Please Remember This

K
ATHLEEN
G
ILLES
S
EIDEL

When I moved into my neighborhood, she was the first person I borrowed anything from. She was the first friend whom I told that I was writing a book, and she offered to type it for me. Her daughters decorated my house when I brought my babies home. She’s the one I call when I am bored in the afternoon; she was the one I turned to when I had a funeral to plan. In hopes that every woman who picks up this book has a friend like her, it is dedicated to—

Donna Vilsack

Chapter 1

 

I
t was part rock festival, part Star Trek convention, and part plain old down-home country fair without the baby pigs and homemade jams.

Nina Lane had been a writer of speculative fantasy, creating in her three books a medieval-like, magic-filled universe that had inspired cultish devotion since her death twenty-four years before. She had spent the last four years of her life living in a rented farmhouse outside Fleur-de-lis, a small river town in northeastern Kansas, and every year during the first weekend in May, more than six thousand of her fans gathered at the county fairgrounds there for the Nina Lane Annual Birthday Celebration.

If you were a Nina Lane fan, it was the place to be. Inside the livestock-judging hall, people took turns reading aloud from Nina Lane’s books, and when local bands weren’t playing on the outdoor stage, groups of fans acted out scenes based on her narratives. Part of being at the Celebration was knowing all there was to know about Nina Lane and, regardless of your gender, dressing like her as well. So vendors wheeled in rolling wardrobe racks full of crocheted vests and long black skirts patterned with
large flowers. For a few dollars you could find someone to do your hair like Nina’s, spraying it black, scraping it into a bun, pinning a flower over your ear.

Even if you weren’t a Nina Lane fan, the day was fun. There were pony rides for the kids, popcorn and cotton candy, chili dogs and beignets, the square little doughnuts from New Orleans. Many vendors displayed merchandise that had nothing to do with the author or her books. Potters brought their earth-toned mugs and bowls; woodworkers brought pine birdhouses and little mirrors framed in walnut. Tess Lanier was particularly interested in the beaded jewelry. Some Native American Indians were displaying several pieces that she thought were marvelous. She was going to buy herself a pair of earrings.

Back at home—Tess was from California—she had twice set up a booth at a crafts fair to sell the vintage linen that she collected—place mats, napkins, table runners, and dresser scarves. In her own quiet way, she had enjoyed it thoroughly. She liked talking to the people who were knowledgeable collectors; she liked chatting with those who weren’t. She liked the bright, fresh anticipation with which everyone set up a display in the morning; she even liked the shared weariness of knocking the displays down in the evening.

Because she was not a Nina Lane fan, Tess was often looking more closely today at a vendor’s portable canopy or collapsing trellis than she was at the actual merchandise. She saw no one displaying linens. One of the larger tables was covered with a quilt. It wasn’t for sale, it was merely the table covering, but she went over to look at it. It was a scrap quilt, made of
hundreds of little hexagons in a myriad of fabrics. It seemed to be hand-pieced and machine-quilted.

“Are you interested in the quilt?”

Tess looked up. The woman behind the table was speaking to her. She was small, and her features were delicate. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and her skin was beautiful, clear and soft, even though her feathery-cut hair was graying. She was not dressed like Nina Lane.

Tess, at twenty-four, had a medieval, even otherworldly air to her appearance; she was narrowly built, her honey-colored hair spilled over her shoulders in a pre-Raphaelite swirl of waves and ringlets, and she wore light, flowing garments that she usually made herself of vintage fabrics.

“Yes,” Tess answered. “It’s beautiful.”

“Look closer, then. See the pieces that are the most worn.” The woman came around the table. She moved some of her products so that she could pick up a corner of the quilt. “They were feed sacks.”

The woman was standing very close to Tess. “Oh?”

“Yes. During the Depression, the sacks that livestock feed came in were often the only uncut fabric a family had, and they sewed with it, making clothes, quilts, everything.”

Tess knew this. Her grandmother had grown up here in Kansas; she had told Tess about wearing dresses made out of feed sacks.

“So the companies printed patterns on the sacks,” the woman continued. “Some of the patterns were rather pretty, but the fabric wasn’t a good quality. It didn’t last. Here, do touch it. You really can feel the difference.”

It was clear that she wanted Tess to touch the quilt, that it was important to her to have Tess touch the quilt. She was now standing even closer.

Physically, Tess had been an enchanting child, golden and delicate. Her grandparents had taught her to be wary of people who wanted to stand too close. “No, no, thank you,” she answered. “I can see.”

“Then perhaps you’re interested in the soaps or the lotions.” The woman gestured toward the line of herbal products displayed on the table. “I grow all the herbs myself. The roses are wild. Here, you must smell this one. I think you’ll like it.” The woman picked up a knife and, from a bread-loaf-sized cake of homemade soap, sliced off a small wedge and thrust it at Tess. A sharp scent of lavender stung her nostrils. She had to force herself not to pull back.

“I knew you would like it,” the woman exclaimed, stressing the “you” as if she had privileged knowledge about Tess and her tastes. “It has such a healing aura. Do sign the guest book. I’d love to send you my catalog.”

Tess shook her head. “I never buy anything by mail. It would be a waste of your money.”

“I don’t mind. I treasure connections of all types.”

The connection of a mailing list? What was to treasure about that? Tess shrugged and leaned forward to write her name and address—her work address—in the guest book. The pages of the book were a pale gray green, and across the top of each page, “Celandine Gardens” was printed in golden-yellow. All the products on the table were wrapped in the same pale green with the golden yellow letters.

“That’s a pun, isn’t it?” Tess heard herself say. “Celandine Gardens … celadon green.”

“Why, yes!” The woman clasped her hands, thrilled. “I’ve never known anyone to get that so quickly. It pleases me so … not that it matters to me if other people understand, I did it for myself. But you’re right. It is a pun, a verbal-visual thing, since, as you know, the etymologies of two words have nothing to do with each other. Celandine is a plant, of course, and celadon …”

Why had she said anything? Why had she encouraged this person? Tess waited until the woman was finished with her thought, then smiled a polite, thin smile and moved away, careful not to look back. She didn’t stop until she had rounded a building and was out of sight of the Celandine Gardens table.

What had she expected at a Nina Lane event? A polite conversation about the weather? A knowledgeable analysis of the National Hockey League? These were Nina Lane fans. They were crazy.

For about fifteen seconds during her freshman year in college, Tess had affiliated herself with a group of Nina Lane fans, and it hadn’t ended particularly well. She had dreaded running into any of them today. At best, there would be awkward apologies for not keeping in touch and false promises about doing so in the future. At worst … well, Tess didn’t really know what would happen if she saw Gordon Winsler himself, but she truly hoped not to find out.

So far, however, she had recognized no one, and no one had recognized her. Occasionally people looked at her curiously, but her airy, tea-dyed dress with its many rows of pin tucking probably looked a bit like
a costume. They just must be wondering which of Nina Lane’s characters she was impersonating.

The tables in this part of the fairgrounds were closer together, so there was more jewelry and fewer clothes. A baby in a stroller was wearing a little headband with a Nina Lanesque flower perched over her ear. The man pushing the stroller had a T-shirt with a map of Nina Lane’s kingdom on it. At least he hadn’t dyed the baby’s hair black.

One table was devoted to publications. It displayed used copies of Nina Lane’s books and piles of pamphlets, little home-published booklets stapled inside covers of colored copying paper. Tess picked one up.

Nina swept past Kristin, her dark eyes flashing at Duke Nathan.

 

“What’s this?”

“Which one is it?” The girl sitting behind the table looked up. She too was dressed like Nina Lane. “Oh, that’s the scene right before Nina killed herself when she confronted Duke. You know he left her for Kristin.”

Tess knew that. That was one of the first things a person learned about Nina Lane—how her lover, Duke Nathan, had left her and she had followed him to New York and killed herself. “And this is an account of that? Who wrote it?”

“I did,” the girl said proudly.

“How do you know these things?” Tess flipped through the booklet. It was full of dialogue and detail, Nina flicking the flower in her hair, Kristin cowering
in a corner. “You talked to the people who were there?”

“Oh, no,” the girl said confidently. “Duke Nathan won’t talk about it. He never has. What could he possibly say? He left her. It was all his fault.”

“So you made all this up?”

“I didn’t really ‘make it up.’ You see, I’m
very
connected to Nina.”

Tess had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “And that gives you the right to write about these people like this?” Duke and Kristin weren’t characters in one of Nina Lane’s book; they were real people, still living.

“What do you mean, ‘the right’?” The girl frowned. She was growing suspicious of Tess.

“Aren’t people entitled to some privacy, to—”

The girl snatched the booklet out of Tess’s hand. “Well, you don’t have to buy it if you don’t want it. And I’m not the only one who does it. Everyone does.”

Everyone was making up stories about Nina Lane’s final hours? That only made it worse.

Tess moved on, listening to the conversations around her. Many people were discussing Nina Lane trivia. Who was the third son of Refleveil? Tess had no idea. She had read the books, but she didn’t remember a Refleveil. In which direction did the river Ghyfist flow? Apparently that was a very controversial question.

The conversations that weren’t about Nina Lane’s three books were about her life: how she had come to Kansas from the West, how the Settlement had
grown up around her. The Settlement had been an informal artists’ colony, a community of artists and writers. They rented empty farmhouses and walked barefoot across the fields. They gathered sunflowers and picked wild mulberries by day and wrote their books late into the night. Tess heard an odd, urgent tone in the way that the people at the fairgrounds were talking about this long-gone community. They must all be yearning to have been a part of it, to have lived in a farmhouse down the road from Nina Lane, to have crossed a weathered front porch and knocked on the wooden frame of a screen door, to have heard Nina’s voice inviting them inside.

If it hadn’t been for Duke Nathan, they could have. That was what everyone seemed to believe. If it hadn’t been for Duke Nathan, Nine would be alive today. If it hadn’t been for Duke Nathan, Nina Lane would have finished
The Riverboat Fragment.
If it hadn’t been for Duke Nathan, Nina Lane would have been here, she would have been with us today, she would have been our friend.

It was almost enough to make a person feel sorry for Duke Nathan. If people this weird hated him, surely he couldn’t be all bad.

Tess tried to recapture the feeling she had had before stopping at the Celandine Gardens table. She looked up at the sky; it was bright, but the sunlight was gentler than in California. She had never been in the Midwest before, and the landscape was softer and prettier than her grandparents’ descriptions of their Dust Bowl childhoods had led her to expect. It was a green and pleasant place, the contours of the earth folding softly like a rumpled bed first thing in
the morning. When she had driven to the fairgrounds, she had seen violets blooming along the roadside, and the plowed fields had been rimmed with lines of broad-crowned cottonwood trees.

Tess looked for the concession stand. She wanted to get something to drink. She went to stand in line. The people in front of her were whispering, something about a Dave Samson and “the pictures.” She tried not to listen, but their hushed voices were urgent and insistent. This Dave Samson had “the pictures”; the person standing on the left was sure of that. Yes, Dave had been denying it for years, but he had them.

“Why won’t he share them?”

“I guess they’re pretty gruesome.”

Tess opened her purse and took out some money, putting it in her pocket so that she wouldn’t hold up the line when she was finally served. The people were still talking about the pictures. Someone else joined them, and in a moment Tess couldn’t help but understand what the chatter was about.

A bystander had taken photographs of Nina Lane’s mangled body as it lay on a New York City sidewalk moments after her death.

Tess turned with a jerk, wanting to leave the line. Her shoulder bag banged against someone, and as she began to apologize, instinctively raising her hands, she knocked the man’s drink out of his hand. It spilled all over the papers he was carrying.

“Oh, my God, I am
so
sorry.” Tess seized a stack of napkins from the chrome dispenser on the concession counter and tried to blot the spill. The papers were still in the man’s hand. They were brochures,
printed on a good-quality glossy paper. The liquid was starting to bead up. “I can’t believe I did that. I am so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” The man moved the brochures out of her reach. “I have a million of them.” He dropped them and his cup into a nearby trash can.

“But I’m so sorry. I—”

“It’s no big deal. I now have whatever is twenty less than a million. Please. It doesn’t matter.”

She believed him, but still she wanted to explain. “But I’m never clumsy. You have to understand. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not like this. I’m usually—”

She stopped. He was looking amused.

What was wrong with her? Nobody liked it when you kept saying what kind of person you were. If they couldn’t figure that out on their own, it was because they weren’t interested.