VIVIEN, 1919
On the ride back to Napa, Vivien and Sebastian did not speak. The Ford truck he’d borrowed from Robert to come and get Vivien bounced uncomfortably. It was made for farmwork, not for long-distance drives. Vivien was relieved to not have to make conversation. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat, inhaling the smells of leather and earth that filled the cab. Pamela’s face kept floating into her thoughts, startling her into remembering why she was heading north back to Napa instead of asleep at the Hotel Majestic in San Francisco.
Ever since that man had wandered grief-stricken onto her doorstep and launched her into her career as an obituary writer, Vivien had written hundreds of obituaries, too many of them for children. Just last year, when the Spanish influenza hit, not a day passed without a parent falling into Vivien’s arms, overwhelmed by grief. Vivien had struggled to honor a person so young that their character had not yet revealed itself. She had sat at her small desk, staring at a blank piece of paper, trying to find the words to capture the child who had just taken her first steps, the boy who had loved his big sister or applesauce or his mother’s lullabies. Children who could only say a few words—Mama, doggie, bye-bye; who had learned to wave or jump or kiss good night; children who could recite the alphabet or count to ten or write their names in shaky oversized letters; so many children dead, and Vivien given the task to capture the thousand days or less they had lived.
On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it.
She knew the things that brought comfort: hot tea, clear broth, a blanket on one’s lap, the sound of one’s loved one’s name said out loud, someone to listen, a hug. But even these things could not comfort a parent who has watched their child die, who has sat helplessly by their child’s bedside. The parents of dead children wail. They pull at their clothes and their hair as if they need to leave their bodies, shed their skin, disappear. Vivien had come to recognize the blank stare in their eyes, the grief robbing them of any other emotion but it.
And now Pamela was dead, and Lotte had entered this world. Vivien remembered a mother who had come to her last winter, her face bloated with grief. The woman had been unable to sit still, and instead paced relentlessly around Vivien’s parlor. She had lost not one but two children, within hours, and she kept repeating the events of that morning as if by mere repetition they would change. Vivien had seen this often. Mourners needed to tell their stories. Not once or twice, but endlessly, to whoever would listen.
“They were playing together at my feet,” the woman said. “I even remarked on how cheerful they both were, how happy. I remember thinking that I had been doubly blessed. Two beautiful happy children. And then first Amelia got sick, right in front of me. I rushed her off to my bedroom, to get her away from Louisa. This influenza is highly contagious. I know this. And by the time Amelia was gone, Louisa was already sick, already dying too. The doctor never even made it to our house. When he arrived it was too late. He said, ‘So many children gone. Too many.’ And I screamed at him. ‘But not mine! Not mine!’”
She walked and told the story again and again, stopping only to stare at Vivien in disbelief.
Finally she said, “The Twenty-third Psalm. I keep saying it to myself. But the words have stopped making sense.”
That was when Vivien realized that in fact those particular words made too much sense.
“The psalm says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” the woman said. “But God isn’t comforting me. I hate him! He is cruel, not loving.”
How the grief-stricken hated God! Vivien thought. She could hear her own voice cursing him, could feel her own heart hating him.
She wrapped her arms around the woman, and said softly, “Darling, the psalm tells us that we must walk through the valley. We cannot walk around it, I’m afraid.”
The woman’s voice against Vivien’s shoulder was muffled. “I don’t want to,” she cried. “I don’t want to be there. I want my babies back.”
Vivien used the Twenty-third Psalm in Amelia and Louisa’s obituaries. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Their mother’s cup had runneth over with joy and with sorrow, all in a matter of hours.
“Yes,” she had told Vivien later that afternoon, when exhausted from pacing and crying and the business of death. “Yes, that is the perfect thing to express this grief, for which there are truly no words.”
The touch of a hand on her knee jolted Vivien. Lost in the world of grief, she had forgotten that she was in this truck with someone else.
“You’re crying,” Sebastian said softly. He held out a white handkerchief to her.
“Am I?” Vivien said.
Light was just beginning to break in the distance. Vivien took the handkerchief and wiped her eyes and cheeks.
“It is a sad day,” Sebastian said.
“Yes,” Vivien said.
She wondered, not for the first time, how the sun dared to show itself on a day such as this one. But it would. It would shine brightly down on all of them. Flowers would blossom, trees would bear fruit, women would give birth, and the world, as if ignorant of what had happened here, would continue to spin.
“We should arrive in another hour,” Sebastian said.
The sky had turned the particular shade of violet that it did as the sun prepared to rise, a color Vivien had seen too often during sleepless nights wracked by grief. Although that condition of her grief had passed some time ago, she recognized this color, this sky too well.
“How do you call this color?” Sebastian said, pointing one finger upward without moving his hands from the steering wheel.
“Violet,” Vivien said.
“Like the small flower? But the color is not the same.”
“It’s also a female name,” she said.
“Violet,” Sebastian repeated under his breath. Vee-oh-letta.
“Do you have this name in Italian?” Vivien asked him.
“We have Viola. Like in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”
Vivien glanced at him quickly, as if she had never laid eyes on him before. Maybe Lotte had been right about this man.
“You like Shakespeare?” Vivien asked him.
Sebastian sighed. “Like is too weak a word for how he makes me feel.”
Vivien nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“Yes, I see you in the library. The way you love the books.”
“How did you land in Napa, California?” Vivien asked him, feeling a genuine tug of interest.
“You see, my father, he was a soldier for the king. But when there was no more king, he had no work. He tried farming, but he was not a good farmer. I learned, though. About soil and crops, the rain and the seasons. How to nurture things.”
“So you came here,” Vivien said.
“My sisters came to America first and they got jobs in New Jersey, in the factories. But I didn’t want to be inside all day. I couldn’t be. My friend Michele, he told me they were looking for workers for vineyards in California. He went to work for Gallo, and he sent for me. And here I am now.”
Despite herself, she felt her heart softening toward him. It was grief making her so vulnerable, she thought. The news of Pamela’s death, what waited for her at the end of this trip.
Sebastian reached across the seat and took her hand in his rough, callused one.
“I nurture you,” he said.
It was the wrong word, Vivien knew. But she didn’t pull her hand away. She let it rest there, in his.
Sebastian kept his eyes on the road ahead as the sky turned from violet to lavender, lightening with the sun.
When the truck passed under the arch with the words Simone Vineyards carved into it, Vivien reminded herself why she was back here instead of at the ferry terminal boarding her train to Denver. Pamela is dead. She repeated the words, as if by saying them over and over they might make sense. But as Sebastian parked and Pamela didn’t appear to greet Vivien, the words made even less sense. Pamela dead? The little girl’s tanned face, with her bright blue eyes and tangle of blond curls floated in front of Vivien, alive and vibrant.
Her eyes darted to the house. White crepe streamers and violets hung on the door. Lights blazed in every room. The shadows of people moving about the kitchen were silhouetted in the windows.
“I don’t want to go in,” Vivien said.
Sebastian, who had already opened his door to get out, closed it quietly.
“Then we sit until you are ready,” he said.
Didn’t he understand? She would never be ready. Her friend was in there crazy with grief. Vivien, so familiar with the landscape of death, for once did not know what to do or say.
“As long as I’m out here,” Vivien said after a moment, “then nothing has happened. Once I step inside that house, Pamela will really be dead.”
“Vivien,” Sebastian said softly. “Pamela really is dead. I saw her myself. The dottore, he came, but it was too late. The influenza is not as strong this time, but it still can kill. The lungs fill up—”
“Stop!” she said harshly. “Shut up.”
“I stop,” he said.
Vivien tried to sort out what he had told her. Pamela had influenza. The strain was less virulent this time around, yet it had turned to pneumonia anyway and killed her.
“You saw her,” Vivien said.
“I did.”
The kitchen door opened and a man and a woman stepped outside. It was light enough now to see that they were the couple from the neighboring vineyard, the ones who raised goats and made the cheese. The woman looked dazed, her face creased from crying. The man kept his head down, until they neared the truck. Then he looked up and, recognizing Vivien, stopped at her window.
She rolled it down, reaching her arms out toward him.
“She’s been asking for you,” he said, grasping her hands.
His wife’s eyes were wild. “Pamela’s dead,” she said, and there was awe in her voice. “Dead,” she repeated.
Sebastian got out of the truck and came around to the passenger side.
“Sebastian,” the man said. “I know they’ll be grateful you found Miss Lowe and brought her here safely.”
He let go of Vivien’s hands to reach into his coat pocket.
“I’m sure they intend to compensate you, but they’re not themselves. You understand.” He took out a fat roll of bills and began counting them.
But Sebastian stopped him. “I will not take money for helping,” he said.
“I insist,” the man said.
“It is my honor to do this for them,” Sebastian said. “For Pamela.”
But the man kept thrusting the bills at him.
“He said he doesn’t want to be paid for this,” Vivien said sharply.
At the sound of Vivien’s words, the man shoved the money back in his pocket, mumbling an apology.
Sebastian put his arm around Vivien protectively. She turned her face away from what the woman was saying and into his scratchy wool coat. She could hear his heart beating beneath it, and smell his sweat.
“Thank you,” Sebastian said. “I take her inside now.”
He steered her away from the couple, his grip on Vivien strong and steady.
“I’m sorry for that,” she said.
“Stupid people,” he muttered.
The kitchen door loomed in front of them. Vivien had to pull herself together before she saw Lotte.
“Can we sit a minute?” she asked.
Without answering, he led her to the picnic table where just a short time ago she had sat eating chicken and beans, drinking wine with Pamela on her lap. He guided her down to the bench, and he sat close beside her.
Vivien breathed in the morning air.
“You can do this,” Sebastian said.
He took her face in both of his rough hands. It had been so long since she’d been touched by a man in this way that Vivien felt her knees actually tremble. Then Sebastian pulled her face toward his, and kissed her on the lips. His lips were chapped, rough like his hands. The kiss was not passionate or long. Before she could think what to do, it was over and he was helping her to her feet.
“Lotte needs you,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Vivien told him.
She took another deep breath, then walked ahead of him into her friend’s kitchen.
The silence surprised her. Someone stood at the stove making coffee and scrambling eggs. People sat, stunned, at the kitchen table. Even the dogs, two German shepherds, lay quietly in the corner, staring out at everyone.
“Where is she?” Vivien asked. “Where’s Lotte?”
The woman at the stove said, “With Pamela. In the parlor.”
Vivien thanked her and moved across the kitchen, through the narrow hallway lined with muddy boots and dusty hats and jackets. Pamela’s were there with the others, as if she would come to claim them at any moment. Vivien paused, and pressed the girl’s jacket to her nose, inhaling. The jacket smelled of the outdoors, and faintly of Pamela.
The night she was born, Vivien had sat in that kitchen, making tea for Robert and warming milk for Bo, who was still a toddler. She had run upstairs when she heard Lotte’s screams, and arrived by her side in time to see the baby’s head crowning. Lotte had grabbed her hand and squeezed hard as the midwife ordered her to keep pushing. Vivien watched Pamela arrive in one fluid motion, all of her sliding from her mother and into the midwife’s waiting hands.
“A girl!” Vivien had shouted.
“Really?” Lotte said, lifting her head to see for herself. “Oh, Vivvie, the fun we’ll have with her.”
Vivien hadn’t been there for either of the boys’ births. But she had watched Pamela come into the world. She had sat by her friend’s side, counting her perfect toes and fingers. Look how long they are, Lotte had said. We’ll teach her piano, Viv. They had rubbed the soft down on her bald head, deciding she would be blond and stay blond, unlike Lotte whose fair hair had darkened over the years.
She’s a keeper, Vivien had said.
And now she was dead. Vivien stood in the doorway of the parlor and took in the scene before her. Lotte kneeling by her dead daughter, holding her hand. Pamela lay, dressed in the one dress she owned, a green velvet one Lotte had bought her in San Francisco last year. She has to wear dresses too, Lotte had explained when she showed Vivien the ruffly dress with its smocked bodice and lace-trimmed sleeves and neck. Her hair was too flat and her face was bloated. She hardly looked like Pamela at all.
Perhaps hearing Vivien there, Lotte glanced up. At the sight of her friend, she jumped to her feet and began to keen, wailing and rocking and screaming Pamela’s name.
This was grief, as raw as it could be. Vivien recognized it. She knew what to do.
Vivien stepped forward, and opened her arms.
This was how to help a family who just lost their child. Wash the clothes. Make soup. Don’t ask them what they need. Bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant and cry and tell their story over and over. Vivien did these things during the days that followed Pamela’s death. When friends came in to pay their respects, she took their coats and hung them up. She led them into the parlor, and when Lotte looked up into their faces, confused and ravaged by grief, Vivien softly said their names for her. Adelaide and Thomas are here. Pamela’s friend Catherine. The Martinellis. The O’Briens. Dutifully, she recorded the flowers that arrived: white lilacs, Easter lilies, white roses. She offered the guests tea and shortbread that she baked fresh each morning. She swept the floors and opened the curtains to let light inside.
Every morning, Vivien watched Robert go out into the vineyards. He needed the comfort of his work, and she didn’t question that. In her years as an obituary writer, she had seen men argue cases in court or put new roofs on houses hours after they’d lost a loved one. From the kitchen window, Vivien saw Robert methodically mowing down the crimson clover. Bo and Johnny helped their father, walking behind him and collecting what he cut down. In the late afternoon, when the work was done, they washed their hands and drank big glasses of buttermilk. Then they went outside and played mumblety-peg or marbles in the dirt until it turned too dark for them to see. Back inside, Bo avoided his mother and the parlor where she sat with his dead sister. Instead, he sat at the big wooden table in the kitchen and drew pictures of horses that he signed and handed to Vivien. Johnny, though, would go in the parlor and stand by his mother, staring down at Pamela in disbelief. His father had to lead him out of there, yanking on him as if he were uprooting vines from the earth.
But Lotte wouldn’t leave Pamela’s side. She held her dead daughter’s hand and spoke to her as if the girl could hear. She told her she was sorry. I should have called the doctor sooner, she said. She told her who had come by the house and how warm it had become. Sometimes she called the girl’s name, her voice rising in panic. Pamela! Pamela! This broke Vivien’s heart, a mother’s voice calling out to her dead child. Lotte would never again see those bright blue eyes or hear Pamela’s slightly husky voice saying Mama. When she needed to, Vivien wrapped her arms around her friend. She washed her face with one of the cloths Lotte knit by the dozens. She combed Lotte’s hair and sprinkled lavender water on her to hide the sour smell of grief that rose from her. At night, she tucked a pillow beneath Lotte’s head and covered her with a soft blanket.
The night before the funeral, the house grew quiet in its grief. The sobs that had filled it on and off for three days were temporarily silenced. Vivien stood in the semidark kitchen, setting a freshly baked pound cake on a plate. She whisked lemon juice and powdered sugar together until they were smooth. With a knitting needle she poked holes in the cake, then poured the sticky glaze on it. Tomorrow, the house would be full of mourners. Vivien needed to feed them. Oh, she knew they would come with baked casseroles, and pots of beans and soup. But she wanted to make the things she believed would bring comfort to Lotte and her family. This bitter cake. The chicken soup warming on the stove. The bread rising for the second time in the large enamel bowl. She would get up early and bake that bread so that it would be warm for them after they buried Pamela.
Vivien looked around the kitchen. It smelled of yeast and lemons. Everything was clean and polished. She wiped her hands on the apron of Lotte’s that she’d been wearing all day, a white one with a print of large red apples. The apron seemed almost happy, and therefore out of place in this house. She untied it and slipped it off, hanging it on its hook by the sink.
She needed air, she decided. She reached for one of Lotte’s hand-knit sweaters, an oatmeal-colored one with a straight neck. The sleeves were too long, and she pushed them up to her elbows before heading outside into the night.
So many stars, Vivien thought as soon as she stepped outside. Those stars and the chilly air stopped her immediately. She pulled the sleeves back down, and wrapped her arms around herself.
“It doesn’t seem right,” a voice said.
Vivien recognized it. Sebastian. In the busyness and sorrow of these past few days, she had completely forgotten about him.
“That is what you are thinking, no?” he said.
He was sitting at one of the long picnic tables, smoking a cigarette. Vivien walked over to him and sat beside him.
“Yes,” she said. “The stars shouldn’t be so bright. Nothing should look this beautiful.”
He held out his cigarette to her, and she shook her head.
“Everything should mourn the little girl,” he said.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Sebastian smoking and Vivien gazing upward. She saw Orion’s Belt and the Little Dipper, and the sight of those constellations made her cry. Just a few months ago, she and Pamela had lain on their backs in the field and Vivien had pointed out these very stars. The hunter. The large bear. The Little Dipper. The Milky Way.
“Let’s take a walk, hmm?” Sebastian said.
Vivien followed him across the yard, into the vineyards.
“The crimson clover, it a cover crop,” he explained, as if it mattered. “It add . . .” He paused, searching. “Nu-tri-ent?”
Vivien nodded.
“To the soil, you see? Robert, he mowed it down so it will self-seed and come back again in September. For the harvest.”
When they stopped walking. Vivien dared to glance upward again, this time seeing the moon, with thin clouds passing across it.
“It’s waning,” Vivien said.
Sebastian looked up too.
“The reverse of a waxing moon is called a waning moon,” she continued. “When the moon is decreasing in brightness.”
“I think this moon is appropriate then,” Sebastian said softly.
He was looking at her, not the moon. Vivien met his gaze. She let him take a step closer to her. And then another.
“Vivien,” he said. But nothing more.
She did not consider stopping him. To do this, Vivien thought as his lips kissed her lips, was to be alive. To do this, she thought as his lips moved down her throat and to her collarbone, was to fight back at death. It had been so long since a man had touched her that Vivien felt off-balance when desire spread through her. Sebastian steadied her, holding her in his arms, which were strong from working in these fields.
Sebastian did not taste like David, He did not feel like him. His skin was rough, his mouth full of the taste of tobacco and red wine. Later, Vivien would think that she lowered to the ground first. She dropped to the damp dirt and lifted Lotte’s sweater over her head. She unbuttoned her dress, and watched as Sebastian cupped her breast, slipping it from her corset. The waning moon illuminated their naked skin as clothes dropped off each of them.
When he entered her, it was as if something she had lost was returned to her. She half sat up, surprised by that feeling.
“I remember,” she said out loud.
Sebastian paused in his movements. He lifted her so that she was sitting facing him. The shift in position sent a thrill through Vivien, and she heard herself moan.
He kissed her hard on the lips.
“Are you mine?” he whispered. But then he chuckled and shook his head. “This is not what I mean,” he said.
She told him to stop talking.
For a while that night before the funeral, Vivien remembered how it was to be alive. But when morning came and she saw Lotte’s face, the grief etched there perhaps forever, Vivien felt only shame at what she had done.
Lotte had managed to dress in an old black dress that was too tight for her more ample body.
“Vivvie,” she said at the sight of her friend putting two loaves of bread into the oven to bake. “You need to write it.”
Vivien felt flushed from the heat of the oven, and from her own guilty conscience.
“Write it?” she said.
People were approaching the house. Robert and the boys would carry the small wooden coffin up the hill to the family cemetery. Already, Robert was out there, digging Pamela’s grave.
“Pamela’s obituary,” Lotte said, her voice hoarse from crying.
“Oh, Lotte,” Vivien said. “I can’t. I only do that for people I don’t know. People I don’t love.”
The door opened and Sebastian walked in to the kitchen. Vivien could feel his eyes on her, but she refused to meet his gaze.
“But you have to,” Lotte said. “Tell the world about my Pamela, Viv. Tell them how she is, what she’s like, so no one forgets.”
“No one will forget,” Vivien said.
How she wished this man would go away. But he stood there, waiting. Her cheeks burned.
“You have to,” Lotte said again.
Vivien knew that grief made people unreasonable. Selfish. It was unrelenting and illogical.
She put her arm around her friend.
“Of course,” she said. “I will write the obituary.”