Raffi’s death she will meet Leo, fifteen years her junior, an esteemed set decorator, and will believe that at last she has found her soul mate, the love of her life.
Caroline and Leo have six years together. It is a simple picture that comes to her one morning in the shower: an image of Joe on the baseball field, a high-school game she had attended only reluctantly and then watched from way up in the bleachers, far from Noni, Renee, and me. She remembers clear as a bell Joe at the plate in his purple-and-green uniform, and he is like that lilac tree she planted so long ago in her backyard: strong, tall, branching limbs, and beautiful, so beautiful, with the perfect arc of his swing. As ball meets bat, the crack of it explodes into light, and Caroline closes her eyes as she, too, falls into light.
Will, my darling Will, follows Caroline one week later. The single-engine plane he is piloting alone crashes over Hopi lands in northeastern Arizona, an accident that is never fully explained. He’d lived a rich and healthy eighty-eight years and his funeral is a celebration, a party, of all that he was and all that we experienced together. But these two absences, Caroline and Will in such quick succession, will topple me like nothing else since Joe. For years I will find myself sitting with eyes closed, one hand around a book, a pencil, an old T-shirt, and the other on my heart. I sit like that old medium Mimi Prince, and I wait for the enduring vibrations to reach me.
I meet Henry when I believe I’m finished with new experiences. I want only to retreat, to hide away and write in peace. To never hear another siren. Everything, I think, has already happened to me, but then there he is. Henry, fly-fishing in those big rubber boots and a floppy green hat in the river on my new land. He’s a neighbor who becomes a friend, then lover. My house in the mountains becomes our house and we fill it with books, the barn with horses, the river with trout. Our extended families come when they need respite from their lives in cities—Henry’s children and their children, my nieces and nephews, their children and theirs. My sisters never meet Henry, they’re gone by then, but I know they would have approved.
And Noni? On the day of Jonah’s college graduation, she will fly from New York to Seattle, and in those hours over the vast sweep of the United States something goes wrong. Something fails inside her brain, one blood vessel, a nerve, a synapse that does not connect to its partner. Renee meets her at the gate but senses immediately that Noni is not well. “I’m perfectly fine,” Noni says, and waves Renee away, but later in the hotel she’ll lie on the bed and pull the covers over her body and she’ll talk to Renee, a sometimes nonsensical monologue about her childhood, about the first boy she kissed, the teacher who told her she was too smart for secretarial school, the doctor who felt her breasts with her mother in the room, the summer day she first met our father, and other days, other events we’d never known or thought to ask about. For hours Renee sits and listens. She learns more about our mother on that day than she has ever known before.
And finally Noni will talk about the Pause. “Once,” she says, “I went to church. I looked to that dry, ridiculous Father Johns for some kind of wisdom. But after Ellis died, my idea of religion changed. I became a nonbeliever. Your grandmother was turning over in her grave, I’m sure, but the world struck me as stark and unforgiving. There was no plan. No one—no entity, no power, no God—controlled a thing. Life was a struggle. Not without its joys, of course”—here Noni smiles—“but a struggle nonetheless to feed, clothe, house, love the people for whom I was responsible. My children. You four. I was the only one who would ever love you wholly. I was the only one who would give my life for yours, and this seemed an important and terrible burden.” Noni pauses and closes her eyes, opens them again. “It froze me. It did. The Pause, you kids called it. I couldn’t face it alone, any of it, but somehow you managed. The four of you, together. You got through and you forgave me.