"I'm free," Miranda said.
They followed the steep path to a leafy spot closely sheltered by tall skinny birch trees. Miranda put her hand on the white trunk of one of them. "The most beautiful tree." She felt a surge of emotion, this same surge she felt so often now. Maybe it was menopause.
"I wonder if I'm starting menopause. Everything makes me want to . . ."
"What?" Leanne asked.
Miranda threw herself to the ground and rolled in the leaves, breathing in the damp of spring, the dust of last autumn. She lay on her back staring up at the blue sky just beyond the lacy canopy.
"Everything makes me want to weep with happiness," she said.
Would that it were menopause, she thought. She could sweat it out and emerge in a few years a calmer person with somewhat brittle bones. But this? This calm, deep satisfaction? This was madness. This sharp, painful sense of joy, of gratitude that felt like an inhalation of fresh, cool air. This soft exhalation that felt like peace.
Leanne swept a leaf from Miranda's face.
Peace? Miranda bit her lip. If peace burns, this is peace, she thought. If peace makes you tremble, this is definitely peace. If peace is feeling calm one minute, tortured the next, if peace is war, then, then, and only then is this peace.
She stared up at the canopy of leaves, the sun drifting down in dappled warmth. Why couldn't she just have a friend like everyone else? Maybe Annie was right--she was just a drama queen, couldn't live without it.
"Randa?"
She turned to Leanne and opened an eye. Oh, what a mess. "Yeah?"
Leanne twisted a stick in her hands as if she were about to start a fire. "Oh, nothing," she said.
Miranda rolled onto her back again. Leanne had called her Randa.
Suddenly a large little face hung over Miranda, its cheeks streaked with dirt.
"Now you're belly up," the little face explained.
When Miranda got back to the cottage late that afternoon, she found her mother writhing in pain on the couch.
"I can't turn my neck," Betty whispered. "My head is exploding. It keeps exploding."
The EMTs were volunteers. She recognized one--a blond girl she sometimes saw running on the beach. She followed the ambulance in the Mercedes, though later she had no memory of the drive.
"It's meningitis," Miranda told Annie over the phone.
"What?"
"No, it's okay, it's not the kind that kills you."
"Just the kind that makes you wish you were dead," Betty whispered from her hospital bed. "Please stop talking, darling."
But she did not want to be dead at all. She wanted to go back in time, not very far, not to when she was young, not to when she was still happily married to Joseph, just back to that afternoon before she went for a walk on the beach, to that moment when she stood looking out the kitchen window and saw the goldfinch fluttering through the maple leaves. She had been so unfair. She wanted to go back in time, to look out her kitchen window, to see the movement of the little bird, the flash of yellow and flash of black, as it rustled among the leaves, and she wanted to apologize. To the bird. It had been a pretty bird on a pretty day. She should never have doubted either one.
"I will never take another day for granted," she told Annie the next day when the antibiotics had begun to take effect and the pain had lessened, "and neither should you."
"Have you suddenly seen God?" Annie asked.
"Goodness, no. Why, have you?"
When Annie called Josie to tell him that Betty was sick, she had to fight off an irrational sense of I-told-you-so justification. How awful to celebrate your mother's pain because it shamed someone, even if that person deserved to be shamed. Yet when she said to Josie, "Mom is in the hospital with meningitis," she felt a distinct shiver of satisfaction.
19
Betty came home after six days, but she was very weak. After a few days in the cottage, she was even weaker, and Annie and Miranda took her to the doctor's office, each holding an arm.
"What a fuss," Betty said. "I just need rest."
But the doctor said she had caught a staph infection when she was in the hospital, and he put her on heavy doses of various antibiotics.
She insisted on getting out of bed each morning, however, and her daughters would settle her, in her sunglasses, on the living room couch when it was chilly and on the sunporch chaise, in her sunglasses, when it was warm. The sunglasses helped with the headaches.
"You look very glamorous," said Cousin Lou on one visit.
"It's my own private sanitorium." Her legs were covered with a blanket, a cup of broth in her hands.
Lou caught sight of the broom in the corner, grabbed it, and began to sweep absentmindedly.
"How is Mr. Shpuntov?" Betty asked.
"He hit his caregiver yesterday."
"Uh-oh."