I should have realized something serious was wrong with her—she was so different yesterday, but I wasn’t paying attention, not like I should have. I closed my eyes, wishing I could rewind time.
‘Adèle?’ he said, and I turned to him.
‘Yes?’
Papa reached into his pocket and pulled out what was left of the letters Mama had me give him. ‘I’ve been thinking about your mother,’ he said. ‘Tell her I haven’t gotten to this one yet.’ He held up the letter that had been folded into a tight triangle; the one Mama wanted him to read last.
My mouth hung open. ‘Papa!’
‘What?’ He looked shocked that I had yelled, which was unlike me—I knew it was—but with Charlotte, and now Papa wanting to talk about Mama, it was too much.
‘It’s been weeks since I gave you her letters.’ I felt my face scrunch. ‘Haven’t you two wasted enough time playing games?’
A slight gasp followed a long pause. ‘Games?’ he said, pushing his wine glass away. ‘She kicked me out as much as I left.’
‘Ugh!’ I put my hand to my forehead with his scowl. All I could do was think about Charlotte and what she was doing, what was happening to her baby on the other side of the wall. I got up to put my hands on the bricks. ‘Charlotte!’ I shouted into the air. ‘Are you all right? Charlotte!’
Papa walked past me to his back office, stuffing the letter into his pocket as he closed the door behind him. I rested my head against the wall. ‘Open up,’ I whispered.
An hour or more passed before Charlotte finally burst out her front door, her hair wild and curly and loose. I bolted outside, chasing her through the streets. A bottom-heavy bag hung from her clenched fist that looked plump and purple and seemed wet as laundry. Just when I thought I’d caught up to her, I lost her in a thin crowd near a park where a little old woman knitted socks next to a broken wagon.
‘You look lost, child,’ she said, looking up at me. Time had made its mark on her face in the form of a hundred wrinkles and creases. Her nose, the biggest thing on her body, was pitted from just as many years in the sun and in the cold.
‘My sister. I was following her, but now she’s gone.’ I looked out over the park; it was bare except for a lone goose picking at some brown winter grass. ‘Her name is—’
‘Charlotte?’ Her voice had perked, and she seemed surprised I was looking for her, setting her knitting needles and yarn into her lap. ‘I can tell you’re related by your deep-set eyes. The dimples threw me, but the eyes. The eyes say it all.’
‘You know my sister?’
She smiled. ‘Yes, of course. I see her every Sunday.’
‘What for?’
She flicked a wrinkled finger at me, asking me to follow her. ‘This way.’
The old woman took a walking stick from the wagon, and I followed her around the corner to Claudeen’s hill, and the cemetery, perched on top of a mound of rock and dirt that shot straight up out of the flat ground, its all too memorable white picket fence bordering the top like a crown. Charlotte’s husband’s family tomb.
‘The cemetery?’
The old woman nodded, hacking and coughing, motioning with her hand for me to keep following her. We stopped in the dirt at the base of the hill. ‘Sometimes she takes the path. But other times she goes this way.’ She pointed up the hill.
‘To do what?’
I followed her straight up the hill through the dirt and rock—surprised by her spryness—I was more out of breath than she was when we got to the top. ‘She hires me for flowers,’ she said. ‘Every week I decorate their graves. Hydrangeas in the spring. Hearty ones in the winter months. Though not much coming up from the south anymore.’
‘Whose graves?’
She turned me around by the arm. ‘There, dear,’ she said, pointing. In between the many raised tombstones was a flat area with a simple grave marker that had several cup-sized holes dug around it, a tiny mound of dirt on top of each one.
‘She buries her miscarriages,’ the old woman said.
I stumbled backward, my body aching a sick little space for each hole I counted. ‘Five,’ I said, ‘graves… these are graves? All of them?’ My lips curled with a mix of disgust and horror.
‘Limbus infantium,’ she said. ‘Flowers for her babies in limbo.’