improbable that she could run carrying the weight of the girl—running over the snow, holding Charley against her body.
“WHEN SHE WAS BORN, I felt as though she had been given to me so that she could save me,” Sherry Kimball was saying. They were in Charley’s room at the regional hospital in Suffolk, watching her sleep, watching the beeping and whirring of the machines and the dripping of various liquids into her blood. “I was into all kinds of stuff then, and they said she probably wouldn’t even come out normal, you know. But she did, she came out perfect. More than perfect. And she was mine, although she always made me feel that I didn’t know what I was doing. She always made me feel like I shouldn’t have been trusted with her or something.”
“I think everyone must feel like that,” Sweeney said. “I bet if you could have asked your mother how she felt when she had you, she would have said almost the same thing.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Sherry stood up and went over to the bed. “I shouldn’t have let her go alone,” she said to Sweeney. “With everything that’s happened. You wouldn’t have let her go, would you?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what kinds of good or bad choices I would make. But she’s going to be okay, so it doesn’t really matter.” She knew that she should have said something about learning from mistakes, but instead she said, “She’s going to be okay. You get a second chance.” Sherry looked at her, tears in her eyes. Sweeney said it again. “You get a second chance.”
THIRTY-TWO
The storm of 1890 arrived a couple of days before Christmas, as the colonists who stayed were getting ready for the holiday and those who came north for the parties had just begun to arrive.
Morgan later said that he could feel in his bones that something was coming, but he didn’t have any idea how bad it was going to be. By the time it had stopped on Christmas Day, it lay as deep as a child or small woman and we told the children not to go outside for fear they would be buried.
—Muse of the Hills: The Byzantium Colony, 1860–1956,
BY BENNETT DAMMERS
THEY DIDN’T CELEBRATE Christmas Eve. Britta had already made oyster stew, and they were all eating halfheartedly when Sweeney came home from the hospital. Ian jumped up and asked her how she was and Toby tried to give her a hug, and get her to sit down, but she couldn’t stand to sit there at the table and she told them she didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed.
The day after Christmas she would tell Cooper what she thought had happened. She would give them Christmas at least. She would do that for Toby.
Now she was tired. Now she collapsed into the armchair in her bedroom and picked up the first book on the bedside table. She wanted to distract herself with words.
It was the collected Tennyson and she opened to the poem that had started all of this, and read it to herself.
“On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many tower’d Camelot;”
Sweeney found herself thinking of Mary, who had gotten her into this in the first place. Mary, who had fancied herself a kind of Lady of Shalott, pining away on her island until she was rescued by her own Lancelot, Jean Luc Baladin. But unlike the Lady of Shalott, he had taken her away.
“There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:”
She had always liked that line. Shadows of the world appear. It was true, looking at things through a mirror was a misrepresentation. She thought of her mother, who had always put on her makeup for the stage using a double mirror, so as to negate the switching-around effect of looking into a single mirror. It was a common theatrical practice, so you would see yourself exactly as the audience did.
Wait a second.
She dropped the book onto her lap. Her mind was