Free Ada Unraveled by Barbara Sullivan

A
caregiver.
    “I’m fine alone. How could she help me,
anyway?” Victoria.
    “At least she could call her sisters if you
fall. Besides, she’s capable of doing a lot. She could learn to
care for you.”
    “No! I don’t need taking care of.” Victoria
tried to adjust her chair and winced in pain at the movement. “Why
doesn’t someone tell another childhood story?”
    The butterflies were multiplying. Now there
were four of them flitting around my belly.
     

Chapter 9: Twisted Halls
    A tolling clock, down the hall I think,
reminded me that only half this night had passed. And we weren’t
even close to turning the quilt. We had at least one more expansion
rolled on the dowels before us. Sleep was calling me to bed. But I
was six hours away from it even if we ended by five. The drive down
the mountain and putting on my jammies would take another hour.
    “All this tea,” I mumbled and pushed my
chair back once more, stretching my back and neck as I went.
    The bathroom was down the hall to the right,
but I turned left at the door instead, hoping the women at the rack
were all looking at their stitching instead of my retreat. Snooping
again. Good habit on the job, bad habit when making new friends.
Sometimes I had difficulty separating the two.
    Again I noted the dim lighting in the hall.
I’ve always found old houses depressing. The picture display once
meant to enliven the crazy hall had long been neglected. I realized
I was reviewing a family pictorial history that had stopped when
the children reached adulthood. One group photograph revealed there
had been seven of them.
    Seven children and not one grandchild?
    I peered into the faces of the grainy photo,
taken many years ago. Looking for similarities between Victoria in
her eighties and the Victoria of this large tribe—then, maybe, in
her thirties. I couldn’t find them. Maybe because Victoria and Jake
were still so young in this shot. The youngest child was barely
more than a toddler. It looked to be a first communion for one of
the daughters. She was dressed like a bride, all in white.
    I remembered seeing some of my mother’s old
photos of first communions.
    I looked for other family photos, found one
a few feet away. This second group photo showed Jake and Victoria
well into their fifties. All the children were grown, those that
were in attendance. I couldn’t identify the occasion of this second
gathering. Two young men and three young women with their aging
parents.
    Missing were John, and maybe Sarah? Maybe
Sarah was taking the picture. Or John. But why would both of them
not be in the grouping? And, I reminded myself, that Sarah’s
abilities were limited. Just how limited, I had no idea.
    Victoria’s husband Jake, father of this
brood, was holding something up in his right hand. I couldn’t tell
what, in the faded picture. Perhaps a stick.
    I thought about how dramatically women aged
compared to men. Not a new thought, now that I was in my fifties. I
still had difficulty finding the old woman in the other room in
this more mature face. Maybe a little similarity. But it could just
as easily have been a cousin’s.
    Jake, on the other hand, held his identity
through the two to three decades that separated the two photos.
    But there were no more group photos of the
family in this hall. Perhaps the relatives had begun picking over
the remains of Victoria and Jake’s lives already. It wasn’t
uncommon. I guessed the china cabinet would look as scavenged as
these walls.
    I listened for any sounds behind me and
ahead as I snuck down the hall and around the corner, searching the
handful of pictures closer to the kitchen.
    “The bathroom is the other way, Rachel.”
    I startled, but recovered quickly. Sneaks do
that.
    “Oh, thanks, Elixchel. I’m completely turned
around in this house.”
    She passed by me, her Mayan beauty turning
to chiseled rock. Chastened, I retreated back through the broken
hallway.
    Rounding the last corner, I saw that
Victoria