I’m so lost thinking about E.S. and the changeling story that Sky has to come tell me it’s time for dinner. “I’m glad you’re engaging with the material, but I don’t expect you to live up here.” She smiles so I know she’s teasing. “Or never eat or see your baby again.”
“Oh! I suppose Billie must want to go home.”
“Only if she could take Chloe with her. She’s smitten. You’ll have to tear your baby out of her arms.”
I laugh the way you’re supposed to laugh when people make jokes about stealing your baby. You are not supposed to shriek or call a cop or tell them, Fine, take her. I busy myself stacking the journals so Sky won’t see these thoughts flitting across my face.
“It looks like you’ve made good progress,” she says.
“Your father’s journals are fascinating—and I can see ties to your writing in them. In fact, I was thinking . . .”
“What?” she asks when I hesitate.
“Well, you did say you wanted to tell a different story about your father, so I wondered, if you were planning to do that maybe you’d like for me to pick out some sections from the journals that I think relate to your writing.”
Sky takes so long to answer that I’m sure I’ve overstepped my bounds. After all, she’d hired me as an archivist. I was supposed to put order to her personal papers, not speculate on the origins of her writing. What possessed me to make such a suggestion?
Not what. Who. It’s just the kind of thing Laurel would come up with. And Laurel wouldn’t back down even with Schuyler Bennett staring at her as if she were sprouting horns.
“Actually,” Sky says, “I think that’s an excellent idea. Have you found anything along those lines?” Her voice shakes on the last words and I realize how personally charged this material must be for her. Why would she let me poke around in the secrets of her past?
Because she hired you to do exactly that, a voice says in my head. Laurel’s voice.
She hired me to put her papers in order, I counter.
This is how you bring order to chaos, by tracing it back to its source.
“Yes,” I tell Schuyler Bennett, “I came across this one patient that your father treated in the early seventies—a young woman suffering from postpartum psychosis who’d developed the delusion that her child had been stolen from her.” I don’t mention the story Billie told me or that I’d spent the afternoon searching all of Dr. Bennett’s notes on the case. “It reminded me of your changeling story and I wondered . . .”
“Wondered what?” Sky asks, eyebrow arched.
“I wondered if your father ever talked about this case to you.”
“I was abroad in the late sixties at a boarding school in the French Alps, and then I went straight on to college. I don’t remember my father talking about that case.”
“Oh,” I say, crestfallen. “I guess I went off track . . .”
“But then, maybe I’ve just forgotten. It was a long time ago. You should keep looking at his notes on that case. Type them up for me and I’ll have a look. Except . . .”
“Except what?” I ask.
“Well, that’s not really the job of an archivist.”
Here it is. I have overstepped my bounds. She must realize now that I’m not really an archivist. I’m not even Laurel Hobbes. I prepare myself to apologize, but before I can she says, “But that’s not really what you are, is it?”
All the breath goes out of my lungs. She knows. “I can explain . . .” I begin.
She holds up an authoritative hand. “There’s no need. I saw it as soon as I met you. After all, it takes one to know one.”
“One what?” I ask.
“A writer, of course. You have the instincts of a writer. I could tell right away. And the way you’ve put together this story . . . well, to tell you the truth I have been thinking of writing a memoir, but I wasn’t sure I was up to it . . . but if I had someone to help me . . .”
“You mean you’d like me to help you with your memoir?” I ask, incredulous.
“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. Of course, I’ll adjust your salary accordingly.”
I resist telling her that I would do it for free. “I’d like that very much,” I say.
“Good.” She raps her knuckles on the table and then starts to stand up. “I’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Hancock at Crantham.”
“An appointment with a doctor?” I ask, my voice high-pitched, all my scholarly calm gone. “But why?”
“For background on the hospital,” she says. “You’ll need it if you’re going to help me with my memoir.”
WE EAT DINNER on the terrace watching the sun set over a long ridge of mountains to the west. The mountains look unreal, like pieces of tissue paper layered over one another in deepening shades of green and blue.
The terrace is artfully situated so that it gives the best view of the mountains while obscuring the view of the hospital. I imagine Sky’s mother landscaping the terrace to conceal her husband’s line of work. I imagine dinner parties where the conversation centered around the lovely view—as it does now. Sky, her face rosy in the reflected light of the sunset, waves her gin and tonic shakily at the mountains, naming peaks and the number of times she and her father climbed them. She’d been a 3500er by the time she was nineteen, “although my father always contested my claim to Peekamoose, because I’d become so enraged at something he said I stormed down the mountain before we reached the peak.”
“Do you remember what you were arguing about?” I ask as I struggle to debone the brook trout Billie produced for our dinner. This is something I imagine an assistant memoir writer would ask and I’m hoping it will distract Sky
