The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 5

  I spoke down at my plate, avoiding her gaze. “I have a lot of reading I need to catch up on.”

  “Well, you deserve a rest,” she said, “after a stressful week.”

  She reached to squeeze my hand, and her touch stirred guilt and a desire to be honest with her, to repay the solicitude she lavished on me. But at the same time I felt an almost overpowering impulse to draw away. The same old push and pull, as familiar to me as my own breathing in and out.

  I left my hand where it was, allowed her to break the contact.

  They began talking about the professional conference they would attend the next day, and terms like interpersonal press and dissociative fugue and depersonalization made me tune out. When they discussed psychology, my mother and sister were in a world I couldn’t enter.

  I ate my dinner, lifting my head only once to listen to the raspy bark of a fox somewhere outside.

  Chapter Four

  I stood at the door of Mother’s bedroom. I had a few minutes, but only a few.

  It was early Friday evening. Down in the kitchen Rosario made occasional clinking sounds as she prepared dinner. Michelle wasn’t home yet and Mother had a late session at the home of a woman she was treating for agoraphobia.

  I just wanted to look at the picture of Michelle and our father. In and out, it wouldn’t take a minute.

  Yet I hesitated, time slipping away, as I tried to put down the paralyzing sense of wrong that kept my hand from the doorknob. Privacy was sacred to Mother. Not even her daughters could walk into her room without permission.

  “Do it,” I whispered. I grabbed the knob, twisted it, pushed the door open. The room was in shadow, the deep peach color of the walls and bedcovers robbed of vibrancy.

  Leaving the door ajar so I could hear anyone coming along the hall, I tiptoed across a strip of polished floor and stepped onto the big blue Chinese rug. Silently, as if someone lay sleeping in the bed, I crept to the dresser and switched on the lamp.

  The photo stood beside the lamp on the otherwise bare dresser top. Leaning close, I examined the image, a moment from the past caught in a silver frame: my father holding Michelle, the daughter who was named for him. He was so young, happily unaware that his life was almost over. I pitied him in the way I might have pitied an unfortunate stranger.

  He was a handsome man, with the same high cheekbones I saw every time I looked at my sister. Blond hair fell across his forehead in a bright fan. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes because he was gazing down at Michelle. She beamed up at him.

  How old was she? Two, perhaps. A little younger than she was in my strange memory, dream, vision, whatever it was.

  I carried the picture to the bed, sat and turned on the bedside lamp. My father leaned against a tree. Sunlight dappled the grass around him and Michelle. He wore a blue knit shirt with a little alligator on the pocket, she was in a pink romper suit with short sleeves and legs. Summer. Sun and heat and the buzz of cicadas in the air. Where were they? In our yard in Minnesota, at the home I couldn’t remember?

  And where was I? Standing off to the side? Next to Mother as she snapped the picture? Why wasn’t I in it too?

  We must have other pictures of our father that included me. I’d seen them, hadn’t I? Suddenly I was unsure. They certainly weren’t kept in any part of the house where I would come across them. Where would they be if not in Mother’s room? Her study downstairs was a possibility, but I doubted that she kept anything personal among her work-related papers. Besides, every drawer and file cabinet in that room was probably locked.

  I glanced at my watch—6:25. If Mother finished her appointment at 6:30, she’d be home by 6:40.

  Careful not to make a noise that would catch Rosie’s attention, I pulled out the night stand drawer. It held only a box of tissues and a yellow leather bookmark. I crossed to the closet and slid open one of the louvered doors, wincing when it rumbled in its track. The scent of floral sachet enveloped me. Mother’s garments were arranged by type and length: blouses, skirts, jackets, dresses, all further divided by color. I scanned the shelves to one side of the clothes racks and found nothing but shoes and purses.

  Back at the dresser, I opened the top drawer on the left. It contained Mother’s brush and comb, her mirror and a small cache of cosmetics.

  Quickly I explored the rest of the drawers, running my hand under nightgowns and underwear. As my fingers brushed the cool silky fabrics I was reminded of movies in which people furtively searched places where they had no right to be. I stopped, repelled by what I was doing. Going through my mother’s underwear. Good God.

  But after a moment I was back at it. I wanted to see those pictures, the ones of me with my father. If I discovered where they were, I could come back to them tomorrow, when I’d be alone in the house for a while.

  Among folded sweaters in a bottom drawer of the chest, I found a brown packet tied with string, bulging. My fingers shook as I fumbled with the knot. It came loose and shiny papers slid out of the packet, fluttered to the rug. Travel brochures. Palm trees, a white cruise ship, impossibly bright blue water.

  Just then I was startled by the lilt of Rosario’s voice from downstairs, the words indistinguishable but the cadence familiar: she was giving Mother a run-down of things she’d done that day, before leaving for home.

  “Damn,” I muttered, and knelt to scoop up the brochures. I shoved the half-tied packet among the sweaters, shut the drawer. I switched off the lamps on my way out.

  I was in my room with the door closed when Mother came upstairs.

  All through dinner Mother and Michelle talked about the paper on phobias that Mother would deliver at the conference the next day, the passages she still wasn’t happy with, the case histories she’d used. A businessman terrified of elevators. A woman so afraid of heights that she couldn’t go above the first floor in a building. People who’d been unable to leave their homes for years. All were success stories, emotional cripples now leading normal lives because of Dr. Judith Goddard. Mother seldom had a failure.

  How ironic it was, I thought, that this masterful psychologist who had helped so many fearful people couldn’t face her own grief for a husband dead more than twenty years. She’d told me we would talk about my father, and I believed she meant it when she said it. But would we ever have that talk, would she ever be able to answer the questions that roiled in my mind?

  After dinner I went to my room expecting to spend the evening with my feet up on my little sofa, reading a veterinary medicine journal. The journal lay unopened on my lap when Mother’s knock interrupted my thoughts.

  The instant she walked in I realized what I’d done. In her hand she held the silver-framed photo. I’d left it in the middle of her bed.

  With a sigh, I swung my feet to the floor. Why couldn’t I have waited for a time when I wouldn’t be rushed?

  After she closed the door she stood over me, clasping the picture frame with both hands.

  “Rachel?” she said, not sharply, not angrily, but in a gentle inquiring tone. “Were you in my room earlier?”

  Guilt and shame robbed me of any defense. I rolled the journal into a tight tube between my hands. Peripherally I saw her sit on my bed with the photo in her lap. “Mother—”

  “If you wanted to look at this picture, why didn’t you just tell me? I wish you hadn’t gone into my room when I wasn’t here. I thought we respected each other’s privacy as adults.”

  Just the slightest stress on the words, mixing surprise and disappointment, enough to open a wide hollow space inside me. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling ten years old.

  “Thank you.” She held out the picture. “Here. Why don’t you keep it for a while? Look at it all you want to.”

  I dropped the journal onto the couch beside me but I didn’t reach for the photo. “It’s the other ones I’d like to see. Pictures of me with him, all of us together. They might help me remember him.”

  She withdrew the photo and laid it in her lap again, then began massa
ging her left temple. I wondered if I’d given her a headache.

  “I suppose we’ll have to talk about it,” she murmured.

  I squelched the automatic instinct to back off from anything that distressed her. “It’s only natural I’d want to remember him.” It sounded like an apology.

  The look she gave me was odd, impersonal and assessing. “Why has this become so important to you? Now, at your age? Is this Kevin’s doing?”

  “Kevin? No. I’ve always wondered about my father.”

  “Always?” A dark eyebrow lifted. “You didn’t come to me with your questions.”

  How could I have gone to her? The subject of our father was forbidden territory. Michelle and I saw the glint of pain in her eyes, her withdrawal into cool formality, when other people blundered onto the topic. We were afraid she’d withdraw from us as well if we asked about him.

  But now I took the small opening she offered, although I expected the door to close quietly in my face at any second. “Maybe I’m just ready, I’ve reached a stage where I need to remember,” I said. “I do want you to tell me things, but what I really want is to remember.”

  “And Michelle? Have the two of you have been discussing this?”

  I shook my head. “Not lately. But maybe all three of us could talk about it together.”

  She rose from the bed and came to sit beside me on the couch. The photo was face-down in her lap. “You know, you were very young when your father died. Your lack of memories isn’t unusual. I don’t remember much about my early childhood either. Not with any guarantee of accuracy.”

  Her voice was soothing and reasonable, a therapist’s voice, and I could imagine her speaking to a patient in that tone. I shifted slightly away from her.

  “Maybe if we talk about him and I see some other pictures, I might get back a few memories, at least. You must have more pictures. That one can’t be the only one ever taken.”

  I saw the resistance in her eyes, the tension in her jaw, and wanted to back down. But hadn’t she invited this? Hadn’t she just said I suppose we’ll have to talk about it?

  Twisting toward me, she grasped both my hands in her warm, strong fingers. “Rachel, I wish you’d just let it be. Please. Believe me when I tell you it’s for the best.”

  I tried to wriggle my fingers free of hers but she wouldn’t let go. “How could forgetting my father be a good thing?”

  For a long moment she sat motionless, then she withdrew her hands from mine. Her gaze had turned inward, she was in the grip of some thought or emotion that washed ripples of pain over her features.

  “I could never be sure how much damage was done,” she said at last, quiet and slow. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you are ready to remember. But, oh, Rachel, I wish you didn’t have to.”

  Her solemn face, her brimming eyes, the deep weary sadness in her voice suggested something terrible, and I couldn’t imagine what it was. I opened my mouth, wanting to stop her from saying what I’d begged to hear. But I didn’t speak, because equally strong was the need to know what she would tell me.

  “When your father died in that horrifying accident—” Her voice broke on a husky note. She cleared her throat, then met my eyes. Still, she hesitated.

  I ran my tongue over dry lips. “Mother, what?”

  “You were devastated by it.”

  “But—” I faltered. “It’s normal for a child to grieve over a parent’s death.” Somewhere far back in my mind a memory stirred, little more than a feeling, a welling sorrow. “I told you I remember crying about it. Vaguely.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not talking about ordinary grief. There was nothing ordinary about it.” Her dark eyes peered into mine, so intently that I drew back. “You really don’t remember what you did?”

  I managed barely a whisper. “What I did?”

  She raised her chin and went on. “It’s not an exaggeration to say you were traumatized by the loss of your father. It almost destroyed you. I’ll be honest, I was afraid you’d never recover. More than once I thought I’d be forced to hospitalize you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  I sat in stunned silence. My mind went blank, my memory offered nothing.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a second. Tears seeped through her dark lashes and ran down her cheeks. “The suddenness of it, and not being allowed to see his body, not being able to really say goodbye to him. He was so mangled—” She raised a trembling hand to her mouth. “I couldn’t imagine letting you see him. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”

  She turned to me, imploring. “You have to understand, I was torn apart myself, I wasn’t capable of making decisions. Now I think I might have been wrong. Maybe if you’d seen him—” She paused, took a deep shuddering breath. “It’s so hard to judge what to do when a child’s emotions are involved. Everything has lifelong consequences.”

  She hugged the photo tight against her, but when I grasped one edge of the frame she allowed me to take it. With a fingertip I traced the lines of my father’s face, his shoulders, the arms that held Michelle. My father, my dead father. Mangled. Why couldn’t I feel anything for him beyond a vague sense of loss?

  Mother gently removed the picture from my hands and laid it beside her on the couch, out of my reach. “You were so angry at your father for leaving you. Anger’s a normal part of grieving, but with you it was extreme. You’d fly into rages and destroy things that belonged to him.”

  “Rages?” I said in confusion.

  “One day I left you alone for just a few minutes, I thought you were reading and I went out in the yard for a few minutes, and you tore all the pictures of your father out of the scrapbooks and burned them in the fireplace. But this one—” She glanced at the silver-framed photo. “It was in a desk drawer and you overlooked it.”

  My hands formed tight fists in my lap. My nails dug into my palms, but I noted the pain abstractly and did nothing to lessen it. I could imagine the auburn-haired little girl feeding photos to the flames. I could almost feel the heat on my hands. But something in me resisted, wouldn’t allow me to put myself in that child’s skin, to make her me.

  “Don’t dwell on it,” Mother said. “Please. You’re a grown woman now, you’ve made a wonderful success of your life, there’s no reason to relive old heartaches.”

  I jumped up, stumbled a few steps on stiff legs, jerked around to face her. “How could I do something like that and not remember? How could I be so grief-stricken it made me—sick, and not even remember him now?”

  She stood. I saw her composing herself, setting her pain aside to focus on mine. “Forgetting is a blessing sometimes, Rachel. Maybe you should be grateful for it.”

  “How can you say that?” I cried. “You spend your life helping people remember, and you’re telling me to be grateful I’ve got this big hole in my memory—”

  “Rachel.” She stepped over to me, her shoes whispering on the carpet. She held me by the shoulders. “Calm down. Listen to me. If you want to remember, if you’re absolutely sure it’s what you really want, then I’ll hypnotize you. I’ll help you remember.”

  She studied my face for a moment, and I felt her analyzing me, assessing my state of mind. I met her gaze, determined to show the confident strength I knew she was looking for.

  But I couldn’t summon that strength. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Sick and dizzy, I spun away from her. I had to get out of this room, this house, into the fresh air. “I’m going outside,” I said. “You still have work to do on your paper—”

  “Rachel. You know you’re more important to me than any paper.”

  I was already out the door.

  ***

  I walked down the back lawn, away from the circle of light on the patio, and turned my eyes to the northwest sky. It was the spring of the comet with the funny name, Hale-Bopp. This apparition in the heavens fascinated me, and on most clear nights I went out to look at it. A glowing ball with a fuzzy plume of a tail, the comet seem
ed to hang motionless, yet it was hurtling through space, moving, changing, shedding its essence behind it.

  I shivered, already chilled. I’d come out without a sweater.

  How could I forget a cataclysmic event in my life, however young I’d been? Could I trust my own mind, if it was capable of blotting out my father and my grief for him?

  Thank God I hadn’t told Mother about my vision of Michelle crying in the rain. Surely it wasn’t a memory. Mother would never have allowed her children to be out alone and terrified in a storm. It made no sense, and I didn’t want Mother to find out about it.

  What would she make of the other dark images in my head? All through my teens they’d haunted me, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, inhabiting my dreams. I’d fought them, not knowing why they scared me. I’d wondered, when I dared to wonder, if something was wrong with my mind. I couldn’t talk about them with anyone, least of all my mother. During those turbulent years when I was trying to pull free of her calm understanding, when I wanted to be somebody she couldn’t understand, I’d hugged my secret terrors close and never allowed her to suspect them.

  When they faded, I’d been enormously relieved to have them safely locked into a back room of my memory. Little Kristin Coleman, an innocent child, had somehow opened the door, and now my phantoms were roaming free again. Staring into the dark woods that loomed beyond the lawn, listening to the spring frogs along Dead Run, alternately shrill and throaty, I sensed the shadowy presence of the sad-faced woman, the angry man. And I had a clear vision of my little sister crying in the rain, wet strands of blond hair clinging to her cheeks, her blue flowered dress soaked through.

  Blue flowered dress? Oh, dear God. Now my imagination was filling in details.

  I forced myself to make the connection between what Mother had told me and what I alone knew. Grief had unbalanced me at a critical point in my childhood. It left a wound that had never healed. It made me do things I couldn’t remember, and remember things that had never happened.