“What kind of mother doesn’t realize her daughter is dying?” Lotte said, and now her eyes were filling with fear and confusion. Her hands worried that hem, and her body began to tremble.
“What kind of mother doesn’t know?” she said, her voice growing louder.
“No one knows these things,” Vivien said.
Bo’s head popped around the corner. He saw where his mother was going and he quickly disappeared again.
“A mother should know,” Lotte insisted. She was on her feet now, pacing.
She rubbed her arms vigorously. “I could jump out of my skin,” she said. “I want out. I want out of here.”
Vivien got up and tried to stop Lotte, but her friend pulled away from her.
“Take me with you,” Lotte said, turning abruptly to face Vivien. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shining.
“Where, darling?” Vivien asked.
“To Denver,” Lotte said, impatient.
“You can’t leave your children,” Vivien said. “Not now.”
Without warning, Lotte broke into a run. She ran out of the living room, past Bo and a neighbor boy at the kitchen table, and out the door. Vivien followed, trying to keep pace with her. Through the yard, across the vineyard, and beyond to the hill where the small family cemetery sat. There, on Pamela’s grave with the freshly dug earth, Lotte flung herself down. Like an animal, she clawed at the dirt, crying and calling Pamela’s name.
Out of breath, Vivien bent and tugged her friend upward. She wrapped Lotte in her arms, and led her out of the cemetery. Lotte resisted, but Vivien held firm. Dirt streaked Lotte’s worn face, and a small clump tangled in her hair. She smelled of sweat and earth. She smelled of heartbreak.
As they made their slow way back to the house, Lotte trying to break free every few feet, Vivien caught sight of Sebastian working in the field. Yesterday he had cornered her. You will come back to me? he’d asked. Maybe, Vivien had said.
“She was just a little girl,” Lotte told Vivien.
Hours had passed. Vivien had managed to finally bathe her friend, to comb the tangles from her hair and scrub the dirt off her hands and face. The sky was violet as dusk settled over the vineyard. The women sat at one of the long wooden tables outside, a salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers on a platter in front of them. Vivien opened a bottle of wine, and filled two glasses for them. Then she asked Lotte again: Tell me about Pamela.
“She was such a good rider for her age,” Lotte said, her gaze focused on some distant point beyond Vivien. “Bareback. Western.”
She continued, shaking her head. “I worried she’d have a fall, that she’d get hurt. How foolish of me. Instead some germ got her. Something I couldn’t even see.”
“I liked watching her ride that horse,” Vivien said. “The brown one with the white markings on his face.”
“Happy,” Lotte said. “She named him Happy.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their wine. Crickets chirped. Out in the fields, fireflies blinked on and off.
“She loved Robert Louis Stevenson,” Lotte said. “You were reading her Treasure Island just a few weeks ago.”
“Pamela did love books,” Vivien said.
“Adventure stories. She would get mad if the boys could do something that she couldn’t. Like climb that apple tree over there.”
Lotte kept talking, in fits and starts. Remembering how as a toddler Pamela would chase her brothers, put her hands on her hips, and order them to stop being boys. How if they were too rough with her and made her cry, Lotte would make them tell her they were sorry and Pamela would shout: Sorry isn’t good enough. Vivien listened, glad that Lotte was finally talking and eating a little. She would write the obituary later that night, and then she would try again to leave for Denver.
The obituary was already taking shape, the words to capture the little girl who wanted to have adventures, who dreamed of fighting pirates and racing horses.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Vivien thought. She remembered reading Pamela his Child’s Garden of Verses last summer. “The Land of Counterpane.” When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day.
Pamela had said, “Auntie Viv, wouldn’t it be terrible to be so sick that you had to stay in bed all day every day?”
And Vivien had pointed out the last line of the poem, how the land of counterpane is called pleasant in it.
“Well, I don’t think it would be pleasant at all,” Pamela had said. “Imagine not being able to run outside?”
“I think Stevenson was a sick child himself,” Vivien explained. “But he grew up to be quite an adventurer.”
“What did he do?” Pamela demanded, unconvinced.
“He chartered a yacht named Casco and set sail from San Francisco.”
Vivien remembered when Stevenson set sail that summer day in 1888. The newspaper had covered his departure, and Vivien could still see the photograph of Stevenson with his wild long hair and bohemian clothes, standing at the prow of Casco.