The Book of Lost Friends(112)

The entry is palatial and startling. I’ve seen it through the windows, but standing on the threadbare Persian carpet, we’re dwarfed by massive paneled walls and arched fresco ceilings. Nathan looks upward, his back stiff, hands resting on his waist. “I hardly ever came in this way,” he mutters. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or just filling the silent air. “But I gave you the only key I had to the back door.”

“Oh.”

“The judge didn’t, either. Come in this way much.” He laughs a little. “Funny, that’s one of the things I remember about him. He liked to use the kitchen door. Steal a little food on the way through. Dicey always kept biscuits or bread or something like that around. And cookies in the jar.”

I think of the square art deco glass canisters in the kitchen, picture the large one filled with pooperoos.

“Tea cakes.” Nathan alters my mental imagery.

Tea cakes do seem more appropriate for this place. Every inch of her speaks of what she was in her youth. Grand, opulent, an extravagant feast for the eyes. She’s an old woman now, this house. One whose bone structure still shows how lovely she once was.

I can’t imagine living in a place like this. Nathan looks as if he can’t, either. He rubs the back of his neck the way he always does when he considers Goswood Grove, as if every brick, beam, corbel, and stone weigh on him.

“I just don’t…care about this stuff, you know?” he says, as we move to the bottom of double staircases that spiral in opposite directions like twin sisters. “I never felt a connection the way Robin did. The judge would probably turn over in his grave if he knew I was the one who ended up in charge of it.”

“I doubt that.” I muse on the stories I’ve heard about Nathan’s grandfather. I think he was, in some ways, a man uncomfortable with his position in this town, that he struggled to navigate the inequities here, the nature of things, even the history of this land and this house. It haunted him, yet he wasn’t ready to fight the battle in big ways, and so he compensated in little ways, by doing things for the community, for people who’d lost their way, by buying books from charity auctions and sets of encyclopedias from kids working to pay for college or a car. By taking LaJuna under his wing when she came here with her great-aunt.

“I really believe he’d trust your decisions, Nathan. Personally, I think he’d want to finally acknowledge the history of Goswood and the history of this town.”

“You, Benny Silva, are a crusader.” He cups a hand along the side of my face, smiles at me. “You remind me of Robin…and I don’t know about the judge, but Robin would have liked your Underground project.” He chokes on the words, pushes his lips together, swallows hard, and shakes off emotion almost apologetically as he lets his hand drop to the well-worn bannister. “She would’ve liked you.”

I feel as if she’s there in the room with us, the sister he loved so much and grieves so deeply. I’ve always wanted a sister. “I wish I could have met her.”

Another intake of breath, and then he shrugs toward the landing above, inviting me to start upward first. “My mother said, whatever Robin had been working on, that she’d been doing a lot of research, compiling papers but keeping them private. Something to do with the house and things she learned from the judge’s files and journals. You didn’t find documents like that in the library, did you? Robin’s or the judge’s?”

“Nothing other than what I’ve already shown you. Nothing recent, for sure.” A note of intrigue plays in my head. I’d give anything to have even one conversation with Robin.

One probably wouldn’t be enough.

I see a photo of her finally, upstairs in her room. Not a childhood photo, like the faded studio portraits downstairs in the parlor, but a grown-up one. The driftwood frame sits on the delicate, spindle-legged writing desk, offering an image of a smiling woman with pale blond hair. She’s slight and narrow-faced. The deep blue-green orbs of her eyes seem to dominate the photo. They’re warm, beautiful eyes. Her brother’s eyes.

She’s standing on a shrimp boat with Nathan, then a teenager, in the background. They’re both laughing as she holds up a hopelessly tangled fishing rod. “The boat was our uncle’s.” Nathan looks over my shoulder. “On my mom’s side. She didn’t grow up with money, but man oh man, her dad and her uncles knew how to have a good time. We’d hitch on the shrimp boats once in a while, ride along wherever they were going. Drop a line if we could. Maybe get off here or there and stay a day or two. Paps and his brothers knew everybody and were related to half the population around there.”

“Sounds like fun.” I picture it again—the shrimp boat, Nathan’s other life. His ties down on the coast.

“It was. Mom couldn’t stand to be back in the swamp for very long, though. Sometimes people have a thing about where they come from and how they were raised. She married a guy fifteen years older and rich, and she always felt like people on both sides faulted her for it—gold digger and that kind of thing. She didn’t know what to do with all that, so she moved away from it. Asheville gave her the art scene, sort of a new identity, you know?”

“Yeah, I do.” More than I can possibly say. When I left home, I expunged every bit of my past, or I tried to, at least. Augustine has taught me that the past travels with you. It’s whether you run from it or learn from it that makes all the difference.