“She never eats,” Rachel had told me before I met Holly for the first time. “Watch her. She only pretends to, talks all through dinner, then has the housekeeper clear the plates away before anyone notices.” And she’d been exactly right. I’d watched Holly do the same thing at every meal I ate at their house.
“Well, Press certainly came prepared, anyway.” Holly, her hands busy, nodded to the shelf holding two bouquets of flowers—one quite compact and a little dull with yellow carnations and a lot of greenery, the other tall, with lilies, birds of paradise, and thick purple stock. “We both had Delmonico, at The Grange’s florist, out of bed at the crack of dawn. Though they certainly are different in style, aren’t they?” I wasn’t sure what her smug grin implied.
It wasn’t hard to guess which arrangement was from Press.
“Press does tend to go over the top sometimes.” I tried to keep my tone light, but it was difficult to hide my embarrassment.
Holly rested her handwork in her lap. “Oh, the big one is from David and me. Press brought the carnations. Ours were delivered just a few minutes ago.”
I was speechless. The small bouquet was like an insult compared to the other, and hardly suited to Rachel at all. I wondered if there had been some mistake. But Holly had said Press had brought it himself, first thing. I wondered that he’d even been allowed in so early. What did it mean? Perhaps nothing. It was just that everything seemed significant then, as though my life was strangely magnified.
“Are you well, dear? Rachel and I have been terribly worried about you. I can only imagine how devastated you are, but you look so thin. I have a prescription for iron pills from Jack. They might do you some good.”
Was the woman so stupid? My best friend had just given birth to a baby girl, weeks after mine had died, horribly and suddenly. It was too much. Iron pills wouldn’t bring Eva back. Why had I stayed as long as I had at the hospital? I had seen the baby: Seraphina. A seraph. An angel. But the baby didn’t care that I was there, and Rachel wasn’t even awake.
“Maybe you and Press should get away for a while. Sometimes a different setting can help. You won’t be constantly. . . .” Her voice faded and her eyes left my face.
The busy chatter of the hospital staff floated in from the corridor.
“You need not have come, Charlotte. This must be so hard for you. You look tired.”
The unexpected softness in her face, her voice, took me by surprise, and I felt tears threatening in the inner corners of my eyes. Of course I shouldn’t have left the house.
I put on my gloves and fumbled for the wrapped gift I’d brought—an infant’s pillow with an embroidered linen cover—and set it on the deep windowsill with the flowers. “I’ll just leave this here. Please tell her I’ll come by the house when she gets home.”
Holly gave me a pitying smile. “Of course I will. Rachel will be so sorry she was sleeping, poor thing. I told her she needed to get more exercise while she was pregnant, that she’d be exhausted. But you know how she is.”
By that point I was only half-listening. The car in the parking lot seemed so far away, and I wanted to get to it quickly. On another day (or was it in another life?) I might have gone over to The Grange for lunch and shopping, or stopped at the toyshop near the university and picked up a surprise for the children. But it didn’t even occur to me then. I could only think of being back at the house.
Quietly pushing back the heavy wooden chair, I rose. Rachel sighed deeply in her sleep. She looked like a worried, sleeping princess.
“Before you go, would you look under the bag with Rachel’s robe in it and hand me her notions basket? I thought she might get bored and want to work on something for the baby while she’s waiting to go home. I’ve misplaced my needle threader, and I’m helpless without it.”
No! I wanted to scream. I want to get the hell away from here. Away from all of you! But of course I put my handbag down on the chair, lifted the bag, and picked up the wicker notions basket by its handle. The basket was familiar, painted with the same cheerful red and yellow flowers—now chipped and faded—that had decorated it when Rachel first unpacked it in our dorm room at Burton Hall. I had envied that basket, and wished I had a mother who had taught me smocking and bought me dresses and sent me care packages with new gloves and cookies and expensive shampoo. Even though Rachel had joked about the basket being silly and childish-looking, it was obvious that it was one of her treasures, the sort of thing she might pass on to her own daughter.
Even through my gloves I felt the handle burning my fingers. (It was my imagination, of course. It was a perfectly normal wooden handle.) As I passed it over the bed, the brass catch loosened, and the basket gaped open, spilling some of its contents onto the bed.
Holly jumped up, gathering the ribbons and bits of cloth and spools of colorful thread as they rolled over Rachel’s covered legs and across the bed or onto the floor. Nothing was heavy enough to disturb Rachel, but Holly still acted quickly.