No Greater Love (21 page)

“Stop that!” Edwina intoned, wondering why, suddenly feeling like a child herself … stop making us laugh!… stop making me feel better!… stop keeping us from crying!… She thought about it for a moment, and without a sound, Edwina put three peas on her own fork and silently hurled them across the
table at George, as he retaliated in glee, and she threw three more peas back at him, while the younger children squealed with excitement. And far, far away … Phillip rolled relentlessly toward Harvard.

THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER PHILLIP LEFT, THEY ALL FELT THE
pain, and for them, the pain of loss was far too familiar. It was a leaden feeling, and within a week, Edwina saw signs of the strain telling on Alexis. She began to stutter, which she had done before, for a brief time after they first lost their parents. The stutter had disappeared fairly quickly then, but this time it seemed to be more persistent. She was having nightmares again, too, and Edwina was worried about her.

She had just mentioned it to Ben that day, during a board meeting at the newspaper, and when she came home, faithful Mrs. Barnes told Edwina that Alexis had spent all afternoon in the garden. She had gone out there as soon as she had come home from school, and she hadn’t come in since. But it was a lovely warm day, and Edwina suspected that she was hiding in the little maze that their mother had always called her “secret garden.”

Edwina left her alone for a little while, and then shortly before dinner, when she hadn’t come back in, Edwina went back outside to find her. She called her, but as often was the case with the child, there was no answer.

“Come on, silly, don’t hide. Come on out and tell me what you did today. We have a letter from Phillip.” It had been waiting for her in the front hall, along with one from Aunt Liz that mentioned her not being very well, and having sprained her ankle when she went to London to see the doctor. She was one of those people that unhappy things happened to. And she had just asked Edwina again if she’d finally emptied her mother’s room, and the question had annoyed her. In fact, she hadn’t yet, but she still didn’t feel ready to face it, or to do it to Alexis. “Come on, sweetheart, where are you?” she called, glancing at the rosebushes at the far end, sure she was hiding there, but when she walked the length of the garden, and peeked into all the familiar places, she still couldn’t find her. “Alexis? Are you there?” She looked some more, and even climbed up to George’s old, abandoned tree house, and she tore her skirt as she jumped down, but Alexis was nowhere.

Edwina went back into the house and asked Mrs. Barnes if she was sure she’d been out there, but the old woman assured her that she had seen Alexis sit for hours in the garden. But Edwina knew only too well that Mrs. Barnes paid very little attention to the children. Sheilagh was supposed to do that, but she had left shortly after Easter, and Edwina took care of them herself now.

“Did she go upstairs?” Edwina asked pointedly, and Mrs. Barnes said she didn’t remember. She’d been tinning tomatoes all afternoon, and she hadn’t been paying close attention to Alexis.

Edwina checked Alexis’s room, her own, and then finally
walked slowly upstairs, remembering Liz’s words in her letter only that day. “… it’s high time that you faced it, and cleared those rooms out. I’ve done it with all Rupert’s things …” But it was different for her, Edwina knew, and all she wanted now was to find where Alexis was hiding, and solve whatever problem had driven her to it.

“Lexie?…” She pulled back curtains, rustled her mother’s skirts, and noticed that there was a musty smell in the room now. They had been gone for a long time, almost eighteen months. She even looked under the bed, but Alexis was nowhere.

Edwina went downstairs and asked George to help her look around, and finally, an hour later, she was beginning to panic.

“Did something happen today at school?” But neither Fannie nor George knew anything about it, and Teddy had been with Edwina when she went to the paper. The secretaries there were always happy to baby-sit for him, while she went to her meetings. And at three and a half, he was a little charmer. “Where do you suppose she is?” she asked George. Nothing special had gone wrong, and no one seemed to have any idea where she’d gone. The dinner hour came and went, and Edwina and George conducted another search in the garden, and they finally came to the conclusion that she was nowhere in the house or on the grounds. Edwina went into the kitchen then, and after some hesitation, decided to call Ben. She didn’t know what else to do, and he promised to come over at once to help her find Alexis. And he was frantically ringing the doorbell ten minutes later.

“What happened?” he asked, and for an odd moment, Edwina thought he looked like her father. But she didn’t have time to think of it now, as she brushed
her stray hair off her face. Her upswept hairdo had been torn apart while she searched for Alexis in the garden.

“I don’t know what happened, Ben. I can’t imagine. The children said nothing happened in school today, and Mrs. Barnes thought she was in the garden all afternoon, but she wasn’t, at least not by the time I got there. We’ve looked everywhere, inside the house and out, and she’s just not here. I don’t know where she could have gone to.” She had few friends at school, and she never wanted to play at their houses. And everyone in the family knew that she had always been the sensitive one, and she had never totally recovered from their mother’s death. She was just as likely to disappear as she was not to speak for days on end. It was just the way she was, and they all accepted her that way. But if she’d run away, God only knew where she was or what it meant, and what would happen to her when she got there. She was a beautiful child, and in the wrong hands, anything might have happened.

“Have you called the police yet?” Ben tried to appear calm, but he was as worried as she was. And he was glad that Edwina had called him.

“Not yet. I called you first.”

“And you have no idea where she’s gone?” Edwina shook her head again, and a moment later Ben walked into the kitchen and called the police for her. Mrs. Barnes had already helped put Fannie and Teddy to bed, and she’d told them it was very, very naughty to run away, and Fannie had cried and asked if they would ever find her.

George was standing with Edwina as Ben called the police, and half an hour later they rang the front doorbell and Edwina went to answer. She explained that she had no idea where her sister had gone, and the sergeant who had come asked in some confusion who the child’s parents were. Edwina explained that she was Alexis’s
guardian, and he promised to search the neighborhood and report back to her in an hour.

“Should we come?” she asked worriedly, glancing at Ben.

“No, ma’am. We’ll find her. You and your husband wait here with the boy.” He smiled at them comfortingly and George glared at Ben. He liked him as a friend, but he didn’t like him being referred to as Edwina’s “husband.” Just like Phillip, he was possessive about his older sister.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” George growled at her, when the policeman had left.

“Tell him what?” Her mind was totally on Alexis.

“That Ben isn’t your husband.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake … will you please concentrate on finding your sister and not this nonsense?” But Ben had heard it too. After a year and a half of her full attention, night and day, they all felt as though they owned her. It wasn’t a healthy thing for any of them, he thought, he also knew that it was none of his business. Edwina wanted to run her family as she chose, and unfortunately he had no reason to interfere with them. He looked up at her worriedly again, and they went over the possibilities, of where Alexis might have gone, and with whom, and he volunteered to drive her in his car to the child’s various friends’ houses, and Edwina jumped to her feet with a hopeful look and told George to wait for the policeman.

But a tour of three neighboring houses turned up nothing at all. They said that Alexis hadn’t been to visit in weeks, and more and more Edwina found herself thinking of how upset Alexis had been ever since Phillip left for Cambridge.

“You don’t suppose she’d do something crazy like try to hop a train, do you, Ben?” It was her idea, but Ben thought it more than unlikely.

“She’s afraid of her own shadow, she can’t be far from here,” he said as they walked up the front steps again. But when Edwina mentioned it to George, he narrowed his eyes and started thinking.

“She asked me how long it takes to get to Boston last week,” George confessed with an unhappy frown, “but I didn’t think anything of it. God, Win, what if she does try to catch a train? She won’t even know where she’s going.” And she could get hurt … she could trip on the tracks, fall trying to get into a freight car … the possibilities were horrifying as Edwina began to look frantic. It was ten o’clock at night by then and it was painfully obvious that something terrible had happened.

“I’ll take you down to the station, if you like, but I’m sure she wouldn’t do anything like that,” Ben said quietly, trying to reassure them both, but George only snapped at him. He was still amazed at the policeman’s assumption that Ben was Edwina’s husband.

“You wouldn’t know anything about it.” From close family friend, he had suddenly become a threat to George. Phillip’s jealousy of him before he left for school had not been entirely lost on him either. And although Edwina normally kept a firm grip on them, this time she was far too worried about their younger sister to pay much attention to what George was saying.

“Let’s go.” She picked a shawl up off the hall table, and ran out the front door, just as the policeman returned, but the man at the wheel only shook his head.

“No sight of her anywhere.”

Ben drove her down to the station in his Hupmobile with George in the backseat, and all along the way, Edwina glanced nervously out the window, but there was no sign of Alexis anywhere. And at ten-thirty at night the station was almost deserted. There were the trains to San Jose, and it was a roundabout way of going east instead of taking the ferry to Oakland station.

“This is a crazy idea,” Ben started to say, but as he did, George disappeared, running through the station, and to the tracks behind it.

“Lexie!…” he called. “Lexie!…” He cupped his hands and shouted, and the words echoed in silence. There was the occasional grinding of an engineer shifting wheels as they sidetracked a locomotive or a car here and there, but on the whole there was nothing and no one, and no Alexis.

Edwina had followed him by then, and she didn’t know why, but she trusted George’s instincts. In some ways he knew Alexis better than anyone else, better even than Edwina or Phillip.

“Lexie …” he shouted for her endlessly, and Ben tried to get them to turn back, just as they heard a train wailing in the distance. It was the last Southern Pacific freight train that came in every night shortly before midnight. There was a long beam of light in the distance, and as it approached, Edwina and Ben stood safely behind a gate, and then with a sudden flash there was a quick movement, a tiny white blur, a something, an almost nothing, and George took off like a shot across the tracks before Edwina could stop him. And then she realized what he’d seen. It was Alexis, huddled between two cars, frightened and alone, she was carrying something in her hand, and even from the distance Edwina could see that it was the doll she had rescued from the
Titanic.

“Oh, my God …” She grabbed Ben’s arm, and then started under the gate to go after them, but he pulled her back.

“No … Edwina … you can’t …” George was headed in a straight line across the tracks in front of the oncoming train, toward the child who lay huddled next to the tracks. If she didn’t move, she would be hit, and George had seen it all too clearly. “George! No!…”
she screamed, tearing herself from Ben, and heading across the tracks after her little brother. But her words were lost in the scream from the oncoming train as she headed after him. Ben looked around frantically, wanting to pull a switch, an alarm, to stop everything, but he couldn’t, and he felt tears sting his cheeks as he waved frantically at the engineer, who didn’t see him.

And through it all, George was hurtling toward Alexis like a bullet, and Edwina was stumbling toward him, falling over the tracks, her skirt held in her hands, and screaming soundlessly for him, and then with the rush of a hurricane, the train sped past her, and it seemed an interminable wait for it to go by. But when it was gone, sobbing uncontrollably, she ran ahead looking for them, sure that she would find them both dead now. But instead, what she saw was Alexis, covered with dirt, her blond hair caked with dust, as she lay under a train, her brother’s arms around her, lying in the place where he had pushed her. He had reached her, just in time, and the force of his body hitting her much smaller one, as he dove for her, had pushed them both to safety. She was wailing in the sudden stillness of the night, as the train shrieked away into the distance, and Edwina fell to her knees looking at them both, and holding them, as Ben ran to where they lay, and looked down at them with tears pouring down his own cheeks. There was nothing he could say, to either of them, or even to Edwina. In a moment, Ben helped her up, and George pulled Alexis out from under the train. Ben swept her up into his arms, and carried her to the car, as George put an arm around Edwina. She stopped before they reached the car, and looked down at him. At thirteen, he had become a man, as surely as their father had been. Not a boy, or a clown, or a child anymore, but a man, as she cried and held him to her.

“I love you … oh, God … I love you … I
thought you were …” She started to sob again, and she couldn’t finish her sentence. Her knees were still shaking as they walked slowly to the car, and on the way home Alexis told them what George had instinctively known, she had been going to find Phillip.

“Don’t
ever
do that again!” Edwina told her as she bathed her at the house, and put her between the clean sheets of her own bed. “Never! Something terrible could have happened to you.” There, and on the
Titanic
, twice now she had almost lost her life from running away, and the next time, Edwina knew she might not be as lucky. If George hadn’t pushed her out of the way of the train … she couldn’t bear to think about it, and Alexis promised her she would never do it again, it was just that she missed Phillip. “He’ll come home again,” Edwina told her thoughtfully, she missed him too, but he had a right to what he was doing.