you to look after my notebooks.’ I never did find out what set him off, but I promised to do as instructed. Then he sent me this postcard. It’s evidence that the notebooks are mine.”
Helen still held the postcard with both hands. She gripped it chest-high, reminding me of grief-stricken survivors in post-disaster newscasts who so hopefully exhibit head shots of their probably deceased loved ones. To Helen, the postcard was evidence, but for it to carry any weight, one would have to believe that she faithfully recalled a conversation that had taken place decades earlier. I did believe her. If her lawsuit rested on so little, however, it was hopeless. The presiding judge wouldn’t have heard her laugh, wouldn’t have eaten her salty pasta on an empty stomach accustomed to Pop-Tarts, wouldn’t have any good reason to trust her.
“How’d the Elston end up with the notebooks?”
“Freddy died unexpectedly, as you might already know.”
“In a car accident.”
“Right.” She nodded. “It fell to my parents to handle the funeral, which was a nightmare, as you can imagine. They also had to dispose of all his stuff — as they saw it, all his junk. The easiest option was to ask the Salvation Army to pack up the attic, just take everything away.” Helen paused. She played with her hair. “It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to find the notebooks. I figured some idiot had thrown them out along with Freddy’s old sweaters and tennis shoes. But I was wrong. A few years ago, they turned up at an estate sale, and a curator from your university swooped in.”
Not for the first time, my university was taking a finders-keepers approach to cultural patrimony. It was a Collegiate professor who’d raided Tiwanaku and returned home with a truckload of artifacts: ceramics, jewelry, human skeletons. A century later, Collegiate was still insisting that its claim to Bolivia’s national treasure was as good as Bolivia’s.
“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” Helen said.
Unthinkingly, I’d fallen into my stretching routine. Arms up; chest out. I must have looked ridiculous. When I explained that my rhomboids hurt, Helen offered to rub my back. Or more like ordered me to sit on the bed so she could do so. She stood above me, using her thumbs to circle and press my sore muscles. At first the physical intimacy made me self-conscious. But the pleasure of relief banished that feeling quickly. Through some mysterious pathway in my nervous system, every pinch along my spine made my earlobes tingle.
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