Sophie Medina: Ghost Image Part 10

My phone rang when I was halfway back to the Vespa, which I'd chained to a streetlamp on Reservoir Road. Caller ID flashed TOMMY, along with a photo I loved of my half brother standing outside a clinic in a remote mountain village in Honduras where he'd worked on a medical mission during a gap year between college and medical school. His arm was draped around a sweet-faced young girl whose arms ended as two tapered stubs below her elbows. Both of them were grinning like a couple of fools without a care in the world.

Tommy and I were fifteen years apart-I was fourteen when my mother married Harry-but we were close and I adored him, just like I adored Harry. I knew the feeling was mutual, but there was also a special bond between us because Tommy realized, just as I knew Harry did, that deep down inside our mother wished I could be airbrushed out of the family photos and that I'd never been born.

Of course she would never admit it, but there were times when I'd caught her looking at me when she thought I didn't see, and I knew she blamed me for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her life. Her dark-haired, olive-skinned daughter standing next to Tommy and my half sister, Lexie, both of them blue eyed and golden haired, as wholesome and all-American perfect as apple pie. I was the unhappy reminder of her affair with a Spanish soccer player during a study-abroad year in college, a misbegotten marriage, and a dozen hardscrabble years as a single mother after we left Antonio Medina, my father, and moved home from Madrid.

For years I wanted to believe that this broke my father's heart, that he loved me, even if my mother did not. When I was old enough, I tracked down every poster and photo of him playing for Real Madrid without telling my mother, poring over every detail of his life I could find. The first time I saw his picture, dark and n.o.ble looking and dangerously handsome, was like looking into a mirror, and I thought, I am Antonio Medina's daughter. For a while I kept a small backpack under my bed, ready to leave the instant he showed up to sweep me into his arms and take me with him back to Spain, a land of heat and light and fiery pa.s.sion in my young mind. Then one day right before we left New York to move to Virginia so my mother could marry Harrison Wyatt, she told me in a tight-lipped voice that a friend who kept in touch with Antonio said he'd been killed in a motorcycle accident near Seville. I unpacked the backpack and, just in time, Harry came into my life, and his unstinting love filled the empty s.p.a.ce in my heart.

Tommy and I talked regularly on the phone and tried to meet for dinner once every few weeks. But since Christmas he had been working part-time at the free clinic in Adams Morgan in addition to taking cla.s.ses as a first-year med student at Georgetown, and the dinners became sporadic.

"Hey you," I said. "What's going on? I've missed you."

"I've missed you, too. Same old same old. Work, school, sleep. Unfortunately not much sleep. Any chance you're free for dinner?"

My brother's schedule is more tightly programmed than most military campaigns. If he was free all of a sudden either something fell through . . . or something important had come up.

"You mean tonight?"

I heard a stifled yawn. "Yeah, tonight."

"Sure. Is everything all right? You sound beat. Want me to make a reservation somewhere?"

"I thought we could eat at my place," he said. "It's five thirty now, so how about seven o'clock?"

I knew what was in Tommy's pantry: ramen noodles, boxes of mac 'n' cheese, a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter, and probably a big bag of Doritos. His refrigerator wasn't much better.

"Shall I cook?"

"I've got chili."

"That you made?"

"Is that a dig about my cooking?" He managed to sound indignant, but before I could reply, he said, "Relax. It's homemade. Not by me. And before you ask, she's just a friend."

"You know I never pry. A friend who makes good chili?"

"Actually, she makes amazing chili. You don't pry, but you do what you're doing now, ask an innocent question and then another and another until eventually you find out who I'm seeing. Then Nick probably runs her through the Agency database to make sure she's not on some terrorist watch list or wanted in three states." Another yawn. "Hey, Soph, I'm still at the clinic, trying to get out of here. See you at seven, okay?"

Tommy hung up before I could say, "Sure, fine."

I know my brother. Something had happened and he didn't want to talk about it over the phone. Whatever it was, he was saving it to tell me over a bowl of amazing chili.

And that worried me.

I stopped by Safeway on my way home to pick up a six-pack to bring to dinner. Halfway home my phone rang, and it was Thea. I told her about finding the book and what Bram had said about it. The silence on her end went on so long I checked my phone for a dropped call.

"I would absolutely love to see those prints," she said finally. "Something that unique comes along once in a lifetime. If William Coles was considering publis.h.i.+ng a second edition of Adam in Eden that included those drawings, either he never got around to it before he died or perhaps everything was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Thousands of books were lost when London burned, so it wouldn't surprise me if either the original plates for those prints never survived or all copies of the second edition-if there was one-were destroyed."

I could have told Thea I had photographed each of the prints and could send her an e-mail link to a photo gallery once I downloaded them, or mentioned the Fairbairn letter, but something stopped me. They say three can keep a secret if two are dead. Max a.s.sured me Thea could be trusted, but the matter of who owned the book still bothered me. The subject of Edward Jaine being Kevin's patron had never come up between Thea and me, so she probably wasn't aware that it could be a contentious issue.

"Bram's keeping the book in the vault at Asquith's until the new owner claims it," I said. "So at least we know it's safe."

"Well, obviously the Franciscans own it now, don't they? Anyway, Kevin's parents are dead, though I believe he has a brother and a sister living in Jersey. Once the formalities of his estate are sorted out, perhaps we can discuss the possibility of them loaning it to the library to put on display."

"That sounds like a good idea."

After she hung up, I thought about Jack's remark last night about the dangers of the slippery slope. Once you start down, you really can't turn back.

Tommy lived in the Ontario, an elegant Beaux Arts apartment complex situated on a couple of acres on a hilltop in Lanier Heights in Adams Morgan. When the Ontario was built for wealthy Was.h.i.+ngtonians in the early 1900s, its selling point was the height of its location, guaranteeing pure air that was free from malaria. How times have changed. Now you hope the neighborhood's safe enough for you to walk from your car to your front door after dark without getting mugged.

Tommy's apartment was one of the larger ones on the fourth floor. When I knocked on the door, he yelled, "It's open."

He was in the galley kitchen, barefoot and in jeans and a gray Georgetown T-s.h.i.+rt, his straight blond hair still damp from a shower, standing at the stove stirring chili in a flame-colored pot with a book propped next to him.

"Is that a cookbook?" I asked, and pulled the six-pack out of a canvas bag.

"Principles of Biochemistry." The kiss that was probably meant for my cheek landed on my ear. "Is that beer cold?"

"Of course." I gave him a quick hug around the waist. "The chili smells terrific. What can I do?"

"Open us some beers, if you don't mind." He pointed to the window and what looked like a small bra.s.s head of a wolf with its mouth open wide in a scream screwed to the frame. "Use the gargoyle. It's a bottle opener."

"It even has its own dedicated trash can, I see." He grinned as I opened two beers and handed one to him. "What else?"

"There's corn bread in the microwave," he said. "Can you put it on a plate?"

Before Tommy moved in, my mother had furnished the apartment-which Harry owned-in her idea of the perfect bachelor pad. To me it had looked like there ought to be DO NOT TOUCH or DON'T SIT ON THIS CHAIR signs on every surface until Tommy's weights and his unfolded laundry and his piles of books and papers slowly littered the rooms and the place finally seemed more like a home than a decorator showroom. Somehow I figured Mom hadn't seen the gargoyle beer bottle opener.

We ate in the dining room after I cleared the table of his papers and books.

"The chili's great," I said. "And when are you going to tell me what's going on?"

He pa.s.sed me the plate of corn bread and said, "It's Chappy."

At least he didn't beat around the bush. My chest tightened, and I set the plate down hard on the table. Chappy was the name I'd given Charles Lord, our grandfather, the first time I met him when I was two years old and he told me that Charles was happy to meet Sophie. I'd melded the words together and he became Chappy. One of the early postWorld War II photographers who worked for Magnum, the iconic photo agency, he had been hired by no less than the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Before my mother married Harry, she had sent me to Connecticut to spend summers with my grandfather since she couldn't afford day care when school was out. Those summers gave me some of my happiest and most carefree memories. Chappy had treated me as an a.s.sistant, not a child, letting me help him in his darkroom and experiment with developing my own film. When I was twelve, he gave me my first camera and taught me how to shoot. My grandfather was the reason I was a photographer today.

"Is he all right?" I asked my brother. "How come n.o.body told me anything before now?"

"Relax, Soph. Chap's okay." Tommy put down his spoon. He knew I was mad. By "n.o.body," he knew I meant our mother, who had put him up to pa.s.sing on this news. "I mean, he's not in the hospital so it's nothing serious."

"Then what is it?"

"A neighbor found him wandering around Topstone Park in the middle of the day dressed in his pajamas and carrying his old Leica."

"Topstone Park used to be Edward Steichen's home. When Steichen was alive, he and Chappy were good friends. He knows that place like he knows his own backyard."

"Well, Chap, uh, seemed to think he and Steichen were going shooting together, that they had some kind of date."

I closed my eyes. Edward Steichen, another photography legend who organized the world-famous Family of Man exhibition in the 1950s, among many other accomplishments, pa.s.sed away in 1973. Before I was born.

"Oh, my G.o.d. Is this the first time he's done something like this?"

Tommy's eyes met mine, and I knew there was more. "That we know of. Mom drove up to Connecticut this morning. Dad didn't want her to go on her own-especially making that drive to West Redding all by herself-but hunting season just wrapped up and now he's got the spring steeplechase race coming up, plus it's a busy time in the real estate market. She's thinking of staying up there for a while, and he can't afford to be gone that long."

If something were seriously wrong with my grandfather, Harry would drop everything-turn his real estate business over to his partner and get someone else to take over organizing the point-to-point that the Goose Creek Hunt, his foxhunting club, sponsored-and he and my mother would fly to Connecticut. Since he was staying behind, maybe the situation with Chappy wasn't so bad.

"Mom should have told me," I said. "I would have gone with her."

"She knows. That's why she didn't tell you. She said you'd take Chappy's side and the two of you would gang up on her."

"Take Chappy's side about what?"

He broke off a piece of corn bread. "She wants him to move to an a.s.sisted-living facility because she doesn't think he should be rattling around that big house all by himself. Chap won't have any part of it. She's not going to have the easiest time persuading him."

"An a.s.sisted-living facility? Are you kidding me?"

"Hey, calm down-"

"That's been his home for more than forty years. It would be criminal to put him in some room or suite where he doesn't have access to his studio, all those decades of photographs and negatives and slides. Come on, Tommy. His mind's still as sharp as a tack. I talked to him a few days ago, and he was telling me stories about the old days at Magnum, Capa's parties when he'd come back to New York from the Paris office and everyone would go to 21 or the Algonquin. He remembers every detail."

"Soph, Robert Capa died in Vietnam. I think it was in the 1950s." Tommy stood up. "I'm going to get another beer. You want one?"

"I'll stick with this, thanks."

When he came back into the room he said, "Look, sometimes with memory loss you remember things that happened years ago with absolute clarity but you have no idea what someone said to you ten minutes ago or how to find your way back home from church or the grocery store." He paused and added in a gentle voice, "Or how you got to Topstone Park."

"He doesn't have Alzheimer's. Or dementia. He couldn't."

The chandelier flickered as if a small electrical surge had pulsed somewhere in the building, and the light seemed to grow dimmer. Across the room, the radiator gurgled and the heat came on with a hiss.

For a long moment neither of us spoke. Finally Tommy said in a calmer voice, "I don't know anything and neither do you. Mom wants him to see a doctor, get him evaluated."

"So she can move him to some warehouse with a bunch of strangers. It'll kill him."

"Come on, Soph, Chap does need medical attention. Why don't we sit tight until we find out how that goes? Before I forget, we still have dessert. Mint chocolate chip ice cream. I bought it for you."

He was finished talking about our grandfather until there was something new to say. Nick was like that and so was Harry. Men can be so economical with their emotions. Women need the catharsis of talking it out, exploring all the possibilities and angles. Men want to move on to dessert. Done is done.

We stood in the kitchen and ate ice cream out of the carton after Tommy stuck it in the microwave to soften it.

"I'm still going to see you Sat.u.r.day, right?" I said. "We could use your help translating at the shoe store when the kids come with their parents. Your Spanish is perfect."

"I wouldn't miss it. And your Spanish isn't bad, either."

"Mom wouldn't speak it after we left Spain. Mine is workmanlike, only what I remember from high school."

"It's better than that. It's a terrific thing you and Gracie are doing, Soph. I see a lot of those kids in the clinic. It's hard to imagine the kind of poverty I saw in Honduras right here at home."

"I wish we could do more. It just seems like a drop in the bucket. One pair of shoes." I pushed up my sleeves.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"The dishes. It's the least I can do since you fed me, plus I owe you for Sat.u.r.day."

"No, you don't."

"Go get whatever's left in the dining room."

Tommy flashed a grateful smile and when he came back with dishes and our empty beer bottles, a copy of the Was.h.i.+ngton Tribune was tucked under his arm. He set the paper on the counter folded to Grace's story on Kevin.

"This fell off the dining room chair when I was cleaning up. I'm sorry I forgot to say something about Kevin when you got here. He was a good man. G.o.d, what a shame."

I set the clean flame-colored pot he'd used for the chili in the dish drainer, and he picked up a towel and began to dry it.

"I'm really going to miss him. The last time I saw him was the day he died. He promised to help me with a book on the forgotten gardens of Was.h.i.+ngton," I said. "Grace and I planned to use the profits from the book's sales for fixing up the Adams Morgan Children's Center. I'm going to be lost without Kevin's help."

"I'm sorry," he said again. He gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. "But if you're looking for overlooked gardens, the Ontario's got a great one. Plus we have an incredible communal herb garden. Kevin used to come by every so often to help one of our older residents who was a good friend of his until she pa.s.sed away last year."

"He did?"

He nodded. "I'm serious about you photographing it. I'm sure the board would give you permission. It's not just your run-of-the-mill parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. There's a lot of exotic stuff. My next-door neighbor grows herbs for teas and uses some for medicinal purposes. I've warned her to be careful, but she says she knows what she's doing."

"Do you grow hyssop?"

"No idea. I can ask my neighbor. It's pretty common. I think it's been around since the Bible. Why?"

"I heard something today about a plant someone thought might be hyssop. It was supposed to help with memory loss."

Tommy gave me a skeptical look. "Are you thinking of Chappy?"

"Of course."

He pulled out his phone and started tapping. After a moment he said, "Looks like there's two kinds of hyssop. What you're probably talking about is called water hyssop. Listen to this. Water hyssop is commonly used as a brain tonic to improve mental alertness and enhance learning and academic performance. The herb has antioxidant, cardiotonic and anticancer properties. It improves intellect, memory, consciousness, mental acuity, mental clarity and longevity. Water hyssop calms the mind and promotes relaxation." He looked up. "It's common in Ayurvedic medicine. That was from a website about India."

"When I was in India on an a.s.signment years ago, I developed a horrible rash on my arm that wouldn't go away. I tried everything-pills, creams, even a shot of cortisone. Finally our translator took me to a woman who practiced Ayurvedic medicine. She made a salve-I don't remember what was in it-that cured it within two days," I said. "It was like magic."

Tommy slipped his phone into his jeans pocket. "Or maybe what you were taking conventionally finally started to work. Ayurvedic medicine is part of that whole constellation of alternative or complementary medicines that includes acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, stuff like that. You can find pract.i.tioners here, too, but all of it's unregulated," he said. "You've gotta be careful. Maybe you were lucky."

"Or maybe that Indian woman knew what she was doing. If it's true that Chappy has the beginning of Alzheimer's, I'm going to find someone who knows Ayurvedic medicine and get him or her to make him a tea or tonic from water hyssop. So what if the FDA hasn't approved it? That doesn't mean it couldn't help. Do you think you could check and see if there's any in your garden?"

"First of all, it grows near water, so we probably have the other kind of hyssop if we have it at all." My brother laid his hands on my shoulders. "Let's not jump to conclusions, okay? Or practice medicine without a license."

"It's plants, not drugs. And I'm not going to brew some concoction myself. I'll find someone who knows what they're doing."