The Lost Hours (6 page)

Dum vita est, spes est.
The letter shook in her hands as the words danced in front of her eyes.
Where there is life, there is hope.
Was it really possible to have once been so young as to believe in hope? And in friendships that were meant to last a lifetime? But it was more than the passage of years that had made her a cynical old woman; grief and loss could poison more than just time.

Peering again through her bifocals at the letter, Lillian read it for the third time.

Lillian sighed, her chest tightening.
So Annabelle is gone.
The years seemed to rush at her like an incoming tide, the memories like a picture show in vivid color, each one moving forward like a sewn hem, and each stitch a mouthful of grief. But never regret. The one thing she attributed her longevity to was her stubborn ability to never confuse grief with regret.

There was a soft rap on the door behind her before it was opened. Lillian smelled the dust and the sweat and horse before Tucker spoke. Her bones and her eyesight might not be as strong as they had once been, but her sense of smell had not yet deserted her. She closed her eyes again, remembering the man who’d once carried the same scent and found herself smiling softly.

Tucker kissed her on the cheek and she looked up at him, seeing more of her son-in-law than her daughter in his olive skin and nearly black hair. He had her late husband’s height and broad shoulders and her own dark green eyes. But his aura of regret was his own, and settled on his shoulders like an ill-fitting coat.

He moved to the sideboard and poured himself a tall glass of iced tea. “Can I get anything for you, Malily?” His childhood name for her had stuck, and had suited Lillian at the time as she’d once considered herself too young to be called “Grandmother.”

“Sherry,” she said, watching his eyes.

He didn’t even pause as he unstopped the decanter and filled a small sherry glass to the top. “I’m sure it’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said softly.

Tucker crossed the room and handed her the glass, then remained standing. Although long since grown, he knew better than to sit on Lillian’s furniture when he was dirty from working outside.

After taking a long drink of his iced tea, he said, “That new horse is a tough one. He’s got a big personality and the strength to match it. Who knows what kind of abuse he’s gone through, though.”

Lillian took a sip of the sherry, already thinking about how soon she could have another, and turned to the window seeing past the rings and stables, beyond the green pastures, and saw through years to three little girls sitting atop a pasture gate. She turned back to Tucker, noticing his fingers wrapped around his iced-tea glass and how they were no longer the hands of a doctor. She thought of the horse with his scars and wondered if having them so visible wasn’t preferable to the hidden kind where nobody knew how to avoid the parts that still hurt.

“I need you to do me a favor.” Lillian avoided Tucker’s eyes by taking another sip from her sherry, welcoming the numbness that seeped into her fingertips.

He sounded wary. “What is it?”

She paused for a moment, weighing her words. “I need you to write a letter for me. The granddaughter of an old friend of mine, a Piper Mills, wants to meet with me to discuss aspects of her grandmother’s past.” Lillian regarded Tucker before continuing. “As you know, I gave all of my papers to Susan for her research, and I don’t have the heart to go search for them now nor do I expect you to do it. It’s too soon. . . .” She looked away, unable to watch the color drain from his face. “And I’m afraid my memory isn’t as good as it once was, and without the papers I doubt I can recall anything with any accuracy. I’d rather just tell this Piper that I’m not available. I was thinking that if you wrote the letter, she would assume I was too ill to speak with her and leave it at that.”

Tucker returned to the sideboard and poured himself another glass from the frosted pitcher of iced tea. A drop of condensation dripped on the mahogany surface and he quickly wiped up the spot with a napkin before his grandmother had a chance to say anything. “Piper Mills. The name rings a bell.”

Lillian took a deep breath, wrinkling the letter in her hands as she balled them into fists in her lap. “About six years ago she was regarded as one of eventing’s sporting elite and an Olympic hopeful. The rumor was her grandfather had already bought plane tickets to Athens.” She smiled ruefully. “Then at Kentucky she fell from her horse and he landed on her. Nobody knows for sure, but they say it was her fault, that she knew something was wrong when there was still time to pull back but she continued into the jump. She broke her back, shattered her leg and a few ribs, and punctured her lung. They had to euthanize her horse. She hasn’t ridden since.”

Tucker eyed his grandmother. “I remember now. I thought she died.”

Lillian looked down at her glass. “She probably wished that she had.”

Tucker turned away and Lillian regretted her words. But it was so hard to avoid pressing on his bruises. Since Susan’s death, talking to him was like walking with two broken legs; anywhere you stepped it was going to hurt.

Tucker stared outside at the empty lunge ring. “If you were friends with her grandmother, why haven’t our paths ever crossed?”

Lillian lifted her empty glass for Tucker to refill. “Because her grandmother and I ceased being friends a long, long time ago.”

He took her glass but set it on the sideboard and she knew better than to argue with him about it.

“So why now? Why does she want to talk to you now?”

Lillian closed her eyes and leaned her head back, the warmth of the sun from the windows feeling like poison ivy pricking at her skin. “Because Annabelle—her grandmother—has recently died. I suppose it’s not unusual for those left behind to want answers to questions they never thought to ask when they had the time.”

AvoidingTucker’s troubled eyes, Lillian pressed on. “Those papers—the ones I gave Susan—they’ve caused us so much grief. I don’t think I could stand to have someone else go through them.”

Tucker returned his glass to the sideboard, the crystal clunking hard against the wood. “I’ll take care of it today.” He crossed the room to kiss her on her cheek again. “I’ve got to go. We’ve got a truckload of hay and shavings coming in this morning and I want to make sure it’s all good before they unload it.”

When he straightened, she reached for his hand and squeezed it, hoping he would accept this mute apology for saying Susan’s name aloud. He squeezed back, then left. As Lillian watched him go she thought again of the damaged horse and its unwillingness to trust and realized how very much alike the wounded animal and her grandson really were. She fingered the gold charm around her neck, the one she’d worn since she was ten years old, and as she listened to Tucker’s footsteps fading down the hall, Lillian wondered if she was the only one who could still see his scars because she knew exactly where to look.

The bells of St. John’s were ringing the hour as I tried to bury my face deeper and deeper into the cool cotton of my pillowcase. I lost track of the number of times they rang, but thought it was more than ten. Alarmed, I kicked off the covers, remembering that the Goodwill truck was scheduled to stop by before noon to collect the bags of my grandfather’s clothing, which I hadn’t yet collected or sorted. I’d donated all of my grandmother’s clothing to the home where she’d lived the last years of her life, not being able to bring myself to go through it all and sort it. Anything of value had been left behind when she’d moved sixteen years ago, and anything she’d obtained since was nothing I wanted to hold on to.

My feet landed on paper as I slid them over the side of the bed. With a groan, I reached down and picked up the letter that I’d read at least a dozen times, my disappointment having now morphed into full-out anger. I relished the emotion; it was the only emotion I’d felt in a very long time.

Holding the crumpled paper in front of me, I read it again, curious to see if maybe reading it in the light of day after a night’s sleep might change the way I felt.

My gaze traveled from the letter to the newspaper on the bedstand. I hadn’t yet canceled my grandfather’s subscription and I found myself reading it from cover to cover as if to make up for my own lack of involvement. It was folded open to the front page of the people section—written the same day as William Gibbons’ letter—where a large photograph taken at a charity horse event was the main feature. The photograph focused on an older woman, looking neither frail or bedridden—her only seeming nod to her age being a beautiful ebony cane—and a younger man flanking a young girl tricked out in equestrian garb and holding aloft a gold trophy.

The caption read:

I slapped the letter on top of the newspaper, welcoming the new wave of anger. I’d still only skimmed through the scrapbook pages, not completely understanding why I hesitated to read them thoroughly. But I’d seen the name Lillian Harrington on practically every page and from what I could tell, the pages spanned nearly a decade of my grandmother’s life, beginning around the age of thirteen.

And then there was the picture of the three girls sitting atop a pasture gate, grazing horses visible in the background. Their arms were thrown around one another’s shoulders, their identical expressions of joy, mirth, and friendship plastered on eager faces. I shut my eyes, having finally accepted that my anger was aimed at myself. I shifted uncomfortably on the perch of my bed, realizing that all the answers to my unasked questions were now buried along with my grandmother under the alluvial soil in Bonaventure Cemetery.

I felt something else, too—an undercurrent that wasn’t anger or disappointment. It was what I imagined I’d feel if I looked up into the sun to find all the answers and found instead only blindness. I wasn’t naive enough to assume that any answers I’d discovered would be what I wanted to hear.

Stumbling to the bathroom, my back and right knee aching with the sudden movement, I hurriedly showered and dressed, pulling my jeans out of the bottom of a pile of laundry I hadn’t yet found the energy to wash. The burst of energy I’d discovered with my newfound purpose of contacting Lillian Harrington had fizzled, then gone flat like a bottle of Coke left open too long. William T. Gibbons’ terse letter had taken care of that. My eyes stung as I pulled my hair back into an unforgiving ponytail and tried to think of anything else to get excited about beyond the arrival and departure of the Goodwill truck.

After limping down to the kitchen and rummaging through the cabinets to find large plastic garbage bags, I returned to my grandfather’s room and opened his closet. Not allowing sentiment to cloud my progress, I dumped suits, ties, slacks, and belts indiscriminately into the bags. I paused only when I came to his straw hat. I didn’t touch it, but left it on the shelf where my grandfather had last placed it, then watched as it quickly became the last item remaining, a lone survivor of a long life, my part in it no longer clear. I considered it for a moment, seeing the hat and myself as the last testaments to my grandfather’s years on this earth and couldn’t really decide which one he’d put more faith in. At least the hat had shielded his eyes from the sun. I’d only succeeded in letting him down.