“Come on,” Nina said, taking her by the elbow, helping her to her feet. They walked out of the greenhouse and into the snowy yard.
“Let’s go inside,” Nina said.
Mom ignored her and walked into the calf-deep snow, her hair and nightgown billowing out behind her in the slight breeze. At last she sat on the black bench in her garden.
Of course.
Nina followed her mother. Unbuttoning her own coat, she took it off and draped it over Mom’s thin shoulders.
Shivering, Nina drew back and sat down. She thought she knew what her mother loved about this garden: it was contained and orderly. In the sprawling acreage of the orchard, this one square felt safe. The only color in the garden, besides summertime and autumn leaves, belonged to a single copper column, simple in design and accentuated with scripted decorations, that supported a white marble bowl that, come spring, would be filled with white, trailing flowers.
“I do not want him buried,” her mother said. “Not in ground that freezes. We’ll scatter his ashes.”
Nina heard the familiar steel in her mother’s voice again, and she almost missed the craziness of a minute ago. At least the woman in the greenhouse felt things. This woman, her mother, was back in control. Nina longed to lean against her, to whisper, I’m going to miss him, Mommy, as she might have done as a little girl, but some habits were so ingrained by childhood that there was no way to break them, even decades later. “Okay, Mom,” she said finally.
A minute later, she stood up. “I’m going to go in. Meredith will need some help. Don’t stay out here too long.”
“Why not?” her mother said, staring at the copper column.
“You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“You think I could die from the cold? I am not a lucky woman.”
Nina put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, felt her flinch at the contact. As ridiculous as it was, that little flinch hurt Nina’s feelings. Even now, with Dad’s death between them, Mom wanted only to be alone.
Nina went back into the house and found Meredith still in the kitchen making calls. At her entrance, Meredith hung up and turned.
In the look that passed between them was the realization that this was who they were now. The three of them—she and Mom and Meredith. From now on they’d be a triangle, distantly connected, instead of the circle he’d created. The thought of that made her want to run for the airport. “Give me a list of numbers. I’ll help with the calls.”
More than four hundred people filled the small church to say good-bye to Evan Whitson; several dozen of them had come back to Belye Nochi to show their respects and raise a glass. Judging by the dishes Meredith had washed, a lot of glasses had been raised. As expected, Nina had been a marvelous host, drinking easily and letting people talk about Dad; Mom had moved through the crowd with her head held high, rarely stopping for longer than a moment; and Meredith had done all the heavy lifting. She’d organized and set out all of the food people had brought; she’d made sure there were plenty of napkins, plates, utensils, and glasses on hand, as well as ice; and she’d washed dishes almost continuously. There was no doubt that she was doing what she always did when stressed: hiding out behind endless organizing and chores. But honestly, she wasn’t ready to mingle with friends and neighbors yet, to listen to memories about her father. Her grief was too new, too fragile to be handed back and forth in drunken hands.
She was elbow-deep in soapy water when, at about midnight, Jeff came into the kitchen to find her. He took her in his arms and hugged her. It was like coming home after along journey and the tears she’d held back during the last few days, and the wrenching memorial service today, came pouring out. He held her, stroking her hair as if she were a child and saying the great lie, It will be okay, over and over again. When there was nothing left inside, she drew back, feeling shaky, and tried to smile. “I guess I’ve been holding that in.”
“That’s what you do.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Should I fall apart?”
“Maybe.”
Meredith shook her head. It only made her feel more separate when he said things like that. He seemed to think she was a vase that could break and be glued back together, but she knew that if the worst happened—if she shattered like glass—some pieces could be lost forever.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “You helped me through my parents’ deaths. Let me help you.”
“I’m fine. Really. I’ll fall apart later.”
“Meredith—”
“Don’t.” She hadn’t meant to say it so sharply, and she could tell she’d hurt his feelings, but she was barely hanging on here. She had no energy to worry about anyone else. “I mean, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of things here. The girls are tired. Why don’t you take them home?”
“Fine,” he said, but there was a guarded look in his eyes she didn’t recognize.
After everyone had gone, Meredith stood in the clean, orderly kitchen, alone, and wished almost immediately that she’d made a different choice. How hard would it have been to say, Sure, Jeff, take me home and hold me . . .
She threw the dishrag on the counter and left the hiding place of her mother’s kitchen.
In the living room, she found Nina alone, standing in front of a large easeled picture of Dad. In a pair of crumpled khaki pants and a black sweater, with her short black hair a mess, she looked more like a teenager ready for her first safari than a world-famous photographer.
But Meredith saw the grief in her sister’s bottle-green eyes. It was like too much water in a glass, spilling over, and she knew Nina was like her: neither of them knew how to express it or even really feel it as fully as they should, and she hurt for both of them, and for the woman who lay upstairs in her empty bed, feeling the same loss. She wished that they could come together, dissipate some of this pain by pooling it. But that wasn’t who they were. She put down her wineglass and went to Nina, the little sister who’d once begged her to remember Mom’s fairy tales and tell them in the dark when she couldn’t sleep. “We have each other,” Meredith said.
“Yeah,” Nina agreed, although their eyes betrayed them both. They knew it wasn’t enough.
Later that night, when Meredith was at home, tucked into bed beside her husband, it occurred to her that she’d made a terrible mistake, and regret haunted her, kept her awake. She’d been wrong to attend her father’s wake as a caterer instead of as a daughter. She’d been so afraid of her feelings that she’d boxed them up and shoved them away, but it had made her miss it. Unlike Nina, Meredith hadn’t heard the stories his friends had had to tell.
Sometime around three in the morning, she got out of bed and went to the porch, where she sat wrapped in a blanket, staring at little beyond the vapor of her own breath. But it wasn’t cold enough to numb her grief.
For the next three days, Nina tried to be a real part of this family, but her every attempt was a failure. Without Dad, they were like random pieces of a board game, without a common goal or a rule book. Mom stayed in bed, staring straight ahead, knitting. She refused to come down for meals and only Meredith could coax her into showering
Nina had always felt vaguely useless next to her sister’s über-competence, but it had never been as apparent as it was now. Meredith was like Ms. Pac-Man, moving steadily forward, ticking chores off her list. Somehow, impossibly, she’d gone back to work the very day after the funeral, so she was running the orchard and warehouses, taking care of her family, and still she managed to come to Belye Nochi at least three times a day to micromanage Nina’s chores.
Nothing Nina did was right; Meredith did everything again. Vacuum, dishes, laundry. All of it. Nina would have said something, but honestly, she didn’t give a shit, and Meredith moved like a frightened bird, all wing-flapping and chirping. She looked scared, too, like a woman on a cliff about to jump or fall.
But all of that, Nina could handle.
It was the grief that was killing her.
She thought, He’s gone, at the oddest times, and it hurt so badly she caught her breath or stumbled or dropped a glass. (Meredith had loved that.)
She needed to get the hell out of here. That was all there was to it. She wasn’t doing anyone any good, least of all herself.
Once she’d had that thought, there was no getting rid of it. All day today, she tried to talk herself out of it, told herself she couldn’t run away, certainly not so close to Christmas, but at three o’clock, she went upstairs to her room, closed the door behind her, and called Sylvie in New York.
“Hey, Sylvie,” she said when her editor answered.
“Hi, Nina. I’ve been thinking about you. How’s your dad?”
“Gone.” She tried not to react to that word, but it took effort. She went to the window of her girlhood room and stared out at the falling snow. It was midafternoon, and already it was darkening.
“Oh, Nina. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I know.” Everyone was sorry. What else was there to say? “I need to get back to work.”
There was a pause. “So soon?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure? You can never get this time back.”
“Believe me, Sylvie, the last thing I want is this time back.”
“All right. Let me do some checking. I know I need someone in Sierra Leone.”
“A war zone sounds perfect,” Nina said.
“You have serious issues, you know that, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
They talked for a few more minutes and Nina hung up. Feeling better—and worse—she went downstairs and found Meredith in the kitchen, doing the dishes. Of course.
Nina reached for a towel. “I was going to do that, you know.”
“These are lunch and dinner dishes from yesterday, Nina. When exactly were you going to wash them?”
“Whoa, slow down. It’s dishes, not—”
“People dying of hunger. I know. I get it. You do things that matter. Me, I just run the family business and take care of our parents and clean up after my important sister.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Meredith turned to her. “Of course not.”
Nina felt impaled by that look, as if all her faults had just been laid bare. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“No. Not really.” Meredith reached for the cleanser and began scrubbing the white porcelain sink.
Nina moved toward her sister. “I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.
Meredith turned to face her again. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a soapy trail behind. “How long are you staying?”
“Not long. The situation in Sierra Leone—”
“Spare me. You’re running away.” Meredith finally almost smiled. “Hell, I’d do the same thing if I could.”
Nina felt as bad about herself as she ever had. She was running—from her ice-cold mother, from this too-empty house, from her brittle, competent sister, and from the memories that lived here. Perhaps those most of all. She cared about what her selfishness would cost her sister, and about the promise to her father she was ignoring, but God help her, she didn’t care enough to stay. “What about his ashes?”