The Beach Quilt (34 page)

It was late September. Adelaide was still keeping summer hours at The Busy Bee, though running the shop almost entirely on her own now was tiring. That said, she was grateful to have someplace to
go
every day.

It had been a month since Sarah had died. Adelaide still had trouble believing that she was gone. At least once a day, she relived that shattering phone call from Joe. She thought she would never be able to forget hearing those terrible words: “My daughter is dead.”

Everything had been all right at first. The baby had been in some small distress, but Sarah had managed to give birth to him naturally.

And then, a moment later, disaster had struck. Sarah began to bleed heavily (exsanguination, or hemorrhage the doctors called it) and rapidly went into hypovolemic shock. The doctors had been just about to start a blood transfusion and intervene surgically when Sarah had died.

Just like that. Here one moment, gone the next.

The exact cause of the hemorrhage remained unknown. Even after an autopsy, the doctors explained, there might not be an answer to that most dreadful of questions: Why?

But the Bauers said they didn't need to know why. Knowing what had caused the fatal bleed wouldn't bring back their daughter. Besides, Joe had trouble with the thought of his child's body being cut apart even if it was in pursuit of the truth.

Adelaide hadn't dared to argue with her friend's decision not to have an autopsy performed, though she and Jack felt that if Cordelia had been the one to die on the operating table . . .

But their daughter was not the one who had died. They were the fortunate ones.

The door to the shop opened, and a young woman came in, holding the hand of a little girl around the age of five. The girl was clutching a baby doll around the neck, not a grip recommended in the real world.

“Good afternoon,” Adelaide said. “Let me know if I can help you with anything.”

The woman smiled and went over to the far wall on which two newly acquired quilts were displayed. The little girl marched over to Adelaide, who stood behind the counter, and held her doll up for inspection.

“This is my baby,” she announced with unmistakable pride. “Her name is Belle. Like the princess.”

Adelaide felt her heart contract. “She's a very pretty baby,” she said. “You must love her very much.”

The little girl grabbed the doll back to her chest. “Oh, yes,” she said quite seriously. “Very much.”

The young woman came to join them at the counter. “My daughter is obsessed with that doll,” she whispered. “I can hardly pry it out of her hands at bath time. It's part fabric,” she explained. “Water will ruin it.”

Adelaide smiled weakly. “Yes,” she said. “My daughter was the same way with a stuffed unicorn. She still has it, and she's almost seventeen.”

It turned out that the woman was simply killing time and not interested in buying. Ordinarily, this sort of visitor didn't bother Adelaide in the least. But now, she prayed for the woman and her daughter to leave.

Girls and dolls, women and babies . . .

Finally, they did leave, and Adelaide sighed aloud in relief.

Every day since Sarah's passing presented a new challenge. And everyone was coping as best as he or she could. Jack, in his usual vigorous manner, was spearheading a scholarship in Sarah's name. Joe, in his usual stoic manner, had refused to take any time away from his work commitments.

And Cindy . . . every single day she visited Sarah's grave, most times with the baby. Sarah had been buried in the Bauer family plot in a beautiful old cemetery on the outskirts of Yorktide. “In a way, she's back home,” Cindy had said. “I mean, really home, with her ancestors.” She had put the hexagon quilt she made for baby Sarah seventeen years ago in the coffin with her daughter. “A quilt is a treasure which follows its owner everywhere,” she told Adelaide, quoting a popular saying among quilters. “It will comfort Sarah on her journey.”

Adelaide was glad that Cindy could find solace in that belief.

As for Adelaide, well, the way she was coping with the loss was by throwing herself into the care of her daughter. Cordelia had taken Sarah's death very badly. For the first two weeks she had barely been able to swallow water. She had been overcome by fits of sobbing that threatened to choke her. She had spent hours curled up on her bed, clutching her old stuffed unicorn. She couldn't sleep. She wouldn't talk.

Adelaide and Jack had felt it necessary to take Cordelia to a doctor who advised putting her on a prescription tranquilizer. They carefully monitored her dosage, and Cordelia was showing some small improvement but not enough for her parents' peace of mind. At least, she was eating again but without any real interest. The other day Jack had been able to raise the ghost of a smile when he did his infamous imitation of Bill Murray's character in
Caddyshack
.

She had gone back to school a week after its official start but without any of her usual enthusiasm. Teachers and administration had been trained in dealing with tragedies such as what had befallen Sarah, and as Sarah's only real friend, Cordelia was being looked after closely. Still, she was on her own when kids came to her with expressions of condolence or offers of friendship or, horribly, condemnation disguised as sympathy: “She got what she deserved.” No one had actually
said
that to Cordelia, but there were ways in which critical comments could be couched in flowery, innocent-seeming language. Adelaide had heard some of them herself from a few nasty-minded people in town.

And on the topic of nasty-minded people . . .

The letter Adelaide had written to her mother just before Henry was born was still in her desk. Once Sarah died, Adelaide had realized that there were more important and more immediate concerns for her to handle than a coldhearted old woman.

Adelaide looked at her watch. Cordelia would be home from school soon, though Jack would be staying late for a meeting. Without debating the idea, Adelaide set about closing up The Busy Bee for the day. Losing a potential sale mattered nothing; being home with her grieving child mattered an awful lot.

Cindy had just come back from visiting Sarah's grave. It was a nasty day in early November, damp and chill and overcast. Snow was predicted. Sarah had loved the snow so much. It would look pretty piled on her headstone.

Cindy put the kettle on to boil. The house was quiet. Henry was down for a nap, Joe was at work, and Stevie was at school. Unconsciously, Cindy put her hand to the silver charm she wore around her neck. It was the one she and Joe had given Sarah for her birthday back in August. She wore it in memory of the vital and special person Sarah had been—and always would be, in Cindy's memory.

A memory that was at times intensely, acutely detailed and clear; at other times, frustratingly vague; and at still other times, almost restfully nonexistent. Grieving, Cindy reflected now, was a very strange process. Some days, she thought she wouldn't survive it.

She had read somewhere, a long time ago, that the intensity of a really strong emotion could almost make you lose your memory of what had
caused
that really strong emotion—a person dying, a traumatic event. At the time, the idea had made no sense to her. But now . . .

Just that morning Cindy had realized she had forgotten the exact color of Sarah's eyes. The day before, try as hard as she might, she simply could not call up the last words she had heard Sarah speak or the last words she had spoken to her daughter. These experiences filled her with a desperate sadness, as well as with deep feelings of guilt. What sort of mother couldn't remember the color of her child's eyes? What right did that sort of mother have to live?

In the first weeks after Sarah's death, as she lay in bed, listening to the baby's tiny movements in the crib by her bed, Cindy had wondered if forgetting might be a good thing in the end, easier to bear, less awful than too precise and constant a degree of memory. She had wondered if she could pray for a state of relative emotional oblivion. Would her God grant such a request? Would any God?

And then she had wondered: How would a state of emotional oblivion affect those people in her life who were still here on earth—Joe, Stevie, and Henry? In the end, after weeks of near sleepless nights, she had come to realize that to feel nothing would be of no benefit to anyone at all. Like it or not, she was a deeply generous person and nothing could totally change that. She couldn't willingly abandon those Sarah had left behind. It would be a sort of penance for Cindy to push past the pain and guilt, the sorrow and the anger, and be present for her family. Her family—what remained of it—
had
to be her mission in life. It was what was going to keep her sane.

The teakettle whistled. Cindy poured the water into a cup and sank into a chair at the kitchen table. She might forget some things, even temporarily, but others could never be forgotten. There were too many witnesses, too many aides to memory. Sarah's funeral was one of them.

Every member of Joe's family had attended, Jonas and Marie from Chicago and the cousins from Brunswick. Cindy's father had come (and gone back to Augusta shortly after the church service), though his wife and her children had not. Cindy had been glad about this. She didn't know May well enough to feel comfortable sharing such an intimate grief. She would have liked to believe that May understood this and had chosen not to come because of it. But maybe May just hadn't been able to get the time off work.

It was different with the neighbors and other townsfolk who came to the church, people with whom the Bauers shared their daily lives in ways both large and small. Some had barely known Sarah herself; some were Joe's clients; some were members of Cindy's quilting workshops; others knew the family only by sight. But both Cindy and Joe were glad for their presence and support. There were major benefits to life in a small, tightly knit community, and the support of that community when tragedy struck was one of them. The amount of food that arrived at the Bauer home in the days and weeks following Sarah's death was astonishing. Neighbors had taken it upon themselves to mow the lawn and to take the garbage to the dump. Joe's employees had taken up a collection among themselves and Joe's repeat clients, and had presented him with a check to help with the funeral expenses. Cards and flowers were left for Cindy and Joe and Stevie at The Busy Bee.

And then there were Sarah's schoolmates. Every single member of Sarah's class had been at the funeral with the exception of one boy who was traveling in California with his parents. Many of Stevie's classmates had been there as well, as had their parents. The reverend had told them it was the most well-attended funeral The Church of the Savior had ever seen. It was a bittersweet distinction.

Cindy thought she heard Henry waking and hurried into the living room to check on him. But he was still asleep in the cradle Joe had made for him. Cindy looked down at her grandson. She loved him so very much. “Poor little thing,” she whispered.

At some point in the future, Henry would probably want to know about his birth father. Now, the telling would be up to Cindy and Joe, and she figured they would cross that bridge when it loomed into view. To tell the naked truth—that Henry's birth father had wanted nothing to do with him—seemed a brutal choice. To disguise the reality with the intent of easing Henry's pain would be kinder: “Your father was very young; he wasn't able to help care for you.” It wasn't far from the truth.

Cindy went back to the kitchen and poured more hot water into her cup. Thinking of Justin reminded her of the day the card from the Morrows had arrived. It was about a week after Henry's birth and Sarah's passing. She and Joe were in the kitchen. He was sitting at the table going through some paperwork from the hospital. Cindy was standing at the counter, separating the mail into bills, junk, and personal notes and letters.

She remembered thinking that the house seemed upsettingly quiet without Sarah's presence. Even though she had never been a loud or noisy person, her absence fairly screamed.

And then, she had come to the card.

She had opened the envelope with trepidation. At this terrible time, would June Morrow dare to attack or to blame? Cindy couldn't be sure what that despicable woman was capable of doing.

There was no salutation. The printed message was the usual sort of thing to be found in these cards. There was no personal note. Someone, probably June, had signed the card Mr. and Mrs. Morrow. It was as impersonal a gesture as it could possibly be. Cindy wondered why they had even bothered to send a card at all.

“We got a card from the Morrows,” Cindy had said. “Do you want to see it?”

Without looking up from his work, Joe had laughed bitterly. “No.”

Cindy had carefully torn the card into shreds and tossed it into the garbage can. “Not one word about the baby. They act as if he doesn't exist. It's—it's appalling. Their own flesh and blood . . . It's insulting. It's wretched behavior.”

“Good riddance. At least they aren't fighting us for custody. Not that we would let them win. We're adopting that baby, and that's final.”

Cindy hadn't replied. She harbored a secret worry that if the Morrows did sue for legal custody of Henry they might win. She didn't know enough about the law to feel even a shred of Joe's confidence in the Bauers' rights to the baby. And Justin, as the father, still might stake a claim....

But now, almost three months after Sarah's passing and the birth of his son, there had still been no word from Justin. He must have been told. He must not have cared. Or maybe, just maybe, he was too overcome with remorse to make himself known.

For the first few weeks after Sarah's death, Cindy's feelings of anger toward Justin had threatened to grow out of control. In her darkest moments, she blamed him for having killed her daughter. She fantasized about hurting him. Once she dreamed of killing him. She told no one of these feelings. She didn't want to be told that they were wrong or dangerous. In a way, she welcomed them.

But the demands of a baby—of Sarah's baby—had taken rightful precedence in her mind and in her heart. Increasingly, Justin was more of a distant and unpleasant memory than an object of loathing. She no longer feared him. She almost pitied him.

Cindy sighed and looked over to the fridge. The photographs of Sarah and Stevie through the years were still on the door. She would never take them down. She needed reminders of that idyllic past, when both of her surviving children were with her, happy and healthy. She missed Sarah dreadfully, in a very deep way she couldn't articulate, and in a million tiny ways, too. She missed Sarah's daily companionship. She found herself turning around from the stove and addressing the table, as if Sarah was sitting right there. “Do you know who I saw in the drugstore today?” Or, “Do you remember the Christmas we made that wonderful chocolate bark?” It was always, always a shock to find no one else in the room.

Cindy heard the front door open. Stevie was home from school. Cindy hurried to greet her daughter. Clarissa, always alert, was already perched on her shoulder.

“How was school?” Cindy asked. She thought that Stevie looked thinner than usual. It frightened her.

“Fine. Did you visit the grave today?” Stevie asked, unwinding her scarf without unsettling Clarissa.

“Yes.”

“Was everything okay? I mean . . .”

“Yes,” Cindy said. “I replaced the flowers. The caretakers had raked up most of the leaves.”

“Good.” Stevie walked over to where Henry lay asleep and peered down at him. “Is Henry okay?” she asked. “Did he eat well?”

Cindy felt her heart contract. This was a routine now, Stevie's coming home from school or Cordelia's house and checking to be sure that nothing bad had happened to the family in her absence.

“Yes, Stevie,” she said firmly. “Everything is perfectly fine. Now, why don't we go into the kitchen for a snack?”

Stevie, Cindy's last surviving child, raised the ghost of a smile and followed.