Page 27 of The Lost Hours
Helen sat back in her chair, feeling her brother watching her as she listened to the girls scraping the ice cream from their bowls. She felt an odd connection with this quiet, sad woman. Maybe it was because they were both essentially motherless, set adrift without their stories to guide them. Or maybe it was because Helen sensed that they were both traveling in a world that had been darkened by events they’d had no control over.
Helen leaned toward Earlene. “Before you leave, I have something to give you that might help you with your research.”
“Helen.” Tucker’s voice held a note of warning.
“Just some papers and family letters,Tuck. Everything else I gave to Malily when I cleaned up the cottage.”
“I just don’t want . . .” His voice faded, and she pictured him indicating Earlene.
“I know,” she reassured him. “It’ll be fine.”
She felt her brother relax back into his chair, his breathing slowed. When he spoke again, his words were directed at their guest. “So you ride?”
“I used to.” Earlene’s voice held a note of wariness and Helen wondered if Tucker could hear it, too.
“She told us she fell off of her horse, remember, Daddy? That’s why she doesn’t ride anymore.” Sara’s voice was raised, but they’d all grown used to her conversations that sounded a lot like shouting contests. Helen supposed that was what happened when you were the youngest and had to fight to be heard. The little girl continued. “Malily always says that the best thing to do when you fall off is to get right back up again. ’Else you forget the reason you used to get up on the horse in the first place.” Sara spoke with a mouth full of ice cream, but Helen didn’t correct her. She was too interested in hearing what Earlene would say.
She could sense Earlene forcing a smile. “Yes, I suppose your grandmother is right.” Glass clinked and Helen pictured Earlene taking a drink from her water glass. “But I . . . well, I guess I just figured I’d ridden long enough and that it was time to try something else.”
“Like genealogy.” Tucker’s voice was devoid of recrimination, and held only surprise. Since his grandmother had put him in a saddle at the age of two, horses and riding had been constant themes in his life. Even through medical school, marriage and children, they remained as a sort of anchor to the man he strived to be regardless of where life tugged him.
“Like genealogy,” Earlene answered, her words tight.
Lucy spoke, her clear, high-pitched voice belying the maturity of her words. “I think the scars on her knee are from falling off her horse, which means it was probably worse than just falling off. Maybe she had a good reason for quitting.”
The quiet was deafening for a moment, Lucy’s words silencing even her little sister.
Tucker finally spoke. “Or maybe it’s a good reason for getting on a horse again.”
Helen heard Earlene’s chair slide back on the rug. “I need to get going. Thank you so much for dinner. I can walk back to the cottage . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” Helen said as she pushed her own chair back. “The mosquitoes will have picked you up and spirited you away before you make it down the oak alley. Odella will most likely be with Malily for a while but I’m sure Tucker would be happy to drive you back.” Without waiting for anyone to argue, she stood. “Tucker, since your nanny’s off tonight and the girls are staying here, why don’t you get the girls ready for bed while I take Earlene upstairs to give her those papers I talked about? Then you can drive Earlene home.”
Neither one of them answered right away, and Helen couldn’t decide who was more reluctant: Earlene, who couldn’t wait to escape from having anybody scrutinize her life, or Tucker, who’d spent more time with his horses than his children since his wife’s death.
Helen held out her arm. “Earlene, if you’ll grab my elbow, I’ll lead the way. I don’t want to trip and hurt myself on the stairs.” She hated using her blindness to extract sympathy, but she figured Earlene needed her help as much as Tucker needed to spend time with his daughters so she did what she thought necessary.
She felt Earlene’s cold fingers touch the bare skin on her arm before Helen led the way back to the grand staircase that curved up and around the foyer, hiding a rueful grin as she considered which one of them was more profoundly blind.
I hurried my pace to catch up with Helen, who didn’t really seem to need my help. I was glad to be out of the dining room and eager to see what papers she had for me. As I’d been reading my grandmother’s scrapbook pages, the whereabouts of Lily’s and Josie’s pages hovered in the back of my mind. From Helen’s conversation with Tucker, I doubted Lillian’s would be in there, but I was still hopeful that I’d find a reference to the scrapbook or necklace—anything that would give me something concrete so that I could finally approach Lillian.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt a small fire that felt a lot like longing sending sparks inside my chest, where my fearless heart had once beat. As we wound our way up the staircase, I thought back to what had first started it and realized that it was something Sara had said.Malily always says that the best thing to do when you fall off is to get right back up again. ’Else you forget the reason you used to get up on the horse in the first place. I remembered now where I’d heard it before. I’d been young, small enough to still be riding my first pony, Benny. I’d slid off of her backside because I wasn’t paying attention, bruising my backside almost as much as my ego. It had been my grandmother’s arms that had reached for me, pulling me up to stand while my grandfather looked on, his mouth turned down with disappointment. When she’d leaned toward me to brush the dust off of my collar, she’d told me why I needed to get back on.
That had been the first of only two times anybody ever had to remind me to get back in the saddle. I don’t think that I’d ever thanked her for that, either. I’d taken her words of wisdom like I’d accepted her plates of fried chicken and corn bread—nourishment I needed but never noticed, forgotten as soon as the next challenge presented itself. And then I’d fallen from Fitz and I’d almost died. But my grandmother was in the nursing home by then, so there’d been nobody to tell me to get back on, and I quickly tried to forget the reason I used to get up on a horse in the first place.
Helen reached out her hand and let a finger slide down the wall as she began counting doorways, and I continued to analyze how my self-absorption had shifted almost imperceptibly. It was also something Tucker had said about me giving up riding horses for genealogy. His voice held the surprise of watching a starving man choose a glass of water over a four-course meal.
I’d met his eyes and seen none of the recrimination I’d expected. Instead, I recognized something familiar, and knew he understood how it was to feel incomplete unless you were in a saddle, how walking or running and even flying in a plane could never compete with the freedom and power you felt when you were riding into the wind on the back of a horse. It’s the complex mix of vulnerability and bravado that makes a great horseman, and in Tucker Gibbons, I recognized the mind-set of the person I used to be. But I’d also noticed that he hadn’t seen that person at all when he looked at me. It shook me at first. Shook me hard enough to start that little spark in my chest—enough to make me follow Helen upstairs instead of bolting out of the house as my instincts kept telling me to do.
Helen paused by the third door in the dim hallway, then turned the knob and pushed open the door. She flipped on a switch and the room was bathed in bright lights from the ceiling and walls. Helen moved about the room, turning on table lamps. “Can you see all right?” she asked.
I wanted to laugh. I felt as if I were standing inside a crayon box, each wall surface brighter than the last. Her antique four-poster bed was draped with dark purple chiffon, contrasting with the fuchsia and lime green quilted duvet with matching toile shams and roll pillows. “I can see fine. In fact, I think I might need to put on my sunglasses.”
Helen smiled as she made her way over to a Queen Anne lady’s desk, which sat under an oval window on the side of the house I hadn’t yet seen. “Malily helped me with it. I wanted colorful and she promised me that colorful is what I’d get.”
I stood in the middle of the room admiring the way the lemon-colored rug thrown over the wood floor matched the painted ceiling. “I’d have to agree. It’s really beautiful.” I thought of the stern Lillian I’d just had dinner with, and I couldn’t imagine her agreeing to create a room like this in her house. But she had done it for her blind granddaughter, and it made me wonder what other surprises lurked beneath the quietly refined facade of Lillian Harrington-Ross.
Helen pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk and lifted out a large three-ring binder that bulged with papers, their corners exploding from the confines of the cover. “After Susan died, Odella helped me gather her papers and put them in here. I’d read them if I could, but since I can’t I guess I was just waiting for the right person to come along.” She held it out to me. “I’m going to let you borrow these if you promise that you’ll let me know if you find anything interesting.”
