Please Remember This (8 page)

He did keep his eyes open. None of the women in that community was pregnant. But he resolved that as soon as one was, he would speak to her directly.
Do not allow Sierra Celandine to deliver your baby.

In August, Matt filled out all the kindergartners’ school health forms, and in September, he gave the high school football team another round of physicals. He wouldn’t sign off on one of the fullbacks; he didn’t like the sound of the boy’s heart. That wasn’t making him any friends. October brought a nasty case of head lice to the second grade. The town had never seen anything like it before. Kids kept getting infected and reinfected. Their mothers were going nuts, and the Laundromat had to extend its hours. November was cold, but everyone seemed in pretty good health.

Then one night in the middle of the month, he heard a pounding on his door. He’d been asleep, but he was out of bed instantly.

The porch light was on, and through the pane in the door he could see her, Sierra. She wasn’t wearing
a coat. Her ankle-length dress was light-colored and splattered with dark splotches.

It was blood.

He pulled open the door.

“Oh, Matt …”

Her voice said it all. She was thin and cold, a wild bird, swooping through the sky, suddenly smashing into a plate-glass window that she hadn’t known was there.

Except she wasn’t a bird, and she hadn’t shattered a window. There was a mother and child.

“Do I need my bag? Is there anything that can be done?” It might well be too late. Both mother and child might already be dead.

“No, they’re both stable. Duke called an ambulance. They’re on their way to the hospital.”

“That’s good.” The hospital was in the next county. A doctor there would take the call. There was no need for Matt to go. “Come in. It’s freezing out here.”

She let him lead her inside and close the door. But she didn’t sit down.

“What can you tell me?” he asked.

She moved restlessly. “You were right. It was clear that things weren’t happening right, but I kept expecting any instant it would suddenly all turn around and be fine. Instead it all kept getting worse. It never let up. And there was no one to help me. There were plenty of people, but none of them would believe me that this was bad—no one else believed that she actually might die. Everyone was just waiting for the commercial because they were all
thinking that this was like a TV show. It couldn’t be really happening.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“The phone was out. Do you believe that?” She tilted back her head. “Duke and Nina had forgotten to pay the bill. Everyone can be so disorganized around there. I don’t have a phone. Finally I got someone to go up the road, and of course that took forever. We heard the ambulance siren when the baby finally slid out. Then no one wanted her to go to the hospital, but I didn’t want to be responsible anymore.”

“You made the right decision there,” he said. “The mother needs to be looked at.” This was exactly what he had been trying to avoid. “I hadn’t noticed any women who were pregnant. Who was it?”

“It was Nina.”

“Oh.” Nina Lane did seem to be the center of everything out there, but she was the one the locals never saw. She never came into town.

Sierra needed to talk. She went over and over what had happened.

Even in a hospital, Matt concluded, this birth would have been tricky. At a minimum they would have used forceps. The pain had made Nina panic. But if she had had an epidural, she could at least have listened and helped push.

Matt didn’t say, “I told you so,” but he also didn’t pretend. If anything had gone wrong, he would have blamed Sierra.

She stayed for an hour, telling the story again and again, and then, as abruptly as she had arrived, she
left. “I can’t stand looking at this blood anymore. I have to change.”

Three days later he came home and found her sitting on his front steps. She had three cardboard boxes stacked up next to her.

She stood up. “These are my books.” She was speaking without making eye contact. “I was going to burn them. But my grandparents are Jewish. I can’t make myself burn a book. So will you do something with them? Give them to the university library or something?”

“Of course I will. The K.U. Med Center will be glad to have them.”

Sierra Celandine was out of the healing business.

At work the next week, Matt’s nurse showed him a new chart. “Take a look at the name of this baby,” she whispered.

Matt peered at the label on the chart.
Lanier, Western Settler.
It took him a moment to figure it out. Western Settler was the baby’s first name. “Lanier used to be a local name, didn’t it?”

“There is that building downtown. But this is Nina Lane’s baby. Apparently Lanier is her real last name. She and the father aren’t married.”

“That’s none of our business,” he reminded her.

“But they named the baby after a
boat.”

“That wouldn’t have been my first choice,” he acknowledged. He took the chart and opened the examining room door, wondering how Nina Lane was faring as a mother.

But Sierra Celandine had brought the baby in. Matt greeted her and began the examination. The baby was a girl and perfectly healthy. She was on formula.
That surprised Matt. All that talk about natural childbirth seemed consistent with breast-feeding. But he didn’t comment. He talked instead about vaccinations. Sierra was opposed to two of them.

“Certainly vaccines can be refused,” he said. “But you can’t do it. It needs to be the parents.”

“Nina doesn’t know anything about the risks of inoculation.”

Most new parents didn’t. “And the father?”

“Duke?” She paused. “He can be surprisingly conventional sometimes.”

But not conventional enough to have married the mother. That might keep him from having certain rights. Once again Matt didn’t know enough law to talk to Sierra. “We don’t do anything for another month, so you have time to talk to them. Or have them come in next time.”

She could tell he was wondering why they weren’t here now. She looked away. “Nina’s still pretty rattled about how the birth went.”

Matt wondered fleetingly about postpartum depression. “Well, try to get one of them in here.”

That didn’t happen. For the six-week checkup, Sierra once again brought Miss Western Settler.

“Things are hard for Nina right now,” she explained. “Duke left.”

Matt winced. “It’s good that she has you to help.”

The baby had gotten over her newborn-squished look. She was rosy and sweet with a few wisps of hair. Matt gave her her first DPT and polio vaccines, and the next thing he heard about any of them was that Nina Lane had committed suicide in New York City.

He went to the funeral. It was an odd affair, held in an abandoned schoolhouse north of town, presided over by a young man in a purple caftan and supervised by a blank-faced Jack Frederickson, the local mortician. He and Matt were the only men in coats and ties.

Sierra had the baby with her, but everyone in the Settlement was making it clear that the two locals weren’t welcome, so Matt left without speaking to her.

A week after that, he got a call from a lawyer in California who represented Roy and Violet Lanier, the parents of Nina Lane. Was it true that she had a child? Did Matt know its whereabouts?

Nina’s parents hadn’t known that she had a baby, and their lawyer acknowledged that they were daunted at the prospect of raising another child. “Nina was quite a handful, but they know their duty.”

They knew their duty? This baby girl was going to be raised by people who knew their duty? It was a chilling thought. At least Sierra would love her.

He could stall, but what would be the point? Duke and Nina had not been married. Even if Duke had wanted the child, every judge in this county would give the baby to the grandparents.

That night he drove back out to Sierra’s. She had no curtains on her windows, and he could see her lights.

He knocked. She eased the door open, her finger on her lips. Obviously the baby was sleeping. “I’m sorry about Nina,” he whispered.

She shrugged. What was there to say?

“I got a call from her parents’ lawyer, asking about the baby.”

Sierra’s eyes flicked toward the bedroom. “Oh.”

Had she been thinking that the baby was now hers? Of course she had.

“I told the people in California,” he said, “that there was no rush, that the baby was being very well taken care of. But my guess is that she’ll be picked up next week.”

“Next week?” Sierra sounded blank.

I understand. The baby is your life. You’ve given up medicine; she’s all you have. And you love her. You can’t imagine giving her up.
“I don’t know the exact day, but I will let you know.”

He was warning her, giving her a chance to run.
You’ll need to go to Canada.
He prayed that she could hear what he could not say.
You can hook up with the draft dodgers there. They’ll help.

It turned out that the Laniers had never flown before, and the prospect of being on a plane, much less with an infant, unsettled them. They were talking about driving out.

“What would make sense is for one of us, someone from Fleur-de-lis, to take the baby there,” Matt’s mother said. “Then if there seems something strange about Mr. and Mrs. Lanier, we can alert the California authorities.”

She would have gone herself, but, of course, she was raising her own grandchildren. So Kate Carruthers, Doc Bailey’s daughter, said she would make the trip. Her kids were in high school; they could manage without her for a few days.

Matt didn’t say anything. He didn’t think that the trip would need to be made.

He was wrong. Two days before Kate was scheduled to leave, he found a note on his doormat.

Dear Matt,

With all my heart I believe that Western Settler would be better off with me than with Nina’s parents. But what right do I have to be so sure of myself? I was sure of myself the night she was born, and I was wrong then.

So tell Mrs. Carruthers that she will be ready.

Sierra

 

Time passed. Matt rarely saw Sierra, and as the people from the Settlement began drifting away from town, he assumed that she would leave as well. But then every few months he would see her. She had lost too much weight and her color was bad.

He would speak to her. She was using her herbs to make soaps and lotions, she said. Was she trying to sell them? he asked. She supposed she would have to someday, she answered.

She gave him a little basket of products for his mother. Mrs. Ravenal was enchanted with their fragrant richness. One of her friends’ grown daughter belonged to the Junior League in Kansas City. Samples of the products reached her circle, and Celandine Gardens was born.

Sierra began to need things from town—packing tape, boxes, the UPS truck, a construction crew to put up a hothouse, teens to work in the field. She started to look healthy again, but she sounded like a
distorted version of her old self. Instead of being passionate and determined, she now was just weird.

Doc Bailey retired, and Matt took over the practice completely. He was in Topeka, talking to a Senate committee about health-care issues, when he met Carolyn Shelby, daughter of the former governor. She was a wonderful woman, compassionate and practical, so committed to Kansas that she would never have lived anywhere else.

The responsibility of Matt’s two nephews didn’t daunt her. Ned and Phil came to live with them as soon as they were married. They had then had the three girls of their own, and despite all the normal exasperations of family life, things had really been okay.

Carolyn was his partner, his companion, his helpmate. But Matt always had a feeling that if they had had the chance, Sierra would have been the love of his life.

Chapter 4

 

T
hey were farms, nothing more, nothing less. Even before checking into Fleur-de-lis’s only motel on the last Friday in July, Tess had followed Duke Nathan’s directions to her grandparents’ childhood homes. The Swenson place was inhabited; white bed sheets flapped on the clothesline and a brownish dog lay under a locust tree. The fields on the Lanier farm were still under cultivation, but all that remained of the homestead was the concrete slab over the well and the foundations of the house and the barn.

Tess saw them and she felt nothing. She could have been anywhere. If this was what she had come to Kansas to find, the trip hadn’t been worth it.

It wouldn’t have been this way for her mother. Her mother would have felt something. History wasn’t a single straight line for Nina Lane. Time was like a bolt of fabric folded over and over on itself with only the thinnest space dividing the past and the present. Sometimes the two could blur, fusing together as if different moments were happening at once. The past could erupt into the present with dark violence, or it could seep through with warmth, giving the present a richness and a glow.

But that was Nina Lane. Tess was not Nina Lane.

She was going to be Miss Kitty.

During the Nina Lane Annual Birthday Celebration, the Fleur-de-lis Best Western had been full, and Tess had had to stay across the river in Missouri, but at the end of July, there were plenty of rooms.

The motel clerk had never heard of the Prairie Bell school. “But if you hold on, I’ll call my aunt. She might know.”

The aunt did indeed know. Not surprisingly, the school was north of town, a half mile or so from the old Lanier place—after all, it was where Tess’s grandfather had gone to school. Ned—whoever he was, both the desk clerk and his aunt spoke as if Tess would know—was using it for storage.

It was after five when Tess arrived at the schoolhouse. A dusty black pickup was parked under a tree, and someone was standing at the edge of the road, his arms folded. He was staring across the road at a corn crop.

It was the man she had spoken to during the Birthday Celebration, the rumpled one whose eyebrows were darker than his hair, who had given her directions to the parking gate.

She pulled her car over to the side of the road and got out.

He came over to greet her. “Can I—” He paused. “Oh, wait a minute, you were at the Birthday Celebration. What are you doing here? I thought you lived in California.”

He remembered her. How nice. “I do, but I’m back again.”

“That’s great. I certainly didn’t expect to see you again. What a nice surprise.” He put out his hand. “I’m Ned Ravenal.”

His grip was firm and warm. He must be the Ned who was storing stuff at the schoolhouse. Then it all made sense to Tess. He was the local historian in charge of the riverboat excavation.

“I’m Tess Lanier.”

“Lanier … that’s a local name. At least it used to be.”

“My grandparents were born around here, but I grew up in California.”

“So is that why you came back, to look up family history?”

“Not in any serious way, no.” Tess wasn’t going to talk to anyone about her plans just yet. She would hold her cards close to her chest. Surely that was what Miss Kitty would want her to do. “I just wanted to see a few places. This is the Prairie Bell school, isn’t it? I think my grandfather went here for first and second grades.”

“He sure might have. Do you want to come in and look around? I’ve got some stuff inside, but you’re welcome to snoop to your heart’s content.”

Tess’s ideas about country schools were from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House
books. She envisioned them as narrow shanties with the wind whistling through the unfinished pine walls, but this gray stucco building was solid and prosperous-looking.

Inside the double doors was a foyer that had been used as a coat room. Benches were attached low to the wall and coat hooks were arrayed above. A half
flight of stairs led up to the classroom. The stairs were wide, with railings on either side and a third railing running down the center. Tess could imagine children on these stairs, pushing and jostling each other. A timid child might have clung to one of the railings. She would have been such a child, afraid of the big boys and their rough noise.

The classroom itself was big and light with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The front wall was still covered with blackboards, and there were windows on the side walls. The ones on the left looked across the road and the cornfield to the trees at the river’s edge. Scars on the floor showed where the desks had been bolted down. They had been the kind where the seat to one desk had been attached to the desk behind it. Tess had seen such desks in antiques shops. They had slanting lift-up tops with little pots for ink. Filling the inkwells must have been the responsibility of the most careful pupil, probably a girl, someone like herself. Tess could have filled inkwells without ruining her dress. Even if the dress had been made of calico from a feed company, she wouldn’t have wanted to get ink on it.

Tess felt a funny tickle in the back of her throat. She wondered if she was allergic to something, dust or pollen, perhaps.

Suddenly the room came to life. It was full of sounds. Tess was surrounded by sounds, shoes scuffing across a wood floor and desk lids closing with muffled bangs, children whispering, a pencil being sharpened, a bell—

“Are you okay?” She heard a voice coming from far off.

It was the man—what was his name? Ned Ravenal.

“Oh, of course,” she said quickly. “I’m fine.” She wondered what had just happened. “I was looking out the window. I don’t know how much I would have learned if my school had had a view like that.” The fields were so open and green.

“The kids were all farm kids; they were used to seeing fields. In fact, some of them were probably sick to death of fields and were thrilled to be inside, sitting down, reading.”

She wondered about her grandfather. He must have been one of those kids who had loved school.

The space was currently being used as an office. A sleek-looking computer sat on a battered desk. A long table held a roll of blueprints. There were empty shelves made of raw wood and a number of boxes. One was open. It was full of the brochures describing the excavation of the
Western Settler.

Tess felt the tickle again, the tickle in the back of her throat. Her vision blurred. The room was unfurnished, crowded with people, oddly dressed in robelike garments of muddy turquoise and muted yellow. There was guitar music and someone in purple …

Tess cleared her throat. This was strange. She spoke quickly. She didn’t like things that were strange. “So are you spearheading this riverboat project?”

“I hope we don’t get to the point of needing spears, but if we do, I guess I will be the one throwing them.” He explained that he had originally planned to start as soon as the sweet corn had been harvested, but was now waiting for a groundbreaking ceremony on Labor Day. “I’ll be chomping at the bit, but it’s in
the best interests of the town to have some whoopla.” Then he grew a little hesitant, jamming his hands in his pockets and looking out the window as he spoke. “Listen, I don’t want to sound unfriendly here, but the legal position is clear. All the artifacts are ours. If something can definitely be traced to a particular family and it doesn’t have unique historical interest, we will consider passing it along, but I’m not making any promises.”

“That makes sense,” Tess said politely, then realized that she had just told a complete lie. “Actually, it doesn’t, at least not to me. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He tilted his head, his dark eyebrows pulling close together. “You’re not interested in your family’s stuff?”

“I can’t imagine that my family had much stuff. That’s why they had to leave. They were broke, the Dust Bowl and all.”

He waved his hand, dismissing everything she knew of her family’s history. “No, not those people. I’m talking about the ones on the riverboat. We probably won’t be able to identify the owners of most of the personal belongings, but the Laniers had so much more money than anyone else. If we find rich-people stuff, it was probably theirs.”

“Whose? What are you talking about? There were Laniers on the riverboat?”

He drew back. “You didn’t know that?”

“No.” Tess had never heard anything about this. The banks taking away the farms, she knew about that. Her grandparents each having had an uncle killed in World War I, she had heard about them. But
Laniers being on the riverboat? Her family ties to Kansas were even stronger than she had realized.

“Their names were Louis and Eveline,” Ned was saying. “He was the younger son of a reasonably important New Orleans family. They had a seventeen-year-old daughter named Marie with them, and Eveline was pregnant. Six months after the wreck, Herbert was born. He was the one who built the Lanier Building.”

Tess wondered if Nina Lane had known this. Of course she had. Everyone said she had been obsessed by the riverboat.

So why hadn’t Tess’s grandparents told her?
Grandpa, you told me the story of every
Gunsmoke
episode. Why didn’t you tell me our own story?

Were you afraid that I would become obsessed too?

“Apparently they were going to spend the summer in the St. Louis area,” Ned continued. “I don’t know what made them decide to go West, and I doubt that we’ll find out. No paper on board—no books, diaries, or correspondence—will have survived. But the Laniers certainly were luckier than everyone else. The boat sank in less than five minutes. People only had what they had on their backs, but Eveline Lanier had three hundred dollars in gold coins sewn into the hem of her petticoat.”

“Three hundred dollars … that was a lot then, wasn’t it?” Tess had never heard of any Laniers having money.

“It certainly was. It was more than enough to have gotten them back to New Orleans, but they stayed on and used the money to build a decent house and get a sawmill started. Years later she wrote an account of
the wreck. I suppose you haven’t read it or you’d have known about your family. But I’ll make a copy of it for you.”

“That would be nice.” This was all so surprising. “I would like to read it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said bluntly. “It’s so full of high-minded, insincere, Victorian moralizing that you want to choke her, and she’s an incredible snob, even though she keeps claiming that she isn’t. Have you seen the Lanier Building yet?”

“That was my next stop. Will it be easy to find?”

“Yes. I’m heading into town, so will you let me show it to you? Can I give you a ride, or would you like to follow me in your car?”

“I’ll take my car.”

The road in front of the schoolhouse wasn’t paved, and small clouds of dust rose from his rear wheels, but in a moment they were on the county blacktop and then, after another two miles, they were in town.

Main Street ran perpendicular to the river. The street was wide, with angled parking on either side. The new Beaux Arts-style wrought-iron streetlights that Tess had read about on the town’s Web site gave the commercial district a slightly Parisian air.

The left signal light on the rear of Ned’s pickup flicked on in the middle of the last block; he was obviously about to turn into a parking space. Tess did likewise.

“I guess I should have warned you,” he said after they got out of their vehicles. “The place is a little run-down.”

That was not an exaggeration. Tess looked up at the building that one of her ancestors had built and
named after himself. Made of rough-hewn blocks of limestone with an entranceway recessed into the façade, it had obviously been quite grand once. It had four tall, arched windows and the entry recess was a generous five-sided niche. The floor of the niche was covered with tiny hexagonal tiles. Black tiles against a white background formed the words “Lanier Building,” and the stone above the entranceway was also carved with those words.

The problem was that at some point someone had attempted to paint the building teal, but the stone was rough and porous. It hadn’t taken the paint well at all.

“You have to understand. We did our time as the Haight-Ashbury of eastern Kansas, and apparently back then, someone thought that teal paint on top of limestone was a good idea.”

“It wasn’t,” Tess said simply.

“I have to agree with you there. Do you want to go in? The Lutherans have been storing their extra tables here because of the trouble they’ve been having with water in their basement, and since I keep needing to borrow more and more tables for the museum, they gave me a key.”

What was he talking about? What Lutherans? What basement? If Tess had been in his shoes, she would have just said,
I
have a key. Do you want to go in?
“Yes, I’d like that.”

He held open the door for her. It was a big space, empty and dusty, with a flimsy partition running down the middle. The Lutherans’ long tables were folded and leaning up against one of the outer walls.
The partition probably wouldn’t have stood up to their weight.

“It’s good-sized,” he said, “bigger than anyone needs now.”

“But I hear you’re getting a number of new businesses.”

“It’s pretty incredible … although I sure hope we haven’t been selling people a bill of goods about how much attention the boat is going to draw. I know that I’d drive a couple hours to check out something like this, but then, I’m the guy who is digging it up, so I’m probably not a great reference point.”

Tess noticed that she was smiling.
I
like him.
The thought was clean and simple. He was a friendly, interesting person. She could see that if he ever really got started talking about the riverboat, he might never shut up—there were parts of his brochure that had been pretty boring—but he seemed to know that about himself. “You mentioned needing tables for a museum. Will that be for the things you find on the boat and are refusing to give back to their original owners?”

“Absolutely. In fact—”