“Well, I can give you a nice room. You’ll have to share the bathroom, but I only have one other guest right now. He’s permanent; he works at the mill.”

  “That’s fine.” Natalie smiled. She was tired and hungry. The thought of a warm bath was inviting.

  “It will be seven dollars a night. But that includes breakfast, dear.” The woman sounded apologetic.

  “All right. That sounds perfect. My name is Natalie Armstrong.”

  “And I’m Mrs. Talbot. Anna Talbot. Please come in, Natalie.”

  “Well, I’ll get my things from the car, Mrs. Talbot. And is there someplace in town where I could get some supper?”

  Mrs. Talbot frowned. “Oh, goodness. This is Thursday. I’m afraid every place is closed by now. On weekends, you know, there are places that stay open in the evening, but Thursday—well, you run out and get your bag, Natalie, and I’ll fix you a bowl of soup and a sandwich. Would that be all right? I’ll just add a little to your bill.”

  Natalie smiled gratefully and went to her car for her small suitcase. Every town, she thought, should have an Anna Talbot, to make strangers feel at home.

  I bet anything, she thought, as she took her things to the room that Anna Talbot pointed out, that she knows my parents. As she washed her hands, she looked in the mirror. Her face was tired; it had been a long drive. I wonder, she thought, who it is in this town who has dark hair and blue eyes, like mine.

  She sat in the kitchen, ate homemade vegetable soup and a thick chicken sandwich, and drank a glass of milk. Anna Talbot hovered politely, making sure she didn’t need anything else, and then took her knitting to the small sitting room where the television set was still on. When she was finished eating, Natalie rinsed her dishes in the sink, and then went tentatively to the door of the sitting room.

  “That was delicious, Mrs. Talbot. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, dear. Just let me know if you need anything.”

  “Well, I wondered if you might let me look at your telephone book, Mrs. Talbot. I have to see someone in Simmons’ Mills tomorrow.”

  Anna Talbot chuckled. “Natalie,” she said, “I’ll give you the phone book.” She reached to a nearby table and handed Natalie the thin volume. “But you could just ask me. I know everyone in this town. I can tell you where they live, whether they’re home, how their health is, and who they voted for, for president.”

  Natalie laughed. “I came to the right place, then. You can probably tell me if Foster Goodwin’s office is still at 43 Main Street. And whether I might be able to see him without an appointment, tomorrow.”

  Anna Talbot looked at her knitting, startled, as if she had dropped a stitch. Then she looked carefully at Natalie through the top half of her bifocals. Across the small room, the television screen had made the transition from a cheerful weatherman to a commercial for some kind of laundry detergent. A man in a white uniform was solemnly advising a frustrated housewife about the grease stains on her husband’s shirt.

  “Foster Goodwin,” said Anna Talbot, puzzled, “has been dead for ten years.”

  16

  Damn, THOUGHT NATALIE, and she felt the beginnings of tears rising hot behind her eyes. I am so stupid. I came up here like an idiot, expecting that everything would fall into place. Find Foster Goodwin, I thought. He’s the only one who knows everything. Just find him, and he’ll tell you. I forgot that it was seventeen years ago.

  No, I didn’t forget. But I thought it didn’t matter. And of course it does. Everything changes in seventeen years. Foster Goodwin is dead. Now what?

  I am so tired that I can’t even think. I have to go to bed. But first I have to figure out what I’m going to do tomorrow. Somewhere in this strange town with one main street I can find my whole past, if I just figure out where to look. The doctor. What was his name? He was the one who delivered me; he’ll know. He’ll remember.

  If he’s alive. Natalie sighed, and sank down into the chair just inside the door to the sitting room. Anna Talbot was watching her. She had begun again to knit, her fingers moving automatically, lifting the yarn behind the needle again and again. Under her hands a blue mitten was taking shape.

  “You look very tired, dear.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie, “I am. It was a long drive.” (What was his name? What was his name? The letters are upstairs in my suitcase, and I’m too tired to move.)

  “Rest for a minute, Natalie,” said Anna Talbot. “I’ll make tea, and we can talk. Look—” she held up the mitten. “For my latest grandchild. I haven’t ever seen him, and he’s almost two. But they live in Kentucky. It’s such a long trip.”

  Natalie looked around the room, and saw the framed photographs of grandchildren—all ages, some infants, some in graduation gowns. School pictures, their colors too bright, their smiles too forced. Snapshots, blurred, of children holding up fish, of young girls posing in party dresses, boys beaming in front of new bicycles, new babies dangled in front of an amateur camera.

  “You have a big family, don’t you, Mrs. Talbot?”

  “Sixteen grandchildren,” the woman said proudly. “Five children. All of my children grew up here and graduated from Simmons’ Mills High School. Two of them graduated from college. Of course, I don’t see them often enough. They’ve all gone away. Very few people stay in Simmons’ Mills—young people, that is. My own children have all gone away years ago. But they write.”

  “You must miss them,” said Natalie politely.

  Anna Talbot smiled. “It’s lonely, sometimes. My husband has been dead five years, now.”

  It’s lonely, sometimes. What a sad thing, Natalie thought, to be lonely. I’ve never really thought of it before. Because Tallie is alone, and not lonely; Tallie loves the aloneness, though she misses Stefan still, even after all these years.

  “Mrs. Talbot, I’d love some tea,” said Natalie. “I just want to get something from my room.”

  She rose, went to the tidy bedroom at the top of the stairs, and took the letters from her suitcase. There it was. “The family was referred to me by Dr. Clarence Therrian,” Foster Goodwin—the late Foster Goodwin (she winced)—had written.

  Please, thought Natalie, coming down the stairs, let Clarence Therrian be alive. Because if he isn’t, I don’t know what to do next.

  Anna Talbot poured tea from a graceful pot decorated with pink roses and thin gold lines. So different from Tallie’s thick pottery that had in it memories of earth and strong hands. But this was more appropriate for Anna Talbot. Natalie thanked her and sipped her tea from a fragile cup.

  “Mrs. Talbot,” she said. “I came here because I need some information that Foster Goodwin had. The only other person who might be able to help me is a doctor named Clarence Therrian.” Please, thought Natalie again. Please. When she was a child, her mother had called it a magic word.

  “Poor Clarence,” sighed Anna Talbot, taking up her knitting again, “poor, dear Clarence.”

  He’s dead, too, thought Natalie, and her stomach wrapped itself around the warm tea in a tight and painful knot.

  “I sent him a plant the other day,” said Anna Talbot. “A cutting from that coleus in the kitchen. I potted it in a lovely little green pot that I’d been saving for something special. Poor Clarence. I hope he’s able to enjoy it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know Clarence, dear?”

  “No.”

  “A dear man. He was the only doctor in Simmons’ Mills for years and years. He delivered all my children. He cared for my husband until he died. Now, of course, there are other doctors. In the past few years, young people seem to want to come to a place like this. So there are three young doctors in town now. All with beards.” She grimaced. “Can you imagine, being examined by someone with a beard? Poor Clarence. He was always so meticulous about his appearance.”

  “What do you mean, was? He isn’t dead, is he? You said you just sent him a plant.”

  “Oh, no. But he’s very, very ill. Poor Clarence.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, as if her news were scandalous. “He had a, you know, a growth.”

  Cancer, thought Natalie. How often she had heard the relatives of her father’s patients refuse to say the word.

  “Of course, he’s much older than I am,” Anna Talbot quickly pointed out, as if she were thereby eliminating the possibility of its happening to her. “You know”—and she was speaking in a semiwhisper again—“there was a feeling, in the town, after Clarence’s wife died two years ago, that perhaps he and I—well.” She took a tiny pair of scissors from her knitting basket, snipped off her yarn, and held up a finished mitten. “That was silly, of course. Clarence and I have been friends for years. He’s a dear man. Perhaps I mentioned that already. But he’s much older than I. I think he’s at least eighty.

  “It’s dreadful that he’s all alone now. They lost their only child very young, and then Mary passed away—such a crowd at her funeral, dear. They were such loved people in this town. But he has no family left, and that’s why I took it upon myself to send the plant. I wouldn’t want you to think it was anything more than that, dear.” Anna Talbot looked up shyly, and she was blushing. Natalie felt a surge of affection and pity for the woman.

  “Where is he, Mrs. Talbot?”

  “Oh, he’s in the hospital, dear. The Simmons’ Mills Community Hospital, just beyond the mill, on the river road.”

  “Do you think I could see him?”

  Mrs. Talbot’s face wrinkled into a frown. “I couldn’t say. I understand he’s very bad now. Is it terribly important?”

  Natalie nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it really is.”

  “Let me think,” said Mrs. Talbot. “I’ll call Winnie Bailey if you like. She’s one of the nurses at the hospital. She’d know.”

  “Oh, would you? Thank you.”

  Anna Talbot picked up the phone on the table by her chair and dialed. Natalie poured more tea into both their cups.

  “Winnie, dear? It’s Anna Talbot. I hope I haven’t taken you away from one of your programs.

  “Well, I’ll just be a minute. I wanted to ask how Clarence is.

  “Yes, I know, isn’t it sad? Of course he’s older than we are, Winnie.

  “Do you happen to know if he received the plant I sent over on Tuesday? No, well, there’s no reason he would mention it, of course. I’m sure he has scads of flowers. It is in an especially nice green pot, though, if you should happen to notice.

  “Well, I have a guest here, Winnie, who would like to see him.

  “I’m not sure. No, she isn’t related, I don’t think. But she would just like to talk to him for a minute.”

  Anna Talbot covered the receiver with one hand and whispered to Natalie. “It wouldn’t take long, would it, dear?” Natalie shook her head no.

  “All right, Winnie, I’ll tell her that. Thank you. You go back to your television now, dear. Goodbye.”

  Anna Talbot was quiet for a minute, and then she sighed. “It’s as I thought. He’s doing very poorly. Poor Clarence.”

  “But I can see him for a minute?” asked Natalie.

  “You’re to go over around eleven in the morning, dear. Ask for Winnie Bailey, and she’ll take you in.”

  Natalie finished her tea and suddenly she was over-whelmingly exhausted. She stood up. “Mrs. Talbot, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve been such a help to me. Now I have to get some sleep.”

  “Of course, dear. If you want an extra blanket, they’re in the chest in your room. And I wonder, dear, if you would do one small favor for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “When you see Clarence, would you point out to him the coleus in the green pot? And tell him that it’s from Anna Talbot?”

  17

  FRIDAY WAS CLEAR and cloudless over Simmons’ Mills, with a sky so blue it could have been colored in by a child who had saved his very best crayon for the effect. Natalie left her car at Mrs. Talbot’s and walked to the hospital.

  The town, brightened by the sun in morning, seemed less gray than it had the night before. The buildings on the main street were old ones, but the wood was painted, the bricks were clean, and there were people entering and leaving the few stores, the bank, the library, and the post office. At night, it had seemed a movie-set town, left behind after the actors had gone away; in the daytime, Natalie realized, walking toward the mill that dominated the north edge of the town with its silhouette, it was simply an ordinary small town, one in which lives were being lived, it appeared, with contentment and a kind of quiet charm.

  My mother walked here, she thought, waiting for me to be born.

  The hospital was new: modern, stark, and efficient, with the vaguely antiseptic smell that bright-figured draperies and Matisse prints never seem to dispel in hospitals. Entering by the front door, Natalie saw in the lobby a young doctor, bearded, and smiled. Imagine being examined by a man with a beard, Mrs. Talbot had said. He smiled at her with interest in return, but she turned away, to the woman behind the information desk.

  “I’m looking for someone named Winnie Bailey,” she said. “A nurse.”

  The woman nodded. “Second floor,” she said, pointing to a flight of stairs. “Up there and to your left.”

  Winnie Bailey was behind the nursing station on the second floor, and she looked up and nodded when Natalie appeared. “You’re the one Anna called about,” she said.

  “Yes. My name is Natalie Armstrong.”

  “You know, Dr. Therrian is very ill,” the woman said.

  Natalie nodded.

  “He hasn’t been allowed visitors. But he’s been feeling a little better for the past two days, and I’ve checked with his doctors. It’s all right if you see him, but only briefly. Of course you won’t be upsetting him, will you? You haven’t brought bad news?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Natalie. “I just need a little information that I think he has, about someone who was a patient of his a long time ago.”

  Winnie Bailey wrinkled her forehead. “Goodness. That might be a problem. He’s feeling pretty well this morning, but of course he’s on a lot of medication, and his mind does wander. You may find that he won’t be able to understand what it is you want.”

  Oh, he has to, thought Natalie. He must. “I’ll just have to try,” she said. “It’s so important to me.”

  “Would you like me to go in with you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Natalie. “It will be all right.”

  “Well then, it’s room 234, just down the hall there. I wouldn’t stay more than fifteen minutes.” Winnie Bailey smiled and picked up some folders and her pen.

  The door to room 234 was partially open, and hung with signs, no visitors, no smoking. Natalie pushed it gently with her hand and looked inside to where on old man lay alone. His eyes were closed, his face pale against the pillow, and a bottle of glucose dangled from its rack beside his bed, attached to his left arm by the narrow plastic tube that dripped the solution in measured drops into his vein. There were vases of flowers on the wide windowsill, and among them was the green pot of coleus. Natalie smiled. She went closer to the bed.

  “Dr. Therrian?” she said softly.

  He turned his head and blinked his eyes. He stared at her for a moment, and then looked around the room as if he had lost his bearings, as if he were reassessing where he was.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” Natalie said.

  The old man turned to her again, looked at her carefully, looked at her hair, at her face, moved his eyes along her blue sweater, back to her face again. Then he reached out his hand, and took hers, and smiled.

  “Julie?” he said.

  18

  THIS IS SO HARD, thought Natalie. How can I torment this old, tired, sick man with my questions? He can’t even understand what’s going on. His mind is wandering. He thinks I’m someone else. He’s probably in pain. I should just leave him alone.

  But I have come all this way. And he’s the only one who can help me.

  She said gently, “Dr. Therrian. My name is Natalie.”

  “Julie?” he said again.

  “No,” she answered. “I’m not Julie. My name is Natalie. I’ve come a long way to see you. Can you hear me?”

  He nodded.

  “I can’t stay long because the nurse said that you need to rest. So I’ll try to explain this quickly.”

  He was watching her intently, and his hand was still in hers. It was cold, and she held it tightly to warm it.

  “You delivered me, Dr. Therrian. Seventeen years ago.”

  He smiled. “Many,” he said.

  “Yes, you delivered many babies. Is that what you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “I was special, in a way, though, because for some reason my mother couldn’t keep me.” It was hard for her to say it.

  He closed his eyes and nodded his head again.

  “You remember her, don’t you, Dr. Therrian?”

  “Blue eyes,” the old man said.

  Natalie bit her lip. “Yes. They said she had blue eyes and dark hair. Dr. Therrian, I want very much to find her now.”

  He was watching her again, and he didn’t say anything. “Would you tell me her name? Do you remember her name?”

  He gripped her hand suddenly, and she realized from his face, as it drew tight and his eyes closed, that a spasm of pain had overwhelmed him. She waited, and felt pain herself, for this man who was so alone and so close to death.

  Finally he relaxed. “Dr. Therrian,” Natalie said, “I’m so sorry that I have to bother you like this. But there is no one else who knows; do you understand?”

  He nodded, and said softly, “You look like her. I thought you were Julie.”

  The short sentences had tired him, she could tell. He was breathing deeply, and he took his hand away from hers, as if he wanted to go to sleep. Natalie felt agony for him, and desperation for herself. She tried again.

  “Please don’t talk. I’ll just ask you questions, and you can nod your head yes or no. Maybe that will be easier.”