The Lost Hours (5 page)

Her brown eyes blinked slowly as if trying to focus on my face and then I watched as her gaze slowly traveled to the bundle in my hands and stopped, her eyes sad and unblinking. I came closer and sat at the edge of her bed, her gaze never leaving the blue-yarn sweater. Her hand, as delicate as a fallen leaf, reached out and grabbed a fistful of the soft fabric, the blue veins in her hands like roadmaps of her life. Slowly, she pulled it toward her and buried her face in the sweater as I had done, and I wondered what memory she was smelling.

“Do you know whose this was?”

She didn’t respond, but kept her face buried in the sweater. After a moment her shoulders began to shake and a keening I had never heard before erupted from her, the sound bringing back to me all of my own lost hopes and dreams.

With a hesitant hand, I touched her shoulder, appalled yet compelled to reach her as I witnessed a depth of emotion I never thought her capable of.

“It’s okay, Grandmother. It’s going to be okay.” The words were as empty of meaning as my incessant patting on the sharp bone of her shoulder that protruded from her cotton nightgown. It wasn’t okay. And for a brief moment I wished that I had never found that sweater in the trunk or read the letters, that I had been allowed to continue in my numb existence in the quiet house on Monterey Square. But I had found the sweater and brought it here to show her. And I had remembered the words that haunted my dreams the night before, words my grandmother had told me long ago that I thought I’d forgotten.
Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair.The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people’s hearts.

I thought back to my own mother, dead now for more than twenty years and how she’d left home at eighteen and never gone back. I remembered her only from an old Polaroid of her standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with my father—a picture I always thought was to show the world how very far from home she wanted to get.

My grandmother’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun and I thought for a moment that she’d forgotten what she was crying for. But when she turned her reddened eyes up to me, I saw within them a clarity that I had not seen for years.

“He’s gone,” she whispered, her fingers like claws as she hooked them into the sweater. Tears fell down withered cheeks but she didn’t blink or take her gaze away from me. She let go of the sweater and grabbed my hands, her fingers cold and brittle. She leaned toward me and very quietly whispered so close to my face that I could feel her puffs of breath. “Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to.”

My grandmother looked away and let go of my hands, distracted now. She leaned back against her pillows and closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy,” she said, keeping her eyes closed.

I wasn’t ready for her to go to sleep yet. I leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Who’s Lillian, Grandmother? Who’re Lillian and Josie and Freddie?”

Her eyes rolled violently under her lids but she didn’t open them. Instead she turned her face away from me, but I saw her hand tighten into a fist before tucking it under her chin.

“Grandmother?” I whispered.

She didn’t move. I stayed on the edge of her bed for a long time, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest with a growing sense of unease—the same feeling one gets upon leaving home for a long trip and knowing something has been forgotten.

Finally, I stood and leaned over to kiss her cheek. I startled when her hand closed around my wrist and her eyes opened. “My box,” she said. “I put it in my box but now I can’t find it.”

“What box?” I asked, remembering the smell of summer grass and the feel of dark earth in my hands and knowing the answer already.

But she had closed her eyes again, her breathing settling into the reassuring rhythm of a peaceful sleep. I touched her cheek, vainly seeking a connection with this woman who had raised me, and wishing again that I had never read her letters or discovered the light blue baby’s sweater in the trunk.

I didn’t even pause to change my clothes or shoes when I returned home. I did stop in the kitchen to gulp down two pain pills, not really bothering to wonder if I was doing so from habit or just from the need to soften the edges of reality for a while. Then I went directly to the gardening shed and pulled out my grandfather’s shovel, then made my way through to the back garden to the spot where I remembered burying my grandmother’s box.

I considered for a moment calling George, but the thought of his overeager smile and his insistence that I think about my life made me hesitate. If I found that my back and knee wouldn’t allow me to use a shovel, then I’d take another pain pill before calling George for help.

After swatting at the sand flies that had begun to swarm around my neck and ankles, I lifted the shovel high, stabbing the earth with the tip as I’d seen my grandfather do, and gritting at the wave of pain that grabbed my spine. I wasn’t used to doing more than walking around in my house and leaning over a computer desk at various libraries as I researched, despite the insistence of George, my grandfather, and my physical therapist that I be more active. Using my good leg, I pressed down with the heel of my foot and embedded the entire head of the shovel in the dusty ground of my back garden.

Starting to feel the light-headedness I associated with my medication, the pain seemed to ebb, its edges soft and bubbly like that of an oncoming wave sliding onto shore. I wiped a bead of sweat that had begun to drip down my forehead, then lifted the shovel with a full load of dirt and dumped it behind me.

It didn’t take long; the hole had only been as deep as the shallow box required. But by the time the shovel finally hit metal my blouse and pants clung to my skin with sweat and I had begun to see spots before my eyes.

I knelt in the sparse weeds beside the gaping wound in the earth and reached inside for the tin box, my fingernails scraping red clay as my fingers found their way around it. Impatiently I lifted it out of the hole, eager to have it over with, and relieved that it wasn’t too heavy to lift by myself. I brushed off the top, then lifted it open, the old hinges hardly protesting.

I sat back with the box on my lap, the unearthed dirt and small rocks clinging to my pants, and I looked inside. A bundle of raw-edged scrapbook pages, stacked beneath a worn and cracked front cover and wrapped in a frayed black grosgrain ribbon, lay nestled inside. On top of the pile, as if placed as an afterthought, was a framed sepia-colored photo of three young girls, two unrecognizable but the blond one uncannily familiar. I wasn’t sure at first. In the photo, the girl had a sparkle in her eye as if she knew a secret and her smile was full of mischief. But the wide eyes and slightly snubbed nose were definitely my grandmother’s; I recognized them mostly because I saw the same eyes and nose every time I looked in a mirror.

I pried off the stiff cardboard backing, not feeling the pain when my nail tore back. Pulling the frame in closer to block the sun with my shadow, I peered down at the back of the photograph where someone had scrawled in amateur calligraphy three names: Lillian Harrington, Josephine Montet, and Annabelle O’Hare. I startled, recognizing the first name as the name on the letters my grandmother had written. My eyes flickered down to the words written beneath the names:
Dum vita est, spes est—Cicero.
I frowned, recalling the quote written on the wall of my high school Latin teacher’s classroom and often repeated by her. I stared at the words for a long moment, remembering that my grandmother had written the same ones in her letter to Lillian.
Where there is life, there is hope.
I had never understood its relevance and still didn’t.

I lifted out the pages and gave them a cursory flip, my perusal slowing as I noticed the brutally torn edges of each page, as if they’d been ripped from the spine with force.

Sweat dripped onto a page and I stood to bring the bundle in the house for closer inspection. I must have stood too suddenly; my head swam and my vision blurred as I lost my grip on the pages and fell to my knees. I put my head down to my chest and waited for my head to clear before opening my eyes again.

The scrapbook pages lay scattered on the bare earth and encroaching weeds, the pages fluttering like moths. Crawling on my hands and knees I began gathering them up, shaking off the dirt before stacking them. As I lifted a page that had been nearly torn in half, I spotted a small newspaper clipping that was stuck facedown to the back of it. Yellowed glue with paper remnants coating its top clung to the side facing out as if the clipping had once been glued between two scrapbook pages.

Carefully, I pulled it off and read it, feeling my skin growing colder and colder despite the pressing heat of the summer sun.

The article was from the
Savannah Morning News
and dated September 8, 1939. It read:

I felt ill, either from the pain pills or the heat. Or maybe it was from facing a past that perhaps would have been better remaining hidden. I lay down, pressing my face against the cool earth. I tasted dirt and weeds and stubborn grass but I didn’t have the energy to turn my head. I stayed that way for a long time until my stomach settled and my head stopped spinning. I opened my eyes and pulled myself up on my elbow, catching sight of the upturned tin box, where something glinted from an inside corner. Slowly, I reached out my hand and pulled it toward me, unsure of what I was looking at.

It was a necklace of sorts, with a thick filigree chain halfway filled with a mismatched assortment of charms that bore little resemblance to one another. They reminded me of the angel charm Mr. Morton had given me and I sat up to examine the necklace more closely, clenching my eyes shut for a moment to stop the spinning. I dangled the charms in my hand, studying them and wondering why most of the chain had been left empty. I fingered the figures like a blind woman uncoding Braille, trying to read the stories behind them until I reached the last one.

I looked down into my palm and saw a tiny gold baby carriage, its spokes delicately molded, and wondered what all of these charms meant. The sand flies continued their invisible attack as I stared down at this buried treasure, biting me without mercy and as persistent as old grief.

The necklace slipped through my fingers and into my lap and I inexplicably began to cry. I wasn’t sure if my tears were for the old woman whose stories remained untold, or for the girl I had once been who had believed herself invincible but who had grown into a woman who no longer believed in anything at all.

Lillian Harrington-Ross sat at the window in her sitting room and stared at the letter in her age-spotted hands, deliberately overlooking the fingers that resembled more the knotted trunks of live oaks than the graceful fingers of a woman who’d once taken so much pride in her hands.

The sound of hooves beating on dried, packed earth drew her attention out the window to the lunge ring, where her grandson,Tucker, had brought the recently rescued cherry bay gelding, the vivid scar bisecting the horse’s flank appearing like a caution sign. Tucker held the lunge whip out, expertly guiding the reluctant gelding around the ring, coaxing secrets from the animal’s unknown past.

Lillian rarely opened her blinds, preferring the darkness, but she’d wanted to watch her grandson and the new horse to surreptitiously study them both to see if either one of them showed any sign of healing. She sat back in her chair and looked out at her grandson through half-closed eyes, seeing another man in the shimmering heat, another man who’d known how to speak to horses and who’d had no tolerance for broken things. She let her eyelids shut completely, feeling the tremor in her old hands, imagining that it had been the power of a horse felt through the pull of the reins. But that had all been so very long ago. And she wondered again how she had let something so precious exit her life so easily. Like the moment a parent realizes their child is too big to be carried yet not remembering how long it had been since the last time.