Chapter Seven

Helene Bright knew, as she went toward the back of her bedroom closet, this little exploration was not a good thing. Almost accusing, the cardboard moving box had always sat at the back of the closet, next to orderly rows of shoes, beneath rows of dresses and blouses. The box contained nothing more than letters, old photographs, report cards, and other documentation of life, the papers and other detritus used to prove we exist. They meant nothing, really, when life passed. Perhaps they meant nothing when we lived.

But they meant something to her, and as she crouched before the box, gingerly holding out her hand in an offer of peace, as if warily approaching a wild animal, she questioned whether doing this would do anything more than louse up what was already a lousy day. Opening the box, she pictured herself a matronly Pandora, clothed in the vestments of Chicago’s North Shore. But unlike Pandora, she knew what the box contained.

Her memories. All the papers, photographs, and records conjured up mental images. Images she had longed to submerge, sink beneath the acquisition of clothing, antique furniture, gourmet foods, bottles of wine that carried price tags in the hundreds and sometimes even thousands, cars, more. When acquiring things did not blot out the memories, she always had her trusty Dunhill cigarettes and a Bloody Mary at the ready, just as she did now.

Kneeling against the hardwood floor, she set the half-drunk Bloody Mary to her right and put her cigarette between her lips. Pulling the box out from under the row of dresses sent up a small cloud of dust.

She stared at it uncertainly, almost as if she didn’t know what it contained. Her heart pounded. She feared the box’s contents, as though opening it could release scabrous, long-nailed fingers that would grab her face, rend her flesh, and cut off her air.

Why did she have to look in the box anyway? It had been years since she had leafed through its contents, years since she had even thought about her nephew, Timothy. A conscious act of will had ensured she didn’t think about him and the horrible way he had died. She had spent most of her energy these last few years blocking out the memories, trying to sever any ties, emotional or otherwise, she had with him. It hadn’t been easy. When she had been able to keep him out of her conscious, everyday thought, he would creep into her slumber late at night, small hands poised above her face, ready to strangle or soothe. She never stayed asleep long enough to find out which. On those nights she would awaken, bathed in sweat and panting, sometimes even beating her frustration into her pillow. “I’ve failed! I’ve failed!” she would cry into the empty room, knowing the phrase went beyond merely failing to keep him out of her mind.

She slid her fingers under the top of the box and lifted the lid. Failed? she thought. Had she failed? Would a jury of her peers convict her? She had tried to do her best by him. Was it her fault he turned out to be a—she could barely even think the word, let alone say it aloud—homosexual?

Some would say it was her fault. She lifted out the photograph from its place on top of everything else. Seeing his face again brushed away the mental cobwebs that had formed around his image, bringing into sharp focus his beautiful, waifish features. She sucked in some breath as too many memories came rushing back. A ravaged apartment, walls splattered with blood. Mysteries never to be answered, mysteries certainly never to be probed by her mind, which was too tired and, she could admit, too relieved that everything was tied up prettily in the end, in spite of the tragedy. “Too pretty to be a boy,” her friends had always told her, sometimes in front of Timothy himself, as if this were supposed to be some kind of compliment.

There we are, she thought, sliding the side of her hand across the satin grain of the photograph to free it from its screen of dust. “My, how I loved you,” she whispered to the blond image below, the bright blue eyes, like frozen sky, staring back at her. She held the picture away from her, remembering.

His eighteenth birthday. She had worked for weeks, making it special. Dinner at Charlie Trotter’s, followed by a play afterward at the Palace. What had they seen? It didn’t matter. Afterward, she had instructed the driver to take them down to Lake Michigan. They walked along the lakefront, hand in hand, looking more like lovers in the moonlight than aunt and nephew.

And I liked giving that impression.

That night the air had been warm, the moon a sliver of pewter hovering over the waves, sending out a swath of brilliant white across the gently rolling water.

She took a big swallow of Stoli and tomato juice. Were her hands trembling?

She remembered standing by the dark water and thinking if only… If only this moment could last, if only age didn’t separate us, if only familial ties, forged in blood, could be undone…

The photograph had been taken earlier, before they had gone out, Timothy so handsome in his navy blue Brooks Brothers suit, she in her glittering Bob Mackie dress, black hair pulled back to show off the white sheen of her skin and large greenish-brown eyes, the eyes of a cat.

She didn’t think she was flattering herself to say their age difference wasn’t all that apparent. Even though she had been more than twice his age at the time, she still looked like a girl, still blushing, pert nose turned up with surgical precision.

It was after he had gone, just two years later, that she had begun to age.

She slid the photograph back into the box.

Why had that bastard called, looking for Timothy?

Why couldn’t the past lie dead, like her nephew?

She slammed the cover back on the box, stood, and kicked it back into the shadows, where it belonged.

Perhaps tomorrow she would come up here and take everything out and burn it. After all, the memories it contained had nothing to do with her life now, nothing at all. She was as far removed from that box as she was from the Sahara. She didn’t know why she hadn’t done it years ago.

Besides, what the box contained could, in the event something unforeseen should happen to her, start a whole string of probing questions. Questions neither she nor anyone near her would ever be prepared to answer.

But right now, it was time for another Bloody Mary.