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By Root 531 0

moved through the house with the stolid presence of a relief worker in an emergency zone: disrespectful toward death and seemingly unwilling to be cowed. With her matronly bulk and poodle perm — her only concession to age — she had Mattie off the couch and upstairs within minutes. When Julia was certain that Mattie could stand up by herself in a room alone and pull on a pair of jeans, she came back downstairs to attend to her granddaughter. She stood in the kitchen and made a pot of strong tea. She laced it generously with brandy from a bottle she had brought with her. She told the woman from the airline to be sure that Kathryn drank it down, at least one mug. Then Julia went back up to Mattie and made the girl wash her face. By then the Valium was kicking in, and except for small sudden bursts of surprise and grief, Mattie was winding down. Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

Julia made Mattie lie down on her bed and then returned to the front room. Sitting beside Kathryn on the couch, she peered into Kathryn’s cup to see how much tea she had swallowed, then told her to drink some more. She asked straight out if Kathryn had any tranquilizers. Robert volunteered the Valium.

Julia said, “Who are you?” and Robert told her, and then she asked him for a pill.

“Take this,” Julia said to Kathryn.

“I can’t,” Kathryn said. “I’ve had the brandy.”

“So what. Take it.”

Julia didn’t ask Kathryn how she felt or if she was all right. In Julia’s way of thinking, Kathryn knew, there wasn’t an alternative to being a certain level of all right. Nothing else would work now. The tears, the shock, the sympathy — all of that could come later.

“It’s awful,” Julia said. “Kathryn, I know it’s awful. Look at me. But the only way to the other side is through it. You know that, don’t you? Nod your head.”

“Mrs. Lyons?”

Kathryn turned from the window. Rita, a small blond woman from the chief pilot’s office, was sliding her arms into her coat.

“I’m going to go now, to the inn.”

Rita, who wore oak-colored lipstick, had been in the house all day, since four in the morning, yet her face was oddly dewy, her navy blue suit barely wrinkled. The woman’s partner, Jim something, also from the airline, had left the house hours ago; Kathryn couldn’t remember exactly when.

“Robert Hart is still here,” Rita said. “In the office.” Kathryn was studying the perfect part in Rita’s straight hair with a kind of fascination. Rita, she was thinking, bore a striking resemblance to a certain newscaster on a station out of Portland. Earlier in the day, Kathryn had minded the strangers in her house, but she’d quickly seen she couldn’t cope alone.

“You have rooms at the Tides?” Kathryn asked.

“Yes. We’ve taken several.”

Kathryn nodded. She understood that the Tides Inn, which in the off-season was lucky to have two couples for a weekend stay, would be full now, full of the press and people from the airline.

“You’re all right?” Rita asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I get you anything before I go?”

“No,” Kathryn said. “I’m fine.”

It was an absurd statement, Kathryn was thinking, watching Rita leave the kitchen. Laughably meaningless. She would probably never be fine again.

It was not yet four-fifteen, but it was nearly dark already. In late December, the shadows started as soon as lunch was over, and all afternoon the light was long and stretched thin. It made soft, feathery colors she hadn’t seen in months, so that nothing seemed exactly familiar anymore. Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

She crossed her arms and leaned forward against the lip of the sink, looking out through the kitchen window. It had been a long day, a long, terrible day — a day so long and so terrible it had hours ago passed out of any reality Kathryn had ever known. She had the distinct feeling she would never sleep again, that when she’d woken early that morning she had emerged from