The man waded in and carefully pulled Winifred from the water, holding her draped across his arms. More people had come, nine or ten of them, women in long skirts holding umbrellas, men in top hats with canes, a few more children with nurses who were lucky enough not to be made hysterical that day. The man placed Winifred carefully on the ground; he examined her head, touching the spot that was bleeding. He touched her lips and put his face to hers before lifting her head to check her neck.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding very sorry. “I don’t know if she’s breathing.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Netty cried, pacing back and forth, arms in the air as if she herself were fighting off pirates. John and Michael watched Winifred, looking down at the soft, sad face of their sister. They’d never looked at her before, not like this, not when she’d been so still. Winifred was always playing with them, always running around and now she wasn’t. They saw her as if she were a grownup, lying on the grass, her hair wet, her dress stained, blood on her face as if this is how it was once you grew up.
“Police!” Netty cried, running frantically back and forth in front of all these people. Two men ran away from the crowd, which had gotten bigger with Netty’s screaming. “Police, police, help, help,” Netty cried and the boys watched the crowd grow. They saw the man who’d said he was a doctor lean over Winifred, trying, they assumed as he examined her head, to save her.
CLaIRe
The house didn’t feel the same, it didn’t look the same, blue was not blue, red not red, as if every aspect of life from the very big to the very small had been slightly slanted left or right. From the moment Claire stepped through the door that night after the morgue it had all been permanently altered. As if she were in some kind of nether-house, the light fixtures shone at odd angles, the furniture sat tilted, she couldn’t see the sun through the windows and yet it was the same house, the only place she’d been able to stomach since the news.
It had been poison, that’s what the doctor had said after a thorough autopsy. Cyanide and Wisteria, the fruit of a poisonous plant had been ingested; they’d found enough of it in Preston’s body to kill a child, though, the doctor had explained, “an adult could have survived such a dose.” The doctor had also said the police were looking into it, they’d launched a thorough investigation and soon they hoped they’d be able to move on to an arrest. A neighbor of Claire’s was apparently what the police called “a person of interest.”
The police might be able to move on, they could stop obsessing about Preston’s death and focus on the investigation, but Claire could not. There had been times in her life when bad things had happened. She didn’t get into graduate school, her father had died of cancer when she was twenty-three years old, but through all that someone had always been there to say, “You’ll move on, you’ll get through it, this is not the end of the world.” This—is—not—the—end—of—the—world. But this, this was different, this was the end of everything. And how do you move on from that, how do you pick up the pieces once the oceans have frozen over and the land gone fallow, once the asteroid has hit and the sun is no longer shining? It was as if her life had been split down the middle, her time with Preston and her time without him. Claire was thirty-six years old, Preston had encompassed but ten years of her life, and yet looking back he had been all of it, as if her entire childhood and young adult life had been waiting for him and now the rest of her life would only be wanting to see him again. All of it was now gone, all of it was in that powder blue coffin they had just buried in the cemetery across from the church.
It had been a ceremony, that’s all Claire could say about the wake, the funeral, the burial and though she’d sat in front, looking up at Father O’Shay and Father Sherman, though she’d been there while Matthew and his mother and sister, while Claire’s sister Emily and her own mother had planned the entire affair, still it was as if she were sleeping through it. Those pills the psychiatrist had given her, she’d taken more of them, more every day, and other pills to go to sleep at night. Soon, Matthew said, she’d have to stop taking those pills, she’d have to go back to living her life, to being the woman she’d been. How could he expect that of her? That woman was gone. That woman had been buried in a powder blue box.
After the funeral, there had been food, people moved about the house carrying plate after plate of it. Claire wandered through her dining room and into the kitchen watching the food as if this were not about the people but about the casseroles, salads and plates of brownies everyone had so kindly brought, offering food because their words, their thoughts were not enough. At least a casserole was a tangible expression of their sympathy. It had started the day after she found out. She hadn’t told anyone but they knew. Kerry O’Conner had brought over a creamed chicken casserole, Tom and Frieda Spellman a tin of turkey potpie, Kathy Hannigan chocolate chip brownies, which had seemed particularly insensitive seeing that the only person living in the Tumber house who would have appreciated such a treat was gone. It had all been food, food in trays, in plastic containers, in oversized bowls. And the plastic ware, there had been so much plastic ware, oversized utensils, tiny spoons, even plastic toothpicks dressed up to look like swords, all of it accumulating in her house, taking up counter and refrigerator space. If Claire had been the kind of woman who hated to cook this food might have been welcomed, but she liked stirring stew, roasting potatoes, basting a ham and while she hadn’t been in the mood to cook all week, she missed her own food, the things she and Matthew and Preston ate at her table, in a normal world that did not feel as if it were swimming underwater.
Today the food had gotten worse. Jillian Donners had brought a lasagna and Halle Coleman a batch of fried chicken. People were over, it was just after the funeral and of course there had to be a get-together. Like following a wedding or a christening it’s not enough to simply go to the church, to listen to the priest, sprinkle some water, sing a hymn—more had to be done, fellowship had to be experienced no matter how macabre and so there was now this party. Claire had been expecting it. When her friend Linda lost her mother last year everyone had piled into their cars after the body was laid to rest, expecting to dish out plates of potato salad and summer squash as if it were a very solemn, very somber barbeque.
Cara List stood near the counter tossing a salad, two forks working away, shaking the lettuce and tomatoes as she turned and glanced at Megan, Preston’s friend, Tom Craig’s mother, who lived three streets away. They looked like regular women (and it had been so long since Clare had felt like a regular woman), heads tilted toward each other, eyes focused but willing to wander, hands animated. They seemed lost in conversation, as the salad was absentmindedly manhandled and Claire watched them, arms wrapped around herself, feeling weak, as if she might just tumble to the floor. But there was something about it, she couldn’t look away, it was so normal, so natural and all she wanted was to be the kind of woman who could just do that again. Cara List nodded knowingly as Claire turned around, walking back through the dining room to look out the windows of the double French doors. They hadn’t yet taken the swing set down, though Matthew had put Preston’s bike and the little playhouse away in the garage. Taking a screwdriver to the wooden poles and hauling the big aluminum slide up to the attic above the garage felt like too much of an undertaking, too much of a sign that it was over, really over. Not that the yard didn’t look as if it had aged a hundred years.
The clamor went on at her back and Claire tried not to notice it. It had been three days of preparation, none of which she’d wanted to do. Her mother had come out from Chicago, as had her sister; they were now sitting on the couch in the family room, sniffling as they went through an old photo album. Her mother had called the funeral home and most of the arrangements had been made through Claire, around and over Claire, though not by her. They thought he should have a powder blue casket with fine, white lining–go ahead; they wanted to read an excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit–good idea; serve coffee at the wake–great. Everything suggested was fine with her; Claire had no complaints, no needs. There was nothing she wanted and there was no way for the wake, the funeral, even the burial in Matthew’s family plot across from the church, to make anything seem better or worse. The priest had wanted Matthew to say