TV with him-"
"Read to him-" he said. His voice was blurred, strange.
He hardly recognized it.
"She was probably the first person Todd saw each morning and the last person he saw at night," Polly said. Her hand lay on his wrist. Her eyes looked earnestly into his. "If anyone was in a position to see it coming, it was the person who died with her. And that person never said a word."
Suddenly the thing inside fell. His face began to work. He could feel it happening-it was as if strings had been attached to it in a score of different places, and each was now being tugged by a gentle but insistent hand. Heat flooded his throat and tried to close it.
Heat flooded his face. His eyes filled with tears; Polly Chalmers doubled, trebled, and then broke into prisms of light and image.
His chest heaved but his lungs seemed to find no air. His hand turned over with that scary quickness he had and clamped on hersit must have hurt her terribly, but she made no sound. "I miss her!" he cried out at Polly, and a great, painful sob broke the words into a pair of gasps- "I miss them both, ah, God, how I miss them both!"
"I know," Polly said calmly. "I know. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? How you miss them both."
He began to weep. Al had wept every night for two weeks, and Alan had been there to hold him and offer what comfort he could, but Alan had not cried himself Now he did. The sobs took him and carried him just as they would; he had no power to stop or stay them. He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.
He pushed the coffee cup blindly aside, heard it hit the floor in some other world and shatter there. He laid his overheated, throbbing head on the table and wrapped his arms around it and wept.
At some point, he had felt her raise his head with her cool hands, her misshapen, kindly hands, and place it against her stomach. She held it there and he wept for a long, long time.
8
Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there. anyway.
That had been the beginning between them, even though he felt more like the end had not recognized it as a beginning; it had he had finally musof something. Between then and the day when tered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner with him, he had thought often of the look of her blue eyes and the feel of her hand lying on his wrist.
He thought of the gentle relentlessness with which she had forced him toward ideas he had either ignored or overlooked. And during that time he tried to deal with a new set of feelings about Annie's death; once the roadblock between him and his grief had been removed, these of her feelings had poured out in a flood. Chief and most distressing among them had been a terrible rage at her for concealing a disease that could have been treated and cured... and for having taken their son with her that day. He had talked about some of these feelings with Polly at The Birches on a chilly, rain-swept night last April.
"You've stopped thinking about suicide and started thinking you're angry, Alan."
about murder," she'd said. "That's why you He shook his head and started to speak, but she had leaned over the table and put one of her crooked fingers firmly against his lips for a moment. Shush, you. And the gesture so startled him that he did shush.
"Yes," she said. "I'm not going to catechize you this time, Alanit's been a long time since I've been out to dinner with a man, and I'm enjoying it too much to play Ms. Chief Prosecutor. But people don't get angry at other people-not the way you're angry, at leastfor being in accidents, unless there has been a big piece of carelessness involved. If Annie and Todd had died because the brakes in