absolutely helpless, she said, “You know what I’ve been thinking lately?”
“What, sweetheart?” Tom came into the room and reached for her hand. “What have you been thinking?”
“How I wanted to paint this house blue, and we never did it, because the boys—and you—said no, you didn’t want to.”
Tom’s big face seemed in her eyes to get slightly bigger, and he said, “Well, let’s do it now, sweetheart. We can have the house painted any color you want. Let’s do that!”
Cindy shook her head.
“No, I mean it.” Tom bent his head down toward her. “It would be fun, sweetie heart. Let’s paint the house.”
“No.” She shook her head again and turned her face away from him.
“Sweetheart—”
“Oh, Tom. Stop. Please. I said no. We are not going to paint the house now.” She waited a moment, then said, “Honey, can you please take down the wreath that’s still on the front door?”
“Right now,” he said, nodding. “Sweetie heart, consider the wreath gone.”
* * *
Before her illness, Cindy had worked as a librarian at the local library. She loved books, oh, did she love books. She loved the feel of them, and the smell of them, and she had loved the semi-quiet of the library, as well as the old people who came sometimes for the whole morning, just to have a place to go. She had liked helping them get online with a computer, or finding the magazine they wanted to read. Most of all, she had loved checking out books, mentioning to people the books she liked; these people would come back and talk to her about the books they had read at her suggestion. Cindy used to read everything, and even now there were books piled on the table beside the bed, books were piled up on the windowsill, and some on the floor as well. She almost had no preference for any kind of book, and she had sometimes thought that odd; she had read Shakespeare and the thrillers of Sharon McDonald, and biographies of Samuel Johnson and different playwrights, silly romance novels, and also—the poets. She thought, privately, that poets just about sat on the right hand of God.
When she was young, Cindy had thought about being a poet—what a silly idea. But as a child she had liked poetry; her third-grade teacher had given her a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Poems Selected for Young People, and when her little sister colored all over it in red crayon, Cindy hit her. Always this memory caused Cindy deep pain, because of what had happened later to her little sister. But Cindy had memorized all the poems in the book before they were colored over in red, and she felt—somehow—that it had ushered her into a world far away from her tiny home. This was partly because her teacher had told her that Edna St. Vincent Millay had grown up in Maine too, only an hour away; and that the poet, as a young girl, had been raised in poverty. The teacher had been kind in how she said that, and it was not until years later that Cindy realized it was to help her, Cindy, with her own circumstances of need. Cindy had written some poetry, but only for herself; she knew nothing about it, really. Andrea L’Rieux, who was two years younger than Cindy, had become the Poet Laureate of the United States a year ago, and Cindy felt a vast and secret pride that this person from Crosby, Maine, had accomplished such a thing. In truth, Cindy did not always understand the poetry that Andrea wrote. But it was brave; Cindy knew that. The poetry was a lot about Andrea’s life, and Cindy understood, reading it, that she, Cindy, could never have done what Andrea did. She could never have written about her mother in such a way, could never have written down the revulsion she felt at the sight of her mother’s cheeks drawing in as she smoked, nor even could she have written anything about herself.
What she would have written about was the light in February. How it changed the way the world looked. People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring. But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now. Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you