Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

Chinese rug. Silently, as if someone lay sleeping in the bed, I crept to the dresser and switched on the lamp.
    The photo stood beside the lamp on the otherwise bare dresser top. Leaning close, I examined the image, a moment from the past caught in a silver frame: my father holding Michelle, the daughter who was named for him. He was so young, happily unaware that his life was almost over. I pitied him in the way I might have pitied an unfortunate stranger.
    He was a handsome man, with the same high cheekbones I saw every time I looked at my sister. Blond hair fell across his forehead in a bright fan. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes because he was gazing down at Michelle. She beamed up at him.
    How old was she? Two, perhaps. A little younger than she was in my strange memory, dream, vision, whatever it was.
    I carried the picture to the bed, sat and turned on the bedside lamp. My father leaned against a tree. Sunlight dappled the grass around him and Michelle. He wore a blue knit shirt with a little alligator on the pocket, she was in a pink romper suit with short sleeves and legs. Summer. Sun and heat and the buzz of cicadas in the air. Where were they? In our yard in Minnesota, at the home I couldn’t remember?
    And where was I? Standing off to the side? Next to Mother as she snapped the picture? Why wasn’t I in it too?
    We must have other pictures of our father that included me. I’d seen them, hadn’t I? Suddenly I was unsure. They certainly weren’t kept in any part of the house where I would come across them. Where would they be if not in Mother’s room? Her study downstairs was a possibility, but I doubted that she kept anything personal among her work-related papers. Besides, every drawer and file cabinet in that room was probably locked.
    I glanced at my watch—6:25. If Mother finished her appointment at 6:30, she’d be home by 6:40.
    Careful not to make a noise that would catch Rosie’s attention, I pulled out the night stand drawer. It held only a box of tissues and a yellow leather bookmark. I crossed to the closet and slid open one of the louvered doors, wincing when it rumbled in its track. The scent of floral sachet enveloped me. Mother’s garments were arranged by type and length: blouses, skirts, jackets, dresses, all further divided by color. I scanned the shelves to one side of the clothes racks and found nothing but shoes and purses.
    Back at the dresser, I opened the top drawer on the left. It contained Mother’s brush and comb, her mirror and a small cache of cosmetics.
    Quickly I explored the rest of the drawers, running my hand under nightgowns and underwear. As my fingers brushed the cool silky fabrics I was reminded of movies in which people furtively searched places where they had no right to be. I stopped, repelled by what I was doing. Going through my mother’s underwear. Good God. 
    But after a moment I was back at it. I wanted to see those pictures, the ones of me with my father. If I discovered where they were, I could come back to them tomorrow, when I’d be alone in the house for a while.
    Among folded sweaters in a bottom drawer of the chest, I found a brown packet tied with string, bulging. My fingers shook as I fumbled with the knot. It came loose and shiny papers slid out of the packet, fluttered to the rug. Travel brochures. Palm trees, a white cruise ship, impossibly bright blue water.
    Just then I was startled by the lilt of Rosario’s voice from downstairs, the words indistinguishable but the cadence familiar: she was giving Mother a run-down of things she’d done that day, before leaving for home.
    “Damn,” I muttered, and knelt to scoop up the brochures. I shoved the half-tied packet among the sweaters, shut the drawer. I switched off the lamps on my way out.
    I was in my room with the door closed when Mother came upstairs.
    All through dinner Mother and Michelle talked about the paper on phobias that Mother would deliver at the conference the next day, the passages she still wasn’t happy with, the case histories she’d used. A businessman terrified of elevators. A woman so afraid of heights that she couldn’t go above the first floor in a building. People who’d been unable to leave their homes for years. All were success stories, emotional cripples now leading normal lives because of Dr. Judith Goddard. Mother seldom had a failure.
    How ironic it was, I thought, that this masterful psychologist who had helped so many fearful people