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There’s another silence. Then he smiles, he smiles at last, and Miriam lets go of a breath she didn’t know she was holding, her body flooded with relief she hadn’t known she was craving.
“Well,” he says, “that’s some great news. Just wonderful. Although, too bad.”
“What? What’s too bad?”
He smiles. “Well, I took a little walk down the pine path this afternoon. Would you believe the reach has frozen over?”
She laughs with delight then, and reaches for his hand across the table, laying her other palm against her not-yet-swollen belly. She thinks that perhaps this baby is a sign of change to come, a way for them to find their way back to each other when they might have started drifting apart. She thinks,We’ll name it after him.Theodore for a boy—and if it’s a girl, why not, Theodora.
She is as certain of their love in this moment as she has ever been.
After all, they still have so much time.
16.
2015
January
It was an accident.
Legally, I mean. Somewhere, someone typed that word—Accident—next to the wordsManner of deathin a file that had Mimi’s name on it, and that was that. Case closed.
It was supposed to be satisfying, even a relief. An accident meant you could stop asking why and how and what if. It meant it was over, and there was nothing left to do but bury her and get on with your grief. No bang, no whimper, just a shrug. A life had ended.
An accident meant it was nobody’s fault.
Richard gave us the news on the day he came back from the police station, where he’d signed the papers for the release of my grandmother’s corpse.
“Did they say anything?” Diana asked, and his lips peeled back in a humorless grin.
“Oh yes. They told me that after a careful examination of the evidence, they decided that none of us murdered her. Isn’t that comforting?” he said, and then walked off in search of a whiskey without waiting for an answer.
Of course it was easy for him to joke. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to look after her.
He wasn’t the one who didn’t wake up when she crept off into the night.
The funeral was a blur, the pews of St. Saviour’s church crowded with unfamiliar faces, everyone in black. The priest, a man in his fifties with kind eyes and prematurely gray hair, was unfamiliar, too—but he seemed to know Mimi, which surprised everyone, my mother most of all. When we traveled back to the house for the reception, he was among the first guests through the door.
“I’m so sorry,” my mother said, even as the Reverend Frank was trying to say thathewas sorry, for our family’s loss. “She never told me she was going back to church. I would have—”
“She hadn’t been to the church itself in some time, as I understand it,” he said. “But I keep hours at a few retirement homes on the mainland, and I visited with her at Willowcrest many times. She was a remarkable woman.”
I blinked. In all the hours I’d spent visiting Mimi, she had never said anything about visiting with a priest, and I’d never seen the reverend before.
“I never saw you. And she never mentioned you,” I said, and then cringed as I realized how rude I sounded, but he just smiled.
“No, I don’t suppose she would. Whenever we met, she often seemed to think it was the first time. But I believe our conversations were valuable all the same.”
My mother began talking again and I looked around the room, wondering how many of the people here I would remember meeting, if I ever saw them again. Willowcrest had chartered a shuttle for the residents who wanted to attend, but the handful of elderly ladies who’d turned up were nobody I recognized, which confused me until Adam took me aside to explain that they attended every funeral they were allowed to, whether they’d known the dead person or not.
“Why?” I’d asked, bewildered. I had to stifle the world’s most inappropriate burst of laughter when he shrugged and said, “They like the food.”
There was one party present I did recognize, apart from Adam. Jack Dyer was here, dressed in a suit that was shiny at the elbows and looked like it had belonged to at least three men before him. Beside him in a wheelchair was Shelly, clutching the iPad that was apparently a permanent accessory, staring hard out of the one eye she could still focus with, and working her mouth like she was trying to chew her own tongue off. I’d heard from Adam that she was moving into Willowcrest. I wondered how she could afford it.
Shelly Dyer’s good eye darted back and forth, watching everyone who was paying no attention to her, all the people walking around and past her like she was a piece of furniture. This must have been her first time back in the house since she’d lived here all those years ago, but it was impossible to read any emotion on her half-frozen face—until her gaze suddenly shifted and she was looking directly at me. I forced myself to stare back, to smile politely. Shelly’s face may have been unreadable, but there was plenty of emotion in her single glaring eye, and whatever she felt about being back at the Whispers, it definitely wasn’t friendly.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find Adam standing behind me. I hadn’t been close to him since the day Mimi died, when he pulled me into his arms to try to keep me from seeing her body trapped under the ice, and now he was keeping his distance. Anyone looking at us would see nothing out of place, just a professional caregiver chatting politely with the grieving granddaughter of thewoman he used to care for—only when I looked back, Shelly was still looking, her head shaking slowly side to side as if she’d seen something she disapproved of. Me?Us?Had she somehow seen with only one good eye what nobody else but Richard had noticed?
