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.”