“Are you all right? Are you all right?” a man asked.
I opened my eyes. Mr. Gill.
“You look very upset,” he said, his voice sympathetic.
“I’m fine.”
He kept staring at me. “I saw you hurrying across the dance floor. I feared that something was wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
He shook his head slightly. “You’re a friend of my daughter, but I don’t know your name.”
At first I thought it was kindness — unwanted kindnessand I tried to think of a polite way to tell him to get lost. Then I realized why he was so concerned and why he had followed me down the stairs. He knew my name — the name I was born with — and I knew his old phone number. “Anna O’Neill Kirkpatrick,” I replied, and watched Elliot Gill swallow hard.
“I’m not really friends with Erika. I arrived in Wisteria just a few days ago. I came tonight with Zack, who lives next door to my great-aunt.”
“Of course,” he said. “You came because of your uncle’s death.”
I explained once again how I had been responding to Uncle Will’s invitation and didn’t learn he was dead until I arrived. Elliot Gill never took his eyes off me. The way he listened, his mouth moving as if he were anticipating my words, as if thirsty for whatever I had to say, made me wonder if I not only looked like my mother, but sounded like her.
“Your aunt Iris,” he said, “how is she taking all this?”
“The way anyone who knows her would expect. She still talks to Uncle Will.”
“Crazy as a loon,” he remarked softly.
“Maybe.”
Mr. Gill raised a pale eyebrow. His eyes were gray, his hair a thin mix of gray and yellow combed across the large dome of his head. Erika must have gotten her dark beauty from her mother.
He pointed to a booth, the one where the stalker and his friend had sat. “Why don’t we sit and chat?”
I wanted to go home and cry my eyes out, but I pulled myself together. One of my reasons for coming to this stupid party was to ask him questions about my mother.
As soon as I slid into the private, candlelit booth, I wished I had insisted on a table in the center of the room. It was the way he looked at me. I wanted to keep reminding him, I’m Anna! Anna!
“You’re not staying with Iris, I hope?”
“What do you mean?”
“You should stay with me,” he said. “We have an extra room next to Erika’s. You will be safe with me.”
“Thank you, but I really like being with Aunt Iris.”
“Are you aware of the degree to which Iris suffers from mental illness?”
“I’ve never seen her medical records, but I have some idea.”
“Over the years she has been in and out of hospitals. As you may or may not know, your mother’s life with Iris and William was extremely difficult.”
“It would have been more difficult without them,” I replied, feeling the need to defend them. “It would have been hard for my mother to keep me and continue with school.”
“She had options.”
“She did? Like what?”
He didn’t answer.
“You mean there were other people she could have lived with.”
“Exactly.”
“What was Joanna like?” I asked.
He stared at the flickering candle. It took him a long time to answer. “Bright, imaginative, beautiful. . She was a young woman with big dreams. I had just purchased my first store — I’m a pharmacist by training — and hired her to work part-time behind the counter. Joanna was hoping to attend medical school, but after she became pregnant, she thought nursing a more practical choice. She was a healer by nature, intuitive about people.”
“She was psychic,” I said.
He went on as if he hadn’t heard me, his narrow fingers tracing a pattern on the tabletop. “She was so innocent, so full of life. I watched her fall in love.” His eyes rose to meet mine. “When a young woman falls in love, she looks a certain way, has a certain light in her face. She becomes irresistible.”
I folded my arms and sat as far back as I could.
“You move like your mother,” he said.
I unfolded my arms, as if I could undo that observation.
“You have the same eyes and hair. Joanna often wore red.”
“I don’t.”
“She loved reds and pinks,” he continued. “Of course, everyone told her she should wear green or blue. She wore red defiantly.”
I smiled. “Then we share that — defiance.”
“You should try those colors, perhaps just a pretty pink or red scarf. She loved to wear scarves. She loved anything that floated.”
I was glad Mrs. Gill wasn’t around to hear the tone in his voice. “Are you my father?”
“God above! No.”
“It seemed a reasonable thing to ask.”
“Joanna wouldn’t tell me or anyone else who your father was. He lived on the West Coast, traveled for work, and spent a lot of time on the East Coast — I know that much. He was married and didn’t tell her, not until she got pregnant.”
“Then left her high and dry — nice of him.”
“She had options,” he replied.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“I offered to marry her and accept you as my child.”
“Oh!”
I tried to imagine it, living with this man in a manse on the river, wearing designer clothes, carrying the most expensive phone, driving a car that people envied. . I thought about it and decided that, if the choice had been mine, I would have preferred Joanna to shack up with Mom in our Baltimore town house. “Okay, I see now. Joanna said no.”
“William said no!”
“But it was her choice, wasn’t it?”
“Precisely,” he said, not understanding what I meant.
It seemed to me that if my mother had been anything like me — if she had been the kind to wear red defiantly — she would not have let Uncle Will dictate that decision. Maybe Mr. Gill just couldn’t admit she had rejected him.
He talked as if he were still in love with her. Her rejection must have hurt him deeply and made him angry. Erika had just turned seventeen, meaning she was eleven months younger than I. My mother had said no, and Elliot Gill had married someone else soon after.
“If Joanna had married me, she would be alive today.”
I glanced up. “Excuse me?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “She wouldn’t have been living in that wretched house when the place was robbed.”
There was a long silence between us. How angry was he? I wondered. Aloud I asked, “What do you think Uncle Will wanted to tell me about my mother?”
“I have no idea. We weren’t on speaking terms.” His hands were tightly clasped. The tips of his fingers twitched, then he said in a gentler tone, “I suppose he wanted to tell you what she was like. . I would very much like to see you with your hair up. You should wear a scarf—”
“I don’t have any scarves.”
“I’ll buy you one.”
I’d heard enough and started sliding out of the booth. As I was standing up, a woman with Erika’s hair and eyes, and Erika’s unfriendly expression, walked toward us.
“Elliot,” she said, “we are waiting for you.”
“My love, this is Anna O’Neill.”
She ignored me. “Erika wants to open her gifts.”
“Of course.” He rose to his feet, gesturing for me to join them.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” I said, and headed toward the ladies’ room. Before I had gotten to its door, they disappeared, and I left the restaurant.