“But you are coming back here, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She reaches across the sofa to squeeze my arm. This makes her happy, the idea that I shall return, that she can give me a home and a child to sing lullabies to, that she can give me versions of what has been taken from me.
“I’ll need to go back to San Francisco at some point,” I say, and she frowns.
“Why?”
“I must see what’s left of the house. And I need to see the lists of the dead and injured. I need to make sure. I need to make sure he’s gone.”
She leaves her hand on my arm and says nothing.
And then she nods. She needs to know, too.
We need to be sure.
20
Morning birdsong is drifting over my head through the half-open window as I awaken. I lie in the most comfortable bed ever with Kat next to me, still asleep, lips slightly parted. A quilt that has been dried in the fresh country air is tucked up to our chins. It would be so easy to just stay at the Loralei with Kat and never leave. So easy to pretend I don’t know that Candace still lives. So, so easy, if only Kat didn’t know.
But surely the ease would in time give way to guilt and shame.
I need to leave today for Arizona. The longer I wait to do what I must, I know the harder it will be. I must go while I still have the resolve to do the right thing.
I try to keep my tone cheerful as I tell Kat before we head downstairs for breakfast half an hour later that today we will at last be on our way to see her mama. She has not said but a word or two since the tent at Golden Gate Park, and when I tell her this now I am met with silence. But I see in her eyes a mix ofconflicting thoughts. She loves little Sarah, that is obvious, and I even think she loves me. Part of her wants to stay here; part of her wants to see her mother. Her heart is painfully torn in two, and it occurs to me that surely it has been a long time since this poor child has been truly happy. Maybe she can’t even remember the last time she was truly happy. I think back to Candace’s letter and how she wrote that she’d not been a good mother to Kat when she had the chance. I recall her writing that she took the losses of her infant sons far too hard and I wonder if Candace was neglectful, withdrawn, or impassive toward her daughter. Did she withhold love from Kat the way I know Martin did, the way her grandparents apparently did? Martin told me Candace had been sick for a long while before she died, but I’m thinking now only half of that statement is true. She’d indeed been bedridden for months, but not before she died. It was rather before her father whisked her away to that sanatorium. Candace hadn’t been well enough to care for her daughter, nor had she the will to. This is why I ponder if there was ever a time when Kat remembers feeling loved and cherished. Perhaps with me she did. Perhaps with me she does. Perhaps she does not trust this love I have for her, because with everything that has been stolen from her, why should she?
And now I am taking her away from her half sister, who is precious to her.
“I know how jumbled you must feel inside.” I pull her to me as we sit on the bed. “I want to stay here, too. But your mama longs to see you, and I know you ache to see her, too. It’s all jumbled, isn’t it?”
Kat sighs lightly against my chest. She nods.
“I’ll find a way to come visit you,” I tell her. “I’ll bring Belindaand the baby, all right? We’ll all come. I’ll find a way. Don’t you worry about that.”
We stay there, saying nothing to each other, for a long while. It’s a heavenly moment for me nonetheless, sitting in silence with the child I love as close to me as my own skin.
At the breakfast table the mood is solemn. Belinda has obviously also grown fond of Kat and is sad to see her go, even though she has known her less than a week. When people are thrown into an abyss and together find their way out of it, they are not the same people. They are bound to one another ever after, linked together at the core of who they are because it was together that they escaped a terrible fate. It doesn’t seem like Kat and I met Belinda only last Tuesday. It seems we have always known her.
Kat holds Sarah while I help Belinda with the breakfast dishes. Then I bring down the travel case we brought, which now holds Kat’s clothes as well as one of Belinda’s nightgowns and a couple of her shirtwaists and skirts.
Elliot is taking Kat and me to the train station in San Mateo, where we will board a train that will stop first in San Jose and then continue on to Los Angeles, with stops in between. From Los Angeles we will board another train to Tucson. I’m grateful for the ride to the station, but I’m not looking forward to sitting with Elliot, with Kat between us, for twenty minutes.
“He can’t ask me about Martin,” I told Belinda when she said he’d be at the house at nine o’clock to fetch Kat and me. “He can’t say one word about him. Not with Kat there in the buggy.”
“He knows he can’t, Sophie,” she assured me. “He won’t.”
And she is right. After our good-byes—Kat, already protecting her wounded heart, barely acknowledges Belinda and thebaby as we bid farewell—we take off in the buggy and Elliot fills the silence with talk of the land and his shop and how his father and grandfather were carpenters before him.
It seems in no time at all we are back at the train station in San Mateo.
“You have everything?” Elliot says after Kat and I are standing on the pavement in front of the depot.
I have money for the train tickets, the travel case, Candace’s letter and the other documents I took from Martin’s desk, the rest of the cash from the strongbox in a borrowed handbag. Kat.
“Yes.”
Elliot and I stand and look at each other. So much could be said; so much won’t be.
