A Traitor to Memory

Thus, people had crawled out from under rocks to comment on life as a nanny—NEWSREADER: I WAS A NANNY AND IT WAS HELL blared one headline—and those who had no experience as nannies had experience with Germans they wanted to reveal—A RACE APART, FORMER BERLIN GI SAYS, announced another. But what Libby noticed most of all was the number of stories that dealt with Gideon's family having had a nanny for his sister in the first place.

They went at the topic from several angles: There was the group who chose to dwell on what the German nanny was paid (a pittance, so no wonder she finally offed the poor kid, like in a greedy rage or something) compared to what something called “a well-trained Norland Nanny” was paid (a fortune that prompted Libby to seriously consider a change in career, pronto), crafting their nasty little articles in such a way as to suggest that the Davies family had gotten to the max what they'd paid for with their skinflint pennies. Then there was the group who chose to dwell on speculating what purposes were being served when a mother made the decision to “work outside the home.” And then there was the group who chose to dwell on what it did to parental expectation, responsibility, and devotion when a family was burdened with a disabled child. Battle lines were drawn all over the place on the topic of how to deal with the birth of a Down's Syndrome baby, and all the options taken by parents of such children were given a good airing out: give them up for adoption, put them away at the Government's expense, devote your life to them, learn to cope by asking the aid of outside agencies, join a support group, soldier on with upper lips stiff, treat the child like any other, and on and on.

Libby found that she couldn't begin to imagine what it had been like for all of them when little Sonia Davies had died. Her birth would have been tough to deal with, but to love her—because they must have loved her, right?—and then to lose her and then to have every detail of what went into her existence and the existence of her family displayed for public entertainment and consumption … Whew, Libby thought. How did anyone deal with that?

Not well, if Gideon was anything to go by. He'd changed his position so his forehead was balanced on his knees. He continued to rock.

“Gideon,” she asked him, “you all right?”

“I don't want to remember now that I remember,” he replied numbly. “I don't want to think. And I can't stop either. Remembering. Thinking. I want to rip my brain from my head.”

“I can buy that,” Libby assured him. “So why don't we dump all this stuff in the trash? You been reading it all night?” She bent to the papers and began to gather them. “No wonder you can't get your mind off it, Gid.”

He grabbed her wrist, crying out, “Don't!”

“But if you don't want to think—”

“No! I've been reading and reading and I want to know how anyone could continue to exist, could even want to exist … Look at it all, Libby. Look. Just look.”

Libby looked again at the papers and she saw them the way Gideon must have seen them, coming upon them twenty years after the fact of being protected from the knowledge of what that time had been like for his family. Particularly, she saw the thinly veiled attacks on his parents in the light he would be seeing them. And she made the leap that he no doubt had already made from what the papers had printed: His mother had left them because of this; she had disappeared for nearly twenty years because she had no doubt begun to believe herself as ill-suited for parenthood as the newspapers had made her out to be. It seemed that Gideon was finally understanding his past. Little wonder that he was inches away from flipping out.

She was about to say all of this when he got to his feet. He took two steps, then swayed. She leapt up and grabbed him by the arm.

He said, “I've got to see Cresswell-White.”

“Who? That attorney?”

He headed out of the room, fumbling in his pocket and bringing out his keys. The thought of him driving alone across London spurred Libby to follow. At the front door, she snatched his leather jacket from the coat rack, and she trailed him along the sidewalk to his GPS. As he attempted to insert the key in the lock with a hand that trembled like an octogenarian's, she threw the jacket over his shoulders and said, “You're not driving. You'd get in a wreck before you got to Regent's Park.”

“I've got to get to Cresswell-White.”

“Fine. Cool. Whatever. I'll drive.”

During the drive, Gideon said not a word. He merely stared straight ahead, his knees knocking together spasmodically.

He got out the moment she turned off the ignition in the area of the Temple. He set off down the street. Libby locked the car and trotted to catch up, reaching him as he crossed over at the end and entered that holy of legal holies.