NEVADA BARR earned her master’s in acting at the University of California and worked in commercial theater for eight years in Minneapolis/St. Paul. At thirty-six, she changed careers and became a park ranger, currently working on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. Barr has written five novels, with the second, Track of the Cat, winning both the Agatha and Anthony awards. Her latest book, Firestorm, featuring her park ranger sleuth Anna Pigeon, was published in the spring of 1996.
Nevada Barr
Lilac trees, two in white, two in plum, and two in the palest lavender, had grown up as Gwen had grown. Now she was in her forties and the lilacs were higher than the eaves of the house. One of the plum-colored trees had died. Slash, piled shoulder-high, lay on the concrete between the garden and the alley. It had taken Gwen all morning to cut it down and haul the withered limbs out to where the garbage men might deign to take them.
Digging out the last of the grasping roots, Gwen uncovered the bone. A museum curator, she knew a finger bone when she saw one. Letting her rump fall back on the freshly dug earth, she contemplated her find.
The day was still and warm, a hint of the hard winter past making the fragile spring almost unbearably precious. Growing up in Minnesota, there’d been many days like this one. Payoff days, her mother called them. Days when you were paid in full for chilblains, dead batteries, frozen nose hairs.
Here in the arbor behind her mother’s house in Minneapolis, two blocks from Lake Nokomis, Gwen had spent those days curled down in the fertile earth arranging tiny plastic soldiers on the rooted mounds beneath the lilacs and fighting glorious bloodless battles till the last Horatio fell heroically defending the last bridge.
When had a real corpse come to join those of her phantom armies?
An Indian, perhaps, buried before whites settled the area. A homesteader, laid to rest in a family plot long since forgotten, sold and resold till at length a city had crept over sod and sodbuster alike.
Gwen looked up from the earth between her feet. Beyond the shade-dappling the sun shone with an unwavering intensity that by July would seem harsh. So close in winter’s shadow it was a promise of renewal and, so, eternal life. Every leaf, each blade of grass, was wreathed in light. Spring’s coronation.
The glare was not so kind to man-made structures. Mullions in the many-paned bay window were peeling, white paint curling off in strips like sunburned flesh; a crack ran up the foundation where the water faucet poked through the cement; the little statue of the Virgin Mary listed drunkenly, attesting to a neglect Gwen’s mother would once have been incapable of.
At some point during the twenty-six years Gwen had been gone, Madolyn Clear had gotten old. A pang of guilt and one sharper for opportunities lost, cut through Gwen’s chest. She pulled up her knees and hugged them close.
She had always thought of her mother as a rock, remaining unchanged as the oceans of life broke against her. For a little girl that brought with it a strong sense of security and not a little loneliness.
A memory from childhood, a snapshot without cause or effect, rose in Gwen’s mind. She was very young, not more than two or three. It must have been around the time her father died, though there were no cerebral Polaroids of that. She was dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, her short hair molded into sleepy spikes. Mud mottled the carpet under her bare feet. One plump hand, fingers spread like a starfish, was pressed against her mother’s bedroom door at the top of the stairs. Inside she knew her mother was crying.
Idly, Gwen wondered if she’d pushed open that door or stayed lonely and lost in the hallway. Probably the latter. There were no memories of seeing her mother cry. Not ever. Everybody cried. Madolyn must have felt safe only in private.
Privacy, her mother’s one indulgence, was all but lost to her now. Since the stroke the sitting room had become her bedroom. The stairs effectively banning her from the rest of her house, she spent her days in the bay window, propped up in the hideous comfort of a hospital bed looking out on her garden.
Light glittered off the windowpanes. Gwen couldn’t see inside, but she waved anyway.
Her mother was no longer a poor woman. Money could buy cooks and nurses and therapists. Gwen had been asked to tend the garden. So much needed to be done with love and not just with a spade. Turned firmly out-of-doors, she nurtured the flowers with the tenderness she was forbidden to lavish on her mother.
And a skeleton lay beneath the lilacs.
Gwen wondered if she should tell her. “No shocks,” Dr. Korver had warned, but Gwen doubted a corpse would distress Madolyn. Pragmatism had soaked so deep into her mother’s bones it was sometimes hard to reconcile the woman as she was with the photos of her as a young bride, dripping with white after the wedding mass, decked in the ruffles and lace of her going-away suit.
And, too, there was nothing awful about a skeleton so long and so quietly dead. Her mother might even be intrigued, delighted. Who wouldn’t be delighted to find a skeleton in the arbor? A story to dine out on for years to come. Still Gwen felt an odd reluctance to tell her. Perhaps it was simply a reluctance to move. The heady scent of the lilacs wrapped around her in a gauzy cloak. Like Dorothy in her poppy field, Gwen was paralyzed with the perfume.
Wriggling her feet deeper in the warm soil, she watched the dirt cascade over the rolled cuffs of her trousers. The house had its ghosts, its lonely hallways, as all houses did, but not the arbor. Bootsies and Tippies and Pinky-Winkies lay interred in various corners and there were remembrances of skinned knees and broken arms and once she’d dislocated Ricky Harper’s little finger, but none of that marred the garden’s perfect peace. Despite Minnesota’s snows Gwen remembered it always sunny, always in bloom. As one remembers childhood.
A second snapshot materialized. This one was captioned, a single line of dialogue in a familiar yet unnameable voice. Gwen was at the piano pretending to play. Her feet didn’t reach the floor; a dress in rustling pink frothed around her little bottom. On the high back of the old upright sat a yellow cat. His tail, fat as a striped sausage, switched down near the pages of music. The window to the garden was open and there was a faint pleasant sound of distant laughter.
The voice wasn’t her mother’s—a neighbor lady probably. “At least now you can keep the house full of flowers,” she’d said. “Small blessings.”
Gwen’s house in Pasadena, California, was always filled with flowers. Her first husband had been allergic to them and to her cats. After the divorce her mother said it wasn’t wise to completely trust a man who was allergic to cats. It meant they were part rat.
“… now you can keep the house full of flowers. Small blessings.” Who had been allergic? Not Gwen, not her mother. Not you, Gwen thought, looking at the spectral finger beckoning amid the roots. At least not for a long time.
Gwen seldom thought of the past. She and her mother didn’t discuss it by mutual if unspoken agreement. Yet here under the lilacs the past seemed to rise up from the earth as insistent and cloying as the scent of the blooms overhead.
Coming home, Gwen thought, and her mother’s stroke proving a mortality neither wished to admit. Gwen’s age. She’d found herself getting in touch with old college friends, thinking fondly of reunions. The mad scrabble to grow up, to do and be and speak, was over and there was a desire to recapture the things undervalued in the rush to adulthood.
Surely it had been more than a decade since she’d thought of Ricky Harper, though they’d dated in high school and he’d gotten even with her for dislocating his little finger by breaking her heart. Disasters of about equal magnitude.
“Lit out,” Ricky had said. Gwen remembered the words clearly. He’d said it of her father, hence the damaged pinky.
She turned her thoughts back to the bony-pinky protruding from the rich black dirt.
The strange and dreaming lethargy lifted and she rubbed her face like a woman coming out of a long sleep. A curator’s instincts reasserted themselves and she pulled off her mother’s gardening gloves—heavy white cotton decorated with apple-green sprigs. The kind old ladies wear. The hands that were exposed were starting to wrinkle, age spots beginning to form from so many years working out-of-doors and Gwen smiled at her snobbery.
Kneeling over the bone, she carefully swept away the earth. Without access to a lab, she couldn’t tell how old the find was, but the knuckle was still intact. Bit by bit she removed the soil until wrist, thumb, and index finger were exposed. Probably it was nothing, still she felt excitement building. Anthropologists, even those who’ve long since left fieldwork, dream of finding a Lucy the way gamblers dream of the big jackpot.
Several more minutes work raised Gwen’s hopes even further. On the third finger of the right hand—for it was a right hand—something glowed dull and coppery. Gwen allowed herself a snort of derision as images of Aztec gold and Ojibwa copper danced incongruously through her head.
With great care, not as if the finger could still feel, but as if prying eyes might see and suddenly cry “Thief!” Gwen worked the ring free and polished the face of it clean with the tail of her shirt.
1946. University of Minnesota.
Modern dead; not history but murder.
Panic clouded Gwen’s mind. Nausea threatened to rob her of her senses, and though she was sitting, she felt as if she would fall and clung to the sturdy trunk of a lilac.
Numbers, clear and neat as arithmetic problems, clicked through her thoughts. In 1945 her parents were married and bought the house. One year later her father graduated from the University of Minnesota and went to work for the city.
Without looking at it again, Gwen slipped the ring in her pocket and gently pushed dirt back over the bones.
Cancer, her mother had said.
“Lit out.”
Never once had Gwen visited her father’s grave. Buried in Sioux Falls, her mother told her, in his hometown. Gwen had never been there. Madolyn was estranged from her husband’s family. Religious differences was how she explained it and, assuming they were Protestant, Gwen hadn’t asked again.
Cards addressed to Gwen came at Christmas and on birthdays till she was out of school. Grandparents she’d never seen and did not mourn died while she worked on her doctorate at Stanford.
Gwen eased up from the ground and started to brush the dirt from her trousers, but the effort proved too great. The forty feet to the back door stretched an impossible distance and she found herself shuffling along the walk, the noise of her dragging steps clogging her ears.
As she passed through the front hall her mother called to her, but she pretended not to hear. Mud from the newly opened grave tracked the sage-green carpet of the upstairs hall and the snapshot came again: the little bare feet, the starfish hand, the mud, the weeping behind the closed door. Someone had tracked freshly dug earth upstairs that day as well.
Gwen’s head swam and she stumbled the last few steps to collapse on Madolyn’s bed; hers now.
She closed her eyes and would have closed her mind had she been able. Images chased each other around inside her skull like maddened ferrets. She imagined she could feel the weight of the ring in her pocket pressing on her thigh. Soon she would take it out, examine it again, but there was no hurry. An old photograph of her father had served as the springboard for the ten thousand daydreams of a lonely child. The ring was his. She’d memorized it along with the grain, the light, and the shadows of the photo.
Anger plucked her from the bed like a giant hand and in anger, she snatched up the phone. There was no statute of limitations on murder.
Before the second ring she laid the receiver back in its cradle and sat down on the edge of the bed. Her knees were shaking too badly to support her.
Lots of men must have graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1946. They would all wear the same ring. The corpse could have been a classmate of her father’s, a family friend.
Buried in the backyard.
A lover then; her mother took a lover, her father killed him then “lit out.” Or died of cancer as her mother said, taking his secret with him. Madolyn may not even have known of the murder. It could have taken place when she was out of town for some reason.
Gwen felt herself calming down, her breathing leaving off the ragged pattern of tears. Hysteria was being replaced by a lifetime’s habit of rational thought. Explanations could be found. Truth was seldom more awful than one’s febrile imaginings. She smiled, if weakly, at the lurid picture she’d conjured of her mother wild-eyed and blood-spattered wielding Norman Bates’s knife.
For several minutes Gwen sat, her feet flat on the floor, her back bowed, staring at the carpet and thinking nothing at all. Too many electrical impulses at once had short-circuited her brain. From below the sweet strains of Doris Day’s “Sentimental Journey” filtered up through the heater vents.
Of course Gwen would have to pursue it. Letting sleeping skeletons lie was out of the question. Her mother was too fragile to confront, the police too abrasive. Not that the Minneapolis police weren’t as polite as midwestern myth would paint them, but there would be digging literally and figuratively. Strangers couldn’t be expected to take the time and energy that delicacy required.
Again she picked up the phone. Grandmother and Granddad were dead, but Gwen assumed Sioux Falls still existed. Seven phone calls to the seven cemeteries and mausoleums didn’t turn up any Gerald Clear interred in 1950.
Nausea returned. Gwen put her head between her knees. Her hands fell to the carpet like leaves and she found herself staring at the dirt-encrusted nails with morbid fascination as if they were the hands that buried the corpse, not the ones to unearth it after so many years.
Pushing herself to her feet, she made her way toward the bathroom to wash. On the wall above the light switch was a small wooden cross adorned with a long-suffering silver Jesus. Clawing it down, she hurled it against the far wall. From downstairs her mother called: “Honey, are you okay?”
“I’m okay, Ma,” Gwen shouted.
“Come downstairs when you’re done.”
Gwen turned on both taps to drown out her mother’s voice and watched the dirt from her hands sully the white porcelain of the old-fashioned sink.
There was an uncle in Des Moines, she remembered. Once or twice as a child she’d seen him, but relations between him and her mother were strained. Gwen didn’t even know if he was still living. If so, he would be close to eighty.
Her old bedroom had been converted to a study some years after she left home. Oblivious to the mess she made, or on some level relishing the release of destruction, Gwen turned it upside down searching for his address. She was almost disappointed when she found it fairly quickly under C in her mother’s well-ordered Rolodex.
Lest thought rob her of courage, Gwen punched in his number not knowing what she would say if he should answer. When an old voice creaked “Hello,” she was momentarily stunned. At the third repetition, she found her tongue. “Uncle Daniel?”
“This is Daniel Clear,” the man said with unconcealed annoyance.
Gwen introduced herself in greater detail and the annoyance evaporated. She told him her mother had had a stroke. Daniel took that as the reason for the call and Gwen didn’t disabuse him of the notion. Had it not been for the skeleton, she wondered if she would have thought to inform him. Probably not.
“Tell me about Dad,” she said when the preliminaries were behind them.
Uncle Daniel didn’t find it an odd question and Gwen realized she’d been wanting to ask it for a long time. The romantic fog of perfect love her mother had generated around her father’s memory had ceased to be enough after Gwen’s own marriage failed in mutual acrimony.
The picture Daniel painted of his little brother had grit, sand, and spice, and Gwen knew when this was over she would seek the old man out.
Daniel remembered an altar boy, quick with his fists, hot-tempered, a favorite with the girls and the apple of his mother’s eye.
His memories dwindled and he began wandering to second cousins and others Gwen neither knew nor cared about. She asked him why he—all of her father’s family—had become estranged from her mother.
“It may seem like a little thing to a modern young lady like yourself,” he said. “But to us it wasn’t. It nearly killed your grandma. Your mother just went and buried him up in the cities. Never invited any of us to the funeral. Didn’t even tell us till it was all over.”
Gwen sat in the wreck of the study and grasped at straws of justification. Hot-tempered, quick with his fists, a favorite with the girls. People didn’t kill without reason. Had her father cheated, been killed in a moment of passion? Had he beaten her mother? Was he killed to protect Gwen? Gwen had no memories of abuse, but people sometimes didn’t.
The thought physically sickened her. A glimpse of herself, face half in shadow, hankie clutched to her eyes, on Oprah, leavened the horror with absurdity. Vaguely she remembered repressed memories, like chicken pox, were more or less age-specific. Mid-thirties rang a bell. She comforted herself with that.
And the lies of True Love and her sainted father? Fairy tales to delight a little girl? Or to rewrite history for a shattered and disappointed woman? The crosses, the statues, mass and communion and confession: the ultimate hypocrisy or lifelong penance?
The phone was still cradled on Gwen’s knees. With one hand she flipped through the Rolodex, then punched in the number for Dr. Korver’s office. In his seventies, he still ran a practice. Gwen pleaded emergency and because Annie, the receptionist, had known her since she was three years old, she was given an appointment.
Compelled by some outdated formality that overtook her when she returned to childhood haunts, Gwen divested herself of jeans and slipped on a fitted rayon dress and flats. The short, graying hair got a few licks with a brush but, as always, it did what it did. Without saying good-bye to her mother, she lifted the car keys from the hook under the kitchen cupboard and slunk out the back door.
Dr. Korver looked much as he had as long as Gwen could remember:. bow tie, suspenders, a clean-shaven and age-defying baby face. His hair was white but was still so thick and lush, one could almost believe he had it bleached to reassure his older patients.
Perched fully dressed on the examination table, Gwen knew neither of them was completely at ease.
“Annie said an emergency,” Dr. Korver said for starters.
“I need to talk to you.” Dr. Korver didn’t do anything so crass as to glance at his watch, but he fidgeted and Gwen could read the impatience just as clearly. From the look on his face, talk wouldn’t take precedence over so much has an ingrown toenail. “I need to know how my father died,” Gwen said abruptly.
“Cancer. Surely your mother told you?”
Gwen nodded. “Did you see him?” she pressed.
“If I remember rightly, he died in Sioux City or somewhere, visiting I think. You should be asking your mother these questions, Gwen.”
“You never saw him dead?”
He shrugged his shoulders. This time he did look at his watch.
“So you don’t know that he died?” Gwen sounded accusing and he reacted in kind, his avuncular manner disappearing behind a mask of injured pride.
“He had an inoperable brain tumor. Unless he got hit by a truck first, he died of it,” he said bluntly, and stood to indicate the interview was over.
Gwen caught hold of his arm. “Please,” she said. “Could I see my medical records and Mom’s?”
Dr. Korver looked at her for a moment. His visage softened. He’d come to recognize pain in all its guises. “What’s wrong, Gwen?”
She said nothing and the kindness was pushed aside by irritation. “You can see your medical records, though I don’t know what good it’ll do you. I can’t let you see your mother’s without her permission.” He left and Gwen felt as cold and exposed as if she wore only a backless paper gown.
After pulling her file, Annie left Gwen alone in the records room. Quickly, she flipped through the pages. Though she was healthy, so many years of care made it thick. Before 1952 there were seven entries: three general check-ups, an ear infection, fever, a scald on her left forearm, and a hairline fracture of her left foot.
Taking advantage of Annie’s trusting nature, Gwen moved to the filing cabinet and walked her fingers through the C’s. Her father’s file was gone, taken to storage years before no doubt, but her mother’s was there. Still standing Gwen scanned the entries from 1945 to 1952: influenza, broken rib, tonsillitis, sprained wrist. The box marked INSURANCE/HEALTH/LIFE had the word “None” scribbled in it twice. No wonder there was such a paucity of doctor’s visits during those years.
Footsteps sounded on the linoleum outside the door and Gwen hastily fumbled the file back into place. Her heart pounded as if peeking at her mother’s medical history were a capital crime. No one entered the records room and Gwen took a moment to pull herself together before she ventured out and said her good-byes to Annie.
She couldn’t bring herself to go back to her mother’s, not yet. She chewed mechanically through a late lunch at Kapoochi’s on Nicollet and Eighth. The food was more an excuse for the glass of Chardonnay than an end in itself.
When the dishes had been cleared and only another solitary glass or dessert could excuse lingering, Gwen returned to the festive crush on Nicollet.
Because the sun shone, Minnesotans made it a holiday. Flower vendors lined the street. People walked and waited for buses and shopped and chattered in groups. Gwen joined the loiterers gathering sun on the wide brick sills of the Conservatory.
Fortified with wine, she could again think of the skeleton, her mother, and murder. Broken rib, sprained wrist, scalded arm, fractured foot; a history of abuse or just the vagaries of living? Gwen had nothing to compare it to, no government statistics on how often the average mother and daughter damaged themselves in the pursuit of daily life.
Why kill a dying man? Surely it was easier and safer to let nature take its course. Self-defense? Possibly. A favorite with the girls: killed in a moment of jealous rage or because he was going to leave? Also possible.
Madolyn Clear never remarried and Gwen had believed it was because she never stopped loving her dead husband. Could it be that memories of a bad marriage made her shy of the institution? And the lilacs? “Now you can keep the house full of flowers. Small blessings.” Revenge? Planting a man allergic to lilacs under six trees of blooms? Each thought was more wretched than the last, sick-making, and Gwen shook herself free of them as a dog rids its fur of raindrops.
Too many years had passed since the death of a father she had never known for the lash of his murder to cut too deep. Betrayal of truth was the injury; loss of the idea that love existed, that she was born from it and to it. Death of the possibility, of the dream.
Gwen relinquished her place in the sun to a polite young woman with tricolor hair and two nose rings. There was one more stop to be made and then she must go home.
St. Bartholomew’s was in South Minneapolis in what was considered a bad section of town, though to Gwen’s perception—altered by years in other cities—the homes still retained their dignity and the people on the streets didn’t appear to have lost their hope. The church was staid and conservative, an edifice of brick and mortar that blended well with the apartment houses that had sprung up around it in the 1940s. The front lawn was badly in need of attention and the steps had deteriorated, not from the constant tread of feet but from disuse and neglect.
The front doors were locked. Gwen picked her way through the struggling rhododendrons to the rectory behind the church. Decay had taken the small brick dwelling as well. Windows were draped as if against terrible cold, and leaves from the previous autumn lay in dusty piles in the corners of the porch.
After two tries with the doorbell and a rapping that left her knuckles burning, Gwen was turning to go. Soft shuffling from within stopped her. Unconsciously donning a pious look, she waited in feigned patience.
A man so old he looked elemental—cracked stone and sere earth—opened the door and blinked up at her from eyes made milky with cataracts. Beyond the changed flesh Gwen could barely recognize Father Davis, the priest to whom she’d poured out childish confessions. Cataracts and time had clearly robbed him of all recollection of her.
“I’m Gwendolyn Clear,” she told him. “My mother, Madolyn Clear, and I used to attend mass at St. Bartholomew’s.”
For long moments he stared at her. Minute workings of the muscles around his mouth attested to some kind of mental process. “Gwennie,” he said at last, and she was impressed. “Do come in. You’re just in time for something I’m sure. Tea? Sherry? Coffee? It’s always a good time for company.”
Inside, the rectory was dark and stifling. Father Davis wore wool trousers and a pullover sweatshirt and tapped at the thermostat as he passed, his old bones needing heat from without.
Ensconced in a worn chair by a blessedly dead fire, Gwen accepted a glass of orange juice as the quickest way to absolve both of them of the niceties and waited while Father Davis settled himself. Scooping a tiger cat from the seat of the chair opposite her, he lowered himself carefully into its depths then arranged the cat across his knees like a rug.
“I no longer say mass,” he said. “But I still occasionally hear confessions of the very wicked.” He smiled to let her know he was teasing.
Because he was a priest and because he was Father Davis, Gwen told him everything. She finished and the silence between them was long and comfortable. The old man stroked the tiger cat, the muscles around his mouth twitching as he thought.
“As a priest I’m not allowed to speak of much the good Lord has seen fit to let me remember,” he said at last. “But you mustn’t let these shadows from the past blot out your faith in the things that are good: love and forgiveness, sacrifice, redemption. I have known you all of your life and known your mother most of hers. All I can tell you that might be of help is that to my knowledge your mother loved your father dearly. Indeed, loved him more than she feared God.”
Blinking again in the clear sunlight, Gwen fished sunglasses from her bag as she skirted the shrubbery in favor of paving stones on the way back to where she’d parked the car.
Time had poured its obscuring dust over events but still she held some facts—or educated guesses that she would use in lieu of facts. Gerald Clear had a temper. Gerald Clear was beloved of the ladies. Gerald Clear had inoperable brain cancer. Her mother had killed him or knew the person who had, and hid the crime by burying him in the backyard. Madolyn loved him “more than she feared God.” Medical records catalogued four possible abuse injuries in seven years.
Gwen drove back to Lake Nokomis so slowly that cars honked at her more than once, but she scarcely acknowledged them. At a stop sign less than a block from the house her car came to rest. Traffic was light and no other vehicle appeared to remind her of the business of driving. As the car idled in neutral, the doctor’s reports filtered back through her mind.
No insurance. Not life. Not health.
In 1952 the Clears were poor—poor as church mice, her mother was fond of saying. There would be no money for the medical bills from an extended illness. Dad was going to kick the bucket anyway so what the hey?
Gwen shook her head as if disagreeing with some unseen adversary. Madolyn had loved her husband more than she feared God. And the pieces fell in place. Sudden tears choked Gwen and she sat at the intersection and cried till the pressure of a Volvo in the rearview mirror forced her to move.
Madolyn Clear was propped up in her hospital bed, sun from the bay window making a patchwork of light and shadow across her legs. While Gwen had been out she’d been given a shampoo and short snow-white hair fell in natural curls. A pair of reading glasses hung around her neck on a cord of psychedelic colors. One hand, slightly gnarled with arthritis, rested on the book she’d been reading.
When Gwen came in she smiled. The teeth were yellowed and crooked but they were all her own and Gwen thought her smile beautiful. It faded to a look of concern as Gwen crossed the hardwood floor close enough that her mother could read the strange lines her face had fallen into after the storm of tears.
Gwen sat in the window seat, the light at her back, and took the ring from the pocket of her dress. Laying it on the coverlet between her mother’s hands, she said: “I know all about Daddy.”
Madolyn stroked the dull gold with one finger as if it were a tiny living creature. “And do you hate me?” she asked without looking up. Beneath white lashes tears sparkled in the sun. Gwen pretended not to notice. Her mother had seen fit to hide them for over forty years. It would be ungracious to discover them now.
“No, Momma.” Gwen wanted to take her hand but lacked the courage. Instead she laid hers on the coverlet touching her mother’s as if by accident. “I admire you. I’ve always admired you.”
They sat for a time without speaking. A house finch came and hopped along the windowsill beyond the glass and Madolyn’s old Siamese cat crept close to fantasize.
“Why lilacs?” Gwen asked. “Dad was allergic, wasn’t he?”
Madolyn looked startled then laughed. “That’s right, he was. It’s been a very long time. Gerry said they were his favorite flower because they gave me so much joy. He knew he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground so he asked to have lilacs planted over his grave. So I’d visit often, he said.”
“Was he afraid of the pain? Of losing his faculties?” Gwen asked.
“Your father wasn’t afraid of anything,” Madolyn said. Then: “Of course he was. Who wouldn’t be? But he would have faced it as he faced everything. He knew he was dying and that the medical costs would eat up our savings, our car, even our home. You and I would be left alone with nothing. He loved us very much.” Tears trickled from beneath the papery lids and found channels in the wrinkled cheeks. This time Gwen did take her mother’s hand and Madolyn held tight, her grip warm and dry.
“But he didn’t kill himself,” Gwen said.
“It would have meant his soul,” Madolyn said. “And there never was a finer.”