EPILOGUE

While she waited for the memorial service to begin, a little blonde girl, encouraged by her mother, placed a teddy bear beside a wreath of pink roses. If Ginger hadn't turned down the familiar road between the two strip malls, she wouldn't have recognized the dump. The new parking lot was filled with Saturns and minivans and the white gravel path that led past a cement birdbath and a wooden bench to the park's center, to these stones arranged like a child's game of hopscotch and covered now with tokens of bereavement: stuffed bunnies and baby dolls, carnations wrapped in cellophane, candles burning in tall glass holders, Hallmark sympathy cards and homemade construction paper ones sitting upright on the slabs of stone.

Her father and Ruth Patrick shook hands with the reporter from the local television station and made their way around the homemade shrine. He wore his black preacher pants, a white clerical collar, and over these a blue and white seersucker jacket, a gift, Ginger figured, from Ruth Patrick. His letters to Ginger in the hospital had detailed the construction of the Rose Hill Farm retirement complex behind the mall and the Pirates Cove Putt Putt next door to the megachurch, and how the chamber of commerce tore down the barn, hauled away all the garbage, and thinned the trees to create this memorial park. He rarely mentioned Ruth Patrick, but Ginger knew by his change of address that they had moved in together and that he'd given up the cemetery job and was going back to the community college for his teaching certificate.

“Let us bow our heads,” he began, his church voice all the more resonant for lack of use. “Dear Father in Heaven, we pray that this gathering will honor your endless gifts of bountiful love. Amen.” He lifted his eyes and scanned the faces in the crowd with his unnerving composure. “This spring has been bittersweet. While crocuses and daffodils rise and the buds of the maple press out into leaves,” he motioned to the red and yellow tulips swaying in a bed at the park's far corner, “it's as if we've lost a part of ourselves as elemental as our hand or our foot, and this loss shakes us.” He paused a moment. “So let us pray for the safe return of all missing children and for the lost souls who perpetrate these evil acts. Every human soul is a part of God and we must have mercy when we see that one of his holy sparks has been lost in a maze and is almost stifled.” Her father unclasped his hands and looked above the crowd, his voice less serious, invested now with enthusiasm and hope. “Today we gather together to throw off the miserable blanket of despair and celebrate the memory of Sandy Patrick, a girl with a soul as expansive as this blue sky above.”

Her father gave Ruth Patrick a questioning look and she nodded, took a step forward, unfolded an index card, and glanced down, then up again. “Thank you all for coming today,” her voice shaky. “It means so much to me and my son. It means a lot that you're here to honor Sandy and that in your hearts she will live on forever. We miss her still, but knowing that so many people care has helped us both very much. I thank you.” She paused and looked over at Ginger's father, who nodded encouragement. “As we were going through Sandy's things, we found several poems she had written, and my son Andrew would like to read one now.”

The thin boy in the new blue suit and clip-on tie didn't raise his eyes to the crowd, just started to read fast, rushing the words together in a way that implied if he'd wanted to read the poem before, now, in front of the crowd, he felt embarrassed.

The bear said to the butterfly,

“Come back and be my friend.”

The butterfly said, “No I won't,

we've come now to the end.”

The poem went on about a brown bear and a place where butterflies sang and cattails were pink and ducklings yellow. She imagined Sandy's soul, like diaphanous cotton candy charged with static.

*  *  *

Switching off the lamp with the lace shade, Ginger pulled back the comforter, and got into bed. She was relieved the sheets weren't swarming with Little Mermaids. Downstairs, Ruth Patrick and her father sat quietly together on the couch in the basement, waiting for the spot about the memorial service on the eleven o’clock news, and she heard the boy snoring in the room next door. After the service he'd thrown a piece of gravel at a little girl, and when his mother yelled, he'd started crying and continued in the car all the way back to the house.

Ginger opened the jewelry box on the little table beside the bed. A tiny ballerina popped up, bits of lace for her skirt, a dab of pink paint for a bodice, a dab of brown for her bun, moving in circles on the tips of her toes to the tinkling notes of a lullaby. Ginger looked out the window at the houses spinning out in curly cul-de-sacs like the paisleys the orderly at the hospital called Tears of the Buddha. She remembered the shining police lights, the frenzied dogs, saliva stringing off their pink gums, and the tiny emaciated creature lying on the afghan, strands of her hair encased in ice. Eyes staring through the broken bricks and ice-covered ferns. Smeared with feces and covered with spider bites, Sandy's face strange and shrunken like a blue gray cat's, already transported to the nether world, a wood nymph or a forest fairy, found only inside the pages of a children's book.