The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [67]
She had slept, too. Some widows didn’t sleep. Maybe that was expected. But Iona did. Except during the fierce bursts of energy when she was looking for another house, she never felt fully awake. She took two or three naps just to get through the day. It wasn’t fatigue, though. It was grief, masquerading as exhaustion. She was exhausted for a year.
These things—all these things, she fears—are in store for Mason and the girls. She does not wish these for them. Be gentle with them, she thinks. She doesn’t know where those words come from. It’s not exactly a prayer.
Something begins to happen then—a sense of something moving among them that wasn’t there before. It alarms Iona at first, lest it grow into one of those fall-down flop-around jolts she saw in a TV show about the Holiness Church, but it doesn’t. This is different—a perception of the room being fuller than before, not with people but with a dignified sort of . . . not affection, exactly, but close. A bit like the way she felt when Richard lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the tip of her fingers. A lovingness. A warmth.
Looking around the circle, she wonders if everyone else feels it, too. The faces in front of her are no longer sharp, no longer tight with tension. They’re relaxed, even dreamy, almost as if they’ve all been rendered in soft focus.
It must be the morning light making them look that way; mornings are so beautiful here. But mornings are beautiful everywhere, depending on where you want to be. The something moves among them. The power. Outside it is not nearly this warm. Here they are. Marie. Julianne. Everyone. To Iona, they no longer look troubled. They look serene.
The last amen is said. The women let go of each other. Their palms are clammy; they seem a little embarrassed . . . yet comforted, too. What was it they shared, anyway? Did they share something? It must have had to do with all this holding hands. Some touchy-feely jolt of emotion. That must be all it was.
Yet there’s a smoothness inside Iona. Something to take with her. A sense that this was nothing ordinary. Whatever it was that had moved through the room, Iona senses that it was meant not just for her, but for each of them. Solace. A gift.
Iona doesn’t think it will do Paisley a bit of good.
That night, Ginger watches Rachel slam out of the house into the front yard, into a gusting wind that sweeps her hair viciously off her forehead. It’s all she can do to resist offering her daughter a hat and coat. Even at twelve, she reminds herself, sometimes you need the clarity of the cold sky.
Moments before, Rachel had capped hours of steaming around the house by pounding her brother on the shoulder and yelling, “I can’t believe you’re taking bets on Mrs. Lamm being dead by Christmas! You’re such a dickwad, Max!”
Max had opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness.
Now, Rachel stands in the wind, thinking God-knows-what thoughts. Once, years ago, she confessed that, out there in the yard, she contemplated “mainly stuff nobody else cares about, like how it would feel to be in somebody else’s body.” Tall enough to look down on the tops of other people’s heads. Muscle-bound enough that you could hardly bend your arms. “After a while I am all those people.” Rachel had giggled then. What she hadn’t said, but Ginger knew, was that sometimes she was Brynne.
And now? Leaning against the tree with its battered-looking ribbon, Rachel is probably thinking, Dead by Christmas. Fifty to one. Dead by Christmas. She probably