As her daughter's infancy gave way to walking and talking, and the Fifties became the Sixties, she worried still that some illness or accident would interrupt the dream, and she kept a mother's watch on sharp corners, pennies on the floor, and the inviting holes of electric sockets. When she was three, Erica developed what Margaret feared were petechiae along the concave notch of her collarbone, a necklace of bloodpricks, and in her panic Margaret ran through all the thromboembolic dangers, only to be laughed at when her doctor husband diagnosed mild impetigo. When she was six, Erica jumped off a swing at school and lost her first baby teeth. At age seven, Erica fell off her bicycle and needed two stitches to close the wound in her chin. Paul patched her until she grew too old for his ministrations. But those few scares were the only bad things that had ever happened. Only the accretion of days and weeks and years eased Margaret's anxiety and threaded the beads of worry onto a stronger chain, and yet, no amount of love was store enough.
Awake that winter's morning, she decided that the child who had come as if summoned was a blank slate upon which, at this late hour of life, she might begin again. She longed to check on the sleeping girl but thought better of it. The house itself seemed to breathe the steady rhythms of slumber, coming to life once more at the hour of nine, which ordinarily settled into listlessness, lulled by the neighborhood emptying of children off to school and parents off to work.
She was used to moving numbly through the desolation of her life. Like the survivors of momentous devastation, she had patched her sorrow and moved on to some semblance of normalcy. And now the girl had come, and Margaret sensed the cracks in her will to abide nothing but the memory of her daughter. Everything, bad as it was, had been fine, bearable. But this morning, Norah had shattered the world.
4
On his way to open the Rosa Rossa Flower Shop, her neighbor Mr. Delarosa stopped by and banged on the front door, interrupting her reverie. After struggling down the stairs, Margaret stopped at the mirror by the front door to fuss with her hair and cluck at the puffiness around her eyes. Pasquale Delarosa was the last of the old-timers in the neighborhood who remembered her husband and daughter, and once Margaret was widowed, he had volunteered to handle the outside chores—shoveling the walk, pruning the boxwood, raking the leaves—in an act of charity and kindness that she repaid with cherry pies in the summer and rum-soaked fruitcake each Christmas. But he rarely visited otherwise, and his demeanor on the front porch suggested some embarrassment and trepidation for having gotten her out of bed.
“Scusi, Mrs. Quinn, so sorry to disturb you early in the morning, but I just wanted to check on you, see that everything is okay.”
Gathering a fold of cloth to her neck, she motioned for him to come inside.
“No, no, I've got to open the shop. Two funerals this week. But there was a noise last night, late, and I thought I'll just go check on Mrs. Quinn, see she's okay.”
The air chilled her bare ankles, and she gestured again to welcome him out of the cold.
“Round three this morning. My wife's dog was pazza, just bizarre, barking and chasing her tail, and you know she's old now and never gets up off of the bed, but something boing in her head set her off, and I say ‘Fate silenzio!’ and threw a shoe, but yip-yap-yap, and my wife looks out the window, says there's someone in Mrs. Quinn's yard, like a monster, but I don't see nothing. But I get up this morning, she says go check on your way to work Mrs. Quinn, and I came over, look around, nothing. Not even a footprint in the snow. Only your car, eh? Frost everywhere, but a clear circle on the windshield, like someone threw a pot of boiling water, but probably nothing, eh? You're okay?”
“I didn't hear a thing all night, Mr. Delarosa, and I slept like a baby.” She averted her gaze from his.
“You doing all right, then? I haven't seen you out on your walks so much.”
“It's been so cold.” Rubbing her arms, she pretended to shiver, and he took the hint, waving and saluting as he walked toward the street. Alone again, she smiled to herself and danced to the kitchen to ready a breakfast, dredging up from memory the distant recipe for pancakes. Halfway through stirring the batter, she realized there was no maple syrup in the house. Jam, perhaps, or powdered sugar. She wondered if the girl would mind.