sack out,” Mona said. “I’ll be there if you want me.”
“I do want you,” she said, but she said it in a low voice so that Michael perhaps wouldn’t notice it. Michael was at her right, devouring a plate of food and a can of cold beer.
“Yeah, okay,” said Mona. “I’ll just be lying down.” There was a look of dread in her face, weariness and sadness and dread.
“We need each other now,” Rowan said, speaking the words as low as she could. The child’s eyes fixed on her, and they merely looked at each other.
Mona nodded, then left, without even a quick farewell to Michael.
The awkwardness of the guilty, Rowan thought.
Someone in the front room laughed suddenly. It seemed that no matter what happened, the Mayfairs always laughed. When she had been dying upstairs, and Michael had been crying by her bed, there had been people in the house laughing. She remembered thinking about it, thinking about both sounds in a detached way, without alarm, without response. Drifting. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.
Michael finished off the roast beef and the rice and gravy. He took down the last of the beer. Someone came quickly to put another can by his plate, and he picked this up and drank half of it immediately.
“This is good for your heart?” she murmured. He didn’t respond.
She looked at her plate. She had finished her portion as well. Downright gluttonous.
Rice and gravy. New Orleans food. It occurred to her that she ought to tell him that during all these weeks she had loved it that he had given her food with his own hands. But what was the use of saying something like that to him?
That he loved her was as much a miracle as anything that had happened to her, as anything that had happened in this house to anyone. And it had all happened in this house, she mused, when you got right down to it. She felt rooted here, connected in some way she had never felt anywhere else—not even on the Sweet Christine, bravely plowing through the Golden Gate. She felt the strong certainty that this was her home, would never stop being that, and staring at the plate, she remembered that day when Michael and she had walked about the house together, when they’d opened the pantry and found all this old china, this precious china, and the silver.
And yet all of this might perish, might be blown away from her and from everyone else, by a tempest of hot breath, breath from the mouth of hell. What had her new friend, Mona Mayfair, said to her only hours ago? “Rowan, it’s not finished.”
No, not finished. And Aaron? Had they even called the Motherhouse to let his oldest friends there know what had happened to him, or was he to be buried among new friends and conjugal kindred?
The lamps burned brightly on the mantel.
It was not yet dark outside. Through the cherry laurels, she could see the sky was the legendary purple. The murals gave off their reassuring colors to the twilight in the room, and in the magnificent oaks, the oaks that could comfort you even when no human being could, the cicadas had begun to sing, and the warm spring air rolled through the room, from windows that were open everywhere around them—here, and in the parlor, and perhaps in the back to the great unused pool, windows open to the garden graveyard where the bodies lay—the bodies of her only children.
Michael drank the last of the second beer, and gave the can the usual squeeze, and then laid it down neatly, as if the big table demanded such propriety. He didn’t look at her. He stared out at the laurels brushing the colonnettes of the orch, brushing the glass of the upper windows. Maybe he was looking at the purple sky. Maybe he was listening to the commotion of the starlings that swooped down at this hour in great flocks to devour the cicadas. It was all death, that dance, the cicadas swarming from tree to tree, and the flocks of birds crisscrossing the evening sky, just death, just one species eating another.
“That’s all it is, my dear,” she had said on the day of her awakening, her nightgown covered with mud, her hands covered with mud, her bare