Page 11 of Lost Memories (Secrets of Mackinac Island 1)

Chapter Five

By the time Elise arrivedat the hospital in the north-east area of Calabasas, her mother, Allison Darby, the one-time acclaimed actress for both stage and screen, had been pronounced dead from an aneurysm.

Elise found out because she discovered Peter, her mother’s on and off lover, in a heap at the edge of the hallway. He had actually fallen to the ground, all six-foot-three inches of him, and pressed his hands over his eyes. A single sob escaped his lips.

“Peter, what is it?” Elise had asked, although she’d already known the answer.

Elise was allowed to go into the hospital room to see her mother a few minutes after she arrived. Her mother looked completely calm, asleep; her beautiful cheeks glowed beneath the strange hospital lights, and—this was one of the strangest things—she still wore lip gloss, as though she was preparing to go somewhere. Elise had the sensation that she was meant to wake her mother up for dinner or church or something—that she had to drag her out for errands or have her help her drive Penny back to Berkley or sit with her at a candlelit table and listen to her as she cried about her failed script.

But no. Her mother was stretched out on a crisp white hospital bed. The beeps of machines down the hallway filled the air. Elise’s knees wiggled beneath her and threatened to give out.

“Mom,” Elise murmured, marveling that she’d only just spoken to her mother the evening before when she had given her a good-luck pep-talk for the meeting. She had been so devastated that afternoon that she hadn’t wanted to tell her mother what had happened, not yet.

After all, she had felt like her failure would be proof of something. Elise and Allison had both thought the divorce would lead Elise on a better journey; that it would kick her out toward a better career.

In actuality, it seemed as though Elise had just as little success as she’d always had.

Elise shook after that. A soft sob escaped her lips, and she very nearly did give out and collapse to the ground. The only reason she didn’t was because Peter slowly walked up behind her, latched his hands beneath her armpits, and said, “Let’s get you over to the side here. There. See that chair?”

In a second, Elise collapsed onto a rickety plastic thing that hardly counted as a chair. Peter passed her several Kleenex, and she fell forward into them. Her shoulders rolled forward. After a long time, a nurse came to tell them they needed to take her mother away. There were things to be done; another phase had to be put in place.

Elise followed her mother’s boyfriend into the hallway again, grabbed his elbow, and said, “What happened?”

Peter shook his head sadly. Devastation was stitched into every little area of his face, from the wrinkles around his lips to the wrinkle between his brows.

“We had gone out to dinner. I took her back to her place and she insisted I come in for a final glass of wine,” Peter said. His voice shook.

Allison had been pretty staunch about her recent breakup from Peter, describing to Elise in overly dramatic detail just how much she deserved someone better than Peter. That said, Elise had seen Allison melt at the sight of Peter on more than one occasion. This was simply an element of her mother’s personality; she always felt there was something bigger out there, something better. In Elise’s mind, she had struggled with the idea of: Yeah, sure. But what if there’s not something more than this?

Peter’s face crumpled.

“She loved you, Peter,” Elise said hurriedly. “I know it was rough on you, all the yanking you back and forth the way she did.”

“Yes. Yes, it was,” Peter affirmed. “But it was also a part of our game. We liked to keep one another on our toes. I honestly thought we would spend the rest of our lives doing that. I guess, in a way, she did. And she’ll leave me in this state of remembering her forever.”

**

PETER RETURNED TO HISCalabasas home around midnight, which left Elise alone and filled with dread at the far end of the emergency room. Although Calabasas was a quieter area of Los Angeles, things still happened—dreadful things—and people trickled in from the darkness with bloodied limbs and broken bones. A baby in the corner cried, his voice echoing from window to window.

Elise slept-walked out to the parking lot and checked her phone to find numerous calls and messages from Mia and Haley. She shivered and sent a single message to both of them.

Elise: Mom died. I’ll call you in the morning.

Immediately after, she dialed for an Uber and had the car take her immediately back to the house she had shared with her mother, rather than the one in which she had raised her children. She wanted to stand in the middle of what had been. She wanted to feel the last of her mother’s smell, even as it slowly faded away.

The house—which had been her grandparents’ house before their untimely death—sat on the top of a slight hill, at the end of a neighborhood with some of the smaller houses in Calabasas. This had made many children tease Elise as a kid; she was the lower-echelon of a world where it wasn’t uncommon to have a private plane to take you to vacation. The Uber driver dropped her off in front of the house, which bubbled over with memories. All the lights remained on.

Elise entered, noting that the door remained open. Nobody had bothered to close it. She clipped it shut behind her and locked it, then blinked out at the cozy living room, the two wine glasses only half-drunk, the TV with the Netflix DVD menu still running. Her mother had placed her earrings on the side table by the couch.

Elise crept through the living room, then entered the kitchen, where a large photograph of Elise, Penny, and Brad hung in the center of the wall. It had been taken a few years ago, when Allison, Elise, and the kids had gone on vacation together without Sean. At the time, Sean had said that he had to go on a business trip; now, Elise wondered if he had just been with Regina, happy to have his family far, far away.

Allison had never been the tidiest of women. Dishes remained in the sink; the refrigerator was half-stocked and a bit unorganized; a baguette had been nibbled on and remained on the countertop. Elise fell onto the kitchen chair and heaved a sigh.

She sat alone in her mother’s house, knowing full-well that her mother would never return.

This was the house where everything had happened.

Now, Elise knew that she would have to clean it up, organize it, piece her mother’s things into boxes—even sell some of it.

She would have to do all the things that other kids did when they had lost their parents. For whatever reason, she’d never grouped herself into that reality. It was something that happened to other people. Not her.

With a lurch, she had a sudden image of Penny going through that overly-sized house she had purchased in her twenties—the one in which she had raised her babies, gotten older, found and then lost herself. She imagined Penny heaving a sigh and saying, “All right. Let’s pack up Mom’s stuff!”

It was an endless cycle.

But the night of her mother’s death was far too soon for such organization.

Now, Elise walked toward her mother’s bedroom, undressed, and found her mother’s robe. It smelled just like her: a Chanel perfume she always wore, her shampoo, something else that reminded Elise of long-lost afternoons when she had come home from school and read with her mother out in the sunroom.

Elise collapsed on her mother’s bed with the robe still on. She huddled against the pillows and wrapped herself in the blankets, and she gave herself over to crying. She felt each sob through her whole body. Her muscles ached as she went deep into the night. Somewhere in the midst of the hazy grey of early dusk, she found sleep.

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