The Last Secret, page 3
“We’re digging water chestnut roots for soup,” Mama offered, her hand still in Savka’s, gripping it tight.
Natalka made a face. “We eat better on the mountain,” she claimed, her cheeks hollow with obvious hunger, her thin body marked by a winter spent in an underground bunker.
If one looked past the grim determination and grating attitude, Natalka was pretty. Savka couldn’t help but feel grudging admiration for a woman who loved her country so much she’d live with men in a glorified cellar, fighting for a free and independent Ukraine. She’d never been in such a place but envisioned a damp, claustrophobic hole with just enough room to walk past the narrow sleeping benches lining the walls. She shivered violently. Below the muddied hem of her skirt, she’d reinforced her stockinged legs with long strips of flannel torn from an old sheet. But the temperature was dipping and cold air on the wet and muddy strips had frozen them into ice-caked armor. “You aren’t supposed to leave your bunker in the winter,” Savka reminded her.
“You don’t say,” Natalka said. “Who else is going to keep the partisans from descending on your village and stealing your sons?”
Partisans. There was only one reason an insurgent from Kuzak’s bunker had emerged from the forest, asking for Marko Ivanets’s medic wife. “What’s happened?”
“I need you to come with me,” Natalka said, ignoring her question.
Savka shrank back. “Not to the forest.”
“Where else?”
At the sudden staccato rip of machine gun fire, the four women looked up as two planes roared over the mountain—a Soviet Yak chasing a Messerschmitt that climbed in evasive maneuvers and did a slow roll, the black swastika on its tail flashing as it attempted to elude the enemy pilot.
Lilia clasped her hands in mock prayer. “Destroy the Soviet,” she muttered, “please,” as though Gerhard himself were in the cockpit. But the Russian plane was faster and emptied its machine guns at the Messerschmitt, finally scoring a direct hit. Smoke rose from the German plane’s wing, and it spiraled, quickly losing altitude.
The Messerschmitt careened over the river, too fast to give the pilot time to bail out. The engine stalled and it disappeared behind a hill, exploding in a fireball in the forest.
Numb now to this common occurrence, the women drew scarves over their noses when the sudden cloud of diesel fumes drifted to them on air. Natalka shrugged. “One less German to steal your food. One more Soviet to rape your daughters.”
Lilia flinched as if she’d been kicked. When the Russian plane banked and roared over their heads, returning to the front, she followed it with a pointed finger. “Gerhard has taught me to shoot,” she said ruthlessly.
Savka lost patience with her idiot sister. “He’s playing with you, Lilia—he can’t take you back to Berlin.”
Lilia stalked off a short distance, smashing half-frozen puddles with her boots. There was a smear of mud on her cheek. She looked too much like the little girl Savka had fought with in childhood just as bitterly as she did today.
“You’re jealous,” Lilia said over her shoulder. “Marko is dead, and you have no prospects.”
Savka’s eyes smarted with tears. It was one thing to imagine Marko dead, another to hear it from the lips of someone she loved just as much. She tried to ignore Natalka, who watched this sisterly squabble with her arms crossed. If Marko had been killed, how would Savka save Taras from the encroaching Red Army? A widow and her children suffered if they did not have a man to protect them.
Mama placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Lilia is lonely and needs a father for her daughter.” She sighed heavily, gripping the handle of her walking stick.
“I’m lonely, too,” Savka cried, finally breaking.
“This is all rather touching,” Natalka took Savka by the arm, “but I need you to come with me,” she ordered. “Now.”
“My son is expecting us back,” Savka said, trying to pull her arm away.
But Natalka didn’t listen, dragging Savka from the protective embrace of her mother and sister.
2
JEANIE
Gallery Nouveau, Vancouver
february 1966
i’m mortified that only four people are milling about this vast, open gallery like they’re in an Agatha Christie novel, plotting murder. Cue the disgruntled waitress, a sullen bartender, my caregiver, Pat—who’s nursing a whiskey, her face a brooding study of I told you so—and the intensely curious gallery owner.
I watch her sail toward me, glass of wine held in front of her like she’s going to battle. When she called several months ago to ask if Jeanie Esterhazy had enough landscapes for a show, I was elated and disappeared into my studio, painting like a fiend. But she’s sidled up too close to me, the trembling artist, dressed in a navy skirt suit that makes me look like I should be directing passengers to their seats on an airplane, not headlining a gallery opening. I’ve been reclusive, hiding from every single person besides Pat for years now; this proximity to someone with an Etch A Sketch smile is insufferable.
“Behold,” the gallerist says, gesturing to the big, rain-battered front windows. As if she’s summoned them by witchcraft, a swarm of people have appeared on the sidewalk, jostling to be let in. The door opens and deposits them in the entryway, drenched wet as otters, shaking damp off their coats and bewildered at the sudden light and warmth. “They’re here to see your work.”
Now I’m paralyzed with nerves and a vague, niggling worry.
Something’s not right. I thought I was here on my artistic merits. Is she capitalizing on my recklessly tragic past?
She sneaks furtive glances at me, frowning in that vague, insipid way people have when they’ve read daily newspaper accounts about you and are imagining what it must have felt like to suffer that much damage, that much hurt. Her eyes are too bright, too glowy, and the truth hits me like a sucker punch: This is a pity party. I pluck a deviled egg from the passing waitress’s tray and regard the new arrivals with dread. Here be wolves. A few of them crane their necks, searching the rabble, passing over the waif in a hand-me-down suit, tragically stuck in another fashion decade.
“Come see Jeanie Esterhazy,” I say, sotto voce, “the sideshow freak.”
“Nonsense. They want to meet you.” The gallerist gives me a playful shove. “Socialize.”
I swallow my deviled egg and try to smile—a slow rictus, really. “The last time I socialized, I found myself knocked up and tripping down an aisle in a wedding dress.”
She trills a laugh—as if she thinks I’m joking—and swoops across the room, leaving a cloud of perfume in her wake. I consider escape, consider flinging myself out the door or shrinking into a corner, when a miniskirted blonde approaches, legs clad in blinding psychedelic tights. Her hunched shoulders are swathed in a cape, which is terribly brave of her. Gliding past, she bumps my elbow, and turns to look me over. Her expression sours at the sight of my skinny legs poking out beneath the knee-length skirt, and my long hair, wrestled by Pat into a bun that more closely resembles a bird’s nest perched on top of my head.
“Oh,” I say, because the blonde is pretty and hip in all the ways I’ll never be. The gallery lights beat down on me like another sun, and I start to sweat in my prickly suit. Unbearable. Take me out to die like a dog in the woods. Pat assured me she would remain at my side this evening and divert prying humans, but of course she’s otherwise occupied, sending disturbing come-hither looks to a poor man she’s trapped near the bar. The blonde is gazing at me expectantly and I force my sensibly pump-shod feet to hobble forward. I close my eyes, waiting for the first awkwardly blunt question, What did it feel like…
“Waitress,” she says. “Can I have a glass of champagne?”
My eyes snap open, a furious blush speeding up my neck, shame and relief coexisting, burning like a brand. Wordlessly, I point her in the general direction of the bar, and she flashes a peace sign.
“Sorry we started without you,” I profess, as she melts away.
Where have they all come from, quaffing wine or beer, making cultured remarks? The air smells of wet sheep, Swedish meatballs, and cheap perfume. And the din is incredible, a chorus of starlings desperate to out-chirp each other. Smoke hangs in a cloud near the ceiling, lifting from dozens of cigarettes dangling from dozens of hands. What is it they say? Where there’s smoke there’s fire.
I bolt across the room, my pulse racing. Pat and the man she’s cornered are giggling over the naughtiest thing they’ve ever done in public. Not a common Pat topic, but her face has turned a lovely, bloated crimson, and she seems willing to go in any conversational direction if it means she can make this guy laugh.
I range up behind Pat, close enough to smell her unwashed hair. “Get me the hell out of here,” I whisper. “Someone almost recognized me.”
Pat regards me with that wolf-disturbed-at-a-carcass look she saves for our lesser moments. I can hear her breathing. “Almost recognized you? You’d think you were famous.” She says this with unnecessary emphasis, perhaps for the benefit of her newfound friend, who reminds me of a hamster I had when I was a child, all twitching whiskers, stubby legs, and pert-eyed inquisitiveness. “Even I can see these are rubberneckers,” Pat says, “curious to meet the monster.”
The elevator drops ten floors inside me at the stony expression on my caregiver’s face. Monster. How dare she?
Pat licks her fingers like a cat and slicks down a hank of hair that’s dared escape her Rosemary’s Baby pixie cut. Her dark eyes are inspiring, like leather buttons, I think, or two nubbins of coal that someone, a miner presumably, might have chipped out with his axe. Set deep in that floury face—full lips, wide-planed cheekbones, the kind Vermeer or Rembrandt might have loved to paint—the effect is disconcerting, even when you don’t know what she’s capable of.
Muscles twitching in her jaw, Pat grabs me, her fingers wringing the tender flesh of my upper arm like a dishrag. “Don’t go anywhere,” she cheerily warns her conquest before steering me away. She fetches a child-sized glass of wine from the bar, then deposits me behind a low partition near the gallerist’s desk. “We’ll just have to cart these paintings back,” she gripes. “Where they’ll molder to dust in your studio.” When she leaves, I crouch thankfully beneath my toadstool, finally safe to drink, brood, and brace myself for withering comments from those who must destroy the faeries.
“Her detail is remarkable,” floats over the wall. “I feel like I’m there.”
“Puts me in mind of Albert Bierstadt.”
“Or William Morris Hunt.”
William Morris Hunt? How awful. I toss back the wine and make my way back to the bar.
But the comments aren’t withering. I order a stiff gin and tonic and pulse with a little hard-won glory. Maybe all these rubberneckers really have come to see my art. As I slink back to my rabbit hole, glass in hand, I slow to give someone the royal wave, when I’m blinded by a flashbulb going off in my face.
“Just one picture, Mrs. Esterhazy,” a reporter exclaims, lowering the camera. I feel dizzy and nauseous. Despite blazing overhead track lights, the gallery suddenly seems a shadowy maze and me a mouse trapped in it, with no avenue of escape. Because I’m presently famous for only one thing, I gulp down air, bolting for the partition—and anonymity—wiping my sweaty palms on the suit Pat forced me to wear. But it’s impossible to outrun my notoriously tragic past.
“Mrs. Esterhazy!” the reporter shouts.
“It’s Ms.,” I growl.
“Why did Michael leave you after the accident?”
I skid to a stop in the center of the room, flustered and ashamed. In the years since I was discharged from the hospital and Pat became my caregiver, she’s often cruelly reminded me why Michael did a runner.
He never could stomach damaged goods.
The din subsides as people turn to stare. If they hadn’t recognized me before, they do now. Some coughing. A few ripples of discontent. The deviled egg sits like a rock in my stomach.
“Why, she’s lovely,” a woman says, as if she expected the creature from the black lagoon. “You can’t even see the scars.”
I’m frozen in place, my heart doing the flamenco in my chest, listening to rubberneckers talk about me like I’m not even here.
“Terrible what happened to her,” another woman remarks.
“Her mother and aunt died, too, not a year later,” the man beside her agrees. “Poor thing, all alone in the world.”
After a few more cryptic murmurs from the gray masses—mentions of God and curses and burdens some of us are given to bear—I sag with relief when Pat launches herself across the room. She catches the journalist by his elbow, jostling him and his camera toward the door, giving me an all too familiar you will pay look. I resume a dignified clip back to my hiding place, out of the firing range of stares from women who’ve suffered nothing worse than knee scrapes or the odd dose of chlamydia—women with husbands, babies, and children. Women who are loved.
I can see Pat through the bank of windows, on the sidewalk. The rain has stopped and she’s sharing a smoke with the newspaperman, her head thrown back in laughter, probably having a good snort over what she has to put up with as my nurse. If only he knew the truth.
My heart has settled into a thin, even drumbeat. I’ve been told some of what happened on that fateful night, but my memories were obliterated by severe trauma, coma, and a selection of very good drugs. I can’t remember details—a blessing, my vigil nurses Pat and Kay said at the time. You don’t want to remember. They protected me from the many newspaper articles, and from reporters like this one—prying journalists who asked devastating questions. Protected me from those who might remind me of what really happened that night. To this day, Pat keeps journalists at bay and hides any articles speculating as to my whereabouts. The hard kernel of rage I’ve harbored toward Michael Esterhazy has sustained me, encouraged by my nurses and Aunt Suze, even my own heartless mother. Michael did this to you. He ruined your life. An image of him looms in my mind alongside the elaborate fantasies I’ve had, of getting him fired, stealing his first born, evening the score.
But then a real memory rears up from the recesses of my mind, a hideous Italianate wedding cake and Michael standing beside me as we cut into it, his smile strangely vacant. The noise and chatter in the gallery fall away and I look down, watching helplessly as the embroidered French lace of my wedding dress and its full ballet tulle skirt crumble away like leaves blown from a tree by a sudden wind. I lift my hand to touch my bare stomach and the small, round, precious bump when Michael grabs me and astoundingly, we’ve cycled back four months before the wedding, to summer camp. He’s leading me into the dark wood behind the cabins, glancing back with a seductive smile.
I have memories of the night Michael and I went into that forest. I have memories of him standing at the altar, but not his ghostlike form looming over me as people screamed and sirens wailed.
If only you hadn’t been so fucking careless, Jeanie.
Stunned, I stumble backward, tripping over the gallerist’s chair. The forbidden gin and tonic surges through my system, mixing dangerously with my pain medications. How has this one poisonous memory of Michael somehow exploded from my brain? I shake my head and swallow hard. I don’t want to remember more of this nightmare.
But Michael’s words echo in my ears. If he said I was careless, I must have been. What happened that night? What did Pat, Kay, Aunt Suze, and my own mother not tell me?
Pat arrives in a fug of Jack Daniels and cigarettes, accompanied by a balding man in a corduroy sport coat. She glances down at the gallerist’s desk and her eyes calcify as she takes in the two empty glasses. “You’re drunk.”
“I had a memory…” I trail off, feeling lightheaded.
Pat lifts a hand to check her side part and glances at the man in the corduroy coat as if to say, Please excuse the lunatic. She slides one arm around his shoulders and hooks her other arm to pull me close, pouring an acid whisper into my ear that’s just loud enough for the man to hear, if he wants to. “This dweeb has bought one of your little paintings. Just one, mind you, so don’t get too big for your britches.”
“But I remember,” I say helplessly, sending a grateful smile to the man, who thankfully appears not to have registered Pat’s rude comment.
“Impossible,” she proclaims. Now her hand on my shoulder feels more like an eagle’s claw than anything remotely human. “You don’t have memories of that time, Jeanie—too unsettling.”
I draw an unsteady breath. “The accident…” I trail off, then look into her eyes. “Pat, I didn’t cause it, did I?” Even though I whisper the words, saying them out loud makes me feel like a horribly pathetic disaster.
There’s an expression on Pat’s face that I haven’t seen before. Perhaps it’s uncertainty, or relief. “You should not be allowed in public,” she says from between clenched teeth.
She hasn’t answered my question, and I know she never will. The two of us will crawl back to Salt Spring Island and forget any of this ever happened. I lean my head on her shoulder and pretend that it belongs to Aunt Suze; that she’s alive and somehow still loves me.
Pat stiffens. I’ve gone against protocol. Besides the fleeting hug we exchange at Christmas, our physical interaction is null. No one has touched me in years. I suddenly realize how lonely I am, how hungry for contact—even if it’s this brief connection with one of my least favorite people.
She clears her throat, loathing this sort of emotional display, and I know I’m testing her patience. “I’ll adjust your medications,” she says, blinking rapidly. “You’ll never have to remember anything bad again.” She finally releases me from her iron grip, but not before dropping a parting shot: “You may think you can get away with this hysterical show here, but when we’re home…”
