Элизабет Чандлер - Don't Tell

“Where are you?” I cried out.

“Here.”

Ahead of me was a deep crack where the two banks joined, a long and jagged fissure.

“Here, Lauren,” she called out from the fissure. “Lauren, dearest, come to Mother.”

But I didn’t want to go where she was. I hesitated, and the crack closed, sealing her in forever.

I woke up sweating. My heart pounded and I gulped air as if I were emerging from deep water.

Laur-en.

I turned my head toward the hall, thinking I heard the same voice. Silence.

I climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the door. When I opened it, the door to my mother’s old room creaked.

Someone had left it ajar.

I crossed the hall and laid my palms against the door, listening a moment, then pushed it open. At the other end of the room a glass door to the porch suddenly closed. I started toward it and the door behind me slammed shut.

I screamed, then muffled it. A draft, I told myself, a draft running through my room and this one blew the doors shut. I wondered if it had been caused by someone making a hasty exit through the porch door.

I strode across the room, opened the doors to the porch, and leaned out. No one was there. Of course, if it had been Nora, she could have easily slipped into her room, the next door down.

Inside, I turned on the floor lamp and glanced around. It looked as I remembered it, with oak furniture similar to my own and a red-and-green quilt on the bed. Spiders had made themselves cozy here and dust coated the bureau top, but the dresser had streaks on its surface, as if someone had been using it recently. One of its drawers wasn’t closed all the way.

I walked over and opened it. Inside were several old newspapers, tabloids that were badly yellowed. I spread them out on the dresser top. I guessed what was in them; still, the pictures of my mother shocked me — those horrible flashbulb photos that could make the prettiest woman look like a witch.

Had she put them here? Not unless she wanted to torture herself, I thought. The only other thing in the drawer was an empty packet of marigold seeds.

I opened the next drawer. My mother’s favorite pair of earrings lay on top of a scarf she had loved. I touched them gently. At the town house in Washington, my mother’s personal things had been put in safe storage or thrown out soon after she died. I still had her jewelry box in my room at school, but it seemed like mine now more than hers. These items were different — barely touched by anyone else. I halfexpected to smell her perfume on them.

In the corner of the drawer were snippets of photographs.

For a moment I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at, then I saw they were pictures from that last summer, with my mother cut out. Not exactly subtle symbolism, I thought. In the third drawer there were more empty seed packets and a pile of plant catalogs that had been mailed to Nora.

Were all these things Nora’s? Some of the garden catalogs were dated the summer of the current year, which meant Nora had opened the bureau recently; it wasn’t as if she had forgotten these things were here. I found it unsettling to think that anyone would keep the rag-paper photos of my mother seven years after her death. Equally disturbing was the possibility that, after all this time, Nora could have mimicked perfectly the intonation of my mother’s voice. This was the behavior of someone obsessed with a person, obsessed with a dead woman.

I left everything as I’d found it, planning to show it to Aunt Jule, then turned out the light and left.

“Is everything all right?”

“Holly!” I hadn’t expected her to be in the hall.

Nora stood behind Holly, her dark eyes glittering in the soft light. I was too tired to confront her now and wasn’t sure I’d get anywhere if I did. The person to talk to was Aunt Jule.

“Everything’s fine,” I answered Holly.

“Are you sure?”

“I had a bad dream and got up to walk around — to shake it off — that’s all.”

Holly turned her head, glancing sideways at her sister, as if suspicious of something more, then said, “Nora, go to bed.”

Nora moved past her sister and peeked into the room from which I had just come.

“Nora,” Holly said quietly but firmly. Nora returned to her bedroom.

Holly guided me into mine. “You look upset,” she observed as she turned on the lamp. “Do you want to talk?”

“Thanks, but it’s awfully late,” I replied.

“I’m wide awake,” she assured me, sitting on my bed.

She must have wondered what was going on, especially if she heard my muffled scream.

“Nick told us Nora locked you in the boathouse,” Holly continued. “I don’t know what to say, Lauren, except I’m sorry it happened. Please don’t take it personally.”

“What if it was meant personally?”

“Just do your best to avoid her,” Holly advised. “And next time Nora starts making trouble for you, tell me. Someone has to keep tabs on her. Since Mom doesn’t, I’m the warden of this asylum.”

“Holly, what’s going to happen to Nora when you go away to college?”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” she said. “But Nora is a long-term problem. Right now I’m more concerned about you. It has to be hard coming back and seeing things you associate with your mother’s death.”

I glanced away. “I thought that by now it would be easier, but I was wrong.”

She rested her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Then tell me what I can do to help, okay? I’m not in your shoes, so I can’t guess.”

“Okay.”

She stood up. “Well, get some sleep. Tomorrow will be better.”

“Right. G’night.”

After Holly left, I locked my door to the hall and latched the screen doors to the porch. It felt strange, for I had never worried about my own safety at Aunt Jule’s.

Reaching for the switch on my bureau lamp, I noticed that my newfound necklace was twisted up. I touched it with one finger, expecting it to swing free from the mirror stand, bit it didn’t. Like my mother’s necklaces, it had been tied in impossible knots.

I didn’t fall back asleep until dawn. Waking late on Monday morning, I found myself alone in the house. Two notes had been left on the fridge for me, one from Aunt Jule reminding me that she’d be out till twelve, and the other from Holly. She invited me to stop by the yearbook office so she could introduce me to her friends. The underclassmen were on a half-day schedule, so she suggested I come at noon.

A list of needed grocery and household items was also on the refrigerator door. When I tucked it in my purse I discovered a second note from Holly that contained a log of bills due and overdue, adding up to a cool $4,000.1 knew that dropping a big check wouldn’t solve the problem — Aunt Jule would continue to be Aunt Jule. But it would relieve the pressure for the time being and give Holly an easier summer before college.

When I left the house Nora was in the knot garden snipping a boxwood hedge with hand clippers. The square garden, started in the 1800s, was once an intricate green design of shrubs, herbs, and colored gravel. When I was a child it had grown into one large mass of green. But Nora must have been cutting back the shrubs little by little each year. Now they looked like lumpy green caterpillars and were starting to trace out a pattern.

“Good morning,” I called to her.

She looked across the outer hedge but said nothing.

“I’m doing some errands,” I told her. “Do you need anything?”

“No.”

I watched her work for a moment. “Nora, why did you lock me in the boathouse yesterday?”

She raked the top of the boxwood with her fingers, brushing off the fresh clippings. “I don’t remember.”