The Time Between (7 page)

“She did,” he said. “She and Bernadett were wonderful musicians. They both sang and played piano. But Helena was the better pianist, although it’s hard to describe how.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Bernadett was technically brilliant, but Helena became the music she played.”

I looked away from him, ashamed to find my eyes stinging. I remembered my father saying the same thing about me, how it was possible to learn all the technical attributes of the music, but the way I felt when I played was something that couldn’t be taught.

“Maybe she’d like to play for me,” I managed to say.

He shook his head. “Her arthritis is too bad now. She hasn’t played for years. I’ve come to think of this as Bernadett’s piano, since she’s the only one who’s played it for as long as I can remember. She might not have been as gifted as Helena, but she loved to play.”

I glanced back at the silent, closed piano, wondering whether this one held as many good-byes as mine had.

“Come on,” he said, gently touching my elbow. “Let me show you the rest of the house.”

I followed, eager to leave the room and all its possibilities behind me.

The house was large, with four bedrooms, a dining room, a music room, and a nice-sized recently updated kitchen. A sunroom had been created along the northwest corner of the house to encompass the creek and river views and was accessed through the kitchen. As a child, I’d wondered about this room as I regarded it from the vantage point of my johnboat, what it must be like to be inside a place with glass walls.

Two well-worn armchairs sat facing the river, the table between them littered with books; more books—including one that was opened and facedown—were piled on ottomans with worn fabric that matched the armchairs. The room had an air of abandonment, but it seemed as if the occupants had just put down a book and left, expecting to return soon. A small carriage clock ticked on a low shelf, keeping time for no one. On the wall with the door, the only wall not made of windows, were tall bookshelves overflowing with books and knickknacks and a large collection of sweetgrass baskets. Of all the rooms I had seen so far, this was my favorite.

A shallow oval sweetgrass basket sat on top of one of the shelves, and as I looked around I saw that not only the shelves but most surfaces were full of the baskets, all in assorted shapes and sizes. I’d seen a few larger baskets in the rest of the house, but the sheer number of them in this one small room was almost overwhelming.

“Aunt Bernadett collected them,” Finn explained. “She couldn’t drive down Highway Seventeen without stopping at a basket stand or visit the Charleston Market without buying one. She loved the stories that were woven into each basket.” He picked up a small round basket with a lid and examined it for a moment. “They’re probably worth a small fortune now, but I doubt Aunt Helena will ever get rid of them.”

I touched a deep, round centerpiece basket on the floor filled with old catalogs. “My friend Lucy’s mother and grandmother had a stand on Highway Seventeen. I used to watch them create their baskets, and Lucy and I would try to memorize the patterns and guess which one they were making. And then I moved. . . .” My voice drifted away and I looked up to find him watching me intently. I walked past him, out of the room, eager to continue the tour.

All of the bedrooms were upstairs, but the downstairs parlor, with access from the dining room and the kitchen, had been converted into a room for Helena. We walked quietly past the closed door as Finn led me toward the stairs and the upper level.

“You probably won’t have much need to be up here, unless you decide to spend the night on occasion. I have a housekeeper, Mrs. Adler, who comes three times a week and cooks and cleans and stocks the refrigerator, so there are always fresh sheets on the beds. My daughter has a room since she comes here occasionally, too, although not lately.” I caught his frown as he turned back down the hall toward the staircase, past four doors, three of which were closed.

“The guest bedroom is at the end of the hall—it was Helena’s room until about five years ago, when the arthritis in her knee got too bad and we had to move her downstairs. And Gigi’s room is next to that.” He paused in front of the remaining closed door. “This was Bernadett’s. Helena doesn’t want anybody in there.”

I nodded, remembering how I’d wanted to keep the back hall with my father’s jackets and boots left alone like a shrine. But it had been the first area cleaned out when Mama had decided we needed to move.

I moved to stand before the one door that stood ajar. “What’s in here?”

Finn stopped directly behind me, his warm breath brushing the back of my hair. “A relic.”

I pushed the door open wider and stood where I was, taking it all in. The twin-sized trundle bed was covered in a navy blue quilt with various astronomical bodies stitched precisely in brightly colored thread. Star charts and framed photographs of spaceships covered the walls, while what seemed like hundreds of tiny hooks dotted the ceiling, each holding a small fishing line attached to a flying object: model rockets, war planes and passenger jets, planets from the solar system, and elaborately folded paper airplanes.

I turned to him, unable to hold back my grin. “This was your room.”

His face remained unreadable. “Yes. Every summer from the time I was about nine until I went to college. The aunts never saw a reason to change it. To them I stayed that small boy.”

I tried to reconcile the man I knew now with the boy who’d lived in this room, had made the airplane models and rockets, had folded each fold in each paper plane, but I couldn’t. That boy was long gone, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he saw holes, too, when he looked at his reflection in a mirror.

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” he added quietly, his expression showing that he was as surprised as I was with his admission.

I looked closely at him. “I saw you once. When you were about twelve, I think. I might have seen you before, but that was the first time I realized you were the nephew who stayed with the two old ladies in the house in the summer but wasn’t allowed to play with us.” I blushed, realizing what I’d just said. I kept speaking to hide my embarrassment. “You were playing with a paper airplane and you tossed it over the creek, but it turned and got stuck on the bank. I went looking for it the next day and found it.”

“I know,” he said softly. “I saw you. From our dock. That’s as close as I was allowed to get.”

It was my turn to frown. “Did you know who I was, then? When you hired me?”

He shook his head. “Not until I saw you that night at that awful bar and you told me you’d grown up in Edisto. That’s when I realized I knew who you were. I remembered seeing you with your mother and sister in church.”

You remember Eve,
I wanted to say. I’d wear the same skirt and blouse every Sunday—the only dressy clothes I’d owned—but my mother would dress Eve up like she was competing in a pageant. Nobody noticed me at all.

“What a small world,” I said, stepping back into the hallway, away from the ghost of the little boy who still lived in the room.

His answer was the sound of the door snapping shut behind us. Nurse Kester appeared at the top of the stairs at the end of the hallway. “Miss Helena is awake, Mr. Beaufain. I told her you were here with Miss Murray, so she’s pretending to still be asleep.”

Finn’s cool eyes met mine. “Are you ready for this?”

I wasn’t sure if I was or not, but I seemed to have run out of options. “Yes. I’m ready.”

I followed him and Nurse Kester down the stairs and toward the back of the house, sensing the waiting presence of the ghost boy who’d once wanted to be an astronaut and that of the silent piano waiting patiently for the music to start again.

Helena

I
heard the girl’s voice from far away, probably because it sounded like my Bernadett’s—soft like the way a hurricane starts with the gentlest breeze. I turned my head, half-prepared to rise and greet her before I remembered. My sister was gone, vanished like morning frost that fades as you watch. I closed my eyes and turned my head toward the wall, wanting to imagine, just for a few more moments, that I was still in my bedroom in our little house on Uri Utca in the Buda hills, which overlooked the Danube, my beautiful Bernadett in the twin bed beside mine.

“I can come back another time,” the girl said. But I heard Finn’s footsteps approaching, just as firm and purposeful as they had been since he was a five-year-old boy, and I knew he was not going to leave until he had done what he had come here to do.

I felt them in the doorway, watching me, and I practiced slow, even breaths while remembering the grocer across the street—remembering him, not his name—shouting out in my native tongue to the Laszlo boys, who made it a game to steal Linzer cookies from the bin at the front of his store on their way home from school. I could almost smell the sweet honey scent of
anyukám
’s baking
mézeskalács
in the bakery on the first floor of our house, making me crave food for the first time in a very long while. I felt that if I kept my eyes closed a little longer, I would see Bernadett rise from her bed to begin her morning prayers. I was desperate to speak to her; did she not know that?
Please hurry and wake up, Bernadett. Please.

“Aunt Helena?”

Finn’s voice rushed at me, erasing my old bedroom as quickly as a crashing wave takes over a sand castle. Slowly, I turned my head and looked up into my great-nephew’s face, the face with Bernadett’s eyes, framed by the same wide brow. I wondered sometimes if this was why I had always loved him so, if I somehow saw him as a second chance.

“Aunt Helena?” he said again, taking my hand. I had not realized how cold I was until I felt the warmth of his skin against mine.

“I am not dead, if that is what you are wondering.” My “g” still came out like a “k,” something I had not been able to stop even after all these years.

His eyes smiled but without the rest of his face, something my sister had perfected, too. It was disconcerting at first, never knowing what they were really thinking.

“I’ve brought Eleanor to meet you. I told you about her, remember?”

I squinted as the slight figure beside him moved forward, and I felt Nurse Kester place my glasses on my face before tucking another pillow beneath my head so I could partially sit up.

I frowned at the skinny girl with the light brown hair and wide blue eyes, wondering what Finn had been thinking to bring her here. I imagined she seemed timid to others, her shoulders curved forward as if bracing for a blow. But she moved forward and did not hover behind Finn, and her eyes met mine instead of staring at a place behind my head. She reminded me of the Russian stacking dolls my mother had given me for Christmas one year, a smaller doll nested inside each one, hidden from sight until you opened the larger one.

I frowned. “Yes, you did. And I told you not to bother. I do not need anybody else in this house making noise. I have Mrs. Adler and my nurses, and the way they poke and prod at me with all of those needles, I am surprised I do not look like Swiss cheese. If I have any more ‘help’ like that, I will be dead in a month.”

Finn winced almost imperceptibly, and I knew we were both remembering that day when he had found me on the floor by Bernadett’s bed, courting death like an old lover. “I am fine,” I added more gently.

“But I’m not,” he said. “I can’t be with you all the time, and I think you might get lonely here by yourself with just nursing care. Eleanor can read to you, or talk, or discuss books or movies. And when you’re feeling up to it, she can take you to church or out to see friends.”

I stilled, wondering how he could think that I could return to my old life, as if all that had happened had been a made-up story like the old movies Bernadett and I would sometimes watch. And then I remembered.
He doesn’t know.
My secret was mine alone now, like a piece of ripe fruit perfect on the outside, its rotten core visible only after one had bitten into it.

I turned my face away, afraid that he could read my thoughts.

“She plays the piano, Aunt Helena. As well as Aunt Bernadett, I think. When you’re feeling better, you can ask her to play for you.”

The girl tensed, and I turned to study her again, her coltish body seeming to cleave to the shadows. She had one of those delicate, lovely faces that one sometimes overlooked in the presence of blatant beauty, a tulip in a garden of red roses. And it was almost painfully clear that she had no idea of her own beauty.

“She does not look like a musician,” I said, watching the girl closely.

Her chin rose slowly, her fine eyes taking their measure of me. “Neither do you.”

Finn looked at her in surprise, while I forced my mouth to remain in a frown. “Who is your favorite composer?”

Keeping her eyes on mine, she said, “We can talk about that once you’ve eaten something. I believe Nurse Kester said she’d left your lunch in the fridge. Would you like me to get it?”

I shook my head. “No, let Finn do it. You may stay.”

Finn glanced at the girl and she nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

We watched him leave, and then I closed my eyes. “I do not want you here. It would be better if you told Finn that you do not want this job anymore. Tell him I am too much trouble, too feisty for you. That I am not worth your time.”

She was so quiet, I wondered if she had left. But then she spoke. “I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

I do not know what made me angrier—her refusal or her apology. How could she be sorry? I was the one who was sorry—sorry that I had not been allowed to die with Bernadett and silence the sorrowful songs that haunted me still. My voice trembled. “Have you ever known grieving that ends only when your own heart stops beating?”

I wanted to look away, my own pain mirrored in her darkening eyes. “Yes,” she said, so quietly that I did not hear her. But I felt the word as if I had been struck, the waves of pain slow and undulating.
Ah.
I closed my eyes in understanding, knowing now why Finn had brought her. I just had no idea how to tell him that he was wrong, that a broken heart stayed broken even in the company of another.

“I’ll be back on Saturday,” she said, her chin lifting slightly before she turned and headed toward the door. She paused on the threshold, then spoke without turning around. “My favorite composer was Chopin, but his music reminds me too much of my father.” She stepped aside to allow Finn and Nurse Kester to enter with a food tray. Facing Finn, she said, “I’ll meet you in the foyer when you’re ready to leave.”

We watched her go, listening to her unhurried tread on the wood floors of the hallway, and I imagined Bernadett’s ghost nearby, applauding.

Eleanor

As a child growing up on Edisto, I spent as much time with Lucy’s family as with my own, loving how they kept a spot open for me at their Sunday supper table, and grasped my hands during the blessing as if my pale skin wasn’t any different from their own.

It was to their house I’d run after my father’s boat was found, where I’d gone to be gathered tightly into the large bosom of Dah Georgie, Lucy’s grandmother. I had stayed with them until my mother came to get me, saying she needed help planning the funeral. I had never gone back to their small house near Store Creek, wanting my memories of it to fade so it wouldn’t hurt so much.

But I could still hear their voices. The Gullah language, a mixture of West African dialects and English, had always seemed like music, a symphony of words, the lilting cadences and rounded vowels the notes. Sometimes if I pressed her really hard, Lucy would speak in Gullah, but only if we were alone where nobody else could hear. I once asked her why she was so reluctant, and she told me it was because Gullah is the language you cry in.

I remembered that as Finn and I drove away from Luna Point, with its dark rooms and the lonely old woman. Her accent wasn’t as strong as it had once been, as if the ocean’s waves had weathered the harsh consonants like a battered shore. But I wondered if she thought in Hungarian, and if it was the language she still cried in.

“So, what do you think?” Finn asked, his eyes nearly translucent in the glare from the sun.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” I kept my eyes focused on the road ahead, feeling his steady gray gaze on me.

“I still want to hire you, if that’s what you’re asking. I just want to make sure you’re still interested. I know Aunt Helena didn’t make the best first impression.”

I nodded, making the turn onto Highway 174, passing the landmarks of my childhood, prominent on the landscape like bookmarks in my memory. “I have a sister, too. And I understand her pain.” I paused, remembering something Helena had said. “But I think there’s something more than grieving for her sister. Like she doesn’t want to be here anymore. Do you know what I mean?”

Without looking at me, he said, “Yes.”

I waited for him to say more, but we rode in silence, the air heavy with the scent of salt water and marsh. “Show me your house,” he said suddenly. “Where you used to live as a girl.”

I braked in surprise, throwing us both forward. Pressing my foot on the accelerator again, I asked, “Why?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Never mind.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw, as if suddenly uncertain, and I was once again struck by how different he was here than at the office. There, dressed in dark suits and a serious demeanor, he was confident and unapproachable. Except now I’d seen his eyes when he spoke of his daughter and had seen his boyhood room with the model rockets and paper airplanes. I was beginning to learn that there was much more to Finn Beaufain than the person he usually allowed most people to see.

“I’ll show you. It’s not there anymore—it got hit by lightning in the late nineties and burned to the ground. It was on Russell Creek, near the Brick House ruins. We rented the house from the family that still owns the ruins. I used to think it was the most wonderful place in the world and I’d never see anything more beautiful.” I was silent for a moment, thinking about the years following my father’s death, and of the house in North Charleston that was filled with silent accusations and stale penance and where music never played. “I still do,” I added, surprised I’d spoken aloud.

We drove in silence down Highway 174 to Brick House Road. Just before the gates with the
NO TRESPASSING
sign, I turned left on a dirt road. We traveled a short distance until I saw Russell Creek and stopped the car, letting the engine idle. “Have you ever been here before?” I asked, nodding toward the distant skeleton of the old mansion, its missing roof and windows like the mouths of baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed.

“A few times,” he said, and then was silent for a while, so I thought he was done speaking on the subject. He unbuckled his seat belt, and then, staring straight ahead, he said, “I brought my ex-wife to Edisto right after we were engaged, to meet my aunts. I hadn’t been back since I’d finished high school, and I’d never been allowed to explore the island, so I thought it would be fun to discover it with Harper. It’s funny, really; I’d only ever known such a small corner of Edisto, but I’d loved it. It’s what I always thought of as home when I was away at school.” He paused and looked at me. “I wanted her to love it, too.”

“And did she?”

His mouth twisted. “No.” He shrugged. “She’s from Boston, so I probably shouldn’t have brought her in the summer. She couldn’t stand the heat or the bugs or the smell of the marsh. Or how casual and shabby everything is allowed to get here. We were supposed to stay a week and we ended up leaving after two nights.”

I felt personally affronted at her dismissal of my beloved island, knowing where the flaw lay. A distant memory of my father and me brushed through me, and I turned to Finn. “Did you take her to see the sunset? When my father was home and the weather fine, we would watch it together. I don’t think there’s anything else on earth more beautiful than an Edisto sunset.”

“I did. Aunt Bernadett gave us one of her sweetgrass baskets with a bottle of wine and two glasses and sent us out to go watch. But the mosquitoes wouldn’t leave Harper alone and we were back inside before the sun had even begun its descent.”

The image of his ex-wife being bullied by mosquitoes made me want to laugh, and I had to bite my lip and look away.

“Are you laughing?”

I shook my head, although by now I couldn’t hold it in, and an unladylike snort came out of my mouth. I looked up at him, mortified. But he was smiling and I felt myself relaxing again.

“It was a good bottle of wine, even though I ended up drinking it by myself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me, too.” He opened his car door and stood while I turned off the ignition.

The sun was directly overhead, the heat pricking my skin. But a breeze stirred the tall grasses like the breath from a ghost, and I felt light-headed for a moment, remembering my father in this place. With the house gone, it was almost as if he’d never existed at all.

We walked toward the creek, the ruins of the old house behind us. The chorus of insects rose and whirred, the staccato sound of the cicadas keeping tempo for the rest of the band. For a long time after moving from the island, I’d had a hard time going to sleep with the silence, missing the night music of the marsh.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said, turning his face into the breeze. “I wonder sometimes how different things would be now if I’d grown up here instead of in Charleston.” His hair at his temples and at the back of his neck had darkened with sweat, and again I had to work hard to reconcile this man with the cool and crisp Mr. Beaufain. It was as if two souls lived within his skin, separate but not. But maybe everybody was like that, all of us living the lives we had to while dreaming of the lives we wanted.