Things I Want to Say (17 page)

We had dinner at the Lutece, overlooking the Grand Canal in the Venetian. Sitting at the white-draped table, surrounded by the other diners dressed in their finest, I could immerse myself in my fantasy of wealthy woman about town.
We flirted shamelessly with the waiter, who flattered us by flirting back.

After dinner, we took a cab to Treasure Island for Mystère and marveled at the acrobats and clowns. A pair of handsome older men bought us drinks, but we declined their invitation to spend the evening with them. “This is a girls’ night out,” Alice said, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the casino.

Over the next couple of hours, I learned I was horrible at blackjack. The rules of craps confused me and I was intimidated by the überserious poker players.

But I found my calling at the roulette wheel. A game where the chief elements you had to remember were even, odd, red or black was just my speed. I enjoyed a heady dose of beginner’s luck as well, winning again and again. Soon I had a pile of chips in front of me and an appreciative crowd around me, including a number of handsome men, some of whom even wore tuxedos.

I leaned forward and placed a stack of chips on the first range of numbers and waited for the dealer to spin the wheel.

I glanced up to smile at Alice and a tall man moved into my field of vision. He was so familiar I was sure at first I was dreaming. He looked right at me, his expression bland, and I almost doubled over in pain. I had to grab on to the edge of the table and started shaking uncontrollably.

“Ellen? Ellen, are you okay?” I was dimly aware of Alice calling me.

“Move back. Give her some air.” Alice clutched my shoulders and shook me gently. “Ellen, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay.” I stared at the spot where the man had been, but he was gone. Had I imagined the whole encounter? Was my conscience playing tricks on me?

Someone brought a glass of ice water and I drank half of it in one gulp. “I…I’m tired,” I said, pushing the glass away. “I think I’d better go back up to the room.” I turned to go, leaving my chips on the table, but Alice remembered to collect them. She swept the pile into her purse, then put her arm around me and led me toward the elevator.

By the time we got up to the room, I was feeling more stable and very foolish. “I’m sorry,” I said, and sank onto the edge of my bed. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Cocoa came over and shoved her nose under my hand and whimpered. I absently rubbed her ears.

“What happened?” Alice shoved her purse into the room safe and locked it, then came and sat across from me on the other bed. “One minute you were fine, then the next you looked like you were going to pass out.”

“It’s silly.” I stared at the floor.

“Try me.”

I took a deep breath. If she could trust me with the secret she’d revealed last night, I could tell her this. “I swear I saw a man who looked just like my father. As if his ghost was right there in front of me.”

“A doppelgänger,” Alice said.

“A what?”

“A doppelgänger. It means double in German. Someone who looks just like someone else.”

“I thought my mind was playing tricks on me.”

“It’s happened to me before, too.”

“It has?”

She nodded. “I’ve seen men who reminded me of both my ex-husbands. It’s unnerving to say the least.”

“No kidding.” I still felt queasy with the aftereffects of the encounter. “I know he’s dead, but there he was—it was too creepy.”

“I guess it’s like they say—the past always comes back to haunt us.”

The idea angered me. “Why should it have to?”

“Retribution? Redemption? Karma?” She shook her head. “All I know is I’ve been trying to put my past behind me for years and I never could. I’m hoping things will be better for me now that I’ve decided to own up to my mistakes and face the consequences, but I can’t be sure.”

“We can’t make amends for every mistake we’ve made in life,” I protested. “That’s impossible.”

“You’re probably right. But it’s impossible to forget them, either.”

“I just want to forget about my father,” I said. “I don’t want him—or his doppelgänger—sneaking up on me when I least expect it.”

“Maybe you need to do something to bury him again.”

I shuddered. “How would I do that?” Frannie had accused
me of digging up the past when I’d gone back to Ridgeway, but I don’t think she had this in mind.

“I don’t know.” Alice lay back on the bed, her feet still on the floor. “Don’t mind me. It’s probably just a weird coincidence and it doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe it’s your Puritan conscience getting back at you for winning at roulette.”

“You think I have a Puritan conscience?”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with that, but I’m guessing living it up in Vegas is not exactly your style.”

“I’m doing a lot of things on this trip I’ve never done before,” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”

I had left home unsure of what I wanted from life now that I’d met my goal of losing weight. I only knew I hadn’t found it yet—not in Virginia or Kansas or Las Vegas. Maybe Alice was right—I couldn’t move forward because the past continued to drag at me, an anchor pulling me down.

“Good for you.” Alice sat up again and looked at me. “Maybe it’s all part of making your own place in the world, like Grandpa Elvis talked about.”

“What would seeing my dad have to do with that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You’re sort of leaving your old life behind, right?”

I nodded.

“Then maybe your dad just stopped by to say goodbye.”

I called Frannie the next morning, needing to hear her voice. “Where are you?” she asked, then before I could even answer: “When are you coming home?”

“I’m in Las Vegas. I should be home in a few days.”

“What are you doing in Las Vegas?”

Planning an Elvis-themed wedding.
“I’m doing what people usually do in Las Vegas. Gambling. Seeing some shows.”

“It’s a waste of money.” She sniffed.

“I won more than four hundred dollars playing roulette last night.”

She had no answer for that. “I went over and cleaned your place yesterday,” she said. “There was dust everywhere and everything in the refrigerator was bad. I threw it all out.”

I winced at the idea of Frannie tossing out my rotten eggs and spoiled milk. “You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “I would have taken care of that when I got back.”

“I changed your diapers when you were a baby. That was a lot worse than dealing with spoiled food.”

I made a face. Frannie brought up the diaper thing as a way of putting me in my place—a not-so-subtle reminder that there was nothing about me she didn’t know. “You were three years old when I was born,” I said. “You couldn’t have done much diaper changing.”

“I was five by the time you were toilet trained. Believe me, I changed my share.”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t call to argue over my diapers,” I said.

“Then why did you call? To brag about your gambling winnings?”

She was peeved, though whether at me or at life in general I couldn’t tell. “I called because I wanted to talk to my sister. I’ve missed you.”

A long silence, then, “I’ve missed you, too.”

“I had an odd thing happen to me last night,” I said. “While I was playing roulette, I looked up and saw a man who looked just like Daddy.”

“You never did hold your liquor well.”

“I wasn’t drinking. I just looked up and there he was. It was such a shock I almost fainted.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor when you get home. When was the last time you had a complete checkup?”

“I’m not sick. Or crazy.” At least I didn’t think I was. “Alice says it was a doppelgänger—Dad’s double.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Then she changed the subject again. “I’ve been working on a new scrapbook. It’s all about my most famous clients. I’m going to put it on display at the shop when I’m finished.”

I refused to let her avoid this topic anymore. “Do you ever think about him much? About Daddy?”

“No. Never.” The words were clipped. Final.

“I think about him all the time,” I admitted. “Even when I don’t want to.” Lately I’d been thinking about him more than ever. Wondering if things could have ever been different between us. Could I have done something, said something—

“Don’t,” Frannie said. “No good will come of it.”

I pushed on, refusing to drop the subject, no matter how painful it was. “When I was in Ridgeway, I thought I should go by the cemetery, visit his and Mama’s graves. But I couldn’t make myself do it.”

“They’re gone. You don’t owe them anything.”

“Don’t I? Frannie, they were our parents, even if they weren’t very good ones. I always wonder if we couldn’t have done something different—”

“No. We did the only thing we could. It’s over now. I don’t want to talk about it, ever again.”

Always before, I had let her silence me, but I couldn’t stifle my feelings any longer. “Maybe we
should
talk, Frannie,” I said. “Maybe part of the problem is that we’ve kept silent for too many years.”

“It would be a waste of words.”

“I told Alice some of what happened.”

“You didn’t! How dare you!” I recoiled from the fury in her voice.

“I didn’t tell her everything,” I said. “Just some of it. I think it helped, getting it out in the open. Like airing a wound.”

“Those are
my
secrets, too.” Her voice shook with rage.
“You didn’t have the right to share them with someone who’s little more than a stranger.”

“Alice is my friend,” I said. “And what I told her was about me.”

“It’s about me, too. It can’t help but be. You and I lived all that together. You can’t separate your part from my part.”

This was the problem with our relationship in a nutshell. I loved my sister dearly, but her feelings for me went beyond that kind of love. She couldn’t separate my life from her own. She wanted to own not only the day-to-day events, but my feelings and emotions and reactions, as well. And we’d been twined together for so many years, I wasn’t sure how I could ever untangle myself. “Alice won’t say anything,” I tried to reassure her. “You can trust her.”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

Which was perfectly true. Frannie didn’t even trust me. Not really. Which was probably another reason she was so disturbed by my long absence. “I’ll talk to you again in a few days,” I said.

“Hurry home,” she pleaded. “I’ve been thinking we should plan a really nice trip somewhere this year. Maybe Mexico, or even Europe.”

This was her peace offering. If I was so eager to travel, she would go with me, so that she could look after me, as she’d always done.

And so she could keep an eye on me.

“What do you think about taking a trip out to see the Grand Canyon?” Alice asked the next morning as we loaded the truck and prepared to leave Las Vegas behind.

I studied her over the tops of my sunglasses. “I think it’s time we headed for Ojai. You’ve put it off long enough.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see the Grand Canyon first?” She busied herself arranging the cooler behind the seat and avoided looking at me.

“It’s going to be okay with your kids,” I said. I had no way of knowing this for certain, but it was the most comforting thing I could think of to say. “Maybe not right away, but eventually.”

“I wish I could be sure.”

“Putting it off longer won’t make it any easier,” I said gently.

“You’re right.” She swung up into the driver’s seat and reached for her seat belt. “I guess we’d better get going.”

The next five hours seemed like the longest of the trip. Alice fidgeted constantly, changing the radio station, adjusting the air-conditioner controls and shifting in her seat. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and hummed under her breath.

Her nervousness was contagious. My stomach fluttered and my skin felt clammy. I wanted things to work out well for her. I wanted her to reunite with her children and find the happiness and healing she needed.

Frannie would have told me I read too many novels—that nothing ever worked out that way in real life. But why shouldn’t happy endings be as real as tragic ones? Maybe it’s just that good times don’t get the press bad events do.

Much as I wanted good things for Alice, I couldn’t think of anything I could do to help her. I settled for praying, though my emotions were so raw the best I could come up with was
please.

We pulled into Ojai that afternoon and found the apartment Alice had rented. “It’s got two bedrooms,” she said as we climbed the stairs to take a look. “Will you stay with me a few days longer?”

“What about Cocoa?” I looked at the little dog in my arms. Funny how she felt so much a part of my life after such a short time.

“What about her?”

“You said the apartment doesn’t allow dogs.”

“She’s little—no one will see her. And if they do, I’ll explain you’ll be here only a couple of days.”

That was one big difference between Alice and me. I’d spent so much of my life adhering strictly to every rule, while Alice looked at rules more as guidelines, to be followed when it was convenient to do so and overlooked when it suited her.

“I’ll stay a couple of days,” I said. “To help you get settled.” I wasn’t all that anxious to return to Frannie and my routine life, not when so much felt so unsettled between me and my sister and within myself.

After the furniture was unloaded and we’d returned the truck, we took a taxi back to the apartment. I followed Alice into the kitchen, where she opened a box and began unwrapping dishes. “Do you want me here when you call your children?” I asked. I knew it had to be on her mind, though she hadn’t said a word about it. I wanted to let her know I was there to help if she needed me.

“I can’t call yet. I don’t have my phone hooked up yet.” She unwrapped a plate and avoided looking at me.

“You have a cell phone.”

She nodded, then set aside the plate and faced me. “I’m scared.”

I moved closer and took her hand in mine. “I know you are. Just call. I think it will hurt worse if you don’t.”

She nodded and retrieved her purse from the living room. “Do you want me to leave?” I asked. “No, stay.”

Her hands shook so much she had to try three times before she could punch in the number. I waited, eyes fixed on her, scarcely breathing, silently counting the electronic rings. One…two…three…four…

“Hello!” Alice’s voice was strained, artificially cheerful. “Is this Bettina?”

She clamped the phone tighter to her ear, so that I was
only able to hear one side of the conversation. I turned my back, feeling like an intruder, yet aching for a happy ending to all Alice’s years of pain.

“This is Alice MacCray…your mother… I…I know it’s been a long time since we talked, and I wanted you to know how sorry I am about that… Yes. I understand that. But I’m in Ojai now. I wondered if I could see you… Yes, but if I could just…”

There was a long silence, then I heard the phone clatter on the counter. Alice stood, slumped, head down, so still she might have been a mannequin.

My heart twisted, and I wanted to put my arms around her, but I was frozen in place by fear and uncertainty. “What did she say?” I asked.

“She said she didn’t want to see me. That…that she didn’t have a mother.” A dry sob ripped from her throat, and her knees buckled.

I rushed forward to catch her and half dragged her to the living room onto the sofa. “She’s hurt and angry right now,” I said. “That’s only natural. But now that she knows you’re here, that will change.”

“How can you say that?” Alice sobbed. “Why should she change her mind about me?”

I searched desperately for some word of comfort. Why
should
Alice’s daughter change her mind? Why did I believe she would?