The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [108]
Andrea alternately dozes and watches the scenery while John drives. She’s been doing this all the way across the country. John is so antsy, he won’t relinquish the wheel. Just as well, because Andrea is overcome with fatigue. Today she falls into a dead sleep somewhere in eastern Colorado and wakes up to the sight of a cloudless blue sky and a huge, craggy, snow-capped mountain that appears to be rising in the distance out of the perfectly flat road they are traveling.
“Welcome to the Rockies,” John says.
Andrea blinks. The landscape is completely foreign to her, sharp edged and treeless, not at all like the forested East Coast, with its gently mounded peaks that change colors with the seasons. This rockscape has the look of permanence, baking in the brilliance of an unforgiving winter sun. Stunning, but brutal.
“What do you think, Mom?” asks Courtney, from the cubbyhole she’s tunneled in the backseat, wedged between computers and sound equipment and other treasures they didn’t want to send on the truck.
John regards Andrea, too, out of the corner of his eye.
She doesn’t try to speak over the drumroll of her heart, but she’s sure they know. They’re a chain, mentally holding hands, practically reading one another’s thoughts. The scene before them is stark—a harsh, harsh beauty—and yet Andrea can feel the smiles tugging at the corners of their mouths.
This is completely new, they are thinking. This is entirely new.
“I hated to ask you, Iona, but I have about three thousand things to get at Target,” Lori says two days before Christmas. She hands over a pink diaper bag overflowing with enough supplies to stock a nursery for a year. “She doesn’t need to eat for two more hours, but here’s a bottle just in case. I know you have to work. I really appreciate . . .”
“Relax, Lori. My schedule is clear. I live to babysit.”
Secretly, Iona thinks this may be true. This is her fear. But when Lori closes the door behind her, leaving the baby a solid sleeping lump in Iona’s arms, her concern turns darker. Why did she volunteer? Think of all the things that might befall the baby while Lori is away. Rosalie could choke on her milk. She could come down with one of those terrible, racing viruses that reduce an infant to a feverish blob in the space of an hour. She could succumb to SIDS. Iona could trip and drop her.
The baby stirs, makes a sound like a cat mewing, then settles peacefully against Iona’s chest. A bubble of milk escapes from between her rosebud lips. A powdery aroma drifts up from her cap of hair. She is not even a month old. Iona is filled with dread.
Enough, Iona thinks. Nothing bad is going to happen to her on my watch.
A fierce protectiveness gradually replaces her terror. She is the lioness, protecting her cub. She is the mama bear.
Good grief.
Bending to kiss the perfect, smooth new skin of her granddaughter’s cheek, she sits down in the new rocker/recliner she bought for herself as a Christmas/Chanukah present. She turns the baby so that when Rosalie wakes up, she can see the lights of the Christmas tree—an item Iona believed was a waste of money even before she married Richard and decided to forgo trees in deference to his Jewish religion. Then she couldn’t forgo them because Richard wanted a tree for Jeff. But she had never liked them. They were messy. They were work. This year she changed her mind. Children enjoy lights and decorations. Life will be hard enough later on. They say tiny infants can’t see much. Maybe the colorful globes and twinkling bulbs are a waste of money, but who knows? Iona reaches over to switch on the Christmas CD she put in place earlier. She settles in. In her sleep, Rosalie smiles and frowns and tests various other facial maneuvers before she decides on an expression Iona recognizes at once. In repose, she looks exactly like Richard.
On Christmas night after all the company is finally gone, Ginger watches Rachel go outside to look at the