Page 6 of The Lost Hours
My eyes stung with tears I couldn’t shed for a woman I thought I had known. I caught sight of the little blue sweater I had left folded on top of the desk. I lifted it up to my face, smelling nothing but dust and old secrets, and for the first time in my life I realized that my sad, quiet grandmother might have a story to tell me after all.
CHAPTER 3
I hated the smell of nursing homes: the mixture of antiseptic cleaners, stale cooking odors, and old dreams. I hadn’t learned to hate it until my long stay in the hospital six years before when I’d begun to associate those same smells of the hospital with all of my own lost dreams.
The nurse on duty greeted me as I signed in and escorted me to the Alzheimer’s wing, where she had to use a code to open the door. My grandmother had a private room, as private as living in a nursing home could be, and it was at the end of the corridor at the back of the building, giving her two large windows to look out and see the gardens. This was what my grandfather told me when we had moved her in, and I never thought to mention to him that every time we visited she sat facing the wall.
She was asleep when I entered, so I sat in a chair near her bed and watched her sleep. She slept on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek like a child, and her long white hair tied back in a braid that lay on the pillow beside her like a remnant from her past life. My grandmother had always been old to me. I’d seen pictures of her when she was younger, of course, but I could never quite reconcile those pictures of the beautiful bride or young mother with the sad old woman of my childhood.
She stirred, a word lost on her lips as she struggled between sleep and wakefulness, awaking from dreams she couldn’t remember or share. I often wondered what she dreamed of—if she were reliving happier times before the smiling woman in the photos became the old woman, or if her dreams were as blank and empty as her mind had become.
I waited as she opened her eyes and gradually came awake. Her gaze settled on me and I held my breath wondering if she would recognize me today. But her eyes continued on to the window behind me as if I had been nothing more than a piece of furniture.
“Grandmother?” I said quietly, not wanting to startle her.
Her brown eyes shot back to me and widened, but I knew that she still did not know who I was.
“Grandmother,” I said again. “It’s me. Piper. I’ve come for a visit.” I stood and helped her sit up, then fluffed her pillows.
“Yes, Piper,” she said, repeating my words without comprehension. “Where’s Jackson? He said he would come.” She looked at me suspiciously. “Have you seen him?”
“No, Grandmother. Granddaddy is dead, remember? We buried him on Saturday, at Bonaventure Cemetery, where Mama and Daddy are. You wore your black dress with your mama’s cameo at the neck.”
Her eyes blinked slowly as she continued to stare at me silently. Eventually her gaze traveled back to the window behind me. “Jackson brings me flowers. He knows that moonflowers are my favorite.” She suddenly turned her head to face me. “Have you seen Jackson? He always brings me flowers.”
I stood, trying to see the grandmother who’d taught me to garden inside this woman who didn’t know who I was. I felt sorry for this old woman, yet I didn’t know her. Her presence in my life had become like a soft wind that moves your hair and then is forgotten by your next breath. I walked to the window to stare down at the pretty garden somebody had hoped would resemble an English one with geometrical patterns and precisely pruned hedges. Pink roses dotted large green bushes bordering the small square space, highlighting the trellises with climbing wisteria and white wooden benches for weary spectators. I felt sad, recalling the beautiful garden my grandmother had tended in our backyard that now lay sleeping under tired dirt.
I remembered the small blue sweater and the manila envelope in my shoulder bag. Turning back toward the bed, I pulled out the sweater. I would wait to ask her about the key and the letters until later as I had learned that she could only absorb one thing at a time. I wasn’t really expecting her to recognize the sweater or even to reveal anything to me. But when I had been standing in my grandfather’s study the previous day, it had finally come to me how very alone in the world I was—how many years had passed since my grandmother had written that last letter. And I had to at least try.
“Grandmother? I found something yesterday in the house, in your trunk in Granddaddy’s study, and it looks like something you might have knitted. Do you recognize it?”
Her brown eyes blinked slowly as if trying to focus on my face and then I watched as her gaze slowly traveled to the bundle in my hands and stopped, her eyes sad and unblinking. I came closer and sat at the edge of her bed, her gaze never leaving the blue-yarn sweater. Her hand, as delicate as a fallen leaf, reached out and grabbed a fistful of the soft fabric, the blue veins in her hands like roadmaps of her life. Slowly, she pulled it toward her and buried her face in the sweater as I had done, and I wondered what memory she was smelling.
“Do you know whose this was?”
She didn’t respond, but kept her face buried in the sweater. After a moment her shoulders began to shake and a keening I had never heard before erupted from her, the sound bringing back to me all of my own lost hopes and dreams.
With a hesitant hand, I touched her shoulder, appalled yet compelled to reach her as I witnessed a depth of emotion I never thought her capable of.
“It’s okay, Grandmother. It’s going to be okay.” The words were as empty of meaning as my incessant patting on the sharp bone of her shoulder that protruded from her cotton nightgown. It wasn’t okay. And for a brief moment I wished that I had never found that sweater in the trunk or read the letters, that I had been allowed to continue in my numb existence in the quiet house on Monterey Square. But I had found the sweater and brought it here to show her. And I had remembered the words that haunted my dreams the night before, words my grandmother had told me long ago that I thought I’d forgotten.Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair.The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people’s hearts.
I thought back to my own mother, dead now for more than twenty years and how she’d left home at eighteen and never gone back. I remembered her only from an old Polaroid of her standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with my father—a picture I always thought was to show the world how very far from home she wanted to get.
My grandmother’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun and I thought for a moment that she’d forgotten what she was crying for. But when she turned her reddened eyes up to me, I saw within them a clarity that I had not seen for years.
“He’s gone,” she whispered, her fingers like claws as she hooked them into the sweater. Tears fell down withered cheeks but she didn’t blink or take her gaze away from me. She let go of the sweater and grabbed my hands, her fingers cold and brittle. She leaned toward me and very quietly whispered so close to my face that I could feel her puffs of breath. “Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to.”
My grandmother looked away and let go of my hands, distracted now. She leaned back against her pillows and closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy,” she said, keeping her eyes closed.
I wasn’t ready for her to go to sleep yet. I leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Who’s Lillian, Grandmother? Who’re Lillian and Josie and Freddie?”
Her eyes rolled violently under her lids but she didn’t open them. Instead she turned her face away from me, but I saw her hand tighten into a fist before tucking it under her chin.
“Grandmother?” I whispered.
She didn’t move. I stayed on the edge of her bed for a long time, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest with a growing sense of unease—the same feeling one gets upon leaving home for a long trip and knowing something has been forgotten.
Finally, I stood and leaned over to kiss her cheek. I startled when her hand closed around my wrist and her eyes opened. “My box,” she said. “I put it in my box but now I can’t find it.”
