Page 29 of The Lost Heiress
He followed her into the house, which was not large. He could hear the hiss of bacon frying in a pan on the stove in the kitchen just to their right and smell something sweet—cinnamon—baking in the oven.
“Sit, make yourself comfortable,” Sister Mary said, gesturing toward the couch. “Can I get you anything?”
“Oh, no, thank you. I’m fine,” Ransom said as he sat. He put the briefcase he carried on the coffee table. “How is she?” he asked.
“Oh, very well,” Sister Mary said. “It’s been a good week.”
“Good,” Ransom said, nodding. “That’s good.”
They stayed in silence for a moment, and then Sister Mary cleared her throat.
“Well,” Sister Mary said, “I’ll go get her for you.”
And she shuffled back down the hall and up the stairs.
Ransom leaned forward, fidgeting with his hands. He stared at his briefcase and told himself not to be nervous.
Above him, he heard the exchange of muted voices, an excited yelp, the quick patter of footsteps down the stairs and then the hall. A woman entered hurriedly, still dressed in her pajamas, robe, and slippers. Her hair was still mussed from sleep. She stopped abruptly when she saw him, smiled, and clasped her hands behind her back, like an equally shy and eager toddler. It was never not jarring, the juxtaposition of her childlike gestures articulated by a grown woman’s body. She was tall, like their father, but she had their mother’s face—soft and heart-shaped, with steely gray eyes.
“Hello there, Vivi,” Ransom said, standing.
Her smile deepened, and she stared down at the floor, still too shy to look him in the eye.
“I brought you something,” Ransom said. “Would you like to see it?”
She nodded eagerly, and he motioned to the seat next to him on the sofa. She crossed the room, pigeon-toed, and sat, cross-legged, next to him.
He opened his briefcase and took out first the glossy page of aSeventeenmagazine. He had come across it while waiting at the dentist’s office and surreptitiously torn it out and folded it into his pocket when no one was looking. It was a picture of him from the most recent Met Gala. He was dressed in a navy Versace suit, staring haughtily into the camera. The caption read,Hunk! American royalty Ransom Towers looks dashing in Versace.
“Hunk?” Vivi said. “What’s that?”
“Just—uh—you can cut that part out,” Ransom said, feeling sheepish.
He hated pictures of himself. He felt ridiculous taking the magazine page in the first place and carrying it around with him in his pocket. But Vivi had a scrapbook she kept of her siblings, the edges of the pictures delicately cut into patterns—scalloped or zigzags—and labeled with a child’s scrawl. The last time he had brought her some news clippings with his picture, she had asked for something in color.
“You look very nice,” Vivi said, staring admiringly at his picture, as if she were very proud.
“And this is for you too,” Ransom said, taking out a small cardboard box.
He opened it. Inside were a dozen pale-pink blooms, flattened and dried.
On her daily walks, Vivi collected flowers, and at home, she’d dry them and press them into the pages of her book. She’d shown him her collection on his last visit. When he had told her about the cherry blossoms that bloomed in DC in the spring, she had looked at him with wide-eyed wonder and remarked how much she’d like to see them.
So, in March, he’d stopped to gather a handful of blooms as he walked along the Tidal Basin. At home, he’d dried the petals and pressedthem into fresh parchment paper between two large volumes of Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time.
“You’ll take me to see them bloom?” Vivi asked. “Maybe next year?”
“Yes,” Ransom lied. “Maybe next year.”
This was all still so new to him. He had lived the majority of his life without ever knowing he had an older sister. Ransom had only learned of her existence when his parents died and Bass relayed the great family secret to both him and Theo.
Her name was Vivienne Smith, Bass told them. She’d been Theo’s twin. But she’d come out wrong, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She’d gone without oxygen for two whole minutes. The doctors said she might not survive and, if she did, that she might never be quite right. And that was true. As a child, she was always small for her age, and she developed slowly. She didn’t walk until she was three, and she spoke her first words at five. Now age twenty-eight, she had the IQ of an eight-year-old, and she struggled to read past the first-grade level. She lived in Santa Maria in a house their parents had built for her, on the property of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, attended by a full-time nurse and the nuns who lived there.
As Ransom had gotten to know Vivi, he’d realized she lived a full and happy life. She was active; she enjoyed swimming and hiking and tennis. She was curious about the world around her—catching bugs in mason jars, collecting local flora and fauna and pinning them onto boards. Mostly, she was congenial and friendly. She laughed hard and often. But she also had a quick temper and sometimes threw violent tantrums. They came on like a summer storm, with little warning. One small thing would turn her mood, and then there was screaming and crying, kicking and throwing. When she had learned her parents died, she’d given a nurse a black eye. It wasn’t Vivi’s fault, Sister Miriam said. Vivi didn’t understand her own strength. She had emotions too complex and painful for her to process or control.
It was hard for Ransom to square what his parents had done to Vivi, what they had done to their whole family, by separating herand shrouding her existence in secrecy. Ransom knew his parents had grown up in a different time, under the awning of social Darwinism and eugenics, when any kind of physical or mental disability was considered shameful, something to be feared or pitied. The disabled were shuffled into institutions, subjected to lobotomies and forced sterilizations and electric shock therapy. Their own president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been crippled by polio, hid the symptoms of his illness, never allowing the press to photograph him in his wheelchair. Instead, he was always filmed standing at the podium or in his car without any assistive device, terrified that his country would think him weak if they knew he was disabled. Perhaps Ransom’s parents had only wanted to protect Vivi from the ire and condemnation of public scrutiny by hiding her away; or, perhaps, they had only wanted to protect themselves.
The tragic irony was that now, public opinion had shifted. Disability rights were a hot-button issue. The civil rights movement had happened—a movement his father had participated in wholeheartedly; state hospitals were deinstitutionalized, activists were lobbying for equal rights. While his parents’ actions toward Vivi would have seemed, in their day, justifiable, even kind, today they would be seen as cruel, barbaric. To claim Vivi as his sister now and reveal her existence to the world would be to subject his parents and his family to insurmountable censure. The Vivi affair would be a stain on the family that would never come out. He had no choice but to become complicit in the whole thing, to keep her existence a secret, even from Saoirse. He visited Vivi as often as he could, but it was never often enough to assuage the guilt he felt.
