The Unforgettable Guinevere St. Clair Read online

  “I’m too big,” Gaysie added.

  I glanced at Bitty, swinging happily. Next door was a small white house I hadn’t noticed until now. The goose sat on the back porch, occasionally honking. A curtain fluttered before hanging still. A witness.

  “Well . . . I guess.”

  I dropped my shovel in the hole and jumped down after it. It was cooler in the ground, an almost welcome relief from the humidity.

  The hole wasn’t six feet, but it was deeper than I expected, and when I put my hands on the ledge, the earth crumbled down my arms and onto my shoes. Immediately, a helpless feeling rose inside my chest, then all the way up to my hairline.

  “Bitty?” I yelled.

  “Are you frightened?” Gaysie asked. She sounded surprised. I tried to breathe in and out, to not lose control of my imagination as my father frequently suggested I did. I tried to hear him talking to me. Use your brain and control your emotions, Guinevere.

  I jumped up to climb out, but my attempt only brought more dirt down. I could see nothing except for Gaysie’s looming face. Her teeth suddenly looked like yellowed fangs. My hands began to shake. I opened my mouth but no words came out. My hands were clammy, almost numb.

  And then Gaysie began to unwrap the bag. Did she mean . . . to put it in the grave with me? I’d be buried alive!

  I pressed my eyes tight, my breathing becoming shorter. Guinevere. Act! I forced my face upward. Gaysie had stopped unwrapping and was looking down at me, a curious look on her face, almost as if she was amused by my last moments of life.

  I could see the body poking out of the bag.

  Black hair. Thick, unruly, snarled black hair. Matted and wet. The smell of fresh death. My voice came. I screamed, while Gaysie hovered above, ready to bury me alive and top me off with a dead servant. My screams gave me the adrenaline to lunge upward, clawing savagely with my fingernails as the cold dirt poured down my neck and under my clothes. I hung on the ledge as Gaysie got down on her hands and knees.

  “Help,” I whispered.

  “Guinevere,” she said. “You don’t need my help.”

  I fell back in the grave.

  Dirt fell on my cheeks and microscopic dust entered my eyes and nose, making me cough. The moments of my life flashed before me: Vienna teaching me how to play patty-cake, my father’s smile, and—Bitty! I had to save my Bitty before Gaysie turned on her next.

  With an unknown strength, I jumped and grabbed the grass above me. Using my feet and knees, I pulled myself up and away from the devil woman. If she had tried to touch me, I would have bitten her hand off. And blessed Bitty—she was running toward me, Micah and Jimmy close behind.

  “What’s the matter?” Micah asked, out of breath.

  “Worthless!” I screamed.

  They looked at one another, baffled by my outburst.

  And then Gaysie did the oddest thing: She clapped, delighted.

  Grabbing Bitty’s hand, we ran the entire mile back home on the dirt road of Lanark Lane, not stopping until we were panting and crying on Nana’s front yard behind the prim white picket fence.

  “We will never ever go back there, Bitty . . . never!”

  “We didn’t see my school, or the rocket slide,” she wailed.

  “Bitty, hush now. I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  We lay back, looking up at the light blue Iowa sky. “We’ll never go back” was the phrase I uttered over and over: We’ll never go back.

  That wicked Gaysie Cutter was right about one thing. I didn’t need her help, nor would I ever ask for it, not as long as I lived and breathed. We lay on the grass until Nana called us in for lunch. By that time my mood had decidedly changed for the better for two reasons:

  One, I had always longed for an archenemy, and two, I was certain I’d just beaten my New York six-minute-flat mile record.

  CHAPTER 2

  JIMMY AND MICAH CAME AROUND later that day and the next day after that, but I refused to speak with them. Maybe they were used to burying servants in their backyard, but I certainly wasn’t. Besides, they hadn’t seen Gaysie’s face while she was burying me alive.

  “Isn’t Crow wonderful?” my father kept saying. I thought bitterly of Gaysie Cutter. Oh, if only he knew. No, not all of Crow was wonderful.

  But my father didn’t have time to think about that dreadful woman down the street, and I hadn’t told him. He was a busy man. As much as I knew he loved me and Bitty, he had a singular focus for one person: Vienna. He had consulted every brain doctor on the East Coast, then the West Coast, and I guessed that now corn country was what he considered his Hail Mary pass, the key to unlocking Vienna’s memories. He theorized that familiar settings and people could rewire her brain, that her brain was capable of healing itself. Since I believed in my father more than I believed in anything, I let him think that.

  And truly, I didn’t mind moving. I liked New York okay; it had been my home for as long as I could remember, but it was also associated with the heaviest sadness of my life. Iowa was an exciting and fresh start, like the witness protection program.

  Bitty and I had imagined we’d have fields to run through, silver lunch pails, and warm, home-cooked dinners that tasted nothing like the reheated hospital food we often ate. We would make friends with blue jays and field mice and keep cheeping bullfrogs in our pockets.

  Sure, I would miss my old friends, including prosecuting attorney Georgia Piehl, whom I considered a true ally. But I was most sorry to leave behind Lolly, Moose, and Tomato. As one of Vienna’s first nurses, at home and then at her care centers, Lolly was the closest thing we had to a mother. Moose and Tomato were her twin miniature schnauzers that went everywhere with her, so we were practically siblings.

  “I wish you would come too,” I had said more than once as we were getting ready to leave. Lolly shook her head.

  “Honey, my heart hurts just thinking about you leaving me, but I’ve got a husband to feed and a grandbaby on the way. I guess I have to stay around here.”

  I tried not to resent the grandbaby part. Bitty and I were Lolly’s babies. She had cradled, comforted, and read to us, and she’d taken more grief from Vienna than anyone deserved. Through it all, Lolly loved my mother fiercely.

  If I were to tell a secret, I’d whisper that I’d have rather moved to Iowa with Lolly than Vienna.

  Since there were no subway systems in Iowa, we bought our first car for the trip. It was a scarlet red, of course, because red was Vienna’s favorite color.

  “Most people in Iowa own a car,” my father said, stuffing more bags into the trunk.

  “Next you’ll be riding a tractor,” Lolly said. “And some cows.”

  I became instantly fixated on the cow.

  “I need a cow of my very own,” I declared, imagining myself arriving on the first day of school riding one, Queen Guinevere atop her royal bovine.

  “I hate cows,” Vienna said, watching us pack.

  “You can’t hate cows. You’re from Iowa. You were probably a farmer and went to cow shows,” I said.

  “I hate cows.”

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “I cannot abide this conversation,” my father said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Guinevere, your mother truly does not like cows. They scared her as a child. Could you, perhaps, not be an agitator?”

  I frowned.

  Five minutes later Vienna had forgotten our conversation entirely until I mooed.

  “I hate cows,” she said.

  My father gave me the look of death, so I bowed my head and mooed silently out of principle.

  And so it was, in the middle of a sweltering July, that we left our school friends but also our best friends—the doctors, therapists, and brain specialists we saw every day—for the big Midwest sky, somewhere in the middle of America.

  We bravely said good-bye to Lolly, but I’ll admit to tears when I looked back and saw her growing smaller and smaller.

  “I’ll come visit,” she had promised. “Se
e if your mama still remembers me.”

  Yeah. Good luck with that.

  • • •

  We drove through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and finally—Iowa. The trip put twelve hundred miles on the odometer, and my father got a speeding ticket on Interstate 74, but the closer we got to corn, the more relaxed he became.

  “Where are we going?” Vienna asked.

  “Neverland, of course,” I said, looking out the window.

  Usually my father did not allow us to lie to Vienna, but even he had a soft spot for Peter, Wendy, and the Lost Boys.

  “And Nana will be there.” Bitty clapped her hand over her mouth and giggled at the great luck of having a grandmother named after a character in our favorite story, even if it was the dog.

  Vienna grabbed my father’s arm and said in her soft-spoken voice, “I love Neverland! Can we go right now?” He smoothed her blond curls and smiled.

  Vienna clapped her hands like a small child because this was who she was now—a child whose memory no longer included me or Bitty; we were the lost children in her Neverland.

  When we passed a sign that said, WELCOME TO CROW, POPULATION 4,261, I began to sniff.

  “What’s that . . . smell?”

  My father laughed. “Who likes cows now?”

  “I hate cows,” Vienna said.

  I kicked the back of her seat.

  Eventually, we drove into Crow, a small town that followed the lazy, meandering Crow River. At first glance the river ran slow and deliberate, but underneath I could see the swirling of an undercurrent. This gave me a secret thrill.

  We pulled up in front of a large white farmhouse as Nana came down her tidy flower path. With an obvious effort to remain calm, she gingerly embraced her daughter.

  “Where’s Dad?” Vienna asked immediately. Nana smiled and redirected, “I’m so glad you’ve come home, darling.”

  When we entered the living room, my father took in the wallpaper, the old-fashioned giant pink, red, and yellow roses on all four walls.

  “I wanted to change it several times,” Nana said quickly. “But I thought . . . I shouldn’t.”

  My father smiled. “Thank you, Nancy. Familiarity is just what she needs.”

  I could see his pleasure when Vienna smiled at the old photographs on the walls and the hand-sewn doilies on every surface. When she ran her fingers over the piano, Nana was at her side.

  “I just had it tuned—so you could play.”

  Vienna sat and played a song from memory, something that always struck me as all wrong: the way her brain could remember music but not people. Her fingers were uncoordinated and spastic, moving more like webbed duck feet, and yet she could remember the notes and finger positioning. Often, her clumsiness caused frustration and tears, but not this time. She sat and played a disjointed Chopin while Nana stood, clasping both hands to her chest as if to protect her heart.

  Instead of listening, Bitty and I went upstairs to see our new room. We would be sharing Vienna’s old bedroom and the same lovely white furniture hand-picked by Nana for her five daughters, all of whom had shared the room at one time or another. It even had the same old-fashioned pink-and-white-flowered bedspread Vienna had once slept under.

  I would have preferred stripes.

  So many people came over to welcome my parents back to Crow that first day that Those poor, poor children echoed in the halls nonstop. To prove otherwise, I skipped through the house and laughed extra loud until Nana said I sounded more demented than happy.

  That first night, our father stayed with us until we were almost asleep, before heading out to check on Vienna. No surprise, she was having trouble adjusting to her new residence, a small care center in town. Perhaps one day soon, my father postulated, Vienna might be ready to try some overnight visits again. All of us together again, like a normal family. Poor Jed St. Clair. How could he forget the disastrous results of those New York experiments? Like the time Vienna forgot she was banned from using the gas stove and singed her eyebrows off.

  He tucked us into a double bed, turned out the light, then paused to sit. Little Bitty put her arms around my neck, and I started my usual story.

  “Peter came to the window,” I whispered, “because it was Wendy’s last night in the nursery. Nana was tied outside.” Bitty giggled again. “. . . and when they flew to Neverland, Wendy with the yellow hair found the Lost Boys.”

  “Wendy with the yellow hair,” Bitty whispered.

  “Yes,” I said. “All night Wendy told stories to the Lost Boys. She sang and rocked them to sleep until they remembered their mothers again. Then all the boys wanted to go home too and not be lost anymore.”

  Bitty sucked her thumb and fell into sleep beside me. Soon I was in my own Neverland slumber too, hovering between the real world and my imaginary one, where our father never sat all alone on the edge of my bed.

  CHAPTER 3

  I DREAMED OF THAT BIG LADY,” Bitty announced at breakfast a few days after José’s burial. “She was scary!”

  I gave her a small kick under the table along with a murderous look.

  “What? I didn’t tell!” she said.

  “Tell what?” Nana asked, turning from the stove.

  I put on my best wide-eyed, innocent face, which was the wrong tactic, because Nana narrowed her eyes like I had just robbed her jewelry box. As far as my father and Nana knew, we had only wandered into the Cutters’ backyard and gotten distracted by Jimmy and Micah on the way to the rocket slide.

  Instinctively, I had not told on Gaysie and her little let’s-bury-Gwyn party. I was still thinking of the words “accessory” and “crime scene.” After all, my fingerprints were on the shovel, so I had scared Bitty into keeping her trap shut. Sometimes, I told her, criminals come back for retaliation. The image of Gaysie Cutter coming after us sealed her lips as tight as superglue.

  “Was there an interaction with Ms. Gaysie?” my father asked, lowering the science journal he was reading. On the cover was a big and colorful picture of the brain, his most favorite subject. My father may have been a dentist by trade, but he was obsessed now with things like the brain’s “hippocampus” and “amygdala.” In particular, how memory worked. Because of our father, Bitty and I knew the anatomy of the brain like we knew our times tables.

  “Gaysie Cutter!” Nana said. “Of all the people to get entangled with on your first day.”

  “Yes,” I said, using a Vienna technique: deflection. “Did you know she commissioned her own coffin made and she’s not even dead yet?”

  My father chuckled.

  “Cuckoo,” I added.

  “Sometimes, Guinevere,” my father said, back to reading, “we do not recognize a person’s worth the way we should, just because they’re a bit different.”

  “Daddy. This is nothing like that.”

  I swear I saw Nana bite her tongue. We could at least agree on one thing: our obvious dislike for Gaysie Cutter.

  My father just chuckled again, still reading about brains, something I found most unfair, since I was not allowed to read at the table. I looked down at Nana’s heart-healthy breakfast: thick Oliver Twist orphan gruel.

  “Did Vienna like gruel as a kid?” I asked in my most pathetic voice. “Now she eats pancakes and sausage every day.”

  “It’s cracked wheat,” Nana said. “Gruel! You think you’re Oliver Twist now?”

  My father gave me a look.

  “Do you always call your mother Vienna?” Nana asked.

  “Sometimes it’s just easier that way,” my father answered.

  “Lolly says if we observe first, we can tell what to call her,” I said. “ ‘Mom’ doesn’t always work out so well.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Nana said with a strained voice. “Eat up.”

  I took a bite, unable to swallow. If I had a real mother, I’m sure she would have added “darling” or “honey” after ordering me to eat lumpy, mushy gruel.

  “Let’s not dawdle, Gwyn,” Nana added,
her back still to me.

  “Great thinkers are often mistaken for dawdlers.”

  I saw my father smile behind his journal.

  “Well, think and eat at the same time. Land sakes!” Nana said, then disappeared into the pantry. A sound suspiciously like that of a can opening echoed through the kitchen.

  “What is that?” I asked, swallowing abruptly. “Beer?”

  “Guinevere,” my father said. “Really.”

  I knew what was really in that can. It was a well-known fact that Nana was perfect, but I had recently discovered her one vice: Diet Coke. I kept the idea of bribery in my back pocket should the need ever arise.

  But I was also dismayed at the thought that Bitty and I necessitated Diet Coke with breakfast in order for Nana to get through the day. Our father had asked us to try very hard to be good girls. Nana, he said, had become accustomed to living alone. She liked things just so and was trying to cook healthy meals so we wouldn’t die under her care. Mothers, he said, bore many burdens. For example, I once overheard my father say that Vienna’s condition was the great tragedy of Nana’s life. But from where I sat, Nana should be happiest of all of us; she had at least had the best of Vienna.

  I grudgingly slid a small spoonful of mush into my mouth and looked up as Nana tidied the kitchen. She was wearing an ironed shirt and jeans, a spotless kitchen apron, and clean and practical indoor house slippers. Nana reminded me of a perfectly tied bow. Even in New York when she had visited, even without company, she was proper and polite, a woman who always buttoned her top button.

  “Well, we’d better get going to see Vienna,” my father said, folding his journal under his armpit. “Thank you for breakfast, Nancy. What do you say, girls?”

  “Thank you, Nana.”

  “Carry over your own dishes,” he said. “Your Nana is not to wait on you hand and foot.”

  I carried over my bowl. Impulsively, I turned and gave Nana a hug.

  “Oh!” she said, fluttering like a pigeon. “Thank you, Gwyn. You . . . are so much like your mother sometimes.”