Back in the kitchen, she set the empty vegetable basket down. Her hands still shook despite the long minutes she’d spent in the barn, trying to gather herself. It did not have to be right now. This wasn’t the time. But she would tell him. Once Molly was home and they could see the shape of their family again. She folded the newspaper over and set it on the table.
All was quiet in the living room. She looked in, and William was asleep on the couch, head back, mouth open, one arm loosely around Nola Wren, who fussed on his lap,Miss Spiderin her hands.Blueberries for Sallay spine up on the carpet next to a stuffed bear.
“Hush, now,” she whispered, her arms out. “Let Grandpa sleep. He has to get our Molly soon.” When the child reached for Faye, the book dropped onto William’s leg. He didn’t start.
What was it about his face, eyes closed beyond rest? Faye put Nola Wren down and shook her husband’s shoulder lightly. “William ...” He didn’t stir. “William!” She spoke louder now, shook him more aggressively. Nothing. Nola Wren cried, and Faye bent to her, pressed the bear into her hands. She sat beside her husband, put her head to his chest, warm from where Nola Wren had cuddled. He was not breathing. “William!” she cried, black waves crashing inside her. “William. No, you can’t. Oh!”
Nola Wren seemed to think it was a game and tugged at William’s pants, laughing. Then she caught Faye’s despair, amplifying it with uncharacteristic shouts. Faye ran past her to the telephone, dialed 911. “Please, hurry!” she begged.Please, oh, dear God. Faye pulled William, lifeless and heavy, into her arms. Nola Wren plopped on the floor, cried as if she understood.
Faye could hear paramedics arrive, the slamming of doors, knocking and shouting. But it was somewhere far away, in some other time where she wasn’t. She held a colding body, but William—he was everywhere, the dust around her, a genie out of the bottle. She was behind the veil. Shemarveled at the grandeur of his spirit, breathed him into her lungs and bones, remembering a time they danced at the VFW hall. It was winter. In the corner of the wood-paneled hall, there was a Christmas tree with colored bulbs, light snow was falling outside. Yes, the Fireman’s Ball. She’d worn a pretty dress, gold with white piping, her hair done up. So light on her feet! William twirled her until they were floating above all the other dancers and revelers. She threw her head back, joy and disbelief. She did not want to come back to earth. But then the dance hall disappeared, and she was in her living room with this slumped body, her grandchild cried out at her feet. If she moved, she feared he would fall over.
A hand on her shoulder, a face she didn’t recognize, a ghost in a window, tapping on the glass with a delicate fingernail. Faye whispered into William’s ear, deaf now to all sound. “Summer sang in me.” Millay again.
And then, he was there, William, ten years then twenty years younger, leaning against the kitchen doorframe. Worn blue jeans, fur-lined slippers, down vest over a red flannel shirt she had not seen in a decade, hair the color of the setting sun. He held out his hands in that way of his, winked and gestured with his thumb toward the kitchen.
Syrupy smoke blackened the room.
In the oven, the pies burned.
Part Three
1995–1996
Chapter Thirty-One
1995: Mid-Coast Maine
Molly steps off the bus, wobbles to catch her footing.I’m home. Am I home?Pine and sea salt and low tide. Familiar yet foreign as the moon. She’s terrified at how she has missed it all. Missed by way of longing, missed it like a deadline, like a train that’s left the station. But relieved too. She has arrived, older but lighter than when she left. She scans the parking lot. Parents and friends and lovers wave and rush toward other passengers. No face is familiar. She doesn’t see her dad’s truck anywhere. She puts a dollar in the vending machine by the door of the station, presses the button, and a Coke bangs around the innards before dropping into the slot. She cracks it open, takes a swig, though she’s jittery enough as it is. Fizz burns away the cotton on her tongue.
Leo tried to give her money for Nola Wren, but Molly refused it. She gave him the phone number at the farmhouse, promised he could meet their child whenever he was ready, though she’s not convinced he will ever call. All she had asked was that he give her a little time to settle in, to get reacquainted, to figure out whether any of them—her parents, Maeve, Wendy, and, most of all, Nola Wren—would be able to forgive her. She was glad it was her father who’d answered when she called to say she was coming home. Unlike her mom and Maeve, he’dnever slipped into judgment, though Molly knows she deserves their judgment and everything that’s coming for her. She feels ready for it. As painful and heartbreaking and—Jesus, as soul-crushing—as leaving was, she’d never regretted it. Not once. She remembers putting Nola Wren into Maeve’s arms, the relief, knowing she never should have been entrusted with something so precious and fragile in the first place. What worries her now is that coming back will somehow be wrong. She only hopes that it’s not too late and her daughter will have her back in some way.
She looks through the grimy window at the big clock on the wall, trying not to get annoyed. Where is he? Minutes tick by until she’s been standing outside for an hour. Despite herself, she plays out scenarios, all of them ending with her family deciding they didn’t want her back after all. Another busload disembarks, and Molly tears up when three little kids run to greet an old man in a Red Sox hat. The parking lot empties again. She spots a pay phone. Give them fifteen more minutes. She leans against the building, puts her foot up like a dime-store cowboy.
A car, no headlights, turns down the street and heads in her direction.
Maeve spots Molly standing by the bus station. Her stomach, already sick from disbelief and sobbing, sinks. She feels terrible for one thousand reasons, not least of which is that, in the confusion—the utter, utter despair and confusion—no one left in time to meet Molly’s bus. There’d been a flurry of whispered discussion between her, Wendy, and Sam.Someone needs to go. Someone needs to stay with Nola Wren. Someone needs to stay with Mom.Faye was so stunned, practically catatonic, that they’d discussed whether she needed to go to the hospital. Wendy was right. She was in shock. And that meant Wendy was the best person to stay with her. Maeve thought she should stay with Nola Wren, who kept bawling and bawling, though none of them could assume why except that everyone else was crying so why not.That left Sam to pick up Molly. But that wouldn’t be fair to either one of them. Maeve took the keys from him, drove as quickly as she thought she could manage. She’d stopped once—to gulp for air, to scream, to curse, to regather. Her first thought was that she didn’t want to take care of Molly right now, but that had quickly been replaced by a new one. She couldn’t get to Molly fast enough, Molly, the only other person who could possibly feel the same sorrow Maeve felt.
She turns off the ignition, and she and Molly catch each other’s eyes through the windshield. There is affection, fear, sadness.This is the worst day. This is the worst luck.Maeve manages a smile she hopes will convey, beyond love, that she could not be more sorry for what comes next.
No one but the ghosts see these sisters tread lightly toward each other, the older with terrible news to break, the younger with a burden to unbear. The streetlight flickers on, a cone of illumination like a spotlight as they embrace. Maeve steps away first, careful not to take her hands off her sister. “You look really good, Pix,” she says and means it. Her sister’s face is full and clean. Her jawline and hair are their father’s, and Maeve takes a breath at seeing him, like a mirage, there and gone.
“I’d say the same, but you look like you’ve been crying,” Molly says.
Maeve can’t do this in the car while she’s driving, and she can’t wait until they get back to the farmhouse. “I have to tell you something really, really bad.”
They will agree later that it felt like they left their own skin, like, together and from some distance above, they watched death strike at them, collapse them into each other until they were on their knees, crying and grappling for a hold, there in an empty bus station parking lot.
It’s almost sunrise, but Faye hasn’t slept. It has been two weeks since Molly came home, since William’s funeral, since her world cracked open. An eternity. Outside her window, a serenading robin joins the dawn chorus. Her sleeplessness is not the bird’s fault. It is her own. She ruminated all nightover something she saw the day before while aimlessly wandering the shops in town again, desperate to stay away from the sadness that cloaked the farmhouse.
In the bookstore, she had floated up and down rows of cookbooks and travel guides and thick studies of ancient history. She picked up novels idly, skimmed the back covers, set them back down. She was drawn to a gray book displayed on a rounder in the center of the store. Hardened eyes stared at her, daring her to speak.Beyond the Front Line: Children of War in the 20th Century. She lifted the heavy cover like it was sacred. She leafed page after glossy page, blurred blocks of text accompanying wrenching, saturated photos—children fleeing, starving, begging, injured, exhausted, shocked, bloodied. Some children brandished weapons, others confronted them. A child wept over a body. A wailing mother held a limp child. Children in concentration camps. Children wearing gas masks. Maimed children who managed to smile, children who would never laugh again, glassy-eyed children gripped with shock, children playing on mounds of cinder block while war waged around them. Vietnam, Ireland, Biafra, Germany, France, Belgium, Korea, Bolivia, Paraguay, Sierra Leone, Israel, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Nigeria, Colombia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran, Japan, the Philippines, Angola, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda. The list went on. Children playing in rubble, children picking through it for food. Men and their wars—wars for power, for money, for glory. War over territory. War over drugs. War over gods. For years, Faye had not understood war beyond what it had done to her family, how war killed her father first, then her mother, how it tore human beings apart. She had watchedSophie’s ChoiceandSchindler’s Listwith William, and the two of them had wept, though her tears had been soured with shame as if an entire nation’s sins were her own.
She thumbed through the pages, past face after face, thinking she might see her own. She wondered what happened to the children who survived, what they made of the ruins of their lives. Did they grow up? Have families? Bury the past? Were their scars on the inside or outside? A bookseller, practically a child himself with his round glasses and skinny arms, glanced over Faye’s shoulder. “I can’t look at that one.It’s sickening. They’re just kids.” His melodic voice was pitched with disgust. “They didn’t choose. They didn’t have an ideology. War makes orphans and refugees and corpses. That’s it. Unless you’re an oligarch or warmonger, I guess. War makes rich men richer.”
“Mm.” She had nodded at the boy as he stooped to shelve a book. She brushed her hand reverently across the faces on the cover, traced the hollow cheeks of a hungry child, like dipping her fingertips into holy water. She found the old habit and crossed herself.
“It is sickening,” she’d agreed, though the bookseller had gone.
She stares at her bedroom ceiling now, taps her holy fingers together. Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. She remembers shushing Molly through her childhood nightmares, like she had been hushed, as if demons obey and will leave when told. She shifts into the slope of the mattress where springs bulge beneath the pad. She writhes so that they poke at her accusingly. How the body remembers! She flattens out stiffly, crosses her arms, feigns death. Early light streams through filmy curtains.
