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“Really what?”
“Love me?”
Mabel’s sight blurred until above her, she thought she saw a great gathering of doves. Their scalloped wings fluttered like the fans in Theta’s Follies show, the one she’d seen with Evie the night they’d sneaked out. Had that been so long ago? Seemed like ages. Evie. She’d call Evie and tell her that everything was okay. She’d tell her all of it now. You shared the truth with your friends. Yes, she would call Evie.
Mabel’s smile quivered, an echo of the birds’ wings. To her ears, their cooing was like the tick of a steady clock. The iciness in her stomach spread. Her breathing slowed. She coughed. Blood spattered across her pale lips. It was hard to speak.
“People are…” Mabel wheezed. “Mostly good, you…” Wheeze. “Know? Mostly.” She tried to take a breath. It was hard. Like breathing through layers of gauze. Where were her parents? She loved them so. “Mostly. I believe that with…” A bloody cough tore through Mabel’s lungs. “… With all my… all my heart.”
The doves became a giant cloud. The cloud was all Mabel could see, stretching everywhere at once. It reached down, wrapping her in its embrace. And there was singing somewhere. Sarah Snow’s faraway voice.
“From ev-er-ry-y mountainside, le-eh-t free… dom…”
“Listen,” Mabel croaked. She had so little air left. “The doves. They’ve stopped ticking.”
“Rrrii—”
AFTER
After, when people talked of the explosion, they would all remember the blue, blue sky. It was such a glorious, cloudless blue that the billowing black smoke appeared like the pencil scratches of an angry child. They would say that the smoke could be seen from the windows of office buildings near Grand Central by busy people momentarily paused in their work. It could be seen by curious ferry captains hauling twists of rope onto wobbling boat backs, and by tired governesses pushing prams along the East River promenade near the sparkling apartments of Beekman Place. It was impossible to imagine that such harm could ever come under the promise of such a blue sky.
The city stalled, weighted by its grief. It rained. For two days, the sky soaked the ground in its tears. By the time they went to bury Mabel Rose in a private cemetery outside the city, the graveyard was a sopping mess. There was a rabbi who gave a prayer and a poet who gave his, an offering of words, because words were needed even if they seemed as flimsy as a paper aeroplane thrown into a bruising wind. Mrs. Rose sobbed into her handkerchief. Mr. Rose kept an arm around his wife’s shoulders. His face had been hollowed of anything but pain. The Roses’ friends had helped to pay for the funeral. Not one dime came from Mabel’s wealthy grandparents. They were not in attendance.
Evie, Henry, Ling, and Memphis had pooled their money to buy a carnation wreath, a patchwork of color, for the grave. Evie had asked that Mabel be buried with one of Evie’s rhinestone headbands that Mabel quite liked. “So she won’t be lonely. You’ll have all our memories with you always, Mabesie.” Isaiah had offered his baseball, too. “Just because,” he’d said with no other explanation, for what more was there to say? The gravediggers lowered Mabel into the ground. One by one, her friends stepped up and tossed their handfuls of dirt onto the simple pine coffin, listening as each heartbreaking clump hit with finality. The gravediggers set their shovels to work, tamping down the wet earth. There was no headstone yet, not for another year, so Evie marked the grave with a rock. She stared at the dirt on her fingers. Grief squeezed her tightly in its grip.
“Oh, Mabel, Mabel,” she cried. “How can you be gone? It isn’t possible!”
Theta put her arm around Evie’s shoulders. She was crying, too, but trying to hide it. Somebody had to be strong. And it was Evie’s turn to cry.
“I should’ve stopped her. I should’ve done something,” Evie sobbed into Theta’s shoulder.
“Shhh,” Theta murmured. “It wasn’t your fault. Mabel made her own choices.”
“She was the best person I ever knew other than James. She was so good,” Evie said, half-choked on her tears.
“Sometimes,” Ling said from under her umbrella.
Evie’s head was up, teeth bared. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that she was complicated. Everybody is,” Ling said quietly. “Don’t erase her like that. She deserves better.”
“I don’t think she can hear that right now,” Henry whispered in Ling’s ear.
Ling stared at the new grave. “Then when can she?”
There were new ghosts in the streets. Hollow-eyed. Questioning. Why? The mayor declared a citywide day of mourning for the victims of the bombing and a public memorial for Sarah Snow. In death, Sarah had become even more popular. Her beatific face shone down from billboards in Times Square: OUR HEARTS ARE WITH OUR FALLEN ANGEL, SARAH SNOW. High school girls who once worshipped Hollywood motion picture stars now wore corsages and black armbands to show their grief over their lost radio evangelist. As Sarah’s funeral procession passed down a crowded Fifth Avenue—six white horses drawing a white coffin under a giant spray of white roses—the girls pressed themselves against the barricades, sobbing.
“We will find and punish the people responsible for this tragedy,” the mayor promised. It was echoed by the lawmakers and citizens.
In a city jail, Aron and Gloria awaited trial for the bombing. Luis had been shot dead at the fairgrounds with his hands still up in surrender. Gloria’s wealthy parents had found her a good lawyer. In the press, the lawyer insisted that Gloria had been brainwashed by the anarchists, that she knew nothing of the bombing. The newspapers were sympathetic. They ran a picture of Gloria in a simple dress, hands folded almost prayerfully in her lap: CONNECTICUT COED CONNED BY CROOKS.
Alliteration.
On the tenth floor of WGI, in Mr. Phillips’s smartly appointed corner office with the big windows dotted with rain, Evie sat on the other side of her boss’s desk, her hands fidgeting in her lap, her heavy heart still capable of racing. This, she knew, was not a happy meeting, though she hadn’t any idea of why Mr. Phillips wanted to speak with her.
“Evie.” Mr. Phillips’s voice caught on her name and he cleared his throat. “There will be some changes to WGI’s programming. We are requiring a new loyalty oath from all of our radio stars.”
“Loyalty oath?” For the first time, Evie noticed the one-page contract on Mr. Phillips’s desk.
