Scene Seven

Michael’s old bedroom was the logical first stop, and perhaps the only intended destination. Because it shared a closet with the refurbished guestroom, a scent of curing latex paint wafted through a fissure. The sister reached under the bed to pull out a battered suitcase, commenting wryly, “Michael never throws anything away. He only reprioritizes.” Grey with dust, the relic was opened to lay bare pictures and other mementos beside a bed lamp. “I thought you might like to see these.”

Emma looked over the contents.

“I hear you’re leaving the hospital to go to art school,” Miranda inquired. “Is this true?”

“Yes. I think Michael has had as much influence on me as I have had on him.”

“My brother also tells me he’s given you one of his paintings.”

“He has.”

The sister spoke frankly. “It’s very brave of you, I think, to have worked so hard to earn one degree, and then to start over.”

The therapist admitted, “Sometimes it takes a while to find yourself.”

Miranda observed, “And you’re still young enough to make those big life decisions. You’re what…? Thirty…?”

“I just turned thirty-one.”

The sister was affable. “I only know you’ve had a profound impact on my brother.” She paused, adding parenthetically, “You and this nurse he’s taken up with.”

Emma answered gravely, “So I’ve heard.”

“Has he spoken of her to you?”

“Even if I knew…”

“I believe I know who it is,” Miranda volunteered. “I put it together this afternoon on looking through Michael’s journal.”

The distracted guest shuffled through collaged pages in the suitcase, stopping on a trimmed-down pornographic magazine cover made to fit in a frame. Only the nude woman’s head and shoulders were visible. “He has another picture of her,” she commented. “A black and white one.”

“The black and white picture would be from her yearbook.” Miranda’s voice went distant with the rest of the story. “Suzanne (or Amber, as she later called herself) was the great love from my brother’s boyhood.”

“It’s a pity he burned all his paintings of her.”

“We’re not sure he ever did paint her.”

“You don’t believe him? About their fateful meeting in college?”

Miranda still puzzled over it. “Michael fell out of touch with the family when he went away to art school. We don’t know if they actually met again, or if she modeled for him or was solicited by him in some way. All we know is in the days following her death, he claimed they had been betrothed.”

“But there was a phone message.”

“A garbled one from a woman—yes.”

“And the wedding dress.”

The sister spoke plainly. “I needn’t tell you about Michael’s fetish for collecting personal feminine objects.”

Emma only needed to look into the open case to see proof of it. There were many clipped pictures of women, as well as letters, notes, jotted-down phone numbers, and other unclassifiable keepsakes from females he had passingly known. “Then you are not convinced of any of his story about Suzanne?”

Miranda quieted before sharing the details. “No one knows this (unless it leaked out at the hospital), but according to the coroner’s report in Chicago, Suzanne was a few weeks pregnant at the time of the airline tragedy.”

Emma nodded, confirming she was privy to the information.

The sister continued, “To the best anyone can decipher the message left on my brother’s machine that day, it was about a child. An unborn child.”

The picture was returned to the suitcase.

Miranda underlined it. “I believe in my brother. But beyond that, I do not believe.”

“I understand.”

“You know, Emma,” the sister observed, “you look enough like Suzanne to be her daughter.”

“Are you saying I’m a ghost, Miss West? That I’m this child?”

“Of course not.” Miranda closed the luggage lid and refastened it, coming to her point. “It is only a rumor we’ve uncovered over time, but Suzanne disappeared for about a year in high school in Memphis, around the age of sixteen. The story goes it was because she was impregnated by her stepfather, though no one knows whether the baby was taken to term or not.” The sister hesitated briefly to part with the rest of it. “If there was a child, she would be about your age.”

The therapist laughed nervously. “That definitely sounds like something out of Michael’s journal, Miss West!”

“Yes. It does,” she admitted. “Few would have the patience to piece together a story from so many scattered pages across time.” Miranda returned the suitcase to its hiding place, lingering in the floor to note, “But perhaps only one page is needed to make sense of it.”

“Oh…?”

“A poem…” the sister explained. “A poem dedicated to you… Tore out of a binding… But not tossed on the heap… My brother may be chronically disorganized, but what is most dear to him is always in plain view.”

Emma deflected. “It’s not unusual for patients to form attachments for their therapists.”

“Understandably,” the sister said. “But perhaps it’s fortunate (with you leaving the profession) that your professional relationship with him will soon be removed as an obstacle.”

Emma was nonplus, yet would not entertain the sister’s assertions further.

Miranda, having said all she wanted to say, moved to the light switch. She was honest in her feelings. “My brother is a difficult man to love, Emma, but I do love him. The only thing that matters to me is his happiness.”

The young woman’s response aimed at terseness, but came out softer. “Then his happy ending is what we both want.”

Miranda’s voice trailed away with unanticipated bliss. “Then there’s an end to it.”

The light on Michael’s childhood was turned out, and the two women returned quieter downstairs.