The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster Page 14

  Christian paused, slowly connecting the mental dots that led Annie to make that statement. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. As she turned to glare, he added quickly, “Yes, that’s terrible, but there’s something more important at stake here.”

  “What could be more important than my grandmother’s life?” she demanded.

  “Yours!” Realizing he’d just opened a can of worms, Christian withdrew, running his finger over a dent he’d put in the table during their first tea together more than a year ago. He’d been terribly nervous that day, stuttering so badly he’d resorted to using a pen and pad to write down an occasional, stubborn word that Annie would promptly decorate with hearts and flowers using a pink felttip.

  He’d managed to topple a teacup within minutes of being served.That would have been bad enough, but he’d jarred the table as he leaped to right it, and a pewter candleholder had overbalanced, stringing a line of wax across the plate of biscuits while gouging a moon-shaped dent into the tabletop.

  Annie’d only just managed to grab his hand before he could start mopping up the mess with one of her prized linen napkins. She’d whisked out a roll of paper towels and shooed him from the table. With words lodged in his throat, Christian had quickly scribbled a note that evolved somehow from offering to pay for its repair to buying her a new table altogether.

  When she’d wiped up the tea, replaced the biscuits, and covered the dent with a lace doily, Annie had coaxed him from the corner where he was desperately trying to disappear. “Just a second ago it was a dent,” she’d said, laying the note aside to pour him another cup. “Now it’s a story you and I will be laughing over for years to come. Do you think for one minute I’d trade that for a new table?” When he’d shyly pointed out that her cuff was swimming in the mustard bowl, she’d cussed like a sailor and dashed to the sink, knocking over the second candleholder in the process.

  Coming back to himself, Christian said, “Remember this?” tapping the dent.

  She nodded, though her expression indicated that she was on high alert. “I saved the note.” Relenting a little, she added, “Did I really say ‘shit on a stick’?”

  “Among other things.”

  They stared at one another, at a bit of a standoff.

  Christian spoke first. “Annie…Elsbeth’s your family,” he said quietly. “The two of you share a bloodline. And that means a potential bone-marrow donor is just across that wheat field in the back.”

  The room stilled as if the air was sucked out of it, then rushed back in when she rounded on him. “How can you possibly know about—” She stopped midsentence. Guilt was written all over his face. “You’ve been snooping,” she said.

  “I didn’t go riffling through your d-drawers, if that’s what you mean. But I considered anything you left on the console t-t-table fair game.” Without moving a muscle, he gave the impression of melting into the bench he was sitting on. “You don’t tell me anything, Annie,” he added.

  “It’s nobody’s business.”

  “It’s my business!” he said, slamming his fist on the tabletop and causing Annie to jump. “Mmm… Damn it, n-not now!” He let out a lungful of air, calming himself. “M-mine,” he finished, more quietly. “You’re muh-muh-my friend, my best friend.”

  Annie cut him off before he could continue. “For heaven’s sake, if we’re going to fight, I want it to be fair,” she said. “Turn around until you’re back in control. That always seems to help.”

  She stirred the air with her finger, and Christian twisted in his seat, looking at the wall. “Let’s be honest—my only r-r-r-real… friend, though Edmond seems to have some potential.” He sighed and turned around to meet her gaze, his eyes as big as a pair of peach pits whose juice had worried a sour-sweet trail down the bridge of his nose. “I have no one,” he said. “With you gone, I have no one.” Having said that, he turned back, facing the wall, but not before she caught a fleeting, tragic glimpse of pain in his features.

  Annie tried to muster up some anger over his little betrayal but found that she couldn’t. Over the course of their relationship, she’d never once heard Christian express a selfish sentiment. It frightened her. And the pain in his face was making it clear just how much her silence had cost him. So, she filled the cup she’d just washed with coffee and wandered over to stand next to the table. Setting it down, she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, placing her hands on her hips. “What do you know?” she asked.

  “Well…” He paused, noticing a hint of crimson collecting in the cleft between her nose and upper lip. He fished a tissue out of his pocket and handed it to her, his words limping along as he spoke. “Aside from figuring out that you’re on a list for transplant donors, I know the obvious. You’re an orphan, making donors hard to come by. You haven’t asked…me, which kind of hurts.” He looked up, adding, “I’d say ‘yes,’ by the way.”

  “I know.” She pressed the tissue under her nose, slid into the nook, and leaned back against the bench’s upright, closing her eyes. “You’re not a compatible donor,” she said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Her eyes sprang open, but her expression was guarded as she peered at him from above the wad of tissue.

  Suddenly, he understood. “You too?” he asked, realizing that Annie had been doing a little snooping of her own.

  She blotted her nose a couple times before tossing the tissue in a bin. “I might have slipped a note to Nicki along with a twentydollar bill when we donated blood together in February,” she confessed. The corner of her lips pressed in a moue of distaste, as she added, “It was tacky. I know.”

  “You could’ve just asked.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you would’ve asked why.” She reached into her purse for a compact to touch up her nose and cheeks. “We had our blood type tested as part of science class when I was in third grade. I was AB negative. Less than one in a hundred, my teacher told me. How very special.” Annie leaned forward, resting her cheek in her hand. “Now it feels like a noose around my neck.”

  “But Elsbeth…”

  “One out of a hundred, Christian,” she repeated, reaching for her cup. “It’s been five years. Hope hasn’t worked out so well for me, so I live by a more practical philosophy.” Before the panic in his face could find a voice, she added, “I’m not dying. It’s just inconvenient…and, I’ll admit, awful at times.”

  “You can’t give up.”

  “Do you think for one second that I want to be sick?” she asked, bristling as she set the cup aside. “Constantly measuring what I want to do against what I can? Misunderstood by those who don’t know me and pitied by those who do?” She snatched the compact off the table and dropped it in her purse. “It’s just easier to be alone. Less fuss.”

  “But it’s not about pity. This isn’t, anyway.”

  “It’s not? Are you sure?” She gazed at Christian quizzically. “I think it is,” she said.

  Christian’s forehead creased as he thought about her question, a gesture that somehow made him look even younger. “I don’t pity you,” he said finally. “But every time I pretend to suddenly notice something new on the pathway we’ve walked each day for the last year just so you can catch your breath, I want to—”

  He started rubbing the dent in the table with his thumb, swallowing before glancing at her from the corner of his eye. “Do you know why I always carry my cell phone on our walks even though you’re the only person who ever calls it?” Letting her think about that, he picked up the sugar spoon, scooping and pouring, scooping and pouring. Finally, he said,“Maybe it is a type of pity after all, but it comes from my absolute devotion and sense of utter helplessness.”

  At that, Annie grabbed a tissue and reached across the table to dab at his eyes. “And that’s why I love you,” she said, smiling. “Because occasionally, and quite unexpectedly, you sound like a sonnet.”

  He swatted at her hand as she tweaked his nose, the barest hint of a smile replacing the misery that h
ad clouded his eyes a moment earlier, and started tracing the wood grain on the table.

  Annie watched in silence until the secret festering inside her needed lancing. “There’s more to it than that,” she said. “You’re right. It was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read Elsbeth’s letter. I didn’t like that. We’re talking about my grandmother. I may not have known her long, Christian, but there’s a seed of love there. She’s not a young woman, and a bone-marrow transplant can be a tricky proposition. If I indulged in those thoughts”—she lowered her voice—“I’m afraid I’d choose myself over her.” She shook her head, looking miserable. “And I don’t know what that says about me.”

  And that was that. All that needed to be said between them had been said.

  “Now go home,” she insisted. “I have a difficult letter to write and a lot of thinking to do.”

  As she pushed him toward the kitchen door, he turned, looking suspicious. “You’re up to something.”

  “If I am, not even I know it yet. And I always win these arguments, so let’s simply pretend that it has reached its natural conclusion and save some time.” She shoved him out the door and turned to stare at the diary. Waves of emotion washed over her as the implications of her recent discovery, Elsbeth’s disclosure, and Christian’s insight demanded attention. Her mind ricocheted from one thought to another but ultimately kept coming back to Elsbeth. Suddenly, she fixated on the line from the diary that had unnerved her earlier in the day. This magic is strong, but blood is stronger still.

  The words took on a new meaning, and Annie began to suspect that she and El were doomed never to see one another because the same blood ran through their veins. The speculation led to other questions. How could she use the door at all then? Didn’t she share her father’s blood? Annie tucked the thought away for later examination, because she needed to explore something more immediate. Reaching for notepaper and a pencil, she opened the diary to the page titled How to Triangulate Location and seated herself in the breakfast nook.

  A few hours later, notes were scattered across the table, and an impressive pile of wadded stationery was spilling over the top of the trash can at Annie’s feet. She laid her head against the back of the bench, wearily reading through a set of notes before crumpling up the piece of paper on which they were written and tossing it over her shoulder. She flipped through the diary to reread a particular section, then wandered over to the door to stare at a set of engravings. Going back to the breakfast nook, she quickly scribbled some final notations before slamming the diary shut with a most unladylike grunt.

  Standing, Annie rubbed her lower back with her fist, then arched backward until her vertebrae gave three satisfying pops. She turned out the kitchen lights and headed upstairs to bed, determined to sleep, but the audacity of her plan kept her staring at the ceiling through the night.

  As the sun crept over her windowsill, Annie finally gave up and got out of bed. Sitting at the bureau, she brushed her hair out and coiled it into a chignon that she secured with pearl-drop bobby pins, all the while doing her best to ignore the dress draped over the back of the easy chair in the corner—the one she’d purchased at Prudence Travesty’s. Pulling a couple strands of hair loose to frame her face, Annie disappeared into her utility closet, reemerging with an off-white dress in one hand and a pair of matching pumps dangling from two fingers of the other. She glanced wistfully from the dress in the chair to the one in her hand and sighed.

  Dressing quickly, she assessed her image in the mirror. The dress was a contemporary take on Victorian fashion—spaghetti strapped, ruched, with an empire waist—and not quite her thing.

  Throwing a shawl over her shoulders that was so sheer her alabaster skin showed through, Annie went downstairs to the rolltop in the living room, searching through the center drawer until she found the key to her safe-deposit box. That done, she sat at the breakfast nook, nibbling at a scone while reviewing the notes she’d prepared the prior night. When the grandfather clock rang the hour, Annie snapped out of her preoccupation, downed the last of her coffee, and set the dishes in the sink.

  Moments later, the garage door opened and she pulled her 1986 Mercedes W123 onto Dolores Street and sped downtown, parking in a spot directly in front of the bank. While most people in San Francisco prayed to their personal parking saint for such luck, Annie came by it naturally. Little bits of magic—perhaps a gift given at birth by her father—surrounded her.

  Throwing some quarters into the meter, Annie retrieved a hat from the backseat and placed it atop her head. It was the one concession she offered to her eccentricity this morning—an outrageous thing, chalk white, with a brim the size of a garbage can lid (though she would have shuddered at the reference) and a delicate white scarf draped around the crown, its tail flowing down her back to her waist.

  Nodding at her image in the rearview mirror, Annie walked briskly into the lobby and, with a quick wave to the security guard, headed down a set of circular stairs into the cavernous vault—an unforgiving space of steel, gunmetal gray marble, and bleak lighting. She signed the register and handed the custodian her key before following him to her lockbox. He inserted the master key as well as hers—both were required to open her lockbox—then pulled out a recessed surface for her convenience and excused himself.

  Annie lifted the lid off the box. Inside was a stack of twenty documents. She knew nothing about them except that they were her property, accompanying her when she was adopted. Her father—her adoptive father—seemed to know a little about them, but he was annoyingly vague on the one or two occasions they were referenced, simply telling her to ignore them and that they’d be there for her “when she was ready.”

  She collected one and placed it in her purse. She started closing the lockbox lid when she noticed something tucked away in its corner—something she’d forgotten about long ago. Like the documents, it had never held much meaning for her, just an oddity from a past she knew nothing about.

  She reached inside, picking up a tiny, hand-stitched baseball glove. Sitting down, she cupped the mitt in her hands, staring— her face not giving a clue as to the emotions it stirred. Looking around the vault a moment later, as if she’d momentarily forgotten where she was, Annie replaced the glove, closed the lockbox, and headed for the elevator to call on her personal banker.

  The elevator door closed with her inside, looking very determined, only to open an hour later to a much less steady version— Annie clutching at the handrail, her face drained of color. She’d never seen the man speechless before, but then again, it’s hard to talk when you’ve just choked on your coffee. He’d stared at the document like a teenage virgin ogling his first Trans Am.

  “Are you getting out, ma’am?”

  Annie blinked, noticing that she was holding up a crowd waiting to enter the elevator. She mumbled apologies and strode through the lobby thinking about what she’d just learned.

  The instrument was an Edison Electric bearer bond dated eighteen ninety-four—the year of her birth. Apparently, Edison General Electric had merged with a company called ThomsonHouston the very next year to form General Electric, causing the value of the individual bonds to skyrocket even back then.

  “A hundred years and countless mergers later, this piece of paper will be worth a small fortune,” her banker had said. “As a historical document, however, it’ll have Sotheby’s wetting their pants.”

  That comment had her fanning her face before she realized, to her horror, that she was doing so with the bearer bond itself. But it was his next comment that hit her like a brick.

  “Whoever bought this couldn’t have made a more clever pick had they been able to see into the future.”

  See into the future. No doubt her father had.

  The meter had long expired by the time she reached her car, yet there was no parking ticket on her windshield, even though those on the cars immediately in front and behind hers sported one each. This wasn’t new. Annie always chalked it down to luck. Christ
ian, however, called it magic.

  Arriving home, she made straight for her bedroom to quickly change into the dress draped across the occasional chair. She packed an old leather suitcase with a change of clothes, the diary, the article, and the bearer bond she’d taken from the lockbox. She also grabbed a vintage handbag she’d purchased from Prudence Travesty’s, her favorite “utilitarian” hat, and a couple of scarves to wrap around its brim for variety. Lugging the suitcase to the kitchen, Annie scribbled a note to Christian and attached it to the refrigerator with a magnet. Lastly, she selected one of her favorite wines, uncorked it, and poured herself a glass.

  Annie peered at the note on the refrigerator as she savored a sip and, on impulse, attached Elsbeth’s last letter to it. Another thought entered her mind. She opened the diary to the entry on the thirtieth of May, 1894, and laid it on the counter. Then she pulled the note from the refrigerator and scribbled a postscript.

  P.S. Okay, you win. I’m starting to hope again. My father solved the bloodline mystery. Note the entry dated May 30, 1894. You love riddles, Christian. Solve this one for me.

  P.P.S. Oh, and don’t forget that we have tickets to see “Forrest Gump” next Thursday.

  Carrying the suitcase to the back of the house, she reviewed her notes one last time before laying them aside. Then, pulling a pin from her hair, she pricked her index finger so that a small bubble of blood welled up. The diary didn’t necessarily call for this exercise, but Annie wasn’t taking chances. After wiping her blood on the door frame, Annie tapped the runes and the astrological carvings in a complex order as directed by her notes and, gathering the suitcase, stepped through the door…

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Annie Meets a Throwaway

  May 29, 1895

  And into Kansas City. Or so she hoped.

  Annie found herself in a meadow. There wasn’t a stir of wind or a whisper of sound, and she panicked for a moment, wondering if she’d gone anywhere at all but rather was locked in some imaginary place created at the whim of her door.