Nowhere to Hide (2 page)

Ellen said nothing. She knew only too well that for a lot of people, the Christmas season was not a time of good cheer, nor did it necessarily start up visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. This, in fact, was the clinic’s busiest time. People got depressed, even suicidal during the holidays. She wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the season had more than a little to do with Myra’s recent nightmares. Memories of childhood horrors, more or less successfully held at bay during the rest of the year, strangely seemed to gather strength in December.

"What time does Gail’s plane get in?" Myra asked, deliberately changing the subject.

"11:20 in the morning. I can’t wait to see her. Imagine, my little sister signing on with a major record label." Giving a final straightening to the silver angel, Ellen climbed down from the ladder. She stood back to admire her artistry.

Myra plucked an icicle from the shoulder of her blouse and tossed it among the decorations. "I expect any day now I’ll come over here and be confronted with life-sized standups of Gail all over the house—you know, the kind like the Kodak people put out of Bill Cosby."

"I wouldn’t do that to you. You’d see them on the lawn first." Ellen grinned and left the tree to begin tidying the sofa, which was strewn with paper and boxes. Myra
followed,
glass in hand.

"Seriously, you guys have such a super relationship. I envy you. Most sisters can barely stand to be in the same room with each other. Or so I’ve heard."
She finger-combed her hair over the forehead, a habit, to hide the scar that resulted from a childhood sledding accident.
"Being an only child, of course, I wouldn’t know."

Ellen was thoughtfully stacking the empty boxes out of sight on the closet shelf. It was true. She and Gail were close. Closer than any sisters she knew. She suspected it had a lot to do with growing up in a boozed-fertilized battleground. Moving from the closet to the sofa and back again, she said, "Gail and I love each other, of course, but it’s more than that. There’s a kind of desperation at the bottom—an ‘us against the world’ thing." She gave Myra a wry smile.

"Yeah, I know what you mean." Myra was standing behind her at the open closet door offering the last of the boxes. "Listen, I—I hope I didn’t bring you down with my talk of nightmares."

Ellen turned, surprised.
"No, of course not.
Why would you think that?"

"I don’t know. It’s just that you’ve been acting sort of... preoccupied, I guess. Anyway, enough of the heavy crap, okay? We’re supposed to be celebrating here. Christmas is just five days away and your sister is arriving tomorrow.
So lighten up, Ellen."

"Kiss my ‘you know what’," Ellen said pleasantly, taking the boxes from her.

"Ass, dear.
The word is ‘ass.’ God, but you’re a prude."

Ellen laughed. If Myra could defy the dark, then so could she. Compared to the hell of Myra’s childhood, hers and Gail’s would read like the Walton’s. "Well, what
do you
think of it?" she asked brightly, gazing up at the tree. "Is that a masterpiece, or is that a masterpiece?" Just for an instant did the old pang of loss hit
her.
Ed had always been the one to decorate the tree, while she had been perfectly content to sit and watch the transformation, which seemed nothing short of magical, take place.

But Ed had died of a heart attack three years before at the ripe old age of thirty-six. Just the previous night they had talked about adopting a child. He’d seemed fine.
Just fine to her.

"He said he was cold," the assistant foreman had told her the next afternoon, as he stood shifting his feet in their big boots, his eyes tearing. "Then he sat down on some lumber—and he was gone."

They called it SCA—"sudden cardiac arrest".

"It happens," the weary-eyed doctor had told her sadly, apologetically, as Ellen listened in disbelief. "A seemingly healthy young man—no one really knows why. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Harris... so very sorry..."

"It’s a beautiful tree, Ellen," Myra was saying, bringing her back, fading out the remembered sounds and smells of the hospital. "In fact, the entire house looks fabulous.
Especially this room.
I love it. It just seems to wrap itself around you."

Looking around, Ellen couldn’t help feeling a warm glow of pride. The room really did look nice, kind of rustic colonial, if there was such a thing. Most of the furniture was antique, pieces she’d picked up in flea markets and second-hand shops and refinished, working evenings and weekends. The rich, taffy-colored tables and sideboard reflected the fire’s glow.

New slipcovers in soft floral chintz revived the old sofa and chair.
When she and Ed had moved into the old farmhouse, there’d been worn, ratty carpeting on the floor.
To her delight, when she’d lifted one corner, she discovered hardwood flooring underneath. A good cleaning and a coat of varnish had restored it to its original beauty.

The oval braided rug on which she and Myra now stood, she owed to her Sears’s credit card —"owed" being the key word. But she’d wanted everything to be perfect for Gail’s visit. With Gail working in New York, they didn’t get to see one another nearly often enough, and now with the promotional tour coming up after the holidays, it would be even less.

The anxious feeling was back. Even with the aromatic scent of spruce permeating the air, and Christmas music playing in the background, Ellen couldn’t shake the sense of something not right. It had been with her from the moment she opened her eyes this morning, and kept coming at her all day, little spasms that made her chest feel suddenly tight and her hands get busier.
Mere seasonal anxiety?
Had to be.
What else?

"You’ve got a real talent for decorating," Myra said, having wandered over to admire the large print hanging above the redbrick fireplace. Sepia-toned, it was of a gentle-faced woman in a long dress bathing a child in a round metal tub. The blond, curly-haired cherub had a daub of soapsuds on his softly rounded, Victorian chin. This particular treasure she’d come upon at a garage sale one Saturday morning last spring. It had been hard not to appear too eager and weaken her bargaining position.

"Almost as much as you do for helping the walking wounded," Myra went on. "In my house, you’d be lucky to find a chair to sit down on without having to clear it of old clothes and magazines first."

"You’ve got three kids to clean up after," Ellen said, putting an arm around her friend’s shoulders. "C’mon, let’s go out to the kitchen. I need a coffee." Catching Myra eyeing her empty glass, Ellen dropped her arm, saying, "But you go ahead and have some more wine; it will help you sleep."

Myra didn’t need any coaxing. While she poured, Ellen couldn’t resist another admiring look at the tree. Returning the wine decanter to the sideboard, Myra said, "You know, I always feel a little like a parasitic lush drinking your booze while you’re having coffee or a coke."

"Well, don’t. Some of us can handle an occasional drink and some of us can’t." With that, she headed out to the kitchen, a suddenly silent Myra at her heels.

At the kitchen counter, Ellen plugged in the kettle, caught a distorted image of
herself
in the shiny chrome—dark blue eyes, tiny lines fanning out from the corners. Light auburn hair in its unfamiliar chic new cut.

The hairdresser said it would make her look younger and more "today." Ellen didn’t know. She wasn’t used to it yet. It was short at the back, longer on the sides, the ends swept toward her chin. Her neck felt oddly breezy, making her feel even taller than her five foot eight, like an ostrich with its feathers plucked.

Spooning Maxwell House instant into her cup, she could feel Myra sitting at the kitchen table waiting for further explanation. She supposed, after springing it on her like that, she owed her one. Without turning around, she began haltingly, "I-
uh,
developed a bit of a problem after Ed died. Every morning I went to my job, part of which, as you know, is counseling the adult children of alcoholic parents. And every night I came home, and before I even took off my coat, fixed myself a hefty vodka and soda, light on the soda. By nine o’clock I’d be smashed and dead to the world in front of the television set."

The water had begun to bubble, the only sound in the ensuing silence. Ellen poured it over the coffee grounds. The pleasant aroma wafted up to her. When still no response came from Myra, she glanced over her shoulder. "Don’t look so shocked," she said quietly.

"I can’t help it," Myra said, her dark eyes big. "I am. I knew you didn’t drink, but I always figured it was because of your parents and what happened. I thought you hated—"

"Don’t hate it at all.
Got a real taste for the stuff, in fact.
I have what is known in clinical terms as ‘a predisposition toward alcoholism’. In real terms, I’m a drunk waiting to happen."

"My, God, Ellen, I feel awful. You’ve done so much for me. You always seem so strong. I never dreamed... why didn’t you say something?"

"I couldn’t. I didn’t tell anyone." She came and sat down across from Myra and blew a little on the steaming coffee, sending heat up to warm her face.

Looking out the kitchen window, she saw that the snow was coming down harder. It occurred to her that it might not let up and Gail’s flight would be canceled. She banished the thought.

"I was ashamed," Ellen said after several moments. "I, of all people, should have known better. I can’t begin to tell you, Myra, how many women have told me they vowed as children never to touch alcohol, and yet at some point in their lives find themselves... well, where I found myself. Alcoholism doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a clever disease; it creeps up on you. But I caught it in time. I was lucky, many aren’t. So now you know. End of subject." She sipped her coffee.

"But—how come you keep booze in the house?" Myra asked incredulously.

"I like a challenge," Ellen said, and laughed, then grew serious again.
"But enough of that.
I want to hear more about those nightmares you’ve been having lately." It hadn’t been so bad, telling, but she was definitely more comfortable in the counselor role—the old "needing to be in control" thing.

"There’s not much more to tell," Myra said, still clearly not quite recovered from Ellen’s confession. "I wake up out of a sound sleep and there’s this looming dark shadow at the foot on my bed... Damn, Ellen, I should have known. I’m your friend, for God’s sake. I should have been there for you. I should have—"

"You couldn’t. I didn’t want you to," Ellen said flatly. She laid a firm hand over Myra’s. "And you were there for me after Ed died. I don’t know what I would have done without you.
Now, enough already."
She withdrew her hand. "So tell me—you wake up in a sweat. What else?"

Myra sighed, shrugged lightly, stared into her sherry.
"Just this awful feeling of terror.
I can’t move or speak." Her voice had grown small and childlike. She was playing with her hair again. "It fades quickly—the shadow, but I still get a feeling of someone out there—in the room with me.
Someone—evil.
If it was part of a dream, I don’t remember the dream."

"Do you think it has anything to do with your father and—"

"No," she cut in, shaking her mane of chestnut hair as if for emphasis. "I knew you’d think that. I guess it’s natural you would. But it has nothing to do with my father. I’m certain of that."

Ellen nodded. "Good. Does Carl know?"

"No. I started to tell him a couple of times, but, I don’t know, something stopped me. Maybe I just didn’t want him to think it was all starting up again." She grinned dryly. "At least I didn’t wake up screaming."

She had, in the old days. Myra had come to Ellen several years ago as a client, a victim of incest, her psyche in shreds,
her
self-esteem at zero point, dragged even lower by a series of self-destructive relationships.

With help, and Myra’s own incredible strength and natural need to be happy, she’d managed to piece her life together. There was no talk, of course, of "getting over" her horrendous childhood. It was Ellen’s contention that no one ever got over anything that devastating.
You just learned to come to terms with it, to stop beating up on yourself for something you had no control over.
One step at a time.
One forward, sometimes three backward.

By the time Myra met Carl, she was a single mother of two, clerking in a fashionable dress shop, soon to work her way up to assistant manager. Carl had proved to be her "rock" instead of the usual quicksand type.
A quiet man whose love and good humor seemed boundless.
Carl treated the boys as if they were his own and they reciprocated by adoring him. Then along came Joey, a dark-eyed imp whose grin could melt the hardest heart.