He knew he ought to go to his mother, but he thought they had just a little more time. She had said so, after all. Local people had called Maggie a witch often enough that it had become part of her identity. As ridiculous as it seemed when she insisted she could stave off death until daybreak, he believed her. Sunrise would take her, she’d claimed, and sunrise had not yet arrived.
He nudged open Violet’s bedroom door.
Standing in the doorway, he watched Violet pull things from her closet and lay them over her left arm. She held a pale blue peignoir so sheer that spiders might have woven it. His face and neck flushed, and he wanted to laugh at himself, or scream at the world. This wasn’t the time for either.
“You’d be safer here,” he said, startling her. “I could find a place for you to stay while I’m gone.”
Violet tossed the clothing she’d gathered onto the bed with a clatter of metal hangers, then walked over to him and lay her head on his chest. Sadness enveloped them, but a breathless tension as well. He felt they were approaching a crossroads beyond which nothing would ever be the same. Maggie’s death would be a part of that, but not the only part.
Malcolm took her by the shoulders and created space between them. Violet could not mask her disappointment. She cinched the belt around her robe, then ran her hands through her sleep-mussed hair.
He despised his brother for abandoning her, and for leaving them in one another’s company all this time.
“Elias should be here,” he said.
Violet’s gaze hardened. “As should your sister.”
“Yes,” he said. They both knew they were talking about two different things. “But he should have come home.”
“And if he had?”
Malcolm hesitated. The world might be changing, but 1956 hadn’t made much of an impact on Elkhart. Maybe in places likeHollywood and New York City, a man might carry on an affair with his brother’s wife and escape lifelong shame and scandal. In some places, he thought, people thrived on scandal. But this was Indiana.
“If Elias came home,” Malcolm said, “I’d tell him he ought to stay here and be a proper husband to you, or set you free.”
Violet parted her lips, but no words emerged. A puff of her breath reached him just as he inhaled, and he breathed it in. The moment hung between them, all the unknowns, the dangers, the allure of possibility.
He started to speak, to put words to the crazy thoughts in his head.
Violet glanced away. “Did you hear that?”
Malcolm flinched. Had she invented some distraction, afraid of the things they might say to one another?
“I heard nothing.”
“From Maggie’s room,” Violet said.
He rushed from Violet’s bedroom and down the hall to his mother’s. The door stood open. Shadows and candlelight painted the room in strange hues. Malcolm couldn’t see the bed until he entered. For just a moment, he thought he caught sight of a shape at her window, dark eyes peering through the glass. But then he hit the light switch, and the glaring bulb overpowered the candlelight, revealing nothing beyond the window but the opacity of night.
Maggie’s water glass had thumped to the carpet without breaking. A dark wetness spread where it had struck. The last book she’d tried to read had also fallen, and he knew she had knocked these things from her nightstand on purpose.
“Mom?” he said, knowing she’d hate it. Knowing she wanted to be called by her name. But this close to losing her forever, he could no longer pretend it did not cause him pain, that space she’d always insisted on creating between them. “What happened?”
She lay on the bed, head slipped off her pillow, one arm reaching toward him as he crossed the room. There were tears in her eyes.
Malcolm had seen his mother cry only once, the fourth time Elias had promised to return to take up his responsibilities to his wife. He’d sent a telegram instead, something about an investment opportunity, and promised it would be just another month. But Maggie and Malcolm and by then even Violet knew he would not be coming home again.
Now her eyes were yellowed, shot with red, and her face streaked with tears.
“I had a dream,” she rasped. “They were in there with me. Theysawme, and I felt them… stirring.”
He knelt by the bed, took her hand. “I’m sorry, Momma. I don’t know what you mean.”
Her gaze narrowed, took on a flinty edge. “They’re not awake yet, but they’re restless. They know I’m nearly dead. And when I’m gone…”
“Who’s ‘they’? I don’t understand.”
Her eyelids fluttered and closed. She exhaled softly, a quiet rattle in her throat. Malcolm fought the urge to shake her, to demand clarity. Was she capable of clarity now? How muddled had her mind become?
