And they talked about having gotten Jennie to a major turning in her life.
But he didn’t think they expected it would be easy after this.
Nor that they wanted help waiting up for the kid. So he excused himself to his bed and lay there listening to an ambient as new and full of foolishness as could be.
Thinking of Cloud and himself. And beginnings of life and not endings for a change.
Darcy had made supper that evening and Brionne ate half a dish of beef pasta and a whole cookie and half of another for dessert.
But Brionne said very little—or what she said was so quiet that Darcy couldn’t hear.
Once it sounded like, “I want to go home.”
And another time, “Go away!”
But when Darcy started to leave Brionne said, “Where are you going?”
Darcy came back and sat down by the side of the bed. The girl had been dreaming awake, she thought. Not really sleeping, but not entirely aware, either. There was a strange feeling to the night—her own elation with the child’s waking, or the unaccustomed feeling of life in this room, or just the knowledge that the days would change now. Everything had stopped at some time around Mark’s death, and no day had brought anything different from the last. And now every day brought a possibility of things changing.
Now she went to bed at night thinking about tomorrow, and what she’d do, and what she’d try. She hadn’t done that kind of planning in—a long time.
And tonight she lay abed thinking of Mark as she sometimes did, just thinking about him in the dark and the things she’d tell him— and wanting to tell him about all the things that had happened.
But there was so much, there was so very much she’d done that thinking about it became a job in itself, and made her sleepy.
Her edge-of-sleep thought seemed infected with cheerfulness. With recklessness and sheer anticipation that just wasn’t like her.
She felt equal to anything. That in itself was unprecedented.
If the girl had come a year ago Mark wouldn’t have died. Mark would have wanted to live if he’d seen this child, if he’d seen how much she was like Faye. But more, if Mark had felt the things she felt tonight, he’d never have wanted to die.
Right at the edge of sleep she pretended that Mark had seen her and that Mark was sleeping in the bed beside her. She knew better, of course, but she could think that for the night, the way she could tell herself that the empty room had a child again and that mistakes were all revised, and that she had a chance to do right all the things that had for a year been so wrong.
There was a tomorrow again. She’d run to the very edge of the money she had on account. She’d not collected fees for things she’d done on call, or at least not pursued any of the late ones—because she’d not cared.
But tomorrow she’d open the lower-floor shutters and open her office again, and she’d take patients. The miners always had complaints and aches and pains. Miners always had money on account.
And she’d buy Brionne such pretty things.
Things felt better. Maybe it was going to church. Maybe it was just getting another number of days between them and disaster and church days were markers.
But, sleeping in a proper cot alongside his brother in the warmest place in Evergreen village, with the banked coals making a comfortable glow and the stones lending warmth to a peaceful night, Carlo let go a sigh that seemed to stand for so much that had been piled up on him, so much debt, so much fear, so much anxiety.
Things were working out. Rick wasn’t happy—least of all in the public scene this morning, with them being welcomed by the congregation and all. Ordinarily he’d have found it excruciating notice on himself, and had, for the duration, but it meant something. It meant something vitally important, to have the preacher’s backing and to know that they weren’t to blame for that horse that had scared hell out of the village.
Rider business. A horse didn’t come within his responsibility. Wasn’t fair for Danny to get tagged with it—but if the preacher didn’t see blaming him and Randy for that horse, that left Rick Mackey as the only one with that notion. And precarious as his and Randy’s situation was, he wasn’t about to rush forward to claim the blame.
He just—just hoped to God it went away.
He didn’t want to be listening to it when they shot it.
He had a fistful of pillow, doing violence to it without realizing it, and let it go, and let go another sigh, this time consciously, purposefully releasing all the pent-up worry.
He ought to take care of the rest of the pending business he had in town, pay off all the emotional debts and pin down the uncertainties.
Meaning going finally and finding out about their sister, what the doctor thought of her chances, what the outlook was, what the debt might be that she’d accumulated. He was responsible for her. He had to be. There was no one else.
Chapter 15
That’s right, darling. Take another spoonful. There’s sugar in it.”
The girl swallowed down the cereal, and after three or four such spoonfuls, the girl heaved a little sigh and blinked and blinked again. “You’re in Evergreen, honey,” Darcy said. She offered that information every time she thought the girl might have come close to hearing anything or truly absorbing the things she said—because there’d been that moment of lucidity—and then it had gone for the rest of the day. But she knew that if it had come once, it could come back—to the right lure, to the promise of safety and comfort. “You’re in the village up the mountain. My name’s Darcy. How are you doing?”
“I’m tired,” the girl said unexpectedly and matter of factly. But Darcy didn’t let herself show surprise at all.
“I imagine you are, honey. Do you want some more?”
“All right,” the girl said, and ate the rest of the bowl before she shut her eyes and seemed to drift away.
Darcy was trembling as she set the spoon and the bowl down. She sat there by the girl’s bedside telling herself she might really have won this one, and seeing in that wind-burned face, still lovely after the long trek up the mountain, and the hands all broken-nailed and cut, the evidences of a suffering and struggle her Faye had never known except in the few minutes of her death.
This child would never know privation in Evergreen, not while she was taking care of her. This child would grow up safe and have all the things a beautiful young girl should have, and she’d see to it.
She went downstairs and went on tidying up. She arranged things in Mark’s office, and sterilized the instruments in boiling water, against the arrival of clients.
Then she went out on the snowy balcony of the second floor and opened the storm shutters. People about in the winter evening, the few who weren’t using the tunnels in the light snow-fall, stopped in the street and looked up. No one spoke.
But two—two, while she watched, came from the street onto the walk, and stamped their boots on the porch and disappeared under the angle of the porch roof.
She heard a knocking at her door. Miners, she thought. Maybe clients.
It was bitter cold out on the balcony and she gladly went inside and down. She opened the door and set herself in the doorway in such a way that they couldn’t just brush past her without explaining themselves, because some such clients were the sort that deserved sending right down to the pharmacist with an order for sugar pills or strong purgative.
“Ma’am,” the tall one said. “Are you the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“My name’s Carlo Goss. This is my brother Randy. How’s our sister doing?”
The girl’s brothers. It came to her like a thunderstroke that these boys could take the girl away. It wasn’t fair. They couldn’t. Not now. They hadn’t even asked how she was. They didn’t care—