got puppies?”
Joey nodded. “Daisy had ’em day before yesterday, but my mom wouldn’t let me call you.”
“How come?” Jason asked as he climbed over the fence and dropped into the Connors’ yard.
“ ’Cause of your sister. Did you go to the funeral?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What was it like?”
Jason stopped a minute, thinking. “Like a funeral, I guess,” he said. Then, “Can I have one of the puppies?”
To an adult, Jason Montgomery’s reaction to the death of his sister might have seemed callous. To him, her death was as unreal as she had been, and in his life, not much had changed. In fact, for Jason, the most notable event of the day was probably the finger that healed in ten minutes flat.
In her daughter’s guest room, Phyllis Paine packed the last of her belongings into her suitcase and snapped it shut. Her eyes scanned the room absently. She was sure she had left nothing out. In her own mind she was already at home, taking up the myriad details of which life, for her, was composed. Phyllis was not a cold woman. When Julie died, Phyllis had experienced one of those private moments of unutterable grief, and then, taking herself in hand, had risen to the occasion. For two days she had run her daughter’s home as she ran her own—efficiently, quietly, and with a sense of purpose. She had done her best to give Sally room in which to mourn. Now Sally had to begin putting her life back together again. All Phyllis’s instincts told her to stay on, and “do” for Sally. She knew the pain Sally was feeling; she had felt it herself so long ago when her own first child had been stillborn. But no one had “done” for her. She had been forced to deal with her feelings, cope with the turns life can take, and persevere. And so she had buried her little boy, as Sally had just buried her little girl, and then gone on with life.
She picked up her suitcase and carried it downstairs. Sally and Steve were in the living room, sitting on a sofa, a distance between them that seemed greater than the few inches that separated them.
“Steve, would you call a taxi for me, please?”
Sally’s head swung slowly around, and her eyes, clouded by tears that still threatened to overflow at any moment, seemed puzzled. “A taxi?” she repeated vacantly. “Where are you going?”
“Home, dear,” Phyllis said gently. She forced herself to remain impassive to the barely perceptible shudder that passed over her daughter. Her gaze shifted to her son-in-law and she nodded slightly; Steve left her alone with Sally. Only then did she move to the sofa and sit by her daughter, taking Sally’s hand in her own.
There was a long silence between the two women, and for a moment Phyllis wasn’t sure how to bridge it. Finally she squeezed Sally’s hand reassuringly.
“I was wrong yesterday, dear,” she said, “and I want to apologize.”
Sally’s eyes, full of fright and dazed, met her mother’s. “Wrong? About what?”
“About Julie,” Phyllis said. “About how she died. I don’t know why I said what I did before—about babies not just dying. It was stupid of me.”
Sally’s expression cleared slightly. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean I was wrong to insinuate that something must have happened to Julie. I know now that nothing did. She simply died, and we have to accept that.”
“Like you accepted what happened to my brother?” Though her voice was level, there was a coldness in her tone that shocked Phyllis even more than the words.
“How did you know about that?”
“Daddy told me. A long time ago.”
“He had no right—” Phyllis began.
“He had every right, Mother,” Sally replied. “He was trying to explain to me why—well, why you’re the way you are.”
“I see,” Phyllis replied, sinking back into the depths of the sofa. It was the first time her son had been mentioned in Phyllis’s presence since the day he had been born. “And did it explain anything?” she heard herself asking.
“No, not really,” Sally replied, her voice distant, as if she were thinking of something else.
“Then let me try,” Phyllis said, choosing her words carefully, afraid that even talking of that time nearly thirty years in the past might destroy the careful structure she had built for herself. “I blamed myself for the fact that your brother was born dead, even though the doctors told me it wasn’t my fault. Just as you might be blaming yourself for what happened