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.