“No,” Anna said, hating her sister. “She doesn’t do anything at all.”
But in the following weeks, an unexpected thing began to happen: individual boys separated themselves from the group, as if for the first time, and came to sit quietly with Lydia. They begged for extra time, and Anna began to feel important, arranging these visits. The boys claimed that Lydia had told them things: she liked pie; was afraid of spiders; loved rabbits best of all animals. No, goats. Chickens. Horses. Pigs. She’s never even seen a pig, you oaf!
“She misses her home,” said Freddie, the smallest boy, after holding Lydia’s hand for a quarter of an hour.
“What does she miss?” Anna asked, and waited for Freddie to say, Her papa. But although Freddie lived fifty miles from the nearest lake, he said, “She misses the sea.” It was the first time Anna realized that her sister had never seen it.
Anna’s mother ran a bath that night, and Anna washed Lydia’s hair. They hoped the pleasure of the warm water would jolt her into awareness, but it was the opposite: Lydia floated with eyes shut, the faintest smile on her lips. Anna had an eerie impression that the crumpled body she was holding no longer contained her sister, or not entirely. It was as if Lydia were fading into the mystery she had always partly inhabited, as if its pull were too great to resist.
The next morning Anna overslept and had to rush to get to her shop before eight o’clock. The sight of Lydia unmoving in bed haunted her through the day. She measured parts in a state of trancelike absorption very like prayer, dread and hope twining in a burning nimbus around her heart. Please let today be a turning point. Please let her get better today.
She arrived home to find an unfamiliar coat and hat hanging inside the apartment door, a walking stick poised against the wall. Anna set down her purse, slipped off her shoes, and went quietly into her bedroom in stocking feet. Dr. Deerwood sat on a kitchen chair just inside the door. Her mother sat on Anna’s bed. Lydia lay in her own bed, her body unnaturally straight. There was a new hollowness around her closed eyes. The blanket rose and fell on her chest like a pendulum swinging very, very slowly.
Dr. Deerwood stood up from his chair and shook Anna’s hand. Removed from his opulent office, he looked like any doctor making a house call. Although his stiff black bag was closed and nothing especially doctorly was taking place, his presence imparted a sense of order and safety. Anna’s faith in him was instantly restored. Nothing could go wrong while the doctor was present.
She knelt in the narrow space between the beds and laid her head beside Lydia’s, breathing the flowery scent of last night’s shampoo.
“I should never have taken her out,” her mother said. “There was too much wind.”
“Nonsense,” Dr. Deerwood said.
“It’s made her worse.”
“You must put that thought from your mind, Mrs. Kerrigan,” he said with quiet authority. “It is not just wrong but damaging. You’ve given Lydia one more pleasant experience in a life that has been full of them.”
“How do you know?” her mother pressed. “How can you tell?”
“Look at her,” the doctor said, and they did, Anna lifting her head to take in her sister’s radiant flesh, the delicate bones of her face, her luxuriant hair. Her eyes seemed to flicker under their long lashes as if she were watching them through the silken drapery of her lids.
Something broke in Anna’s mother. She doubled over and began to howl like an animal. Anna had never heard her make such a sound, and it terrified her—as if her mother might go mad or throw herself out the window. Panic sprang up in her; she had done this! But no, she’d done nothing wrong. The doctor had said so, and his presence made it true.
Dr. Deerwood took her mother’s hands in both of his. He’d large hands, broad and worn like a workingman’s. Anna watched them in fascination—how had she never noticed those oversize hands?
“You must believe me, Mrs. Kerrigan,” he said. “You’ve done everything it is possible to do.”
“It isn’t enough,” her mother wept.
“It was more than enough.”
His words hung in the air like an echo. Even when he’d forgone the usual cup of coffee that followed a house call and taken up his coat and hat and stick, Anna seizing upon the unruliness of his silver eyebrows; when he’d shaken their hands, all of them understanding they would not meet again, and the sound of his tread had faded downstairs; when Anna and her mother were back in the bedroom watching over Lydia, still she could hear the doctor’s voice: It was more than enough.
Her mother wore a vacant expression. “He never opened his bag,” she said.
*
The funeral took place on a cold Sunday the week before Christmas. Anna sat in a front pew between Stella Iovino and Lillian Feeney; her mother between Aunt Brianne and Pearl Gratzky, who had become more friend than boss since Mr. Gratzky’s passing two years before. It was Pearl who had purchased the arrangement of white lilies for the altar. Their smell peppered the air as Father McBride likened Lydia to lambs and angels and other deserving innocents.
A merciful numbness had engulfed Anna since her sister’s death, enabling her to fulfill the many logistical tasks that had followed: taking a short leave from the Naval Yard; arranging the funeral, burial, and lunch to follow; purchasing a coffin and a plot. The question of where Lydia should rest had briefly paralyzed Anna and her mother. Her mother’s people were all buried in Minnesota, and the thought of Lydia alone here among strangers was intolerable. As a last resort they chose New Calvary, where Pearl Gratzky bequeathed to Lydia the plot she had purchased beside her husband, and where there was extra room on both sides for Agnes and Anna. Pearl was euphoric at this arrangement. “They can visit together,” she cried, with the greedy relief of one who believed she had thereby extended her own earthly tenure.