The Lace Reader (3 page)

“You’re bleeding,” he says, reaching out for my arm. The cops here aren’t as scared by blood as the cops in L.A. are.

“Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say too loud. He leads me inside and makes me sit down at the kitchen table. I’m bare-armed now, holding a paper towel to my forearm.

“You need stitches,” Jay-Jay says.

“It’s fine.”

“At least get some Neosporin on it. Or some of that herbal crap Eva sells.”

“I’m fine, Jay-Jay,” I say, just a little too sharply. 18 Brunonia

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A long silence. “I’m sorry about Eva,” he says finally. “I wish I had something new I could tell you.”

“Me, too.”

“That Alzheimer’s stuff is all crap. I saw her a week before she disappeared. She was still sharp as a tack.” He thinks a minute. “You need to talk to Rafferty.”

“Who?”

“Detective Rafferty. He’s your man. He’s the one who’s handling the case.”

He looks around the room as if there’s something here, something he wants to say, but then he changes his mind.

“What?”

“Nothing. . . . I’ll tell Rafferty you’re here. He’ll want to talk to you. He’s in court today, though. Traffic court. Whatever you do, don’t drive with him. He’s the worst driver in the world.”

“Okay,” I say, wondering why Jay-Jay thought driving with Rafferty was even a possibility. We stand there awkwardly, neither of us knowing how to follow that last thread of conversation.

“You look good,” he says finally. “For an old lady of . . . what?

Thirty-one?”

“Thirty-two.”

“For thirty-two you look great,” he says, and laughs. I don’t go into the main part of the house until Jay-Jay leaves. As soon as I open the door, I realize that everyone has made a big mistake.

Eva’s right here in this house. I can feel her. Her presence is so strong that I almost run after Jay-Jay to tell him to call off the search, that she has come back, but the cruiser has already turned the corner, so I’ll have to call the station.

But first I have to see my Aunt Eva. She must have gone on a trip and not told anyone. She probably doesn’t even know the whole town’s looking for her.

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“Eva?” I call to her. She doesn’t answer. Her ears aren’t very good, not anymore. I call again, louder. Still no answer, but I know she’s here. She’s up on the widow’s walk or down in the root cellar mixing up a new kind of tea, something with bergamot and kumquat essence. Or maybe she never left, is what I’m thinking, though I know that’s not possible. They must have searched the house. At least I assume they did. Didn’t anyone come in here, for God’s sake?

Didn’t May? No, she wouldn’t, damn her. But the cops would. Or my brother. Of course Beezer would have looked. Of course that’s the first thing they would have done. Eva wouldn’t have been reported missing unless she actually
was
missing, right? But now she’s back.
It’s as plain as the nose on your face,
I think, laughing out loud because I’m still channeling Eva’s clichés.

“Hey, Eva,” I call to her, knowing how deaf she’s gotten, but giving it a try anyway. “Eva, it’s me.”

I’m not sure where to start looking. I stand there, in the foyer. Ahead are two matching parlors with black marble fireplaces facing each other from the ends of the long rooms. One of the rooms is closed off; that’s the one Eva uses as her tearoom. I enter the other one. It’s more like a ballroom than a parlor. The fireplaces look empty with neither flames nor Eva’s usual arrangements of flowers in them. Chairs are placed symmetrically and strategically, like pieces on a chessboard. I look at the huge suspended staircase. I know that my next move should be up, but I decide to check the tearoom first, then the other kitchen, and the root cellar, where she blends the teas. I’m calling to her, talking as I go, speaking loudly so that she’ll hear me. I don’t want to sneak up and scare her into having a heart attack or something. She’s probably upstairs. I’m not supposed to be climbing stairs yet, but I’m yelling to her now, and I realize I’m going to have to get up there. I use the railing to pull myself, but it’s easier to climb now than it was a few days ago, even though I can still feel the pull of the stitches with each step. When I reach the second-floor landing, 20 Brunonia

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I’m dizzy and have to sit down on a bench and wait until everything stops spinning. Finally I make my way to Eva’s room. Old canopy bed in the corner, fireplace, armoire. The bed is made, the pillows fluffed. I pick up a pillow and smell it, expecting Eva’s scent. Instead it smells of orange water, which is what Eva uses to rinse her linens. She must have changed the sheets recently. I check the walk-in closet. Everything hangs perfectly on the hangers. There is no laundry in the bins, which means that she has already washed the old sheets. I spent a lot of time in this room when Eva took me in, a lot of time in this closet, actually, which Eva probably found odd but which she never mentioned. Eva is not my blood relation; she was my grandfather G.G.’s second wife, and no relation at all. Still, she understands me in the way a mother should and my own mother never has.

There are six other bedrooms on the second floor. She keeps all but one of them closed up for the winter. Actually, she rarely opens any of them now unless she’s expecting company, which happens more and more infrequently—or so she tells me every week, when she calls. Slowly I move through each of the rooms, looking for her, talking as I go. The ghost furniture stands pale, covered in sheets against the dust.

Exhausted, I climb to the third floor. Even now, at eighty-five, my aunt has more energy than I do. Somehow I know she is up here on the third floor. “Eva,” I say again. “It’s me, Towner.” I ascend the narrowing stairs heavily, holding both railings. I’m so tired. This third floor is my floor. Eva gave it to me the winter I moved in with her, partly to appease me for having to move off Yellow Dog Island, which I loved so much, and partly because the third floor had the widow’s walk, and she knew I could use it to keep an eye on things, like May still alone out there on the island, refusing to come in. Except for an occasional climb to the widow’s walk, Eva doesn’t use these rooms at all now, and, as she tells me often, she The Lace Reader 21

hasn’t changed them since I moved. “They’ll be ready when you are,”

she always says, and follows with some other zinger such as, “There’s no place like home.”

I climb the widow’s walk first, because I know it’s the only place Eva would go if she came up here. But there’s no sign of her. The only thing up here is a gull’s nest; I can’t tell whether it’s a new one or something left behind. I stand alone at the top of what was once my world. How many nights have I sat up here, checking on May, making sure her kerosene lamp went on in early evening, then off again when she finally went to bed? Every night of that one winter I spent here.

Salem Harbor has changed. There are a lot more boats than there used to be, and more houses around the perimeter on the Marblehead side, but Yellow Dog Island looks the same. If I squint my eyes and look past the harbor, I can imagine that I am a kid again and that at any minute I’ll see the sail from Lyndley’s yacht as it rounds Peach’s Point and heads toward our island for the summer. I go back down to the third floor, where my rooms are. This is the only place I haven’t yet looked for Eva and the only place left where she could be. There are four rooms on this floor, which is gabled and smaller than the second floor, but the furniture up here is not covered with sheets, which seems odd, since Eva didn’t know I was coming. One room is a small library filled with all my school things: my desk, cotillion invitations, report cards. There were books required for school, and books that Eva required me to read when she didn’t think the school curriculum went far enough, old leatherbound books from the big library on the first floor: Dickens, Chaucer, Proust. Across the hall is the room that Beezer slept in on Christmas and during his winter vacations from boarding school. The last two rooms were my private suite, a sitting room with two fluffy couches 22 Brunonia

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and a little Chinese table between them. At the far end of the room, through French doors, is my bedroom. Since I’ve looked everywhere else, and since I know she’s got to be in the house somewhere, I figure this is where Eva has to be.

I push open the door, scanning the floor first, suddenly afraid. Maybe she didn’t come back. Maybe she’s been here all along, and they just didn’t check well enough. Maybe she has fallen somewhere up here and she’s just been lying here in horrible pain the whole time.

“Eva,” I say again, dreading what I’m going to find as I open the door to what is the last room in the house, the last place she could be. “Eva, answer me.”

I’m afraid I’ll see her sprawled on the floor with broken bones, or worse. I close my eyes against the thought. But when I open them, there is nothing. Just the room as I left it the year I turned seventeen: the same Indian-print bedspread that Lyndley bought me in Harvard Square, one of Eva’s patchwork quilts folded into a triangle at the bottom of the bed. On the wall across from the bed is a painting that Lyndley did for me the year before she died, all shades of blues and blacks with a golden path leading into deep water. It is a painting of the dream we shared, entitled
Swimming to the Moon.
I walk over and stare at the painting, and I remember a lot of other things then, like the time Lyndley stole a huge bunch of flowers from Eva’s gardens and got in trouble for it, too, because she almost wiped out Eva’s annuals. She had my whole room on Yellow Dog Island completely decorated with those flowers when I got home that day, and she’d really overdone it; they were everywhere. May said it was too much, that it smelled like a funeral parlor. It made her sick to her stomach, she said. Lyndley thought that was an accomplishment in itself, making anyone sick with her artistic renderings. For some reason she found that very funny. It gave her an idea. She made me put on a dress and actually lie down on the bed like a corpse holding flowers on my belly, like Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and she said I The Lace Reader 23

looked beautiful as a dead person, and she started sketching me, but I ruined it because I couldn’t stop laughing, which made the flowers shake too much to draw.

I am jolted back to present time by the sound of footsteps on the stairway.

“Well, there you are,” Eva says, not even winded. I reel around. She’s wearing an old flowered housedress, one I remember, and she doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, the year she came to L.A. with some garden-club group to see how the Rose Bowl floats were made.

I start to cry, I am so relieved to see her. I take a step toward her, but I’m dizzy from turning so quickly.

“You’d better sit down before you fall down,” Eva says, smiling, reaching out a hand to steady me, leading me toward the bed. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” I say, collapsing onto the bed.

“Of course I’m all right,” she says, as if not a thing has happened. She covers me with the quilt. Though it is far too hot, I do not protest. This is a ritual of comfort; she has done this more than once.

“I thought you were dead,” I say, sobbing now, with relief and with exhaustion. There’s so much to say, but she’s shushing me, telling me she’s “right as rain” and that I should get some rest now, that

“things will look better in the morning.” I know I should tell her to call Jay-Jay and also Beezer and let them know that she’s okay, but her voice is hypnotic, and I’m starting to fall asleep.

“Rest your weary bones,” she says, reading my mind the same way she’s always been able to read my mind, pulling the concerns right out of it, putting peaceful images in their place. “Things will look better in the morning,” she says again.

She starts toward the door, then turns back. “Thank you for 24 Brunonia

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coming,” she says. “I know this must have been difficult for you.”

Then she takes something out of the pocket of her dress and lays it down on the bedside table. “I meant to send this with the pillow,” she says. “But I am old, and memory isn’t what it once was.”

I struggle to see what she put on the table, but my eyes are heavy with sleep. “Pleasant dreams,” she says as she walks out the door. On her command I begin to dream, drifting up the stairs and out the widow’s walk, then out over the harbor where the party boat is coming back from its cruise to nowhere, carrying a load of sunburned tourists. The sun is going down, and a new moon is rising behind Yellow Dog Island, our island, and I can see some women there on the dock, though I don’t recognize them. Then I hear the blast from the party boat as it makes its turn, and I’m grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.
Like the muffs they resemble, the lace pillows were gathered
and tied on each end. Traditionally, each pillow also had a
pocket, and the women of Ipswich used the pockets to hold
their treasures. Some held beautiful bobbins imported from
England or Brussels, too precious to ever use. Other pock-
ets held small pieces of finished lace, or herbs, or even small
touchstones. Some hid poetry written in the owner’s hand, or
love letters from a suitor, which were read over and over until
the parchment began to tear along its creases.

—T H E L AC E R E A D E R’ S G U I D E

u

Chapter 4

When I wake up, I look on the bedside table, expecting to find a note. Instead I see my braid where Eva left it last night. Almost waist length the day Eva cut it, today it would reach only to my shoulders. I pick it up. The hair is fine, more like Lyndley’s hair than my own. The length shows bands of color like the rings of a tree, a summer’s sun, a winter’s darkness. At one end is a faded ribbon, tied in a double-knotted bow. At the other, fine hair curling up around it, is a dried-out rubber band Eva put on after she cut the braid from me. It is wound very tight, as if to hold everything still and together.
Hair is full of magic,
Eva always says. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but at least it’s true for my mother, May. 26 Brunonia