Please Remember This (27 page)

Chapter 17

 

T
here was no time to think about that, no time to say anything. Ned was turning into Sierra’s driveway. The Celandine Gardens van was parked by the glass hothouses and her porch light was on. One of the windows etched a sharp white rectangle in the shadowy mass of the small house.

Ned knocked on the door. “Sierra, it’s Ned and Tess.”

“Come in.”

The door was unlocked. It opened directly into a small living room, lit by candles. A lavender scent with a pinelike tang drifted up from the wavering flames.

Sierra herself was seated. She had been reading. A slender goosenecked halogen light shot an intense white beam onto the page of her book. The light was sharply focused, hardly touching the rest of the room. Sierra switched off the lamp, and the room faded into a candlelight haze. Her face was in the shadows.

“I suppose Phil sent you,” she said.

“No,” Ned answered quickly. “We came to apologize if he’s been a bully. We don’t want you to feel
bad about this. I’ll give a talk. Wyatt and Gabe will. It’s not great, but it’s something.”

“I don’t feel bad about it,” Sierra replied, her voice crisp. “I don’t owe anyone anything.”

Her tone was so defiant that Tess didn’t believe her. Sierra felt as guilty as Tess herself did. “I don’t want to be defined as a Dead Celebrity’s Daughter. I’m sure you don’t want to be defined as a Dead Celebrity’s Friend.”

“I wasn’t Nina’s friend. She had no friends. She wasn’t capable of friendship.”

Tess winced at the bitterness in Sierra’s voice. She exchanged glances with Ned. “But we’ve gone on living. I refuse to act as if she is the most important thing in my life.”

Sierra paid no attention. “I wasn’t creative like the others. I wasn’t artistic, but I knew more, and not just about herbal medicines. I could get things done. I could cook, I could organize people. They needed me.”

“Dr. Matt says that you were even a midwife,” Ned said.

“Just three times.” Sierra tilted her head back, remembering. “The first two times, everything went beautifully. Hope and Allegra … they were prepared. They had done their exercises, they had practiced their breathing, and they had read and read, so that they knew as much as a person could. We were all calm, we were all confident. It wasn’t easy, but it was beautiful.”

“And Nina?” Tess asked. “Did she prepare like that?”

“Hardly.” Sierra’s tone changed. “And she lied to
me about it. She said she was doing everything. With anyone else I would have checked on her, tested her, but this was Nina. We always let Nina do things in her own way.”

“Why did she have that kind of power?” Tess asked.

Sierra shrugged. “Because she insisted on it. Whether she was manic or depressed, she needed to be the center of everything.”

“So what happened when Tess was born?” Ned inquired.

Nina had panicked at the first hard pains. “It was awful. She was screaming and screaming. She was hysterical. She kept ordering me to do something, to make the pain stop. With Hope and Allegra, we had been a team, everyone working together, but Nina seemed to think we were all against her, that we were causing this. Then she tore and everything was so bloody and for a moment, the most awful moment, the baby was stuck. By then someone had gone to call the ambulance, but I knew that if the baby really wasn’t getting oxygen, the ambulance would never get there in time.”

Tess had been that baby. She had been the one so close to brain damage or death. She couldn’t imagine it.

“Weren’t you angry with Nina?” Ned asked evenly. “Dr. Matt says that was the last time you did anything medical.”

Sierra shrugged again. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have trusted her.”

“That’s what I don’t understand.” Tess knew that she was repeating herself. “Why was she always the exception to everything?”

“Because she had this talent. Because she was charismatic. We idolized her. We never held her responsible for anything. She was our goddess, our reason for being in the Settlement. Maybe it says more about us than her, that we needed a leader, but we were so uncomfortable with authority that we chose someone who couldn’t possibly lead.”

“Weren’t you really the leader?” Ned said.

“I suppose,” Sierra replied, “at least until the baby was born. Then she was all I cared about. That’s when I started to realize that there really might be something wrong with Nina, when she was so completely uninterested in the baby. Duke knew it too. That’s why he left. He didn’t care about Kristin. He just wanted to get away from Nina. He couldn’t take it anymore. I blame him for leaving the baby, but I can’t blame him for leaving Nina.”

Sierra got up and, as if she didn’t know what she was doing, started to pace restlessly around the room. She was wearing an ankle-length jumper. The dark fabric was stiff, almost canvaslike; its skirt did not move with her body.

She was at the end of the long, narrow room. She reached out her hand and flicked a wall switch. The overhead fixture came on. Its bulb was incandescent, providing an ordinary light, the kind everyone had.

But even in this light, her skin was beautiful, finely grained and delicately colored.

“Nina left me a note. Before she went to New York, she left me a note. Did you know that? No, you couldn’t. I never told anyone.”

“Was it a suicide note?” Ned spoke carefully.

“Yes. I didn’t realize it at the time. I mean, it never
occurred to me that that’s what she was talking about. I was very offended by it even when I didn’t know it was a suicide note, and then when I realized …” She shook her head. Some feelings couldn’t be put into words.

“What exactly did it say?” Tess wanted to know. “Do you remember?”

“Do you still have it?” Ned asked.

“I’m not sure … only if it’s where I put it, but who would have moved it? I’m the only one who is ever here.”

Sierra went over to her bookcases, a series of boards and bricks that lined an entire wall. Tess knew that was how people used to make bookshelves. No one did it now. Ready-made shelves were cheap.

“I put the note in the back of my copy of Dr. Spock. That’s what I was reading at the time. That’s what I had out on the end table. Can you imagine? Me, Ms. Countercultural-Alternative-to-Everything, reading Dr. Spock? But it really helped with a newborn. So when I was packing up Settler’s things, I noticed the note again, and that’s when I realized it had been a suicide note. I couldn’t bear to touch it. I felt as if it would burn me. So I stuck the book on the shelf without opening it. And it sat there for a long time, until I shoved another book in front of it so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I suppose it’s still here. Why wouldn’t it be? I dust the tops of the books every so often, but I’ve never taken them all down to dust the shelves. My grandmother used to do that, but I don’t.”

She pointed to a spot on the lowest shelf. Ned went over, knelt down, and reached in behind the books, fumbling for a moment. He retrieved a paperback volume. He pulled out his shirttail to dust it off.

The cover was a faded yellow with a picture of a baby on the front. Because it was mass-market-sized, a folded sheet of conventionally sized typing paper stuck out above and to the side of the blue-tinted page edges.

Ned eased the paper out. Tess had seen him work with countless artifacts before. He worked slowly but deliberately, keeping his motions steady.

He read:

I’m going to see Duke. You need to get Settler ready to go to California. Whatever babies need to travel. I don’t know.

N. L.

 

Sierra’s lips were tight. “Do you hear that? I was the baby’s primary caregiver. I was her true mother, not Nina. I was the one who loved her. She was my life. And I was to get her ready to go to California. That was it.”

“People who commit suicide …” Tess wanted to apologize for her mother’s callousness. “If they were invested in other people, they wouldn’t—”

Sierra held up her hand, stopping Tess from speaking. She didn’t want to listen to the platitudes of someone with a B.A. in art therapy. And Tess didn’t blame her.

It wasn’t—

Tess glanced up. Neither Sierra nor Ned had spoken.

“What’s this drawing at the bottom of the note?” Ned asked.
—like that.

“What drawing?” Sierra took the note, which Ned had extended to her. “I don’t know. It’s some kind of flower, isn’t it? I didn’t remember it. It must not have meant anything to me.”

“It’s a violet,” Tess said suddenly. “A violet.”

“How do you know?” Ned was looking at her, his head tilted, his eyes alert. He had taken the note out of the book. Now Sierra had it. Tess had not seen it.

“My grandmother’s name was Violet.”

It was the only keepsake her grandmother had saved—that little packet of line drawings of violets. Some had been crude, some intricately detailed, so different from one another that Tess had thought they might have been done by several people. But they had all been done by Nina, at different times in her life, at different stages of her bipolar illness.

Tess reached for the note. Yes, this flower was nearly identical to one in her grandmother’s collection.

These drawings must have been the only way Nina had of expressing her love for her mother. Until she had begun to write the riverboat book, this had been her sole vocabulary.

“They loved each other, my mother and my grandmother. Despite all the damage and disappointment, they loved each other. Grandmother may have been the only person Nina ever loved.”

Was that why there was so little left for Tess? Why her grandmother’s love for her had been so weary? Because she simply couldn’t love like that again?

“I loved you.” Sierra’s voice was low and intense. She wasn’t looking at Tess, but she was talking to her. “I loved you with such passion. I remember holding you, thinking that if anything happened to you, if you died, I would want to die too so that I could go on taking care of you.”

Tess looked up from her mother’s note, the handwriting familiar from the revisions done on
The Riverboat Fragment’s
typescript.

How much of Sierra’s isolation and determined oddness had come from the loss of the baby? If Tess had stayed with her, she would have had to talk to teachers and arrange for play dates. She would have baked cupcakes for birthday parties. Raising a child would have given her life a shape and a meaning that producing hand lotion did not.

And what would being raised by Sierra have given Tess?

She might not be as independent as she was now. She might not be as observant or as serene. She might not have been allowed to develop her own style and her own voice.

But she might have had the capacity to love Ned Ravenal as he deserved. And that would have been good.

“We might have done all right together,” Tess heard herself say to Sierra. “We might have done all right.”

Sierra’s lips tightened. “I guess I’m glad to hear you say that.”

Tess took Sierra’s hand and held it tight. Sierra bent her arm, pressing their clasped hands to her heart.

After a moment Tess went on. “Phil said that you were talking about closing Celandine Gardens.”

Sierra pulled her hand free. “Don’t blame him. I need to do what I should have done twenty-five years ago. Go somewhere else and start over. I should have never stayed here. I’m not sure where I’ll go or what I’ll do, but I need to make a change.”

Tess remembered feeling that way early last summer. She had followed the instinct. She had left California; she had started over. It had been the right thing to do. “But that doesn’t mean you have to shut down your business. You could hire someone else to run it, or you could sell it.”

“I don’t care enough. I want to lock the door and walk away. That’s what people did in the Settlement. They would just leave. ‘Hold on to my stuff until I know where I’ll be, and then you can ship it to me.’ It wouldn’t be packed, it wouldn’t be in boxes, and then most of the time we’d never hear from them. The attic of Nina’s house was full of things people had left behind. Fred Hobart, who owned the place, used to be furious about it, always blaming me even though none of it was mine. It was a relief when it burned down, although we lost all of Nina’s papers.”

Tess listened uneasily. How could she tell Sierra to do what was good for the town when she herself wouldn’t do what the town needed?

“But I’m not like that,” Sierra continued. “I know I could be, I know it’s my turn, but I’ll do the right thing. I clean up after myself. If that means selling the
business so that someone else can run it, that’s what I’ll do. But only if I don’t have to talk to Phil. I can’t stand him.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Tess said quickly. “Or we’ll leave him out of it altogether. We’ll find the sort of person who specializes in selling businesses, and you’ll only have to deal with that person.”

“It had better be a woman.”

“It will be,” Tess promised. There had to be such a woman in Kansas City. If not, they would get someone in St. Louis or Chicago. She would make this work for Sierra. She would help her clean up. She owed her that.

Chapter 18

 

S
prawl Press had never been involved in the Nina Lane Birthday Celebration before, citing the number of used books sold there. Tess now knew that publishers—and authors’ daughters—made no money from the sale of used books.

But the facsimile edition of
The Riverboat Fragment
was going to be published the week of the Celebration, and with a little urging from Tess and a lot from Phil, the publisher agreed to sell the books at the fairgrounds, underwrite the parking shuttle, and pay for printing a program that would include a schedule and a map of the vendors.

The press also wanted to host a party at The Cypress Princess on Friday night with Tess as the featured guest. She refused.

Would she come to New York and meet with key members of the sales force? No.

Would she come to the Sprawl Press table during the Celebration and, once every hour, draw names out of a fishbowl, awarding canvas tote bags silk-screened with the cover of the facsimile edition?

No.

“They’re worse than Phil would ever have been,” she grumbled to Ned.

He nodded sympathetically. “So it sounds like you’re going to refuse to promote the museum by having your picture taken in one of Marie’s dresses?”

Tess drew back, unsure of what to say. She wasn’t willing to make a public appearance as Nina Lane’s daughter. What about as Marie Lanier’s great-great-great-niece? Or her great-great-great-granddaughter, depending on whose story you were believing.

“You’re really a mess,” he continued pleasantly, “if you can’t tell when someone is making a joke.”

“Oh.” Tess felt herself flush. People rarely teased her. But why shouldn’t they? She did get too intense sometimes.

“That’s okay,” he said. “You’re too fat to wear the dress anyway.”

This was certainly a joke. He had three sisters. He knew you didn’t go around telling women that they were too fat.

But it turned out he was serious. She wouldn’t have fit into Marie’s dresses. “It’s the corsets business. Marie would have worn killer underwear. No healthy modern woman could get herself into those dresses. And if I let anyone near one of them,” he went on, “I will never have a moment’s peace as long as my sisters live. Caitlin is hankering after that uncut white satin for her wedding gown.”

Marie’s satin was not white. It was a very pale blush, but it would still make a beautiful wedding dress. “Are you going to give it to her?”

“I hope not. But you never know. I like the three of them more than is good for me.”

“If you do, tell her that I will make the dress for her.”

“I will not tell her any such thing, and if
you
tell her, I will clog up the wands on your espresso machine.”

The publication of the new edition of
The Riverboat Fragment
would inevitably bring Duke Nathan some publicity. His publisher was releasing his latest title during the first week of June to take advantage of that attention.

“I want my books to sell,” Duke told Tess on the phone, “and I’m too old a snake to care why.”

He had sent her an advance copy of the book, warning her that if she didn’t like science fiction, she probably wouldn’t like this.

Tess didn’t like science fiction, yet she was so fond of Duke that she couldn’t imagine not liking his book. But she didn’t, not in the least. She finished it only by assigning herself a certain number of pages to read each day.

“That’s okay,” Duke laughed after he had ferreted her response out of her in another phone conversation. “So many people can’t abide me—or at least the idea of me—but in spite of that, they grudgingly like my work. I can live with one person who likes me.”

There was a thunderstorm on the Thursday before the Celebration, drenching some of the early-arriving campers, but by Saturday morning the ground was mostly dry, with only an occasional puddle in the shaded parts of the park and fairgrounds. The day itself was sparkling and warm. The winter wheat was
yellowing, ripening out of its spring green, and the richly fragrant honeysuckle was growing in such dense tangles of woody vines that they weighed down the wire fences. The sunflowers had begun to sprout, and the milkweed was blossoming with purplish-pink clusters at the tips of their downy stems. The wind was strong, but it was out of the south and was warm.

Tess was not going to be anywhere near the Lanier Building during the Celebration. Word was bound to reach at least a few fans that she was there, and she would likely get trapped. So she spent the morning in the park, where the exhibits and vendors had nothing to do with Nina Lane. How different this was from last year. Last year she had moved around the tables hesitantly, knowing that she would buy little. This year she was aggressive in examining the merchandise, hoping to place wholesale orders to stock her shop. She ran into Emma and Brittany Ravenal and had lunch with them. Ned saw them and came over. Being unwilling to stand in the long line for himself, he started taking bites out of his sisters’ sandwiches. Finally Emma shoved hers at him. “I’d rather starve,” she said cheerfully.

“Fine by me,” he answered.

Tess pinched off part of her sandwich and passed it to Emma.

She would have thought that it would be awkward being around a man who had so casually revealed that he loved her, but it wasn’t, not at all. He was Ned. Nothing would change that.

“I’m coming to hear your talk,” she told him. “What did you finally decide to say?”

“The best part is about the currents in the Ghyfist River.”

Tess was not going to be caught this time. This was a joke, and she knew it. “I’m sure it’s riveting.”

“Actually, it is,” he said mildly. “It took forever to put the evidence together, but once I realized that you have to ignore the first book of the trilogy, it all fell into place.”

Oh, goodness, he wasn’t joking. Was this what happened when someone started to love you? You lost your sense of humor?

The four of them then took the shuttle out to the fairgrounds. Sprawl Press had covered two of the Lutherans’ long banquet tables with crimson plastic-coated disposable tablecloths printed with its logo. A banner announcing the new edition of
The Riverboat Fragment
hung in a swag overhead. Piles of the books sat on the tables and young, New Yorkish-looking people, dressed in close-fitting black garments, were selling books and canvas tote bags.

The book was selling well. The piles on the tables were irregular in height and a number of people were carrying the thin crimson plastic bags the publisher was putting them in. There were also several of the bags littering the ground. Some fans had already started reading the book, a few of them sitting on the ground right in front of the table.

Ned was speaking in the livestock-judging arena, a roofed, open-sided building. In addition to the bleachers running around the perimeter, the central floor of the arena was filled with rows of backless benches facing a small permanent stage. By the time Tess got there, all of the seats were taken, and there
were people standing. She saw the Ravenal family. They had arrived earlier to get seats and it looked like they were saving her one. But she didn’t want to sit so close to the podium. That felt too visible. She went and stood near one of the arena’s supporting pillars.

Ned probably knew as much about Nina Lane’s ancestors as anyone, but he also knew his audience. They were not interested in the struggle to admit Kansas to the Union as a free state. They didn’t want to hear about Eveline Lanier’s civic accomplishments, Herbert Lanier’s mercantile activities, or the heroism of the World War I doughboy. They didn’t care how the increased production during the first World War had left Midwestern farmers vulnerable to the drought of the thirties. They wanted to hear about Nina Lane.

Dressed in an open-collared shirt and khakis, with a flip chart at his side, he began with material that Tess was familiar with. He discussed the extent to which Nina had used the riverboat’s history as source material. He then addressed the notion of daughter Rentha’s pregnancy, an idea now made public by the introduction to the facsimile edition. He detailed the admittedly sketchy historical evidence that he had uncovered for Marie Lanier’s pregnancy. He also suggested that Marie might have had a mental instability similar to Nina’s and that the absence of a Catholic burial might indicate that she too could have committed suicide.

And then he started talking about currents in the Ghyfist River. He argued that the difficulties in trying to map the river were caused by the information in
the first book of the trilogy. In that book the flow of the Ghyfist was confusing and inconsistent. Nina Lane, still a California college student when she wrote it, knew little about rivers. But the books written in Kansas evinced knowledge and interest.

“I grew up playing on the banks of the Missouri River,” Ned said, “and the further I got in the books, the more familiar the river felt.”

People had tried before to compare the Ghyfist to the Missouri, but they were misled, Ned asserted, by the bad information in the first book and by the fact that they were using the wrong map of the Missouri.

Apologizing that there was no way to show slides, Ned lifted back the cover of his flip chart. When Nina Lane wrote
The Riverboat Fragment,
she was indeed using a map of the Missouri River, but it was an 1857 map.

There was a gasp and a rustle in the crowd. People leaned forward to get a better view of Ned’s map. Those in the rear stood up. This was fascinating.

It wasn’t to Tess. She couldn’t possibly make herself care which map Nina Lane had used.

After his talk, Ned took questions. Some were silly. Some were thoughtful. One question made Tess draw a sharp breath. It had nothing to do with the Ghyfist River.

“You talked about Nina’s ancestors. What about her child? Do you know anything about her? Wouldn’t she be in her mid-twenties by now?”

The crowd stirred again.

“She would be,” Ned answered smoothly. “She was raised in California by Nina’s parents. There is
no great mystery associated with her, but she is a person who values her privacy.”

“Do you know—” The questioner tried to ask a follow-up, but Ned had already pointed to another person, whose question was again about the river’s current.

“No, no,” Ned said. “You have to stop thinking about the first book. She screwed up in the first book. She blew it. She got it wrong. Accept that.”

Some people clearly didn’t like that idea—how could
Nina Lane
have been less than perfect? But others were willing to consider it.

Tess followed the crowd out of the arena and began looking at the fairground vendors. Here was the Nina Lane merchandise, the used books, the black, flowered skirts, the crocheted vests. Once again she saw people who had dyed their hair black and fastened it back with a flower.

Their conversations bothered Tess less this year than they had last year. So what if people talked as if the Ghyfist were part of an actual waterway system? It was only talk. They weren’t delusional. If pressed, they all knew the river was fictional. They were just having fun. This pseudo-history was their hobby. Why was repairing antique linens morally superior? These people didn’t live like this all the time. They had normal lives with normal preoccupations. Nina Lane’s books made them feel intellectually alive. They were thinking. They were having fun.

What was wrong with that?

Tess was at the edge of the fairgrounds, near one of the fences. Everyone seemed full of life and energy.
That was what she was seeing this year, not the weirdness but the vibrancy. The sun was still high in the sky, and the smell of the honeysuckle was drenching and intoxicating. People were laughing and calling out to each other. Everything was glowing with life.

How could you have turned your back on this?

It was the first time Tess ever recalled addressing a thought to her mother.

Of course, perhaps it should have been a question she asked herself. Hadn’t she almost turned her back on this without ever knowing it? Willow Place had been lovely with its carefully edged lawns and curving flower beds. The long corridors were immaculate, the reflection of the overhead lights gleaming off the polished floors. It was a civilized, cultivated place for people to age with dignity. But before going there, its residents had lived. Tess had not. Hadn’t the life she had been living in California been its own little version of suicide?

Tess plucked one of the little trumpet-shaped honeysuckle flowers. It was sulfur-yellow. She pinched the base of the corolla, pulling the pale green stamen out of the blossom. She touched it to her tongue, tasting the sweet nectar.

I didn’t mean to.

Tess went still. That was not her thought. Those were not her words. She looked around. There was no one nearby.

I
was confused. I was dizzy.

This was Nina Lane. Nina was talking to her.

I
had come to see Duke, but when the elevator
door opened, I saw Kristin. I didn’t expect to see her.

Tess had no sense of a physical presence, of someone being with her. There was only a voice.

I needed him to come to California with me. But I hadn’t expected to see her. So I stayed in the elevator. It went to the top floor, and I saw an open door. There were stairs to the roof. I climbed up and I kept stepping on the hem of my cape. It had come undone. It had been bothering me all day.

Nina had had a long red cape that one of the women in the Settlement had made. It was her only winter coat, and there were several pictures of her wearing it in Kansas.

And I went outside, to the edge of the roof, and then … and then … I don’t remember anything else …

Nina Lane had not committed suicide. She had fallen, her heel having caught on the torn hem of her scarlet cape. Going so close to the edge of the roof was not the action of a rational, clear-thinking person, but it had not been suicide.