Chasing endless summer, p.4
Chasing Endless Summer, page 4
I didn’t stop to sit at the table Simon had chosen. I continued to walk toward the garden instead. I remembered my mother enjoyed it and took me to it most of the times we came to Sutherland. However, I couldn’t remember my grandmother enjoying it with us more than twice. She was always busy with something. Mommy said her mother was the only person she knew who had devoted her life to ignoring it, whatever that meant.
“Hey, where you going?” Simon called after me. I ignored him.
He caught up with me and seized my right elbow. I turned sharply on him.
“I’m just going to talk to your mother, Simon. Get your breakfast. I’m not as hungry as you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell her that I overheard anything between her and my father and then told you,” he warned. “You’d be sorry if you did.”
I pulled my arm from his grip.
“Take it easy,” Simon continued. “I only mean I won’t be able to find things out for you. No one else is going to tell you anything, especially Mrs. Lawson.”
“You’re not the only one with brains. I’m not stupid,” I said, and walked on.
Aunt Holly didn’t know I was there until I sat beside her on the bench.
“Oh, Caroline,” she said, wiping the tears off her cheeks. “So much new grief so soon.”
“Yes. I was hoping to spend more time with my grandmother.”
“I’m sure after things settled down, she would have liked that.”
“Why?”
“Why what, honey?”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Oh. Well, I think she reached a point where she would have defied anyone. She didn’t have the strength, perhaps, but she had the will.”
She looked straight into the garden and not at me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do more to help you, not that I have that much influence here or ever have. I was very fond of your mother. She was actually my best friend in so many ways. I also felt sorry about your grandmother, sorrier than her own son felt,” she said, turning back to me with a flash of anger in her eyes. “Very often, especially in the earlier days, whenever I came here with Martin, I would spend my time with Judith. We were more like sisters comforting each other.”
She smiled.
“I don’t know which one of us had more complaints that we were afraid to voice to anyone else. For a long time, I blamed my weakness on the loss of my child, but I should have gotten stronger. Your grandfather is a force few can reckon with, especially not his son.”
She looked back at Simon, who had just been given a glass of orange juice.
“It seems I’m failing everyone now.” She looked at me again. “I’m hoping you’ll be stronger as you get older. Or maybe you will live with your father and escape Sutherland.”
“I don’t think that even if I lived with him and his new family in Hawaii, I would escape Sutherland,” I said. From what well of knowledge I drew that, I couldn’t say. It just felt like something my mother would say, because she had never truly escaped, either.
Aunt Holly smiled and stroked my hair.
“Maybe you’ll surprise us all and be the strongest. My husband and, unfortunately, my son are servants. Both cherish my father-in-law’s favor.”
She looked back at Simon again.
“Be careful with Simon. He’s grown into almost a stranger. I know he’s brilliant, but most of the time, I wish he was just an average teenager. I think it was a mistake to let him become part of that Advanced Placement program. Young people need the company of other young people. Good grades and being ambitious are important, very important, but socializing is just as important. I missed out on it and grew up almost as isolated as Martin did, which was what attracted us to each other. I thought he’d get stronger after we married and had our own home.”
She smiled.
“Actually, I thought your grandfather would get weaker with time and Martin would develop his self-confidence and his own self-image. Perhaps it’s not too late. I guess we just have to wait and see,” she said. “After the funeral, I’m going to try to be here more often for you. Maybe you’ll be the daughter I lost. Would you like that?”
If I said yes, I felt I would be betraying my mother, but I could sense Aunt Holly might need me more than I’d need her.
I nodded.
She put her arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead just the way Mommy would.
“The women have to stick together in this family,” she said, and smiled.
“I’d like to know more about Great-aunt Irene,” I said. “I never even heard her name mentioned.”
She sighed. “In time. Too much about this family at once could smother you,” she said.
We sat silently.
“Hey,” we heard Simon say. He had gotten up and drawn closer to us. “Mrs. Wilson made a great breakfast. Everyone needs to eat something, right, Mother?” he asked. He sounded just like Grandfather Sutherland, enough like him to make Aunt Holly turn and nod.
“Yes, Simon’s right. We don’t want to get weak just when we need strength the most.”
“Well, it’s not the most, but it’s important enough,” Simon said, then turned and headed back toward the patio, satisfied he had made his point.
Aunt Holly rose, and I followed. She held my hand.
“Like I said, be careful with Simon,” she said, and we started for the patio.
I almost stopped her to tell her what he had already done to me, but that would have revealed everything.
And Simon was right.
Once I told her, I might well be locked up in that horrible bedroom again.
CHAPTER TWO
I told Simon that I didn’t need his help to do Dr. Kirkwell’s work assignments, but he kept insisting he could do my work in minutes. I thought he just wanted to show off, and I was getting tired of it.
“If I don’t do it and she questions me about it, I’ll be in trouble not remembering what I supposedly had done,” I told him firmly.
I walked away before he could respond, but he followed me to the study next to Grandfather Sutherland’s office. I was tempted to let him do the assignment. I really didn’t want to do any homework. I wanted to mourn Grandmother Judith’s passing, maybe return to the garden where Aunt Holly had sat and think about my grandmother. I was sure my mother would want me to do that, but everyone else in this house was going on with his or her work as if nothing had happened. Immediately after a little breakfast, Aunt Holly had decided to go home and asked Emerson to take her. Uncle Martin still hadn’t returned from wherever he had to go, and Grandfather hadn’t come out of his office.
Except for the sound of vacuum cleaners and the footsteps of maids here and there, the enormous house echoed with deep silence. It expanded the emptiness hollowed out in my heart. I wanted to cry but somehow couldn’t find the tears. It had been so long since I heard my grandmother speak, especially to me. How would I mourn her, someone I really didn’t know? She never came to visit us, even when we were the Robot Family. She couldn’t even sneak over, because Daddy would surely mention it to Grandfather. Because of Grandfather’s attitude about birthdays, she never attended one of mine, and if I received any gifts from her, they seemed to come directly from a store with a generic card printed “Grandmother J.” I suspected Mrs. Lawson was asked to do it and did so reluctantly. However, the more I learned about her and her life with Grandfather, the less I blamed her. She was still my grandmother.
Maybe all the sorrow will come later at night, the garden in which sadness grows so much more easily, I thought. When you’re alone, your feelings have a better opportunity to overwhelm you. Very little is competing for your attention. That was surely true for me in the horrid bedroom for months where I spent almost all day and night by myself. It made it all so much more difficult. Mrs. Lawson enjoyed grinding that into me: “You young people aren’t afraid of anything as much as you are of solitude. Without your constant music and chatter on those mobile phones, you’d wither like dried-out flowers. That’s why you’ll gladly obey and try to be reborn.”
She wasn’t wrong about people my age especially, except maybe when it applied to someone like Simon, who seemed to prefer his own company above the company of others his age. I couldn’t imagine him listening to popular music or even watching television. Ironically, I thought, he was another Prissy, aging faster and faster. Maybe he was realizing it, and that was why he suddenly wanted me to like him, but I wouldn’t let myself feel sorry for him. At least, I hoped I wouldn’t. Instinctively, I knew he might somehow take advantage of it. Really, how sad was that? Maybe nobody trusted him if his own mother didn’t.
This was a mansion and a family where love could come from a spigot in drips and drabs. Like a beggar in a gutter, you held out your palms and hoped for a sign of affection or a kind word. It had been true for my mother and grandmother. It seemed to be true for my uncle and aunt as well. Why would it be any different for me? Where would I go unless my father decided he would give me another chance and invite me to his new home in Hawaii?
When I sat at the table and opened the math workbook, Simon stood behind me, looking over my shoulder, watching.
“You’re making me nervous,” I said.
“What did you and my mother talk about?” he asked. “You were talking quite a while before I interrupted.”
“Grandmother Judith. Maybe you didn’t notice, but your mother is quite upset. I don’t know why your father didn’t stay with her. He’s the one who should have been in that garden with her.”
He was quiet. I started working on the math problems.
“My parents hardly do anything together anymore,” he suddenly said. “I hate eating dinner with them. It’s like eating in a morgue sometimes. It’s why I like spending more of my time here. They’ll never stop feeling guilty about my sister.”
“Well, what do you do to help them?”
“I’ve given them a lot to brag about.”
“Oh boy. How generous,” I said. I put my hands in my lap and turned to him. “Did you even cry about it?”
“Cry? What good would that have done?”
“Showed you cared and you felt sorry for them as well as your little sister. It’s called compassion and sorrow. Didn’t you read that in any of your textbooks?”
“Very funny.”
I turned back to the work. “You’re making me nervous. Why don’t you go do what you do?” I said, but I couldn’t really concentrate and stared at the same problem for minutes, thinking about the things Aunt Holly had said.
Finally, he took the pen out of my hand. “Just watch. You’ll learn that way, too,” he said. It was impossible to understand any of what he did. He zoomed through the answers as if they were already there and he had only to trace them.
“I can’t keep up with you.”
“When you have time, you can reread them.”
He closed the math workbook and opened the English grammar one. With the same lightning speed, he finished the pages that Dr. Kirkwell had assigned.
“She knows I’m not that perfect with grammar.”
“Don’t worry. I deliberately chose the wrong answer twice.”
He looked at the history assignment.
“Just pages to read. Do it to help put yourself to sleep tonight.”
I watched him work the science assignment and questions. He closed the book.
“There. What would have taken you two days, I’m sure. Now you have no excuse.”
“For what?”
“Like I said. We’ll explore the mansion. First, we’ll go down to the basement. There are things to show you, things you’ll want to learn about the family history. You’ll know what’s right to say and what’s not and why not. I had to teach it all to myself, make my own discoveries, but I think I did that pretty well.”
“Do you ever stop patting yourself on the back?”
He smiled. “Well, my hope is you’ll take over for me and do most of the patting.”
“Oh, you do, do you? You’re miles beyond help. I’m not sure you should take a chance and turn your back on me, either.”
He laughed, and then we heard Grandfather’s office door open and close. Neither of us moved or spoke.
“It’s Lawson,” he whispered. “I know her footsteps. She’s coming here.”
“So?”
“You never know what she’ll make up about us.”
He pressed himself to the wall by the door.
She opened it and looked in at me and around the room.
“Where’s Simon?” she asked.
“How would I know? He doesn’t tell me what he does. I don’t even know if he’s still here.”
I saw Simon smile, but I quickly looked down so she wouldn’t sense him standing there behind the opened door.
“Just don’t get in anyone’s way today,” she said.
She closed the door.
“That was pretty good,” he said. “Even I believed you. We make a good team.”
“To do what?”
“Take over Sutherland. What else? C’mon. I’ll even show you some of Grandmother’s old things. You’ll feel less guilty doing it.”
He opened the door and peered out. When he looked back and gestured, I rose and joined him. Maybe he was right. Maybe I should know all I could about the family and about this place. Daddy still had not agreed to let me come visit, let alone take me back. Whether I liked it or not, Sutherland would be my home. I had better learn Grandfather’s Ten Commandments. And I was eager to learn more about my great-grandparents and Grandmother Judith. Maybe there was even information about Great-aunt Irene.
I followed him down the corridor on the left to the basement door on our right.
“The basement is big, but it doesn’t run under the whole house. Grandfather added on to the mansion but just had slabs under the new construction.”
He opened the door and flipped a switch, illuminating the stairway, which seemed to disappear below as if it descended beneath the earth.
“Don’t look so nervous about it. I spent a lot of time down there alone. I made it my private clubhouse. It would take us years to go through everything. You’ll see.”
He started down and then turned to me.
“Close the door,” he said in a loud whisper when I stepped in and onto the top step. “Quickly.”
At the bottom of the stairway, Simon flipped another switch, and the cavernous basement exploded in light. I started down reluctantly and stopped when I saw mice rush for places to hide.
“Mice,” I said.
“They’re as harmless as Mickey. You probably lived with a few when you were being treated by Dr. Kirkwell.”
“Tortured, not treated.”
He laughed, and I continued to the bottom. About halfway to the far wall, the floor was cracked with pitted cement that looked yellow and gray in places. The walls were concrete and the air was musty. I didn’t see any windows. Already my lungs were complaining about dust and stale air. Spiderwebs hung from everywhere on the basement ceiling wall. They had an eerie design, as if each spider claimed a certain amount of inches and didn’t invade the others’. Pipes running along the ceiling looked sweaty, and there was the hum of various equipment, some boxed in on the far right but something else groaning about midway.
“Ugh,” I said. “Why would you want to come down here?”
“Like I told you: discoveries. I’m still making them. Come on,” he said. “I have something very special to show you first.”
“Why is there so much furniture down here, and from the looks of the dust on the sheets covering them, down here a long time?” I asked as I followed him.
“It’s all Great-grandfather’s furniture. After he died, Grandfather Sutherland replaced everything in the mansion except the portraits and some other paintings. One of these days, he’ll sell everything to an antiques dealer and make a small fortune. That’s how he thinks. It’s all investments, even people.”
“He likes to erase the memories of people,” I said, “more than make money on them.”
Simon paused to look back at me. “Exactly. If there’s no evidence of them, there’s no competition with their legacy. Lesson one: one of the worst things you can do is compliment Great-grandfather Sutherland for building the foundation of the Sutherland empire. All of Great-grandfather’s plaques and awards are in that box over there,” he said, pointing. “Grandfather doesn’t like having them in his face. The less said about Great-grandfather, the more Grandfather likes it.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t know enough about Sutherland Enterprises or him to compliment Great-grandfather.”
“Grandfather hates anyone even suggesting he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. If he says anything about his father, it will revolve around how he corrected and improved everything he did. According to him, he saved the Sutherland business. Great-grandfather was unable to adjust to more modern times. Grandfather says his father was mainly lucky.”
“Was that true?”
Simon paused to think and then nodded. “Adjusting to more modern times in business meant being more ruthless, getting there first. Grandfather loves to say, ‘He who hesitates is lost.’ ”
He walked on, passing some black leather-bound trunks, all the same kinds of trunks with straps around them.
“What’s in these?”
“I’ll show you after I show you this,” he said. “As I promised, a couple of them have Grandmother Judith’s things as well as Great-grandmother Abigail’s. Most of Grandmother Judith’s are the things she had when she first married Grandfather. He eventually had her whole wardrobe replaced. My mother says he dressed her like a store mannequin at the start. Later she became very fashionable, as you might remember, and gradually replaced the wardrobe he liked with more expensive things. He was too embarrassed to cut off her credit. He tried to hold her to an allowance, but she enjoyed spending more. You’ll read about it in the diaries that are stashed down here, how he would bellow at a new bill at dinner while she calmly ate and talked about this upcoming charity event or that. She wrote that if she spent an extraordinary amount, she would be sure to invite someone to dinner so he would have to swallow his complaints along with his food.”
