I shook my head. “I don’t want anything for the pain,” I said. I wasn’t going to trade alcohol for opioids. No, thank you.
She hesitated, her quizzical look giving way to understanding. “Are you in recovery?” she asked.
I nodded. I felt myself blush that Oliver was hearing this, not that it was news to him.
“See how you do with acetaminophen or ibuprofen,” she said. “I’ll give you the scrip, just in case, and you can talk to your regular doctor about it.” She held the slip of paper out to me, but I didn’t reach for it. Oliver finally took it and slid it into his jeans pocket.
We were quiet as we waited in the cubicle for someone to bring me the walking boot, but after a while, Oliver broke the silence.
“What’s her name?” he asked. “The girl you … your boyfriend … hurt? Where does she live?”
“Emily Maxwell,” I said. “Somewhere … I don’t know. The accident happened in Raleigh. Why?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I can track her down,” he said. “I have friends in high places.” He winked at me and a lightning bolt of panic pierced my chest.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” I said quickly. “I can’t. But I really wish I could just know how she’s doing.” I bit my lip. “You wouldn’t try to contact her or anything, would you?”
“Of course not,” he said. Then he smiled at me. Squeezed my hands again. “That, Morgan Christopher, would be your job.”
Chapter 40
ANNA
February 28–1940
Anna awakened with a weight on her chest that made it hard to breathe. She knew that weight. It had been with her off and on since her mother’s death in November, and she knew why it was so heavy and breath-stealing this morning: today was February 28. Her mother would have turned forty-four today.
“Why, Mom?” she whispered into the air above her bed. She wished she could wind back time and do everything differently. It seemed she should be able to do that somehow, if she could only figure out the secret. If only she could go back to that argument with Aunt Alice, she could turn the horror of what happened on its head. She would still have her mother with her.
It took her nearly an hour to shift the weight off her chest long enough to get up, shower, and put on her pants and blouse. She had no appetite, and she was glad Miss Myrtle wasn’t home so she didn’t have to make idle chatter over a breakfast she didn’t want to eat. Freda, always easygoing, didn’t bat an eye when Anna said she wasn’t hungry, and for once, Anna was glad for the housekeeper’s muteness.
She drove to the warehouse and wasn’t surprised to find Jesse already inside at his easel, intently working on an overly ambitious painting of a woman staring out a window. Anna had bought him three more canvases as well as a couple of sketchbooks, and his paintings and sketches were now strewn all over the walls of the warehouse. He’d taken to arriving very early in the morning. Sometimes he would get there before sunup, and Anna was no longer surprised to find him already at the easel when she arrived. He wanted to get as much time in the warehouse as he could before he had to go home to the farm.
On the table next to the easel, she could see that he had the Old Masters library book open, probably to one of the Vermeers, since it was clear he was experimenting with evening light in the painting. It did something to her heart, seeing this young boy’s attempt to emulate his idol, and she smiled for the first time that morning. There was so much she wanted to teach him. So much she wanted him to have the chance to learn. She wished she could take him to New York. She’d told him about the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the new Whitney Museum, but telling him about them was no substitute for actually being there. For seeing the art up close. She’d told him, too, that he would be allowed into any museum he wanted to visit in New York City. “The color of your skin wouldn’t matter up there,” she’d said. She knew that was a lie, but at the moment she said it, she felt giddy with the thought of all he could do and see in the city. But then she snapped back to reality. They were trapped in a warehouse in Edenton, and she was filled with sadness again.
“Do you want some help?” she asked, trading her sweater for the smock that hung over the back of her chair.
“Not yet,” he said. “I wanna figger this out by myself.” He stood back and studied the painting on the easel. “Can you tell who this is?” he asked.
Anna came to stand next to him, buttoning her smock over her blouse. The woman was looking out the window, and her large eyes, so much like Jesse’s, gave her identity away. Slowly, she nodded. “Your mother,” she said. “Without a doubt.” The angle of the fading daylight on the woman’s bare arms was not quite right, but she thought it best to let him see that on his own. “Did she model for you?”
“I sketched it while she was washin’ dishes,” he said, chuckling. “Then she hollered at me for jest sittin’ around, doin’ nothin’ worthwhile.”
“Did you show her the sketch?”
“Nah, it’s gonna be a surprise, this paintin’.” He nodded toward the easel. “Next week’s her birthday so this’ll be her present.”
“Oh, she’ll love it,” Anna said, hoping that was the truth. A beat of silence followed, then without thinking, she said, “Today would have been my mother’s birthday.”
She felt Jesse’s eyes on her but kept her own gaze on his painting, her hands resting on the back of the chair in front of the easel.
“Would’ve been?” he asked.
“She died in November,” she said. “Just a couple of weeks before I came here.” She glanced at him. “She killed herself.” It was the first time she’d said those words out loud. Why she said them to Jesse but not Miss Myrtle, not Pauline, she had no idea. But there they were, a burden of syllables dumped on the shoulders of a seventeen-year-old boy.
“Damn,” he said. “How … I mean … why she do that?”
Anna returned her gaze to the woman in the painting. “She had an illness called manic-depressive psychosis,” she said. “That means she would be very happy and energetic—extremely energetic—for a while—sometimes months—and then she’d be very sad for just as long. Her sadness this time lasted and lasted and … it just didn’t let up. My aunt Alice thought she needed to go into the hospital where they’d…” She didn’t want to have to explain the electroshock treatments and all of that with him. “I didn’t think she needed to go and she didn’t want to go. My aunt tried to insist, but I finally won the argument.” Anna felt her lower lip start to tremble and she bit down on it to stop the quiver. Jesse was so still and quiet that she barely knew he was next to her. “I came home from job hunting one day,” she said, “and I couldn’t find her. I knew she was home because I could see her car through the windows in the garage door. I called for her. Walked around the house. Finally I went out to the garage.” Anna shut her eyes, her hands locked tight on the back of the chair. Jesse waited, still as stone next to her. “She’d hung herself from the beams in the garage ceiling.” She lifted a hand to her mouth, pressing her fist against her lips, wishing she could block out the image she would never forget. Her mother’s grotesque, almost unrecognizable face. Eyes wide open, features twisted, her skin gray. She had suffered; that much was clear. Anna could feel the beams of the warehouse high above her. She did not look up. “Aunt Alice had been right,” she said to Jesse. “She needed to go to the hospital, but I was too—”