*
It was nearing midnight when I put the letters aside, rose to my feet, and left the study, too upset to speak. There had been no phone call from the Harrises, and we had yet to find the unsent letter we were searching for, but that wasn’t what bothered me. Bill had warned me of the dangers of digging into the past and I had expected to learn some disturbing truths about Dimity—but I had not expected to learn them about my mother.
Bill caught up with me in the solarium. I stood with my hands on the back of a wrought-iron chair, and Bill hovered behind me, an arm’s length away. It was pitch-dark outside and the rain was still falling steadily.
“I know it’s not what we expected, Lori, but—”
“It doesn’t make sense.” My hands tightened on the wrought iron. “My mother wasn’t like that.”
For four months after the joyful announcement of my birth, the letters from my mother had continued without interruption. Then they stopped cold. She sent one short note informing Dimity of my father’s death, and that was it. For three years, not a Christmas card, not a birthday greeting, not so much as a postcard came from my mother. When I realized what was happening, I went back to that brief note in disbelief—I could almost hear the portcullis crashing down, could almost see my mother retreating behind walls of sorrow and self-absorption.
Dimity, on the other hand, had continued to write. And write. And write. For months on end, without response, Dimity sent off at least a letter a week—and I don’t mean short, slapdash notes, but real letters: long, lively missives written—it seemed to me—solely for the purpose of letting my mother know that she was not alone.
And how did my mother respond to this outpouring of affection? With silence.
“She wasn’t like that,” I insisted. “She didn’t crawl in a hole when things went wrong. She was strong; she faced things.”
“Dimity said that everyone goes through it in their own way. Maybe your mother had to go through it alone.”
“But that’s why it doesn’t make sense. She didn’t have to go through it alone. She didn’t believe in going through things alone. She…” Aching for her, I looked out into the darkness, searching for the words that would explain it all to Bill. “She was a schoolteacher, the kind whose door was always open. Her students used to come back to visit her all the time, no matter how old they got. You should have seen her funeral—the church wasn’t big enough to hold everyone, and they all stood up and talked about her, told how they wouldn’t be where they were if it hadn’t been for her.” A faint scent of lilacs took me back to that day. “Do you know the one thing they all remembered? That they could bring their problems to her, and she would listen to them, really listen, with her heart wide open. If anyone knew how important it was to reach out, it was my mother. So you tell me why, for three of the worst years in her life, she didn’t—” I choked on the lump in my throat, swallowed hard, and went on. “And what about Dimity—left out in the cold for all those years?”
“I think Dimity must have understood,” said Bill.
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “I keep thinking of my mom all alone with a crying baby, and the bill collectors banging on the door. There wasn’t any Starling House for her, but she could have turned to Dimity.” I rubbed my forehead. “God, I never knew.”
“Lori,” said Bill, “it’s late, and a lot has happened to you today. Why don’t you go to bed? We can go on with the correspondence tomorrow, when we’re fresh.”
“I don’t know if I want to go on with it.”
“Then I’ll go on with it for you,” Bill said soothingly. “For now, you just try to get some rest, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”
I was too tired to protest, but I lay awake late into the night nonetheless, curled forlornly under Meg’s blanket, listening to the wind howl mournfully across the rain-slicked slates. I was haunted by my mother’s silence, afraid to imagine the kind of pain that would bring it on. The letters had thrown me into a world of hurt I was not prepared to face.
16