it always does in spring in Louisiana. There had been rain aplenty to help it, and sometimes the glory of the sun and rain at the same time.
She ate her meals—approximately a fourth to one-half of what they gave her. Or so Michael said. She didn’t look hungry. But she was pale, still, and her hands, when she did move them, would shake.
All the family came to see her. Groups came across the lawn, standing back as if they might hurt her. They said their hellos, they asked about her health. They told her she looked beautiful. That was true. Then they gave up and they went away.
Mona watched all this.
At night Rowan slept, Michael said, as if she were exhausted, as if she’d been hard at work. She bathed alone, though this scared him. But she always locked the bathroom door, and if he tried to stay inside with her, she merely sat there on the chair, looking off, doing nothing. He had to leave before she’d get up. Then he’d hear the lock turn.
She listened when people spoke, at least in the beginning. And now and then when Michael pleaded with her to speak, she clasped his hand warmly as if comforting him, or pleading with him to be patient. This was sad to watch.
Michael was the only one she touched, or acknowledged, though often this little gesture was made without a change in her remote expression or even a movement of her gray eyes.
Her hair was growing full again. It was even a little yellow from her sitting in the sun. When she’d been in the coma, it had been the color of driftwood, the kind you can see on the muddy riverbanks. Now it looked alive, though if memory served Mona correctly, hair was dead, wasn’t it? Already dead by the time you brushed it, curled it, did stuff to it.
Every morning Rowan rose of her own accord. She would walk slowly down the stairs, holding the railing to the left, and leaning on her cane with the right hand, placing it firmly on each tread. She didn’t seem to care if Michael helped her. If Mona took her arm, it didn’t matter.
Now and then Rowan stopped at her dresser before she went down, and put on a bit of lipstick.
Mona always noticed. Sometimes Mona was waiting for Rowan in the hallway, and she saw Rowan do this. Very significant.
Michael always remarked on it too. Rowan wore nightgowns and negligees, depending upon the weather. Aunt Bea kept buying them and Michael would wash them, because Rowan only wore new clothes after they had been washed, or so he had remembered, and he laid them out for her on the bed.
No, this was no catatonic stupor, Mona figured. And the doctors had confirmed it, though they could not say what was wrong with her. The one time one of them, an idiot Michael had said, stuck a pin in her hand, Rowan quietly withdrew the hand and covered it with her other one. And Michael went into a rage. But Rowan didn’t look at the guy or say a word.
“I wish I’d been here for that,” said Mona.
Of course Mona had known he was telling the truth. Let the doctors speculate and stick pins in people. Maybe when they went back to the hospital, they stuck pins in a doll of Rowan—voodoo acupuncture. Mona wouldn’t have been surprised.
What did Rowan feel? What did she remember? Nobody was sure anymore. They had only Michael’s word that she had awakened from the coma fully aware, that she had spoken with him for hours after, that she knew everything that had happened, that in the coma she had heard and understood. Something terrible on the day of her awakening, another one. And the two buried together beneath the oak.
“I never should have let her do it,” Michael had said to Mona a hundred times. “The smell that came out of that hole, the sight of what was left … I should have taken care of things.”
And what had the other one looked like, and who had carried it down, and tell me all the things that Rowan said—Mona had asked him these questions too often.
“I washed the mud from her hands,” Michael had told Aaron and Mona. “She kept looking at it. I guess a doctor doesn’t want her hands to be soiled. Think about it, how often a surgeon washes her hands. She asked me how I was, she