like all of us did—home all day with a cranky baby, no adult conversations for weeks at a time, that kind of thing. But she never showed any signs of regret, Scarlet.” Her voice is tender now, and Scarlet feels, suddenly, embarrassed by her questions, by the silly self-involvement Cora must be hearing there.
“No, no. I didn’t really mean regret,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure what I mean. It’s just, well, all that k-selected species stuff, all the ‘singleton’ jokes and whatnot. I just was curious about it, I guess. I know I’m not being clear. . . .”
“Well, who is right now, right? What’s being clear got to do with Addie’s dying? Was she being clear, giving up on treatment like that and—” Cora stops herself, takes a sip of coffee and looks out the window for a moment. She turns back to Scarlet and tries to smile. “Anyway, you didn’t seem to suffer for being an only child. There was your friend Peter, and then our boys . . .”
Her voice catches, and suddenly Scarlet wonders why she’s doing this to Cora, insisting on this topic of mothers and children. “Yes, right,” she says, then tries to steer things to safer ground. “Just thinking about the only-child thing to avoid other thoughts, I suppose. Or, well, I don’t know why. It’s funny what these last days with Addie have brought up. Apart from all the big stuff, I mean.”
“Yes, it is funny. It’s funny what we found ourselves talking about. I mean really, under normal conditions when do we ever wonder about what female dogs think about their own reproduction, or lack of it?” Cora looks down at Lucy, trailing her fingers along the dog’s soft white belly. “But that’s what you talk about. Things like that, things that seem so silly and irrelevant—and then you realize they really aren’t.” She folds her paper then and starts to tidy the table, a brisk habit Scarlet recognizes. She braces herself for what will come next.
“Addie worried, you know, that she might have somehow turned you away from marrying, or from having children,” Cora says when she’s wiped away a tiny trail of milk. “She ended up in tears that night we talked—well, of course we all did. Lou kind of fell apart . . . you know how she feels about her girls now, so convinced they blame her for everything.”
How, Scarlet is wondering, does Cora always know what she’s really thinking? She has done this for years now, greeting Scarlet at the breakfast table, after those long drives and a few hours’ sleep, with a fresh pot of coffee and, before long, a seemingly innocent and indirect observation that was meant really as a pointed question.
But Addie has been dead for only seven hours, and Scarlet has slept for maybe three. Though she was sidling up to the topic herself only moments before, she’s just not ready, she thinks now, to launch into things like Addie’s fears for her. Or what Addie’s life might have taught her about love or marriage or having a child. She can’t ask the questions she needs to ask, and she can’t answer Cora’s questions either. Not now.
So instead she asks Cora something else, though here too she’s afraid of where her answer could take them. “And what did you cry about, Cora, that night with Lou and Addie?”
Cora looks at Scarlet intently for another long moment. Then she waves her hand in front of her face and shifts her gaze to the window. “Not what you’d think, Scarlet,” she says. “I cried because beautiful young girls grow up, and grow old. Isn’t that silly? I look at my granddaughters now, and they take my breath away. Bobby’s girls are eight and five now. Can you believe that?”
Scarlet raises her eyebrows, feigning surprise, though in fact she’s well aware of Cora’s granddaughters’ ages.
“They remind me of you,” Cora goes on. “Of course they’re younger than you were when you started coming here with Addie and Tom, but already Lindsey, at least, makes me think of you. She’s long and lean like you were, with that same wild, long hair. I love just watching her walk, just like I used to love watching you. Young girls are like colts really. Silent and watchful, and restless, under that calm on the surface. Restless and ready to break free.
“And that night I thought, for the first time—can you believe this?—I thought, My Lord, we were like that too, and it seems like it was just yesterday, and now Addie is here in my house, on this huge hospital bed in the middle of my studio, and she’s dying. And I thought, How can this be? We were so young, so happy, tramping through the woods and riding horses and kissing our boyfriends in the moonlight. And then suddenly Addie seemed to leap ahead of us—well, I mean she was always so passionate and intense, but then boom, she was doing this very, very grown-up thing, falling in love with Tom and moving in with him. And then before we knew it we were all doing it—getting married, having families, buying homes, all of it—buried in work, and debt, and caring for children. . . .”
Her voice breaks ever so slightly, and she pauses. Scarlet reaches for her hand, but Cora only lets her hold it for a moment before she pulls it away and goes on. “And through all of that, all those things that seemed to wear the rest of us out, Addie stayed as passionate as ever. Oh, I know she had her low periods. But she never lost all that hellfire and fury that seemed to be burning inside her, keeping her going.”
“Remember when Lou told her she should have been a Southern Baptist preacher?” Scarlet says, and they laugh at the memory, briefly, before Cora grows serious. She is quiet, looking out the window again. Morning light like this isn’t kind to anyone, but Cora’s face has grown lovelier with age; its lines reveal depth, resolve, but there’s a softness there too, and it never goes away. Addie had the same softness, Scarlet realizes suddenly, and it hits her like a stabbing pain. It was just hard to see it sometimes.
“You know,” Cora says, “it stunned me to look at Addie over these last few weeks, to see all that passion drained from her face. It seemed like she finally wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I still can’t decide whether to call that peace, whatever it was she felt at the end. I can’t bear to think that she felt resigned, or defeated somehow. Not Addie.”
When she says this, both women begin to cry quietly. “I think it was peace,” Scarlet says, her voice a hoarse whisper that she can barely hear herself. She isn’t sure of this at all. But if it wasn’t peace, she thinks, maybe it was still something good, something close to peace, something as close to peace as was possible for Addie. And far, very far from resignation—of that Scarlet is certain, based on Addie’s last request. But she promised Addie, when she made that request two weeks ago, not to burden Cora or Lou with this information.
And so she clears her throat to say it again, without necessarily believing it, because she wants Cora to believe it: “I think she’d found a kind of peace, Cora. Resignation wasn’t really in her repertoire, you know?”
There’s a pause then, a heavy one—a quiet between them that, Scarlet knows, Cora would like her to fill with news of what was said, late last night, when Cora and Lou left Tom and Scarlet with Addie. But she isn’t ready to relive those last hours that feel, now, like she must have dreamed them. She would like, for just a little while, to pretend that Addie’s just asleep—that it wasn’t her body they wrapped up and carried down the street a few hours ago, then fussed over ridiculously, as if about her comfort, as they laid her out on the cot.
When they’d gotten her to the restaurant cooler, there, inexplicably, had been Dustin, ready with a plastic sheet and bags filled with dry ice—an “extra precaution,” he’d said, in case they needed extra time. He helped Tom and Scarlet position the bags below Addie’s head and back, at the sides of her legs, her feet. Scarlet shakes her head at the memory: Could she have dreamed it? Had they really laid out her mother’s dead body in a walk-in cooler just hours ago? And were they really going to move that body, and somehow bury it on their own, a few short hours from now?
She
