Marcia Talley: Unbreathed Memories

“Your therapist? My God! Are you sure?”

Georgina nodded her head, her lips a thin, tight line. “Look.”

Georgina pointed. I stood and passed through a pair of French doors into a simply but elegantly furnished office, dominated by a large walnut desk. Someone, probably a decorator, had arranged small Oriental rugs casually about on the oatmeal-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, A perfectly normal-looking black leather sofa stood against the left wall, a matching overstuffed armchair angled next to it. I strolled around the desk. A green blotter. A pen. An appointment book. A framed photograph of a handsome man in his mid-sixties. Dr. Sturges’s husband? Her father? Who could say. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

“What are you talking about, Georgina?” I yelled. “There’s nobody here!” I was afraid my sister had really lost her marbles.

“The balcony.”

Beyond the desk, a set of sliding glass doors led out to the balcony that I had admired last summer. Through the glass I could see an iron bench, a small glass-topped table, and, next to it, a large urn containing an evergreen of some sort. Traces of snow remained piled here and there in the corners where the rays of the winter sun couldn’t reach. Again, nothing appeared out of order. Yet something must be wrong to have frightened Georgina and upset her so badly. I slid open the door and stepped out onto the deck.

A cold wind blew in off the lake, roaring across my ears and whipping my scarf back over my shoulder. I stood shivering at the end of the balcony, surrounded by tall trees. Through their bare, dancing branches I could see the waters of the lake just below. Off to the left, a lone bicyclist stood on his pedals, then shifted to a lower gear as he huffed and puffed his way up the bike trail. The trail curved toward me, then away again toward the lake, over a small bridge.

Ivy snaked along a brick wall that separated the Sturges property from the park. Inside its boundaries lay piles of dried leaves, patches of snow, a small cedar tree, rocks, a blue shoe. Another blue shoe, attached to the leg of a woman wearing a blue suit. A woman whose body now lay broken over the face of a boulder, one leg bent cruelly under the other, her left arm flung out over her head, her eyes blank and wide. From the size of the dark stain that had spread over the surface of the boulder, and from the unnatural angle of the woman’s head in relation to her shoulders, I knew she was very, very dead.

I grasped the railing and swallowed hard, fighting the urge to throw up. Without touching the doors, I hurried back to Georgina. “What happened? Did you see her fall?”

“She was like that when I got here.” Georgina gasped, one hand to her mouth. “I came for my appointment like always and I looked all around… Oh, God.” She sniffed noisily and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Diane wasn’t in her office, and then I felt a draft and noticed that the doors were open. Oh, God! Oh, God!” She rocked faster and faster. “I wish I’d never gone out there!”

I took Georgina by the arms and shook her. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I was too scared. I called you.”

“We have to call the police!”

“But my fingerprints are all over the place! Oh, Hannah, just get me out of here! I’m her last patient on Fridays. Nobody needs to know I was here. We can call the police from the pay phone down by the pizza place.”

She started to cry again, great racking sobs just like when we were kids and I was stuck baby-sitting her. I was a sucker for it then and even worse at resisting it now. “Georgina, we have to call nine-one-one. If there’s even the slightest chance she could be alive…” I stepped back in the direction of the office. I hadn’t seen a phone on the desk, but there had to be one in there somewhere.

“No!” Georgina’s scream caught me off guard. When I turned around a split second later, she had bolted down the stairs, grabbed her coat and scarf, and disappeared.

I raced after her-out the door, up the path, down the driveway, and into the street, where I caught up with her at my car, pounding on the locked door with her fist. “Stop it, Georgina!” As serious as the situation was, the first thought that came to mind was that she would ruin my paint. I unlocked the driver’s-side door and popped the locks. “Get in.”

Georgina silently obeyed, settling into the passenger seat, hugging her bunched-up coat like a security blanket. I knew I should go back to the house and call the police, but I was afraid to leave my sister alone. No telling what she’d do in her present condition. I considered the forest, deep and thick, surrounding us on three sides and, only yards away, the lake, dark and cold, its shoreline rimmed with ice. Against my better judgment I gave her a disapproving, big-sister glare and said, “OK, we’ll call from the pizza place. I don’t suppose it matters where we call the police from, as long as we call them.”

Five minutes later, I was standing in a phone booth at the Lakefalls Pizzeria dialing nine-one-one. “There’s been an accident. A bad fall,” I told the operator. “Two twenty-one Coldbrook.” When she asked for my name, I panicked and hung up. Why did I do that? I leaned against the wall and counted slowly to ten. In the light from the restaurant, I could see Georgina, where she sat huddled in the front seat of my car. I went inside the pizzeria and bought her a Coke.

“Here, drink this.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“You should drink something. Here.” I grabbed her left arm and pulled it toward me. Her hand came out of her pocket, clutching several sheets of paper. “What the hell’s that?”

Georgina thrust the paper back into the pocket of her sweater, like a child. “Nothing.”

“Yes it is. Let me see.” I set the Coke down on the floor of the car and held out my hand, palm up.

“No.”

“Georgina!”

Slowly Georgina pulled the crumpled wad from her pocket and held it out to me, eyes downcast. “It’s pages from her appointment book. I took it because my name’s in it.”

“For the love of God, Georgina! You’re her patient! Your name’s supposed to be in there!” I snatched the pages from her fingers. “First you make me guilty of leaving the scene of an accident-maybe even a crime!-and now you’re tampering with the evidence!” Sirens began wailing, approaching in our direction down Falls Road. I stuffed the pages from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book into the depths of my bag. “And it’s too late to put them back now, the police are already on their way.” I threw my head back against my headrest and closed my eyes. “Oh, God, what a mess! I’ll deliver these to the police myself, but in the meantime, I’m taking you home. You’re going to have a nice, hot bath and tell Scott all about it. You’re going to pull yourself together. Then, first thing in the morning, you’re going to talk to the police.”

But it didn’t quite work out that way. I should have known better after watching Homicide all those years on NBC. The Baltimore police would turn up on Georgina’s doorstep the following morning, even before Sean and Dylan made it out of bed to turn on the television.

Nothing that happened after I brought Georginahome from Dr. Sturges’s prepared me for an early-morning visit from Baltimore’s Finest, least of all the wine. It would help me to relax, I reasoned; but after too many glasses to count, I decided I’d just sleep forever, even on the lumpy mattress that spat cookie crumbs all over me when I wrestled the ancient hide-a-bed open in Georgina’s TV room. Whatever was in Scott’s Box-o’-Chablis knocked me out cold from eleven-thirty until five, at which time my eyes flew open and my throbbing head told me it wished I’d had the brains to take some Alka-Seltzer before putting it to bed. As I lay flat on my back with the pale light of a gray dawn creeping around the corners of the window shade, I relived the previous evening.