“Magnificent, wasn’t it?”
Claire could hear the voices of Dot’s guests raised in excitement. She strained, trying to hear one above them all. But they remained a blur.
“I should get back,” Claire said.
“I hope she doesn’t die today,” Dot said. “It’s not a day to die. Not at all.”
“Dot? I almost forgot to ask. Did anyone pick taupe?” Claire was already laughing at how ridiculous a question she’d asked.
“Yes!” Dot said.
“What? Taupe? Don’t tell me Trudy won?”
“Not Trudy, no. The wife with the appendix. Peggy. She actually guessed taupe. Not beige or camel or ecru. Taupe.”
“How could she?” Claire managed to say.
“She’s brilliant, that’s all,” Dot said. “Hurry home, you hear?”
Peggy. His wife’s name was Peggy. And she was brilliant.
The baby inside Claire kicked hard. Claire put one hand lightly on her stomach, feeling the little foot banging there, kicking, as if she were trying to get out.
10
The Man in Denver
VIVIEN, 1919
“Tell me about Pamela,” Vivien said to Lotte.
Lotte looked at her with vacant eyes, eyes that made Vivien want to look away. She had seen eyes such as these before, of course. Many of the people who showed up on her doorstep asking her to write an obituary had this very look, as if the life had been extinguished from them. Lotte, like all the others, vacillated between this vacant dead stare and a wild, out-of-control one in which her eyes blazed and jumped around, only landing briefly on people and things as if they were searching for something they could not find.
“You know her,” Lotte said, her voice as flat as her gaze. “You know all about her.”
They sat together on the long sofa where Lotte had spent most of her time since the funeral two days earlier. Vivien had a stack of thick paper on her lap and held a fountain pen. The two women’s knees touched. Vivien couldn’t help but remember the afternoons they had sat close like this as girls, each lost in a book, the slight pressure of Lotte’s knee on hers the only reminder of the world outside the novel. Perhaps that was why Lotte had settled so close to Vivien now, to keep her centered, to remind her that there was a world outside the one of grief that she now inhabited.
Vivien laid her hand on Lotte’s leg. “Of course I do,” she said. “But I find that when I write a . . . a . . .”
She stopped. For some reason, she couldn’t say the word obituary. It was as if by saying it out loud, Pamela would be more dead somehow.
Lotte turned that awful gaze on Vivien.
“An obituary,” Lotte said without emotion. “Pamela’s obituary. Because she’s dead she needs an obituary.”
Vivien found she held her breath as Lotte spoke, afraid at any moment the other grieving mother would appear, the one that thrashed and scratched at herself, and wailed. Yesterday, Lotte had screamed, I want to get out of my skin! I want it off! She was wearing her grief, Vivien realized. If she could take off her skin, she might be able to inhabit the right one.
“The way I proceed,” Vivien began, hating the formality in her voice but unable to speak otherwise, “is to ask you to tell me about . . .”
Again she faltered.
She took a breath. “About Pamela,” she said, “and while you talk I write down the things that strike me.”
“Strike you how?” Lotte said.
Oh, Lotte, Vivien thought as she looked into her friend’s flat eyes, are you in there somewhere?
“I can’t explain it really,” Vivien said. “Something just clicks and I know what to write.”
Lotte nodded absently. Her fingers kept working the hem of her dress. It was the dress she’d worn to the funeral, and she refused to take it off. I’ll wear it forever, she’d yelled at Robert when he tried to unbutton it and replace it with a clean blue one. I’ll wear it so I’ll never forget the day they put my baby in the ground.
“I should have taken her to the doctor sooner,” Lotte said. She said this a dozen times a day, maybe more.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Vivien said. It was what she always said in response.
Lotte nodded again.
“Did you think David would die that day?” she said softly.
“I don’t think he died, Lotte,” Vivien said.
“You think he’s in Denver,” Lotte said.
“Maybe.”
“Because you believe that if had died, you would know somehow. You would feel it.”
“Yes,” Vivien admitted.
“You see, that’s why I can’t believe Pamela died. I didn’t feel like she was sick enough to die. I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary.”
Lotte’s fingers worried her hem, twisting it and turning it over and over in her hands.
“Do the people who come to you know ahead of time? Do they have some kind of sign, some intuition that I lack?” she asked.
“No, no,” Vivien said.