“She wants to scatter them on his birthday in May. When the ground isn’t frozen.”
“I’ll come back for that.”
“Twice in one year?” Meredith said.
Nina looked at her. “It’s some year.”
For a moment, it looked like Meredith might crumble, just let go and cry, and Nina felt the start of her own tears.
Then Meredith said, “Be sure and say good-bye to the girls. You know how much they idolize you.”
“I will.”
Meredith nodded curtly and wiped her eyes. “I have to be back at work in an hour. I’ll vacuum before I go.”
Nina wanted to say she’d do it—make one last effort—but now that she’d decided to leave, she was like a Thoroughbred at the starting gate. She wanted to run. “I’ll go pack.”
Late that night, when Nina’s few things had been put in her backpack and stowed in the rental car, she finally went in search of her mother.
She found her wrapped in blankets, sitting in front of the fire.
“So you are leaving,” her mother said without looking up.
“My editor called. They need me for a story. It’s terrible, what’s happening in Sierra Leone.” She sat down on the hearth; her body shivered at the sudden heat. “Someone needs to show the world what’s happening there. People are dying. It’s so tragic.”
“You think your photographs can do that?”
Nina felt the sting of that remark and the insult. “War is a terrible thing, Mom. It’s easy to sit here in your nice, safe home and judge my work. But if you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d feel differently. What I do can make a difference. You can’t imagine how some people suffer in the world, and if no one sees it—”
“We’ll scatter your father’s ashes on his birthday. With or without you.”
“Okay,” Nina said evenly, thinking, Dad understood, and hurting all over again.
“Good-bye, then. Happy Christmas to you.”
On that note, Nina left Belye Nochi. At the porch she paused, looking up the valley, watching the snow fall. Her practiced eye took it all in, cataloging and remembering every detail. In thirty-nine hours, it would be dust that rained down on her shoulders and swirled around her boots, and the images of this place would bleach out like bones beneath a punishing sun, until, in no time at all, they’d be too pale to see at all. Her family—and especially her mother—would become shadowy memory beings whom Nina could love . . . from a distance.
Six
In the weeks following her father’s death, Meredith held herself together by strength of will alone. That, and a schedule as tight and busy as a boot camp recruit’s.
Grief had become her silent sidekick. She felt its shadow beside her all the time. She knew that if she turned toward that darkness just once, embraced it as she longed to, she’d be lost.
So she kept moving. Doing.
Christmas and New Year’s had been disastrous, of course, and her insistence on following tradition hadn’t helped. The turkey-and-all-the fixings dinner had only highlighted the empty place at the table.
And Jeff didn’t understand. He kept saying that if she’d just cry she’d be okay. As if a few tears could help her.
It was ridiculous. She knew crying wouldn’t help, because she cried in her sleep. Night after night she woke with tears on her cheeks, and none of it helped one bit. In fact, the opposite was true. The expression of grief didn’t help. Only its suppression would get her through these hard times.
So she went on, smiling brightly at work and moving from one chore to the next with a desperate zeal. It wasn’t until the girls went back to school that she realized how exhausted she was by the pretense of ordinary life. It didn’t help, of course, that she hadn’t slept through the night since the funeral, or that she and Jeff were having trouble finding anything to talk about.
She’d tried to explain it to him, how cold she felt, how numb, but he refused to understand. He thought she should “let it out.” Whatever the hell that meant.
Still, she wasn’t trying very hard to talk to him, that much was true. Sometimes they went whole days with little more than a nod in passing. She really needed to try harder.
She rinsed out her coffee cup, put it in the strainer, and went to the downstairs office he used for writing. Knocking quietly, she opened the door.
Jeff sat at his desk—the one they’d bought at least a decade ago, dubbed his writer’s space, and christened by making love on it.
You’ll be famous someday. The new Raymond Chandler.
She smiled at the memory, even as it saddened her to think that somewhere along the way their dreams had untangled, gone on separate paths.
“How’s the book going?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.
“Wow. You haven’t asked me that in weeks.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Meredith frowned at that. She’d always loved her husband’s writing. In the early days of their marriage, when he’d been a struggling journalist, she’d read every word he wrote. Even a few years ago, when he’d first dared to try his hand at fiction, she’d been his first, best critic. At least that was what he’d claimed. That book hadn’t sold to a publisher, but she’d believed in it, in him, heart and soul. And she was glad that he’d finally started another book. Had she told him that? “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she said. “I’ve been a mess lately. Can I read what you have so far?”
“Of course.”
She saw how easy it was to make him smile and felt a pang of guilt. She wanted to lean down and kiss him. It used to be as easy as breathing, kissing him, but now it felt strangely bold, and she couldn’t quite make herself move toward him. She mentally added Read Jeff’s Book to her To-Do list.
He leaned back in his chair. The smile he gave her was a good effort; only their twenty years together allowed her to see the vulnerable underside to it. “Let’s go to dinner and a movie tonight. You need a break.”
“Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I need to pay Mom’s bills.”
“You’re burning the candle at both ends.”
Meredith hated it when he said ridiculous things like that. What exactly was she supposed to stop doing? Her job? Caring for her mother? The chores at home? “It’s only been a few weeks. Cut me some slack.”
“Only if you cut yourself some.”
She had no idea what he meant by that, and right now she didn’t care. “I gotta go. See you tonight.” She bent down, patted his shoulder, and left the house. She put the dogs in the fenced part of their yard and then drove down to her parents’ house.
Her mother’s house.
The reminder came with a pinch of grief that she pushed aside.
Inside, she closed the door behind her and called out for her mother.
There was no answer, which was hardly a surprise.
She found her mother in the rarely used formal dining room, muttering to herself in Russian. On the table, spread out in front of her, were all the pieces of jewelry Dad had bought her over the years, as well as the ornately decorated jewelry box that had been a long-ago Christmas gift from her daughters.
Meredith saw the mess grief had made of her mother’s beautiful face: it had sucked in her cheeks and made her bones appear more prominent; it had drawn the color from her skin until her flesh nearly matched her hair. Only her eyes—startlingly blue against all that pallor—held any semblance of who she’d been a month ago.
“Hey, Mom,” Meredith said, coming up to her. “What are you doing?”
“We have these jewels. And the butterfly is somewhere.”
“Are you getting dressed up for something?”
Her mother looked up sharply. Only then, when their gazes really met, did Meredith see the confusion in those electric-blue eyes. “We can sell them.”
“We don’t need to sell your jewelry, Mom.”
“They’ll stop handing out money soon. You’ll see.”
Meredith leaned over and gently scooped up the costume jewelry. There was nothing of real value here: Dad’s gifts had always been more heartfelt than expensive. “Don’t worry about the bills, Mom. I’ll be paying them for you.”
“You?”
Meredith nodded and helped her mother to her feet, surprised at the easy acquiescence. Mom let herself be led up the stairs easily.
“Is the butterfly safe?”
Meredith nodded. “Everything is safe, Mom,” she said, helping her mother into bed.
“Thank God,” Mom said with a sigh. She closed her eyes.
Meredith stood there a long time, staring down at her sleeping mother. She reached out finally and felt her brow (it wasn’t hot), and gently brushed the hair from her eyes.
When she was confident that Mom was sleeping deeply, she went downstairs and called the office.
Daisy answered on the first ring. “Meredith Whitson Cooper’s office.”
“Hey, Daisy,” Meredith said, still frowning. “I’m going to work from Belye Nochi today. My mom’s acting a little strange.”
“Grief will do that to a person.”
“Yeah,” Meredith said, thinking of the tears that were always on her cheeks when she woke. Yesterday she’d been so exhausted she’d added orange juice to her coffee instead of soy milk. She’d drunk half the cup before she even noticed. “It will.”
If Meredith had been burning the candle at both ends then, by the end of January, there was nothing left but the flame. She knew Jeff had grown impatient with her, even angry. Time and again, he told her to hire someone to help take care of her mother, or to let him help her, or—worst of all—to make time for them. But how was she supposed to accomplish that amid all her other chores? She’d tried to get Mom a housekeeper, but that had been a disaster. The poor woman had worked at Belye Nochi a week and quit without giving notice, saying that she couldn’t stand the way Mom watched her all the time and told her to quit touching things.
So, with Nina gone off God knew where and Mom growing stranger and colder every day, Meredith had no choice but to pick up the slack. She’d made a promise to her father to care for Mom and she would never let him down. So she kept moving, doing everything that needed to be done. As long as she was moving, she could contain her grief.
Her routine had become her salvation.
Every morning she woke early, ran four miles, made her husband and her mother breakfast, and left for work. By eight o’clock, she was at her desk, working. At noon, she returned to Belye Nochi to check on Mom, pay a few bills, or do a little cleaning. Then it was back to work until six, grocery shopping on her way home, stop at Mom’s until seven or eight, and—if Mom wasn’t acting too weird—home by eight-thirty for whatever dinner she and Jeff could throw together. Without fail, she fell asleep on the sofa by nine and woke up at three in the morning. The only good part about this crazy routine was that she could call Maddy early because of the time-zone difference. Sometimes, just hearing her daughters’ voices could get her through the day.
