A woman I didn’t recognize responded to my knocks at the Cooper door. She was tall and heavy-set with mousy brown hair cut close to her head. She was dressed in street clothes but had a lab coat overtop. She introduced herself to me as Ella, Ginny’s nurse. So, Harrison had put a guard on her to quell her violent urges. Ginny was sitting on the living room sofa, looking out the window when I arrived. She glanced up at me when I walked in, but said nothing. Her eyes went back to the window. “Ginny, do you remember me?” Ginny eyed me up and down again taking in my white sweater and blue jeans. I must not have made much of an impression because, again, she said nothing. Her eyes were blank. I sat down and leaned towards her.
“Did you bring me a present?” she motioned to the large envelope I had in my lap.
“Why don’t we go to your room and I’ll show you.” I said. The nurse was hovering over us and followed as Ginny led me up the stairs to her bedroom. The older woman went in and took a seat in a chaise by the window.
“We need some privacy,” I said to Ella.
“I’m not supposed to leave her side.”
I smiled. “I think we’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you.”
For a minute I thought she was going to refuse to leave us, but she turned and went back down the stairs. Dr. Cooper had hired a nurse-body guard, but I got the feeling that Ella wasn’t going to be too much of a problem. She didn’t give me the impression that she was overly invested in keeping people away from Ginny. She just wanted a paycheck.
I closed the door and sat on the edge of her bed. “Ginny, I need you to help me with something, if you could.” She didn’t respond but her eyebrows went up questioningly. “I have some personal things of Nick’s. I thought you might want to look at them.”
“Nick went away when he was sixteen. “ She was looking out the window. She turned back to me suddenly. Her eyes were sad. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I sucked in my breath. I hadn’t expected this. I wasn’t going to lie. “Yes, he was in a car accident.” I saw tears make their way down the grooves of her wrinkled face and I took her hand.
“You were his wife?” she asked.
I nodded. My eyes were filling up and I brushed them from my face with my fingertips.
“Such a pretty girl.” She reached out and touched my face. “I always pictured the girl Nick would end up with.” She smiled. “Such red hair. No children?”
“No children.”
Ginny’s tears continued. “Cora has no one.” It was almost a whisper. She wasn’t even looking at me when she said it; she was looking through the window towards Cora’s house. “I thought Nick would have children, that it would somehow all be okay, but now she’s got no one.” I was sitting right next to her but she wasn’t talking to me. Her voice had trailed to a whisper. She was talking to herself.
“I want to show you some things that Nick kept all these years.” I pulled out the photograph of her.
She took it from me; her eyes were clearer, more focused. “He kept this of me?”
I nodded. “He kept some other things too. Do you wanna see?” I opened the manila envelope and gave her the green coin. Her face turned ashen white. “What? Ginny, this was found in with Nick’s things. What’s wrong?”
She seemed to be breathing again and reached out her hand for the token. “I just haven’t seen this in years.” She turned it over in her hand. “Bradford gave this to Nick. Got it from some vending machine in the old Reading Terminal train station. They closed it down long ago when they built the new station. It’s just a trinket but to Nick it was something special from his father. Nick didn’t spend much time with Bradford, but I think he thought he was somehow close to him when he carried this with him.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand as she spoke.
“And Nick kept a copy of that picture in your book. Look.” I put the black and white photograph in her hand. “Who are these kids?”
Ginny squinted down at the picture. “Nick and some friends.”
She started to hand it back to me. “No, who is this?” I pointed to the boy in the back row. “And this?” My finger ran across the face of the toddler. Ginny said nothing. She was engrossed by the black and white figures. Her mouth had turned downwards into a sad frown. “When Nick was dying, before they took him into the emergency room, he talked about this house.” I knew she was listening though her head was still down, her fingers clasping the edge of the picture. “He told me that I had to come here. To find James. Is one of these boys James?”
She sucked in her breath and lifted her head. Her eyes were red and teary. “He talked about James? What did he say?”
“His very last words were, find James. Who was he? And how can I do that?”
Ginny’s chest rose and fell quickly. The tears flowed freely. Her hands trembled. She leaned in towards me. “I don’t think you can. No one talks about this. No one even knows…Nick spent the last few minutes of his life still trying to punish his mother.”
She dropped the photograph and hunched down in her chair. Her entire body was sobbing.
“Stop that!” Ella entered the room and pushed me aside attaching a blood pressure cuff to Ginny’s upper arm. “Leave now.”
I stared at the old woman for a second before getting up. This woman had answers but getting her clear, stable and talking wasn’t going to be easy.
“Go.” Ella’s voice rose in anger.
I left without another word. Once outside I walked along the fence that bordered Cora’s property and looked through the iron bars at the woods on the other side, squinting to catch site of the bench where I’d found my journal page the other day. The trees were so thick I could only see a few feet in. My gaze returned briefly to the Cooper house. Ginny’s face was in the upstairs window; she stared down at me. I waved. She didn’t wave back.
After squeezing through the make-shift gate onto the Monroe property, I stood undecided on the path I looked at my watch. It was still early and Dylan hadn’t called me yet. I wanted to find that bench but getting there meant either going all the way to the clearing and around or forging my way through the brush and taking my chances.
Only a hundred yards off the beaten path I realized I’d made a mistake. The ground was uneven and I had to watch my footing, crawling in spots that were impassable. When I finally found the bench I had been using the other day, my hair and clothes were dotted with small burrs. I picked a few off and tossed them aside then plopped down onto the cushioned seat. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find here. The rest of my journal. Some tattered papers that chronicled the past years of my life. My history. Ever since I’d found that one crinkled page, I imagined the rest of it was just blowing about amongst these trees. I wanted it back.
After twenty dirty minutes of searching, the only thing I’d found was more frustration and anger welling up inside myself. Just then my cell phone rang.
* * *
“Can I come in?” I asked.
He backed up to let me pass but said nothing. I went in to the bathroom and looked at myself. Hundreds of tiny little burrs, each no bigger than the size of a pea, dotted my hair. My once clean white sweater was now smeared with brown patches. Dylan watched from the doorway of the bathroom. His eyes were big and questioning. The burrs were tangled and knotted deep in my hair; it hurt when I pulled them.
“Are you going to help me or just laugh at me?” I was annoyed.
He shook his head. “You know it’s always an experience when you come here. Gravel from your hand. Now this. What the hell were you doing?”
“I was in the woods.”
“On your hands and knees?”
“In some places, I guess I was. Ouch.”
“And what were you doing? No, don’t answer that.”
In the end, Dylan patiently pulled the burs from my hair, one by one. I couldn’t tell if he was mad or not. His expression was one of extreme concentration. He stood back and surveyed his work.
“You may be finding them for weeks, but I did the best I could. If we’re going to see someone I suggest you change your shirt. It’s filthy. You can borrow something of mine if you want.” I followed him to his bedroom. He dug through his drawers occasionally tossing things onto the bed. “You can wear any of those, unless you want to go home and change?”
I shook my head. “No I’ll find something here.”
“I’m going to take a shower. Help yourself. If you don’t want any of those there’s more in the drawer.” He went into the bathroom and shut the door.
I pulled my sweater over my head and looked at the selection in front of me. Most were T-shirts and almost came down to my knees. I went through his drawers until I saw a small shirt, plain white, ribbed with short sleeves and a low scoop neck. I pulled it over my head. It fit perfectly. Maybe a little more form fitting and low cut than I would have usually worn, but it would do. I folded everything up and put it back where it belonged. I was in the mirror, trying to fix my hair with my fingers when Dylan came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He watched me for a second from the doorway. I looked up and caught his eye.
“That was Meghan’s.” A fleeing look of surprise crossed his face.
I turned around. “Do you want me to change?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“I should’ve known.” He didn’t move. I cursed at myself for being such an idiot. It obviously wasn’t a man’s shirt. “Why don’t I go home and change and I’ll meet you back here in half an hour?”
“Not important.” When I walked past him, he took my arm. “It’s okay, really.”
I thought he was going to say something else, but he just dropped my arm, turned around and went back in the bathroom.