Marcia Talley - Unbreathed Memories

Sergeant Williams’s face gave nothing away, so what she said next took me completely by surprise. “You’re not going to like this, but we’ll need to take your sister down to the station for questioning.”

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. “Oh, God! Please don’t tell her you learned anything from me! She’ll never forgive me.” I felt like Judas Iscariot.

“I realize your sister’s not well. We’ll make it as easy on her as possible. We’ll need to take her fingerprints anyway, for purposes of elimination.”

“But Georgina’s fingerprints will be all over the place! She visits Dr. Sturges two times a week.”

“Then they won’t turn up where they shouldn’t,” she said reasonably. “Now, would you call your brother-in-law for me, please, Mrs…?”

I filled in the blank. “Ives. Hannah Ives.” When she asked, I gave her my address and telephone number. I felt like a worm. A low-down, sludge-crawling, big-mouthed, mud-eating worm.

I found Scott in the bedroom holding a glass of water for Georgina, who sat on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, knocking back pills. In another thirty minutes she’d be a zombie. Good luck getting anything out of her then, Sergeant Williams! I told Scott the police needed to speak to him again. I didn’t say about what. Then I skulked away to hide out in the TV room with the children.

“Hi, Aunt Hannah.” Sean looked up as I entered, but Dylan’s eyes remained glued to the TV set where an armada of cartoon tanks was flattening an invading army of robot mice. The sound track was deafening.

“What’cha watching, kids?” I shouted.

“Some stupid boy show.” Julie had laid Abby aside and was using blunt-nosed scissors to cut pictures out of an old National Geographic magazine. At least I hoped it was an old one.

“Can I help you, Julie?”

“Grown-ups don’t like to cut out.”

“This grown-up does.”

She grinned and handed me the scissors. I was in the middle of trimming neatly around the whiskers of a satin-eyed baby harp seal when my brother-in-law’s voice exploded behind me.

“You are not going to take my wife with you!”

The children, lost in their own worlds, appeared oblivious.

“I’ll be right back, kids.” I backed out of the den, pulling the folding doors shut behind me.

Georgina and Scott stood in the hallway just outside the kitchen. Still in her nightgown, Georgina shrank against the wall while Scott stood protectively between his nearly comatose wife and Sergeant Williams.

“I’m afraid we are, sir. You may come with her, if you want.”

“If I want? Of course I want! And I’m going to call my lawyer, too.”

“That is your prerogative.”

Scott faced Georgina, took her by the shoulders, and spoke to her softly. I didn’t hear what he said. My sister nodded mutely. With Scott’s arm around her, they shuffled into the bedroom, emerging five minutes later with Georgina dressed in a loose-fitting pair of tan slacks, a red cable-knit sweater, and clean, white tennis shoes. His hand rested lightly on her back as he guided her down the hall.

Suddenly Scott seemed to notice me. At first he looked puzzled and I panicked, thinking it might have occured to him who was responsible for Sergeant Williams changing her mind about questioning Georgina at the police station. But the puzzlement quickly evaporated, to be replaced with wide-eyed distress.

“The children!” Scott’s face was flushed; he wiped his forehead with his hand. Tears pooled in his eyes. “What about the children?”

I rushed to his side. “Scott! Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the kids.” I hugged him hard and he clung to me, breathing heavily and raggedly into my hair. He kissed my forehead. Then he kissed Georgina and watched, grief-stricken, as she was escorted down the front walk to the officers’ car. He followed in his burgundy SUV, reversing out of the drive in a spray of gravel and squealing tires.

I watched from the front porch, the door standing half open behind me, until both vehicles disappeared over the hill at Church Lane. When I turned, Dylan and Sean stood framed in the doorway. “They’re taking Mommy to jail!” Dylan wailed. His brother’s lower lip trembled and he, too, burst into tears.

“That’s nothing,” Julie proclaimed, elbowing her way between the boys. She laid her cheek against the sparse fur of her toy rabbit. “Abby’s been to jail hundreds of times.”

“Julie! Where’s your hairbrush?” I was helpingthe children pack a few of their belongings and had given them each a plastic grocery bag from Giant to put them in.

“I want my suitcase,” declared Dylan.

“Me, too. The red one.” Sean slouched in the doorway of the bedroom he shared with his brother, pouting.

“I have no idea where your suitcases are, kids. Besides, we’re just going to be gone for a little while. Maybe only one night.”

Sean folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t want to go.”

“Me, neither,” Dylan agreed.

“You are silly boys,” announced Julie. “Granddaddy has a pool table.” That seemed to make all the difference. Julie, I decided, had a future in politics.

I left the boys arguing over which of their Star Wars action figures to pack in their bags while I wandered into my sister’s bedroom. I told myself I was searching for a hairbrush for Julie, but to be honest, I was snooping. As I expected, the room was a mess. The clothes Georgina had worn the day before were heaped in a corner next to the dirty clothes hamper, as if someone with very poor aim had tossed them there. A dresser drawer stood open; another drawer had been hastily closed over some item of clothing, probably the corner of a T-shirt. Compulsively, I picked up the scattered clothing and laid it on the bed, then looked around the room for the missing hairbrush. I was about to give up when something caught my attention, propped up on my sister’s side of the bed between the box springs and the leg of her bedside table-a framed photograph of Georgina at the age of three. I recognized the pose. It was from a snapshot of us girls Dad took for our Christmas postcard the last year we lived in Sicily. But Georgina had cropped Ruth and me out of the picture altogether and blown herself up to a fuzzy eight-by-ten. I tried not to feel annoyed.

I studied the picture and was struck by how much Julie now resembled her mother at that age. I stroked the smooth mahogany of the frame with my fingers. The kids had certainly been handling the picture, poor little tykes. I hadn’t seen picture glass so smudgy with fingerprints since my photograph of Paul McCartney, the love of my life in junior high school.

I placed Georgina’s picture between a lamp and an alarm clock on her bedside table, then made a valiant stab at tidying up the rest of the room, but the clutter of soaps, cleansers, cosmetics, and vials of prescription drugs from three or four different doctors defeated me and I moved on to the less personal and more familiar territory of the family room and kitchen. While the kids took their sweet time packing, I folded up the hide-abed, reduced the scattered magazines to a single pile on the coffee table, moved the children’s breakfast dishes from the sink to the dishwasher, and gave the kitchen table and countertops a badly needed swipe with a damp rag. Around eleven, I got the house locked, the kids loaded into the car, and my Le Baron headed east around I-695 toward Annapolis. On car trips when we were small, my sisters and I used to dream up irreverent lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We Go,” until Daddy, laughing, would threaten to pull over and leave us by the side of the road. Kids haven’t changed all that much. While I drove, Sean and Dylan lounged on one side of the backseat and butchered “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” while Julie, belted in behind me with Abby, pretended to ignore her brothers and wondered aloud why we couldn’t put the top on my convertible down.