Ransomed Dreams (27 page)

It was obvious that Sheridan was like that, like Ysabel. She possessed the same faith, that same huge heart for others. Also like Ysabel, she was in a marriage that defined despair, yet she continued to give herself away.

Calissa prayed that the resemblance to their mother ended there, that Sheridan would not abandon all hope.

* * *

Wilmette

Calissa waved at the neighbors heading across the drive to their house. She shut the front door, locked it, and pushed at Sheridan’s shoulder. “Quick, turn off the lights before somebody else drops by with food and condolences.”

“It’s after nine.”

“Wagners came at 8:52 last night. Not that I noticed the time.”

Sheridan smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s turn off the lights.”

A short while later, the house dark except for one small lamp in the kitchen, they sat down at the table with cups of tea.

“Sher, are you okay? There’s been a lot of commotion since we got home.”

“I am eyeing that cherry pie over there.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Calissa smiled. During the string of visitors that evening, her sister hadn’t ducked out once. “So you really like the hair and the clothes?”

“I do. Thank you for getting me out there.”

“I’m sorry, hon. I cannot begin to comprehend what you’ve been through. To think that you didn’t even have a nice black dress to pack.”

“Liss.” She chuckled. “That was the least of my worries.”

“I know, but I can almost imagine not having a dress. I can’t imagine not having my home or career or friends. You lost it all in the blink of an eye. If I had to start over in a new city, without knowing a soul, I’d crack up for sure.”

“It’s more than that,” Sheridan murmured softly.

Calissa waited, unsure if her sister wanted to speak or not.

Sheridan sipped her tea. “Imagine being married to Bram. By the way, when was the last time he proposed?”

“A week or so ago.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’m imagining we’re married. It’s not that difficult anymore.”

“Hm.”

“
Hm
yourself. Now what?”

“Now take away his personality.”

“Huh?”

“Bram has stopped calling you ‘darling.’ He’s not interested in his business. He never laughs. Never. Nuances in conversation go over his head. Not that there are many nuances, because conversations revolve around how much he hurts and what he can’t do and when he takes his next dose of meds. He’s short-tempered. He never initiates a hug or a kiss.” She paused. “He doesn’t want you in his bed.”

Calissa stared at her and felt a tightness in her chest.

“It’s just the way it is. Kind of like you pulling big-sister duty. It’s not my fault. This isn’t his fault. It’s not what I signed up for, but . . .” She shrugged.

“Whew.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

Sheridan smiled softly, her eyes sad. “Make him well?”

Calissa reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter 45

Chicago

Sheridan held the crisscrossed shoulder strap of her new black bag tightly between both hands and stared straight ahead. The upholstered seat rumbled beneath her as the train began to roll. In her peripheral vision, through the window, the platform blurred.

Breathe.

“That helps,” she murmured to herself and tried it again. “Okay. That’s good.”

Maybe she should have heeded Calissa’s concern. What was she doing heading off on the el, the day of their father’s viewing, to wander around downtown by herself? Her sister had protested vehemently. “You said you’re a mess being in the city. That it unnerves you. And you were with me! Why would you do this alone? Are you nuts or just a masochist?”

Sheridan had replied that God told her it was time to push past her fears.

Calissa went ballistic on that one. “God told you? God?”

Sheridan wondered now if she’d heard wrong.

“Breathe, Sher. Breathe.” She was glad not to have a seatmate listening in on her monologue.

She and Calissa had finally reached a compromise. She swore to go straight downtown and not to her old stomping grounds at the university campus. Calissa would drive her to a Red Line stop, thereby eliminating a train change, a complication that might, according to Calissa, upset her. Sheridan agreed to take a cab to the funeral home no later than three o’clock.

She gave up trying to explain to Calissa what had happened. It wouldn’t have helped her case.

The thing was, she had prayed in the church the other day. She had prayed Niebuhr’s words, that God would grant her serenity in the things she could not change. Such as Eliot’s condition. And she asked for courage to change what she could. Such as the ostrichlike existence. Self-imposed limitations based on her fears needed to go.

So there she was, zipping along on the train, all by herself, because apparently God had heard. That morning she’d awakened with an undeniable, unshakable determination to find a missing piece of herself, the one that had gotten lost over the past year, the one that was buried on an October morning in Caracas at twelve minutes, thirty-five seconds past ten.

Breathe, Sher; breathe.

She loosened her grip on the strap and smoothed her skirt. It was a pretty floral print, muted grays and whites and blacks with a few splashes of red. The gray jacket, white blouse, and pearls were too somber, but she wore them rather than debate over one more fashion matter with Calissa.

She forced herself to look around the train car. It wasn’t rush hour, which explained the sparse crowd. There were two teenage girls in tight jeans and T-shirts, chattering excitedly. Perhaps it was spring break for them and they were going into the city to play. One young man slept hard, a uniform jacket on his lap. Perhaps he had worked all night at a hotel. Another guy looked like a college student, his head buried in a book. There were a handful of business-type men and women, young and middle-aged. A spry elderly lady fiddled with her cell phone.

Sheridan took it in, the microcosm of the city she had loved.

Loved.

Could she love it again?

She wasn’t sure.

She relaxed, let go of the strap altogether, and watched the neighborhoods go by.

* * *

Breathe.

Sheridan smiled to herself. The city was a glut of aromas.

It was the scents that at last released emotions buried for over eighteen months in the deep recesses of Sheridan’s heart. As she emerged from the underground stop at Lake and State streets, the stuffy air tight in her nostrils with metal and oil gave way. She inhaled acridness, that every-city concoction of fuel, smoke, concrete, and warmth held captive between skyscrapers. Putrid garbage, cloying designer perfume, fried food, Asian spices, and unbathed bodies added their odors in passing waves.

Sheridan smiled, stood still, and shut her eyes. If she concentrated hard enough, she could pick up a hint of river water.

In the past, friends teased about her fondness for offensive smells. But to her the odors represented the fragrance of humanity, life in all its messiness. And it was in the messiness that she came alive.

She had caught her mother’s dream to help poor women. With her own gifts, the ones her mother recognized so long ago, she had forged the dream into a work. She was at her best creating programs and teaching, mingling with humanity.

Those things she had not engaged in for over eighteen months.

“Let’s not go there.”

She inhaled the sour bouquet and smiled. Something loosened inside of her. It felt a little bit like hope.

Over the sounds of traffic and passersby, she heard her phone ring and remembered she had promised to call Calissa the moment she landed.

She pulled the cell from her bag and answered it. “I made it, Liss. I’m fine.”

“Uh, Sher?” It was a male voice. “Is that you?”

“Eliot?”

“Yes, yes, it’s me. Hello.”

“H-hi.”

“At last we meet up. How are you?”

“O-okay.”

A mishmash of feelings bombarded her. She couldn’t sort through them fast enough to respond coherently. How she had wanted to talk to him! Now she didn’t know where or how to begin.

Eliot said, “I am so glad I reached you. Did I understand correctly? Today is the visitation?”

“Uh, yeah. This afternoon and evening.”

“And the funeral is tomorrow, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know you have my condolences. How are you holding up?”

“O-okay.” She was okay. As a matter of fact, she was good. Quite good. Why couldn’t she tell him that?

Because she was also mad. Furious about that voice message he had left, so upbeat in her absence. Furious at his absence in the midst of all the good and terrible that was happening. Furious at the question about 1983 that coiled at her heel like a snake ready to strike.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“Um . . .” Sheridan blinked, needing to get her bearings all over again, shoving down an anger she could not adequately express on a cell phone, thousands of miles between them. “Look, Eliot, I can’t think straight. There’s too much to talk about. I don’t know where to begin.”

He didn’t reply.

She listened to his silence. It angered and frightened her all the more. He didn’t know where to begin either. How did they start a dialogue that required speaking a truth that might tear them apart?

“Sheridan, let’s begin with I’m sorry I’m not there.”

“I know. It can’t be helped.”

“Still.” He paused. “Did you talk to him before he died?”

“Eliot, he was in a coma.” Was he fishing for information? Oh, she didn’t want to second-guess him. Anger coursed through her. It pumped her legs into long strides between people on the crowded sidewalk. “I really, really can’t talk now.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m downtown in the Loop.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Should you be—?”

“Yes, I should! This is long past due. It’s been eighteen months. I refuse to allow big-city demons to scare me any longer. I rode the el. Now I’m heading toward Marshall Field’s or whatever it’s called these days. I’m going inside to stand under the Tiffany ceiling where I worked when I was a teenager. Then I’ll check out all my other favorite places.”

“The Picasso sculpture. The Art Institute. That Italian restaurant on Madison.”

He remembered all that?

Reaching an intersection, she glanced both ways and stepped off the curb, joining the flow of others walking against the light. A horn blared. A shoulder jostled hers.

“You belong in a city, Sher.”

She reached the other side of the street and went to the department store’s corner entrance. It reminded her of the row of glass doors on the front of a women’s center in Caracas, Venezuela. She stopped and stared.

And waited.

No crowds ran helter-skelter. No guns popped. No blood spattered the sidewalk. No bodies sprawled on it. No shattered glass. No pain in her arm. She turned a slow circle and carefully noted everything. Skyscrapers, stores, buses, construction, theaters, stoplights, blue sky. All in place.

All right. The city was hers again. Did she belong in a big city?

No, she belonged with her husband.

If she still had one.

She took a deep breath. “Eliot, did you know Harrison visited Caracas when you were there in 1983?”

“Yes.” His voice was scarcely a whisper.

Her head spun. She’d asked wrongly. But he didn’t pick up on it. He didn’t clarify. Maybe it was nothing.

But she had to keep going.

“Did you meet him?”

Only the sound of his ragged breathing filled the earpiece.

Dear God, please no. Please no.

“Sher, we need to talk face-to-face. We’ll talk when you get home.”

The anger loosened her tongue now. She stepped over to a large display window and spoke against the plate glass in a low tone. “When I get home. Eliot, my mother left me a letter. My father committed despicable acts I can’t even hint at over the phone. Your path crossed his the year my mother died. I do not know what to do with this information. I have no intention of coming home anytime soon.”

“But we must talk!”

“Good grief. We’ve had eleven years to talk. Tell Mercedes if she doesn’t want to hire a nurse, she can hire one of her cousins to help out. I need to help my sister for once in my life. Our father left a mess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“I love you, Sher.”

The reply, normally automatic and heartfelt, got stuck in her throat.

The line went dead. He’d hung up, not on her, but on his tears.

Perhaps her husband was no longer a deaf-mute after all. Too little too late?

She didn’t know.

* * *

Had Eliot called her
Sher
? More than once?

Seated in the back of a cab after hours of walking the city, Sheridan finally replayed their conversation in full. She had avoided thinking about it. She’d filled her mind with visiting all her favorite places, accumulating distance between Eliot’s deception and her emotions, riding out the storm before pondering what to do about it.

Yes, he had called her by her nickname. When was the last time he had done that? An eternity, it seemed. He seldom even called her Sheridan.

Over the past year and a half she had watched Eliot disappear somewhere inside himself. She blamed the excruciating pain, physical and mental, the great losses he had suffered. It swallowed his personality whole.

It also swallowed
them
. It swallowed
her
. Everything had changed, even the one constant that should not have ever changed: the heart connection they had known since day one.

Maybe now, in light of the past, Eliot realized what he had put in jeopardy. Naturally he would make nice. Well, he’d been absent eighteen months and dishonest long before that. She had some catching up to do.

* * *

Sheridan made it to the funeral home with time to spare.

Calissa hugged her. “Two minutes to spare. I could strangle you.”