The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 468
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 33: Colors of the Past 8
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part One
Chapter Two
The clang of a heavy grandfather’s clock cut through the room like the voice of a midnight crier. Susan and Melissa turned at once toward the sound but only the gleam of the sickle-like pendulum was visible, caught by a dim blue light at the mid-point of its arc. It swept in and out of the eerie colored shadows as if sweeping in and out of existence.
At the opposite end of the room, the two young women sat over a small table lamp with an intricate shade of colored glass that sprayed its various tints and hues in all directions around the room.
“Well,” Melissa said as the reverberations of time fled into the distance, “your wedding day has finally arrived, Susan. I can see that you’re happy.”
Susan smiled at her new friend and then looked back into the colors of the lamp. “I guess I am,” she said softly. The slow tick of the grandfather’s clock came back to life. “I mean, I know I am. I’ve always known that I would be. I know how lucky I am.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it.” Melissa took a cigarette from the pack on the mahogany table beneath the lamp. When she lit it, the smoke curled up through the changing light toward the shadows on the ceiling. “You deserve everything you’ve got. I’ve never believed ‘but for the grace of God’.”
Susan watched Melissa’s face as she spoke. A beam of purple light shined delicately on her milky white complexion. It gave to her skin a blood-like tint and made her light blue eyes appear deep. Melissa was looking into the lamp, unaware that Susan was watching.
“I know,” said Susan. “I just mean that I’ve always had everything I’ve ever wanted and in a way tomorrow doesn’t seem any different.”
“You mean today.”
Susan laughed. “Yes, today. I know it sounds sort of strange but it’s almost another ordinary day, just like any other.”
When Melissa turned to face Susan, a beam of yellow light caught her diamond earring in a brilliant spark as her hair fell off her shoulder. “I don’t know how you can say that. I know that both of your parents died when you were just a baby. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if I had not had my parents. I just can’t begin to imagine.”
“Uncle James has been very good to me.”
Susan’s eyes moved almost instinctively toward the wall in the back of the room. In the darkness she could make out the outlines of the photographs that lined the wall on both sides of the clock, the wooden frames and the glint of the glass coverings. The details of the photographs, however, were too dark to discern.
But the same thin, blue light that reflected off the pendulum of the clock fell onto a face in one of these photographs that Susan knew well enough to see in any amount of light or distance. It was a photograph of her mother and father, taken by her uncle a few months before Susan was born and the light now fell dimly upon her father’s face. The smile on his lips was accompanied by an anxious, almost fearful look in his eyes as if he had been afraid to look through the lens of the camera into a future he was not destined to live.
“Yes,” Melissa said. “You’re lucky to have him.”
Although lost now in the shadows, Susan knew that with his left arm he held her mother close to his side and that the smile on her mother’s face seemed apologetic of something Susan had never been able to fathom. Her father’s hand gripped her mother’s shoulder tightly and held her slightly off balance. With both hands Susan’s mother held a thick sweater closed around the front of her body, closed over a belly that must have just begun to swell with the life of a daughter.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?” Melissa said after a moment. “How they died?”
Susan looked away from where the photograph hung. “They were killed in an automobile accident the day after I was born.”
“I’m so sorry, Susan.”
“I never knew them except from my uncle’s pictures. He’s a photographer and must have hundreds of photographs around the house, though not that many from so long ago. I used to love to look through them to try to find out something about what they were like. You know how every time you look at an old picture, you think you might see something that you’ve never noticed before. It’s almost as if you think something might appear in the picture from one minute to the next, something that will reveal everything you ever wanted to know. It doesn’t really happen but you do see things a little differently each time you look. It all depends on how you’re feeling at that moment, I guess.”
Melissa took a long drag on the cigarette and exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling. “I can’t imagine it,” she said again. “I’ve always been very close to my parents, especially my mother. I don’t think I’ve ever made a decision without consulting her. I just can’t imagine what it would be like not to have her around to talk to.”
“I’ve always thought of Uncle James as a father. He’s been a better father to me than some of my friends’ real fathers ever were.”
“But your mother.” Melissa was staring again into the colored lamp shade.
“Maybe if I dwelt on it, I would realize something I’d be better off not knowing. Maybe that’s why I never have.”
A woman appeared at the entrance to the room, silent and unnoticed until she spoke. “Would you like your tea now, Miss Susan?” Her voice was deep and soft.
“Yes, Katie. Thank you.”
The woman disappeared as quietly as she had come.
Susan looked toward the photograph of her mother and father. “You know,” she said, “I’ve never really thought about it before, but Katie has been like a mother to me. She has always been here. She worked for my mother before I was born and for my grandmother before that. Now that I think of it, I can remember times when I needed someone to talk to and Katie was there.” She looked around at her friend. “Funny that I’ve never thought of it like that before.”
“I don’t think you know what you’ve missed,” Melissa said. “Maybe that’s good, but when you have children of your own, you’ll want them to have what you never had.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Have you thought about children, Susan?”
“I’ve always thought that having a child was the most wonderful thing that could ever happen to a woman. George wants children, too, but we don’t have any definite plans.”
“Gary and I have only just begun to talk about it. We knew when we got married that we wanted to wait a while but it’s been three years already. At least I can bring up the subject now.”
“George wants to have a baby as soon as we can.”
“And he probably wants a boy.”
“He says he doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
“That’s what he’s supposed to say, but you know they all just want to watch themselves grow up all over again.”
“Well, I hope it is a boy. Then we’ll both be happy, if that’s true, but I know that George will love our baby the same no matter what it is.”
“Well, if you didn’t think that, you wouldn’t be marrying him, would you? Do you have a name?”
“For a boy, James. I want to name him after my uncle and George agrees. For a girl, we don’t really have a preference.”
Melissa took a final draw on the cigarette and dashed it out in the ashtray beneath the lamp. She sat back and stared into the lamp and Susan wondered if Melissa had heard what she’d said.
“I think a baby can really bring two people close together,” Melissa said, as if to no one. “The first child makes the marriage complete.”
Katie entered the room and set the tray on the table. She poured the tea without looking up and then left as quietly as before.
“Thank you, Katie,” Susan said and wished suddenly that the older woman could join them but Katie was gone almost before she’d thought it.
“I wouldn’t let anyone raise my child,” Melissa said. She didn’t seem to notice that Katie had come and gone. “Sometimes I don’t even want Gary around her.”
Susan leaned forward to pick up the cup. A soft, red light fell through the shade, illuminating the deep pink of her cheek and chin. Her thick, light brown hair fell in a braid down her back and when she glanced up at her companion to offer the tea, Melissa saw that Susan’s eyes were dark brown, nearly black, and that the contrast with her hair and skin was striking.
“What lovely eyes you have, Susan,” Melissa remarked as if the colored light in Susan’s eyes had awakened her from her thoughts.
“Thank you,” Susan replied as she sat back with her own cup of tea. “Uncle James tells me they’re my father’s, but you can’t really tell what color his eyes were from the photographs. Uncle James says they were dark brown ….”