Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
When Carmen woke up similarly confused the following morning, Elena called Natalie and said she couldn’t come into the newsroom that day —not until her mother calmed down, at least.
“Did you tell her?” Natalie breathed, referring, of course, to the photograph of Rosa they’d discovered on the wall of Henrietta’s mansion.
“No,” Elena said. “I don’t think I want to. And…” She trailed off. “I mean, she probably knows, right? This is Carmen Vasquez we’re talking about.”
Elena explained to Natalie that she’d discovered Rosa’s brief yet powerful obituary, proof that she’d died long after that supposed 1960 car accident. And there’d been no mention of the car accident at all, not in any newspaper.
“I can’t understand why she’d do this,” Natalie whispered.
From upstairs came Carmen’s cry, tugging Elena back. “I have to run. I’ll try to come in later.”
“We have it taken care of,” Natalie assured her. “Christmas articles are up and running. Bob’s out interviewing the Santa at the mall. Frankie’s taking photographs at the middle school.”
Natalie listed the rest of the Christmas-essential appointments the newspaper had that week, proof that she had it covered, that she could probably be editor of the paper starting now if she wanted to be.
Elena thanked her, got off the phone, and hurried upstairs to find her mother tear-soaked and red-faced.
She paced around her bedroom, looking for something.
“What are you after?” Elena asked, trying to calm her mother down.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Carmen blubbered. “I promise I will.”
Seeing her mother like this broke Elena’s heart in half. Slowly, she urged her back to bed, then hurried to the next room to call Maxine. “She’s taken a turn,” she explained. “Do you have anything that can help her sleep?”
Maxine said she had a break in the next hour and could come to the house right away.
Elena thanked her profusely, then checked on her mother to find that she’d begun to cry and pace again.
Elena wondered if the loss of her mother had been lying dormant since 1960, if Carmen’s emotional health had always been a sleeping lion, ready to pounce when the time was right.
To try to calm her mother down, Elena sat at her mother’s bedside, held her hand, and told her stories off the cuff—stories from her own childhood, stories of her father and mother that made Carmen laugh and join in.
“That was the year your father had that awful mustache, do you remember?” Carmen asked, allowing her head to drop back into her pillow.
“He electrocuted himself when he plugged in the Christmas tree lights, and his mustache puffed out like this.” She gestured wildly.
“I couldn’t stop laughing. You were just a little thing. ”
“I remember Grandpa coming by every Christmas morning as well,” Elena went on. “He always brought the best presents.”
Carmen laughed. “He never knew what to get you! I always shopped for him, wrapped the gifts, and put them in his car. He was a good actor, though. When you opened them, he always wore a look on his face like he was really proud of himself.”
“You bought them!” Elena felt she should have known. She remembered her grandfather’s house, how utilitarian it had been in the wake of her step-grandmother’s death. “I guess I should have known. Why would a man of seventy know which Barbie to buy?”
Carmen giggled sleepily. Just then, the doorbell rang, and Elena announced, “My friend’s here. She wants to say hello.”
“Sure thing, honey,” Carmen said. “Is it Maxine?”
“It’s always Maxine,” Elena said.
“I should have known.”
Elena hurried downstairs and threw herself into Maxine’s arms. The world outside seemed a swirling, hazy chaos, one to match whatever was going on in Carmen’s head. Maxine was the most intelligent person she knew. Maybe she could fix this.
As they tiptoed up the stairs, Elena tried to update Maxine on what she’d learned. “My grandmother died in the eighties,” she said. “I just found out.”
Maxine’s face went pale. “She abandoned her daughter.”
Elena shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”
“No wonder…” Maxine offered, before hurrying up the stairs to find Carmen.
Following her, Elena tried to fill in the blank in Maxine’s sentence. No wonder Carmen is so broken. No wonder Carmen can be so mean. No wonder. No wonder.
But when Maxine and Elena entered Carmen’s bedroom, they found her sweet and serene and nothing like she’d been that morning or the night before. Maxine greeted her warmly.
“Elena was just telling funny stories from Christmases past,” Carmen said, patting the mattress to tell Elena to sit down again. “She remembers so much! Maxine, do you remember this much from your childhood?”
“Probably not,” Maxine said, smiling.
“My daughter always had a brilliant memory,” Carmen said, drawing Elena’s curls behind her ear.
“It’s why she’s such a wonderful journalist. Often, you have to remember what you’ve heard, what you’ve seen, and whom you can trust. It’s always come to Elena so naturally.
She’s like her grandmother in that way.”
Elena felt the compliment like a smack.
Not long after that, Carmen drifted off to sleep, and Elena and Maxine went downstairs to discuss next steps.
Maxine had brought medication to combat Carmen’s feelings of alienation, should they come up again.
“I know they will,” Elena said, trying to be brave enough to face it.
“I know we’re not in the clear. I know we never will be again. ”
Maxine squeezed her hand. “You’ll find a way to manage it. You both will.”
Elena’s lips quivered. She sat on the sofa, exhausted. She half considered calling James at work and asking him to come over and cuddle with her. She half-considered fleeing to Queens and never coming back. It was easier there, where she practically didn’t exist.
“Why would my grandmother do something like that?” Elena asked after a pause.
Maxine’s face was pinched. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“Money,” Elena answered with a shrug. “But I stupidly believed my family to be purer than that.”
“I don’t know if anyone’s pure,” Maxine offered.
“You are,” Elena said.
“I’m not,” Maxine said sadly. “I wish I were.”
Later, after a nurse came by the house to tend to Carmen (if she needed tending), Elena showered, bundled up, and went to the newsroom to see how the last few hours were going.
She found the remaining journalists polishing off a box of cookies and listening to Christmas songs.
Natalie was among them, reading over the article Bob had written that afternoon, editing everything with a big red pen.
When they realized that Elena had entered, they quieted the music and straightened their spines in their chairs.
“I’m not the boss,” Elena reminded them. “I’m not my mother.”
They smiled, but they didn’t loosen up again while she was in the newsroom. She guessed it was because she looked so much like her mother: regal and tan and eagle-eyed. She had to be grateful for that.
Elena went to her mother’s office and sat down, swiveling in her chair and watching the light dim over the snowy bluffs outside.
Twice, she googled her grandmother’s name and discovered that “the writer” Rosa Tompkins had written and published two novels during the 1970s, both with prominent publishing companies.
The better-selling one, Honest Days, was about a nun who’d secretly birthed a child when she was a teenager and given up the baby for adoption, only to meet the baby twenty years later, when the baby tried to join the nunnery.
Although it was a work of fiction, the story struck Elena as incredibly personal.
Had Rosa spent the rest of her days regretting her abandonment of Carmen?
Hoping that Carmen would return to her life somehow? Elena guessed so.
But why had Rosa been photographed with the Cranberry Cove residents? What was her involvement in their affairs? Was she corrupt, too?
For a little while, Elena tried to distract herself with other work.
Rather than using her laptop, she used a pencil to write a pretty little article about the ballerinas set to perform in front of the courthouse that weekend.
It was a silly article, truly, but it was also adorable to consider how important this sort of event was for the town of Millbrook.
Plenty of people would come out to support them. They were the town’s future.
Halfway through the article, Elena heard a sound in the hallway, popped up, and accidentally dropped her pencil.
Peeking out, she watched as two journalists—a man and a woman she didn’t know well—disappeared out the side door.
She wondered if they were secretly dating.
She suppressed a smile and returned to her office, prepared to carry their secret.
When she dropped down to grab the pencil, something flashed in the corner of her eye.
It was under the desk, and something was stuck there.
Elena crouched lower and twisted her head to see a piece of paper, secured there with several layers of tape.
It read: BJ81342. Elena reached for her phone, took a picture, and returned to her chair.
What kind of number-letter combination was that?
Was it a password for something? Oh, but the paper was yellowed and old.
If she had to guess, she’d say that it had been written pre-internet, as crazy as that was.
Even though she was old enough to remember the pre-internet times, those years were blurry in her head.
Suddenly, Natalie knocked, and Elena called her in, asking her to look at the number. “I found it under the desk,” she said. “Any idea what it could be?”
Natalie got on her knees and turned to look. “Huh. That’s strange.” She got back on her feet and put her hands on her hips. “Do you think Carmen would remember?”
Elena shrugged. She didn’t want to tell Natalie that her mother had taken a turn for the worse.
“Didn’t your grandmother work in this office as well?” Natalie said as an afterthought.
Elena’s ears rang. Was it in this office that Rosa had made her decision to leave her toddler and husband behind? “She did,” she said. “And you’re right. I believe she wrote at this very desk.”
Together, Elena and Natalie glared down at Rosa’s desk, as though it were the answer to their simmering questions. But the reality was, it was just a desk. And they were stumped.