“Is it Helene?” Shelby asks.
“No. Helene can’t get out of bed, honey. You know that. Your angel is a big man. Like a wrestler. Maybe a sumo wrestler.”
Shelby laughs.
“He left his car running,” Sue says, “so he could make his getaway if anyone saw him. I was watching through the living room window the whole time. He waved to me.”
Shelby grins. Her mother really is stoned. “And did he have wings?”
Sue laughs. “Of course not! Let’s get serious here. Let’s go get our ice cream. I’m starving.”
Sue hands over the postcard, and Shelby studies the photo. It’s her in her fourth-grade class photograph. There she is, in the front row. She looks so cute, with her long brown hair and her frilly dress. She has a big smile, as if she’s sure of a bright future. Shelby turns the card over. She feels a tightness in her chest. Love something.
Her mother is stroking the little dog. “You’re my baby,” she says.
The afternoon has turned gray. Rain will soon fall. Shelby had planned to take the train back to the city after supper, but she decides to stay and sleep on the couch. She used to read piles of fairy tales. Her favorites were always tales of transformation: brothers who became swans, beasts who hid their kind hearts. She always put her faith in animals rather than in human beings. After they went to Chinco-teague, Shelby begged her mother for a horse. Sue said their neighborhood wasn’t zoned for horses, so instead they went out to a farm in Blue Point, where they fed someone’s ponies handfuls of hay. It has taken her this long to realize how cold it was that day, and how her mother was shivering, but still stood with Shelby in the barn for over an hour.
Shelby wants to spend tomorrow with her mother. She feels her love inside her as if it were as tangible as blood and bones. They’ll go out for ice cream every afternoon and try every flavor there is. She’ll start house-training Buddy. She’ll learn how to make onion soup, her mom’s favorite. Things will get worse, but there’s no reason to think about that now. Tonight Shelby will look out the window to see if her angel returns, and if he does she’ll ask him how he knows so much about love. She wishes he would come to her tonight, climb in through the window to lie down beside her and explain how it’s possible to love someone so much and still manage to carry on when you have to let them go.
CHAPTER
11
Shelby sits on the picnic table in the backyard. It’s cold and there’s a light snow falling and her mother has just been buried. The past months are a blur. October and November were swallowed up by illness and hospitals. Toward the end Shelby left her dogs with Maravelle and set up residence in her parents’ living room. Her mother’s hospital bed was right next to the couch, and sometimes they held hands as they slept. Shelby found all of her old books in a box in the basement. She read the color-coded series of Andrew Lang’s fairy tales to her mother. They became lost in an enchanted cottage with vines growing over the window. It was dark and it was quiet and they could hear each other softly breathing. Every story had the same message: what was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken.
“Wake up,” Shelby would say whenever her mother drifted off as she was reading. “The best part is just about to happen.” But as time went on, Sue was asleep nearly all the time, with Buddy beside her in bed. Shelby had to pick up the poodle and carry him outside so he would pee. He always ran right back inside. My baby, Sue would say, how can I leave you? Shelby was never certain if her mom was talking to her or to Buddy. Now it’s over and they’ve left her in the cold ground. Shelby can’t bring herself to go inside the house. Her fingers are freezing and her toes are turning to ice inside her new fleece-lined boots, but she doesn’t care. She has the grill out, and she’s burning the old Misty books. She doused them with lighter fluid and they flared with fire and all the pages turned orange, then blue, then black. It’s over. All of it. It’s smoke.