was no other family, and her grandparents had not had any particularly close friends. The year hadn’t been easy, but Tess had not been unhappy. Her job was as good as a person with a B.A. in art therapy could expect. Willow Place was a well-run, luxurious retirement home. The facility was immaculately clean, smelling of fresh flowers and lemon-oil furniture polish. The residents had private incomes and cooperative families. Tess’s own
living arrangements were also as good as could be expected. She didn’t have a lot in common with her roommates, but there was no conflict and not much friction.

So her life was fine for now. She did sometimes wonder about the future. Her job was secure, the benefits were excellent, and the salary was adequate for her needs, since she was living with three other women and driving her grandparents’ paid-for car. But the car would not last forever, and she didn’t want to be living with roommates year after year. Salaries didn’t rise quickly in her field, and there were never stock options or performance-based incentives. Tess wasn’t sure she would ever be able to afford to live alone, much less buy a little house. Yes, she had made enough money to pay for the Kansas trip by selling linens, but she couldn’t expect to raise a down payment by ironing place mats.

Her roommates survived on credit cards, maxing out one account after another, paying only the minimum each month, never worrying about how they would retire the full debt. They all believed that they would marry someday, and Tess supposed that they secretly assumed that their husbands would rescue them from their debts. Although if that were the case, then they really needed to be dating guys different from the ones who drifted through the apartment now. Tess wouldn’t have trusted those fellows to change a flat tire.

She didn’t date much herself. The ladies at Willow Place didn’t understand that. They thought she ought to have a boyfriend.

“I’m fine,” she would say. “I don’t need a boyfriend.”

She had never imagined herself married. Even as a golden-haired little girl, she hadn’t fantasized about being a bride. She wondered now if that was because her grandparents had always seemed more like brother and sister to her than husband and wife. They had, after all, grown up together; their families had left Kansas together. But she hadn’t grown up with anyone, and given the kind of men whom her roommates went out with, it was just as well that she felt no great need to be married.

“Duke, it’s me. She came to the Birthday Celebration.”

Sierra Celandine was the sort of person who called you once a year and said, “It’s me.” But Duke Nathan had a good auditory memory. “The what? Oh, that thing they do for Nina? Who came? Who are you talking about?”

“Western Settler. The baby. Your daughter. But she goes by Tess, Tess Lanier.”

“You can hardly blame her for that.” What had Nina been thinking of, naming a baby after a sunken riverboat?

“I wasn’t
blaming
her for anything.” Sierra was instantly defensive. “I was just telling you. And, oh, Duke, we had the most wonderful conversation. She really is a beautiful young woman, inside and out. She’s an ectomorph like Nina was, not all that tall but willowy, with narrow bones and long fingers. And she has this spiritual glow to her, this aura. A
person doesn’t have that unless she is in touch with her true essence.”

Duke Nathan knew exactly what Tess Lanier looked like. He had less information about whether or not she was in touch with her true essence. “Did she tell you who she was?” As far as he knew, she had never come forward, identifying herself publicly as Nina Lane’s daughter.

“No. I recognized her. I mean, these Celebrations can be so hard, even after all this time, to see all these girls dressing like Nina. I had just seen someone who must have weighed three hundred pounds, waddling around as if she looked like Nina. And then I noticed this girl and instantly thought, ‘No, there’s Nina.’ It was clearly my powers of higher intuition, because, except for her build, she doesn’t look like either one of you, and actually, I almost doubted my instinct—and you know me, I never doubt my instincts—but when she signed the guest book with
Lanier,
I felt sure. I suppose Nina’s parents still use that name.”

“I would think.” Duke couldn’t imagine Nina’s parents doing anything else. Why would they have abandoned their own name in favor of their daughter’s pen name? “But they’re both dead now.”

“Oh.” Sierra didn’t seem very interested in Nina’s parents. “She said she was in a job working with the public. I wonder what she does.”

“She’s an art therapist in a retirement home,” he answered.

“An art therapist?” Sierra was clearly delighted. “I knew she had to be a healer of some kind. She has that presence.”

Duke Nathan closed his eyes. Sierra hadn’t always
been like this. Once, she had been impassioned and knowledgeable, a young woman full of conviction. “Actually, I think that the job is more of an activities director. She doesn’t do much therapy.”

“Oh, I’m sure she does. I can’t imagine her not truly touching other people’s inner beings.” Sierra paused, waiting for Duke to agree with her. He didn’t. “How do you know all this about her? I thought you weren’t in touch with her.”

“I’m not.” Duke and Nina had not been married, and at the time of her death, Kansas law would have given him few rights even if he had wanted custody of a three-month-old baby, which he had not. “But I make sure that I know people who are.”

What times those had been, those years in Kansas, years that had left Duke one of the most reviled men in American popular culture.

He had met Nina in college during their freshman year at UCLA. Like so many other girls professing to be free spirits, Nina moved around campus, braless and barefoot, her long hair flowing. But Nina was different from the rest. She had talent, and everyone knew it. Duke was taking a creative writing class with her, and whatever the assignment, she turned in pages from the book she was writing. Everyone else in the class planned to write a book; Nina was doing it.

The professor didn’t like the way she was ignoring his assignments, and one day he set out to get her. He took her work and read it aloud to the class, stopping every few sentences to call attention to her point-of-view violations and her awkward transitions. Technically, he was correct in his comments,
but it was the worst criticism to direct to a freshman writer. It could only demoralize or paralyze. His tone was vicious. He mocked the work, he made little jokes.

Anyone else would have withered. Any other student would have gathered up his papers and stumbled out of class.

Not Nina Lanier. She seemed oblivious to the professor’s tone. She listened to his criticism, shoving her black hair over her shoulder, leaning forward in her seat. Within minutes she was noticing mistakes that the professor hadn’t caught. Duke was impressed. She seemed so strong and brave, rising above the professor’s nasty pettiness. Duke knew that he couldn’t have done it.

Of course, he knew now that strength and bravery had had nothing to do with it. She hadn’t noticed the personal attack. Nina simply didn’t register certain kinds of information. But he hadn’t known that then.

He had hardly begun what might be called his courtship of her when she looked him straight in the eye. “I’m going to Kansas as soon as I can.”