When I say nothing, she goes on. “I’ve already taken care of the documents appointing you as Kat’s legal guardian when I am deceased. I will make sure my family understands no one is to contest it, not that I think anyone will. My lawyer has already contacted the bank in Los Angeles that disperses the money from the trust. The monthly amount is substantial, Sophie. Kat will never want for anything. And I expect you to use that money in whatever way will secure for her a good home. Do you promise me you will do that?”
I nod as more tears trickle down my face.
“Say it,” she breathes.
“I promise.”
•••
Candace leaves by private coach two weeks later, on the thirteenth of August. Belinda and I stand back from the four-horse carriage to give her as much time alone with Kat as she wants to say her final good-bye, but Candace keeps her last words to her daughterbrief. I hear her tell Kat through the open carriage door that she is soon going to heaven to be with her mama and papa, just like she told her, but that she will watch over Kat all the years of her life, and that if she ever needs to talk to her or touch her, she need only go to Belinda’s peach tree and put her arms around it, and Candace will whisper to her through the branches that all is well.
Candace then motions for me to come to the open carriage door to stand by Kat.
“Miss Sophie is your mama now,” Candace says from where she reclines on the seat inside. She nods to me and I put my arm around our little girl.
“I am so proud of you, Kitty Kat. You’re such a brave girl,” Candace says to Kat. “Be happy. I love you.”
Next to me I feel Kat shudder. No words are coming out of her mouth, though. Not one. I start to bend down to encourage Kat to say farewell, but Candace interrupts my movement with three words to the nurse sitting across from her that stop me.
“Close the door.”
The nurse leans forward and pulls on the handle, and the carriage door clicks shut.
Candace doesn’t say good-bye, and I know ’tis so our dear Kat won’t ever regret not saying it, either.
The driver slaps the reins. We watch as the carriage heads down the gravel drive and then turns south. When we can no longer hear the jingle of the harnesses and the clopping of the hooves, Belinda, Kat, and I turn to go back inside the inn.
•••
Over the next two weeks, I can see Kat retreating into silence to work out her mother’s absence; I have learned this is her way ofcoming to terms with events she cannot control. We all have to find a way to do that, don’t we? She has found this one. Who of us can say it isn’t a good way? We imagine together each night before bed—me with words and she with thoughts—where Candace’s carriage might be. We picture her on the desolate landscape of Arizona and New Mexico and then maybe finding the gateway to heaven on her journey. I think it brings Kat comfort to think of her mother as skyward bound, like Elijah in a chariot. She has drawn several pictures of a carriage pulled by winged horses flying into the sun.
I don’t know if she fully understands she will not see Candace again, but I find her often at the peach tree, looking up at its branches and listening to the rustle of its leaves.
On the tenth of September we receive a telegram from Texas and learn that Candace died three days after arriving.
29
September slips into October like it did the previous autumn in this part of California—subtly and with nowhere near the kind of fanfare as in New York or northern Ireland.
I enroll Kat in the little primary school in San Rafaela with some trepidation; she is silent most days, still puzzling out the loss of her mother through the absence of words. I tell her teacher, a Miss Reeves, that my daughter has had to suffer much in her young life and to please, if she could, adjust her expectations. I’m expecting her to tell me to take Kat home like that headmistress did back in San Francisco, but Miss Reeves says Kat is more than welcome in class, and it will be nice for a change to have a child who doesn’t interrupt instruction time with out-of-turn talking. Kat seems neither eager nor hesitant to attend school. She is interested in learning—she has always been—and after the first few days the other children seem to accept the quiet new girl; at least this is what Miss Reeves tells me.
Our new life at the Loralei is tranquil in so many ways. I know I should be more distressed at Candace’s passing, but the fact that she is gone has loosened fetters that had been bound around my heart. Kat is thoroughly mine now, the way I thought she was when I married Martin.
The trust checks from the Los Angeles bank begin to arrive—one a month—in the middle of September. It is more money than Kat and I need to contribute to our board and lodging at the inn, and it occurs to me that in a year or so there might be enough surplus for me to pay Elliot to build Kat and me a cottage on the property, if Belinda will allow it, and I am almost certain she will. Belinda would then have back two of her rooms for inn guests and Kat will have her own home always, no matter where life might take me.
When I share this idea with Belinda and Elliot, they’re both in favor of it, Belinda because she has come to think of me as her big sister and Kat as a niece and she wants us near, and Elliot because he feels he owes me so much for bringing Belinda safely home to him. It is enjoyable in the evenings after the children are in bed to imagine what the little house might look like and where to situate it. It is at one of these impromptu idea sessions over tea and cake after supper that Elliot asks me if I will always want to live here in San Rafaela and, more specifically, at the Loralei. What will happen to the proposed little house if I want to marry again, maybe have other children?
There is so much I could say in answer to this question. I have told Belinda so very little about my life before—a fraction of what I told Candace to gain her trust—and I myself am starting to feel detached from it. I’ve wondered if that would happen someday, and I’ve pondered what it would feel like to see the person I wasas a stranger I no longer know. It is not necessary for Elliot to know that I can’t have children, but I can address the rest of his question truthfully enough and without having to revisit a past that feels less and less like it belongs to me.
“I am in no great hurry to marry again,” I reply in a gently sincere tone. “And the house will always be Kat’s to do with as she will. You’ll let her stay here in it even into her adult years, yes?” I ask Belinda.
“Of course,” Belinda says.
“She may want to marry and move on herself,” Elliot adds.
“She might. She probably will,” I answer. “And if she does, I imagine she would let me stay in the little house that her trust money built. But that’s further into the future than we need to look. Right now I just like the idea of having our own little home, right here, at the Loralei.”
We settle on a drawing of the proposed cottage that I share with Kat a few days later.
