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By Root 727 0

would hear them, and see them as they made themselves visible to her, one by one, across the water. Theresa had been remarkably fluent. Despite her crushing blow she had been coherent. I envied her her Holy Spirit even as I told myself that God didn’t go lighting up highways. I didn’t know if I was now allowed to visit Vermont Acres and carry on, or if we were finished with our business, nothing left for us but the exchange of awkward pleasantries in public places. I tried to think again if our bond was strong enough after all, to carry us over the disaster. We had more than once admitted to each other, with the ardor of schoolgirls—and with hope that the feeling was returned and with fear that it wasn’t—that we were each other’s best friend. I tried to think how I would cope if Emma or Claire met with disaster up at Theresa’s, if they got stuck in one of her modern conveniences and died. I wouldn’t forgive her the needless contraption or her negligence; I could never meet her without placing blame. Despite Father Albert’s advice to consider my pain, despite Theresa’s generous heart, it was impossible to imagine that she could forgive me enough to at least resume some kind of superficial patter. And I didn’t know if the forgiveness itself was light, glittery stuff that showered down and absolved a person and set them free, or if, instead, it was heavy, cumbersome, a new debt, a currency that was continuously renewed no matter how much was paid out.

I didn’t want to bump into her again, and since I didn’t have any idea where she was going I wandered, as slowly as I could, in and out of the trees. Was Theresa, despite her ability to construct whole sentences, well? It was so tempting to indulge in the idea that all the dead people were up in the sky, impervious to the effects of gravity and the orbiting shuttle litter, waiting for us to take our turns and come to them. Lizzy, my Aunt Kate, my mother. I didn’t notice the gnats after a while, as I thought of heaven, of Aunt Kate miles above smelling of tobacco and lavender soap, stooping to receive Lizzy. I had hurt a great deal and for so long through my childhood that I had years before made heaven into a stock routine: My mother was yonder, her apron tied around her trim waist, waiting and waiting with her hands folded at the table, with the cookies overlapping slightly in a circle on the china plate, and cold milk in tall glasses.

As I had grown up, the fantasies were seductive only temporarily, before the logistical problems of heaven reared their ugly heads. Did young people stay forever young, did old people revert back to their prime, were unpleasant characters, people who would have been likable if they hadn’t had lousy childhoods—were they given personality makeovers? What if my mother really didn’t want to sit with my father at the same craft table during the celestial craft hour? What if she’d taken up with someone who loved her for herself, who could meet her needs?

Any loss I suffered always took me back to that first loss. My mother died when I was eight, of lung cancer. She had majored in home economics in college, in preparation for her life as my father’s spouse. Her death taught me that there wasn’t any such thing as logic or mercy. She had had a native distrust of fatty acids long before it was fashionable, and in the face of her family’s scorn she served up margarine and replaced the Sunday pot roast with fowl. She had no vice other than excessive glee when she beat my father at bridge. On those rare victorious occasions, the otherwise perfect 1950s housewife stood up from the table and executed several entrechats in her flat black pumps. My father, who has remained a mystery to me long after his death, drank moderately, expressed himself infrequently, and only if my behavior was rude and unseemly. He sat all day in the fog of his own cigarette smoke in his office where he designed pulley systems. And yet he woke each morning without a cough, each foot gliding into his proper slipper under the nightstand.

When the neighbor, Mr. McCrady, kindly explained