Tom returned with the cocoa. “I sent Mom back to bed,” he said. “There’s no sense in her losing sleep. We can handle this ourselves.” Remembering the longing I’d seen in his mother’s face, I thought he was wrong. Sadie might not need her grandmother at this moment of crisis, but Jeannette needed her. My mother-in-law’s need to be needed was clearly written on her face. But I couldn’t tell him that. It wasn’t my place. I’d already caused enough trouble between them.
Latching onto the cup of cocoa, Sadie drank it down. With a shuddering sigh, she handed the cup to Tom, lay back against me, and closed her eyes.
At that moment, I couldn’t have loved that little girl more if I’d been the one who carried her inside my womb for nine months. Her purity, her innocence, her pain, all struck a place deep inside me. Tom and I sat together on the bed until she’d gone to sleep again. He pulled back the covers and I gently laid Sadie on the bed. Together, we pulled the blankets back up to her chin. Our sleeping angel. I pressed a tender kiss to her forehead while Tom checked on Taylor, who was still sound asleep. And we tiptoed out.
In the kitchen, Tom leaned over the sink, his shoulders slumped in despair.
“How long has she been having these nightmares?” I said.
“They started shortly after Beth died. It happens once or twice a month. I keep hoping she’ll grow out of them, but—” He shrugged. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
Standing behind him, I began to massage his shoulders. “Tom,” I said gently, “I think your daughter needs counseling.”
“No.”
His answer was so immediate, so vehement, that it shocked me. I paused, fingertips still pressed deep into hard, uncompromising muscle. “Tom, the girl is in denial. She can’t even accept that her mother’s dead. How can you refuse to do something that might help her?”
“I already tried,” he said. “It was a disaster.”
“You need to relax.Your muscles are all bound up.” I resumed the massage. “In what way was it a disaster?”
“It made things worse instead of better. The nightmares started coming with greater frequency. Dr.
Weinrich said it was healthy, that this meant we were starting to see progress. But there was no way I could consider torturing my child as progress. I couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take it. She’s too young to be put through that. So we stopped the therapy sessions.”
I moved down to his shoulder blades and began to knead them like bread dough. “I’m not sure I agree. The longer she stays in denial, the harder it will be for her to accept that Beth isn’t coming back.” The tautness wasn’t leaving his muscles. “Jules, with all due respect, you’ve never raised a child, much less one who’s recently lost her mother. I know you’re trying to help, but you’re not an expert.” I took a breath. “No. I’m no expert on child rearing. But I was a little girl once. And I lost my mother. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about.”
He expelled a breath. I continued kneading. Em-boldened by his silence, I said, “Nobody around here ever mentions Beth’s name. There aren’t any pictures of her in the house—”
“My girls have lost so much. I’m trying to help them forget.”
“But maybe—” I moved my hands farther south, wrapped them around his rib cage, heard his soft groan of pleasure as I squeezed and manipulated stiff, tense muscles. “Has it occurred to you that for-getting might not be the healthiest thing for them?”
“No. It hasn’t occurred to me.”
“How can you expect them to heal when their mother’s death—and her life—are shrouded in secrecy? Instead of giving legitimacy to their feelings of loss, you’re invalidating them. Making it seem as though they shouldn’t be grieving, because their mother was never here in the first place. If I were a little girl, I think that would confuse the hell out of me.”
“It’s a great theory, Jules, but that’s all it is. You don’t have a degree in psychology, and even if you did, that doesn’t mean you’d be right and I’d be wrong. Let’s just agree to disagree, and go back to bed.”
“Fine,” I said, giving up on the massage. “I’ll agree to disagree. Are you happy now?” He turned and planted a kiss on my mouth. “Yes.
An obedient wife is a good wife.”
“Good thing I know you’re kidding.”
“Oh?” He played with a strand of my hair. “Just for future reference, what would happen if I wasn’t kidding?”
“My aged granny had a philosophy that covered this particular contingency. She passed it on to all the female cousins. Sort of a rite of passage.”
“Aged granny, eh?”
“You betcha.
Walk softly and carry a big frying
pan.
”
“Ouch. Does that really work?”
I grinned. “It did on Grampa.”
The liberal tip Tom gave them wiped away the scowls, and they left us with smiles and best wishes on our marriage. When they were gone, Tom headed out for his regular Sunday afternoon tee time with the guys, and I spent what was left of the afternoon unpacking. With the eager and oh-so-helpful assistance of two curious little girls, I unpacked clothes and shoes and handbags and jewelry and arranged them in the bedroom closet. Working in the boutique, I’d gotten an employee discount, and I’d taken full advantage. Tom was about to find out how much of a clothes junkie his new bride was. Hopefully, he wouldn’t immediately send me to a twelve-step program.
Sebastian, the fat gray Maine coon cat who’d spent my first few days in the house hiding from me, lay purring contentedly in the middle of our bed while in the background, Paula Cole asked the musical question,
Where have all the cowboys gone?
Sadie, posing in front of the mirror, asked, “Can I try on this lipstick?”
Already world-weary at seven, her sister told her,
“You’re too young for lipstick.”
“Poppycock!” I said.
They both stared at me. “What’s poppycock?” Taylor said.
“It’s a more polite way of saying bull—uh, baloney.” I finished hanging up the emerald silk blouse that brought out the green specks in my eyes and snapped off the overhead light in the closet. “Sit on the foot of the bed,” I told Sadie, and she scrambled up onto the mattress, setting it to bouncing. As a small child, there’d been little that I enjoyed more than playing dress-up and pretending to be a grown-up lady. “Purse your lips,” I said, “like this.” She complied, and I neatly applied the color to her lips, careful not to damage the lipstick I’d paid fourteen dollars for. The color was called Broadway, and was wildly inappropriate for a little girl. Which was what made it so much fun. I yanked a tissue from the box on the bureau. “Blot,” I said, and Sadie obediently smooshed her lips against the tissue.
I stood back to study my handiwork. The bright lipstick was garish against her pale skin. “Stay there,” I said, and rummaged through my makeup case until I found a complementary shade of blusher. I applied it to Sadie’s cheeks, blended it until it looked natural, and then I held up a hand mirror so she could see the result.
The little girl squealed in delight. “Your turn now,” I told her sister, who’d stood by watching the entire process, on her face a look of intense scrutiny, as if she weren’t quite sure whether or not she approved of this frivolity. But when her turn came, she was as eager to be beautified as her sister. For Taylor, I chose a darker shade of lipstick and its accompanying blusher. I was pretty good at this. If my marriage didn’t work out, I could always aim for a career in cos-metology.
Deciding to go for broke, I found a couple of brightly-colored shirts, a pair of silk scarves, and a cluster of dangly bracelets to complete their ensem-bles. By the time I was done, the girls looked sweet and silly and theatrical. A miniature version of the Gish sisters. They were so adorable that I ran for my digital camera to take a couple of pictures.
“Tell you what,” I said, once I was satisfied that I’d properly documented the moment. “Have you ever been to a tea party?”
The girls exchanged glances. “No,” Taylor said solemnly.
“There’s no time like the present. What do you say, Sadie?”
“I say yes!”
I made a pot of Earl Gray and, because there were no cookies or sweets in the house, we drank it with saltine crackers glued together with strawberry jam.
I showed the girls how to lift their teacups with their pinkies curled, and we giggled at the silliness of it all. “When you were a little girl,” Taylor said, “did you have tea parties?”
“Sure,” I said. “My mom and I used to have them all the time.” It was something I hadn’t thought of in years. When Dave was away on tour, we used to paint our nails and curl our hair, dress in our jammies, and have tea parties with my Barbies. Before she disappeared from my life forever.
“Where is your mom?” Sadie wanted to know.
“Y’know…I have no idea.”
They gaped at me, Taylor through narrowed eyes, reluctant to give up her innate suspicion. “How can you not know?” she demanded.
“She and my dad split up and she left us a long time ago. When I was a little girl. I haven’t seen her in twenty-five years.”
“So you mean,” Sadie said, “she could be dead, and you wouldn’t know?”
“I suppose that’s possible.”
“And she never called you?” Taylor said. “Or wrote you a letter?”
I knew they were curious because they’d lost their own mother. They needed to process this information, compare it to their own experience of loss. It was a part of the healing process. I knew that intellectually. But emotionally, it wasn’t that simple. The pain I thought I’d buried long ago shifted position and poked, needle-sharp, at my insides. “No,” I said.
“She never did.”
“That’s sad,” Sadie said matter-of-factly.
“Why don’t you have any kids?” Taylor wanted to know.
Oh, boy. I hadn’t counted on this turning into a full-fledged therapy session, with me as the patient.
I wondered whether they were old enough to hear the truth, decided they were. “I had a little girl.” I could see that I’d caught the attention of both girls. “Something went wrong when I was giving birth, and she died. We named her Angel.”
“Because she lives in heaven with the angels?” Sadie wanted to know.
I smiled at her, hoping she wouldn’t see the tears that hovered just beneath my eyelids. “Exactly,” I said.
“If Daddy had been your doctor,” Taylor said, “I bet Angel would still be alive.”
Tom Larkin as superhero. If only life were that simple. But they were young. It was far too soon to disillusion them. “I bet you’re right,” I said.
“But it’s okay,” Sadie said, “because you have us now. And our mom is up there in heaven, watching over Angel.”
In her eyes, it was an equitable trade, Beth as caretaker for my daughter, me as caretaker for both of hers.
Sometimes it takes a child to dig through the layers of complexity and reduce an issue to its core. “Yes,” I said, grateful that I’d been given this second chance. “I have you. And you have me. We’re very lucky, aren’t we?” Sadie flashed me a shy smile, then ducked her head and took a sip of tea. “Julie?” she said. “You won’t leave us, will you?”
I was afraid to breathe. Across the table, Taylor met my eyes. Beneath her suspicion, I thought I saw a glimmer of something else. Hope, maybe? I thought about my mother, walking out the door one rainy Sunday night and never returning. Thought about Beth Larkin, climbing up on that bridge railing and taking the easy way out, with no thought for the de-struction she was leaving behind. Damn them. Damn them both for tearing out the hearts of little girls whose only crime was loving them.
“No,” I vowed. “I will never, ever leave you.” By Wednesday afternoon, I’d had enough of hanging out in the attic, sorting through the stuff that Dad and I had accumulated over the course of the last thirty years. My knees hurt, my allergies were acting up, and every box I opened was starting to look identical to the dozen boxes that had preceded it. It was definitely time for a break, so I dusted myself off, brushed my hair, spritzed myself with a wisp of my favorite body spray in the hopes of making myself presentable, and headed next door.
Tom had given me the lowdown on Claudia.
She’d grown up next door, and had inherited the house from her grandmother, along with a big enough pile of money to afford her a comfortable lifestyle. She played at raising flowers. According to Tom, she sold some of them to local florists, but she didn’t really need the money. Her gardening was more a hobby than a source of income. Her ex was some kind of pharmaceutical salesman who spent half the year on the road. Their divorce had been bitter, but they shared custody of their son, who was the same age as Sadie. Whenever his dad was home for a few days, Dylan stayed with him.
Claudia’s house was smaller than Tom’s, and had an eclectic New England–cottage feel. There were lots of multipaned windows, a wooden front door with a rounded top, and a trellis thick with some kind of wild and wooly climbing greenery. I rang the bell and waited. When there was no answer, I remembered that she’d told me to come around the back.
So I followed a slate walkway that led me, like the yellow brick road, directly to the emerald city.
Or so it seemed. The greenhouse dominated the backyard, but even this late in the season, flowers bloomed everywhere in the garden. Seemingly random splashes of color, which upon closer inspection had obviously been carefully planned, stretched from the patio to the brook that marked the rear property line. The grass, what there was of it, was green and level and recently mowed. The scents were enticing, and the entire place possessed an im-mensely appealing earthiness.