five
Lapeer County, August
I spoke toward the phone sitting on the console. “Am I out of my mind? I’m in the middle of nowhere here.”
“No way,” came Desiree’s voice over the speaker. “This will do you good. You’re doing a good thing, for that guy and your aunt. And anyway, in the end you’re going to have a great story.”
“Maybe.”
“You will”—her voice crackled—“and then you can sell it to anyone you want. Forget Jack.”
“I guess. I mean, yeah. This could be good. Get away for a while. Breathe some clean air.”
“Exac . . . you sh . . . b . . . f . . . otally je . . .”
“You’re breaking up.”
“. . .”
“Desiree? Can you hear me?”
I stared at the phone. Call dropped. One bar flickered in. Then out. I sighed and looked back out at the road, only to see that I was inches away from the craggy edge of a drainage ditch. I cranked the wheel. Straightening out life should be so simple. No matter what Mr. Rich believed, God was not in control. My situation was incontrovertible proof of that. The frightening thing was that I wasn’t in control either. I should be in Detroit. Instead, I was driving north on a deserted county road, squinting through the colorful remains of dead bugs on the windshield.
I’d called the mysterious Barb the moment I got home the day I lost my job. As it turned out, she was my father’s cousin, which, in her rather convoluted explanation, seemed to make her one of Nora Balsam’s nieces. She remembered me as a five-year-old, but she had moved to Arizona and rarely got back to Michigan.
“You’re an answer to prayer,” she’d said. “I didn’t know there was anyone left in Detroit since your parents and Grace moved. I just assumed you had too. I’ve been worrying about what to do about Nora and here you call me out of the blue.”
“What needs to be done about her?”
“Oh, she is such a sweet, independent woman, and she’s done just fine on her own. But I had a letter from her a few months ago, and there were just one or two things she wrote that had me concerned.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure how to describe it. It was more a feeling I got. Like she seemed . . . different. Maybe not quite as sharp. A little out of step. Her handwriting was a little shaky.”
“She’s old. People slow down.”
“Yes, they do. And that’s why your call comes at such a perfect time. You can run up there and check on her and let me know if you think she needs assistance.”
“Like live-in help?”
“That, or perhaps—and I hate to even suggest this—but perhaps she needs to move into an assisted living facility. She’s out in the middle of God’s country. The nearest hospital is thirty minutes away.”
“Well, I was hoping just to visit her for a day or maybe overnight.” I didn’t intend to tell Barb anything about the camera or the photos or Mr. Rich.
“Oh, can’t you get away from work longer than that?”
Work. That’s right. I had all the time in the world. I had no job. And if I couldn’t get a new job—which I was sure Judge Sharpe and Vic could make very difficult for me—I would have no money. No money, no apartment. Or food. Why hadn’t I just signed that stupid paper so I could get the severance?
I told Barb about losing my job. “You think she’d be up for a houseguest for a bit longer? Maybe I could use it as time to strategize about my next career move.”
“You’re not worried about losing your apartment?”
I laughed. “It’s not like I won’t be able to find another place when I get back. Limited housing stock is one problem Detroit doesn’t have.”
“If you’re sure, I think it would be great if you could spend some extended time there. As I said, she’s very independent. If she thought I’d sent you to check up on her, she might be offended. But if you’re going up there for a little R & R while you figure out what’s next for you, that paints a different picture. I can make all the arrangements with Nora—just give me a week.”
Barb had come through. Nora offered an open-ended invitation to come stay with her. The rest—determining her ability to take care of herself, finding the right time to talk about her husband’s lost property, developing a show-stopping personal interest story around the emergence of the photos, oh, and looking for gainful employment—was up to me. Within just a few weeks I should be back in Detroit putting together the article that would accompany the rare photos and redeem me in the eyes of the journalistic community. This was temporary. A favor. Nothing more.
After an hour or so of driving, the GPS announced, “You have reached your destination.” But just where I had arrived seemed almost arbitrary. The only thing that even indicated human habitation at this spot was a rusty mailbox, a narrow gravel two-track, and a broken line of boulders that might have been a wall in another century.
I crunched along the gray ribbons of stones into a dense grove of towering evergreens planted too close together and too close to the driveway. Needles scraped at the car, trying to push me back out. But I would not be deterred. I could not go back to Detroit. Not yet.
I emerged from the tunnel and was greeted with what would be my interim home. The white two-story farmhouse was simple and forgettable and half strangled by Virginia creeper. I killed the engine and stepped out into the heavy summer air. The wide porch extended like a friendly handshake, but with my first move toward it I felt ill. This was a mistake. There was no way a normal person would agree to having a stranger come stay at their house with no definite end date. Would she resent my presence there? What if her memory failed and she had no idea who I was or why I was on her doorstep? What if she had a shotgun?
As I stood at the bottom step wondering just when it was I had lost my nerve, the faded orange front door swung open and a petite, white-haired lady smiled at me from the doorway. But the smile did not reach her clear blue eyes.
“You must be Elizabeth.”
“Yes, hi, Nora!” I said in a chirpy voice I had never before used to speak to another human. “It’s so nice to meet you. I can’t believe we’ve lived this close all this time and I never knew it.”
She raised her eyebrows at that but stopped short of rolling her eyes, and I got the distinct impression that the unintentional estrangement was somehow my fault.
“Come on in. I’ll show you to the powder room.”
A few minutes later I found myself seated at a round kitchen table topped with sunny yellow placemats and a sweating pitcher of iced tea. My great-aunt lifted the full pitcher with thin arms. No shaking, no tremors. She appeared healthy, strong, and, so far, in possession of her wits.
We sat and sipped in awkward silence as I searched for something appropriate to say. I was so rarely at a loss for words, even around total strangers. But how did one begin such an impossible conversation? When was the right time to bring up the camera and the riots, to test the waters so I could report back to Mr. Rich and get him to loosen his grip on the photos that I now needed more than ever? I lost myself in my glass of tea, and the silence thickened around us until that was all there was.
Finally Nora spoke, perhaps signaled by the hollow clink of ice in my empty glass. “Now that you’ve had a chance to catch your breath, you can bring your things up to your room. I’d help, but I don’t do stairs anymore when I can avoid it. I’ve had William freshen up the back bedroom for you.”
I sucked the slim remains of an ice cube into my mouth and followed her to the grand staircase in the front hall.
“You see that door up there? That’s the bathroom. The door you want is just to the left. If you go up those last few steps around the corner, you’ve gone too far.”
I half dragged two suitcases up the stairs. The higher I climbed, the hotter and heavier the air around me became, and when I reached the landing, beads of sweat sprouted from my forehead. In that one horrifying moment I realized that Nora did not have air-conditioning.
I swept the wet hair from my face and opened the door, surprised to find not a bedroom as I expected but a cramped hall with two more doors and a second staircase, this one steep and narrow and leading back down to some unknown spot on the first floor. I tried the door to the left and found yet more stairs, these leading up, presumably to the attic. I tried the door across the hall. It swung open with a creak, releasing a torrent of yellow sunlight that flowed into the dark hall and kissed my sandaled feet.
The room was hot and musty—a far cry from the fresh and immaculate kitchen. I set my suitcases down and pushed back the brittle sheer curtains at the closest window. The sash relented with an angry crack of protest, and oxygen flowed into the room like CPR. I ran my fingers along a dresser, leaving undulating trails in what had to be years of dust. It was clear that, despite Nora’s assertion that someone had freshened up the room, no one had been in here for a very long time.
But there were some redeeming qualities to this stuffy space. The bed was magnificent. Slender curves of light and dark wood wound themselves around one another at the head and foot like tangled roots, framing a quilt done in every rich hue of yellow I could imagine. Each tiny piece of fabric was artfully arranged so that one shade blended into the next. The pieces right next to each other looked almost identical. It was only when looking at the whole you noticed they were different shades.
Sitting primly between two windows was a small fireplace. The thought of hearing the cozy crackling of a fire while falling asleep made me almost giddy. But no. I wouldn’t be here in the winter. I had a job to do.
I had met up with Mr. Rich on a heavy, clouded August day that whispered of tornados. Thankfully, his suspicious son was too busy to join us. He relinquished the camera, reminded me once more not to mention his name, and advised me to take things slow. The one thing I still didn’t have from him was the box of photos. Linden had seen to that. I was to contact Mr. Rich once I had determined that Nora would accept them, and we’d go from there.
“When I knew Nora,” he said, “she was spoiled and stubborn. We parted on very bad terms.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said, and I braced myself for an unpleasant trip.
The next week, I brought most of my furniture and my housewares back to the same thrift store I’d purchased them from in my first month of employment at the Free Press. Desiree took in my houseplant—singular—which she had given me three years earlier. Everything else—clothes, some books, and childhood mementos I couldn’t part with—I’d packed into the car with a speed that astonished me. I had never imagined I could be erased from Detroit so efficiently.
After two more trips up and down the stairs with all my worldly possessions, I found Nora puttering in the kitchen.
“That bed is amazing,” I said, happy at least to have found something safe to say. “And that quilt is incredible.”
“I thought you might like it. Yellow is cheerful. That’s why I put you in that room. I’ve always been proud of that quilt.”
I ignored her intimation that I might need cheering up. “You made that?”
“Oh, sure. I made all the quilts upstairs.”
The craftiest thing I had ever constructed was a single knitted washcloth in drab brown yarn. I had learned from my mother, at her insistence, and retained enough knowledge and skill to complete the one project. It took me an entire summer.
Nora took my arm and led me back out to the front hall. “There are four bedrooms upstairs. Yours was my bedroom before I moved down to the first floor. Did you see the back steps?”
“Yes. I wondered about those.”
“A lot of old houses have them. So the help could move around unseen while you entertained guests in the parlor. I always used them because the first place I wanted to go in the morning was the kitchen to make coffee.”
My inner nosy reporter perked up. Perfect. If I could get her talking about the house, it wouldn’t be long before she was talking about herself, telling me about her husband, giving me the in I needed to bring up the camera and the photos.
“So what’s the story with this place? When was it built?”
“I was told 1859. But there’s no one story in a place this old. Everything in this house has a story. You’ll have to look around upstairs on your own, but I can give you the grand tour down here.”
For the next hour I moved through each room of the main floor, struggling to stick to my great-aunt’s glacial pace but entranced nonetheless. I gazed at antique furniture, oil paintings, and rugs as she relayed what she knew of their origin. With every room I felt weighed down by a new layer of guilt. This woman clearly loved her home and did not know that Barb had given me the thankless task of determining whether she was capable of continuing to live there on her own.
Eventually we came to her bedroom. If I thought the quilt on my bed was nice, the one on Nora’s was exquisite. A kaleidoscope of color, it was formed from varied patches of jewel-toned velvet and silk, each piece edged with multicolored embroidery thread in a hundred different patterns. I wanted to run my fingers along it, but it looked like something you’d get your hand slapped for touching.
“Wow.” I felt like I had said that a lot during the tour, but it was the one word that kept coming to mind. The house was packed full of wow. “Did you make this one?”
“No. My great-grandmother Mary did. It was the only quilt she made that I know of. Takes a long time to make a quilt like that. All handwork. A lot of Victorian crazy quilts don’t hold up well. The dyes in the silks eat away at the fabric over the years, and it gets worse if you’re not careful with them. Collectors would faint if they knew I slept under it, but I sleep like the dead, so I don’t do much tossing and turning. And I never sit on it.”
This last statement seemed to be added for my benefit—or admonishment. I leaned over to examine the varied stitches. Vines and flowers, geometric designs, ribbons and feathers, something that looked like bird tracks.
“Heavens, no! How old do you think I am? She died in 1875. She’s buried out back.”
I straightened up. “She lived here?”
She looked at me as if I should have known that. “You’ve never heard of Nathaniel and Mary Balsam before?”
I shrugged. “Those names don’t ring any bells.”
Nora shook her head. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because history is written by the victors.”