The canopy bed, with its cream eyelet cover, was strewn with gaily colored wrapped packages, some with birthday paper, some Christmas. There were even Easter baskets overflowing with candy.
"I get her a present every year on her birthday and Christmas," Abigail said, sitting down on the bed and picking up one of the wrapped gifts.
Along one wall more gifts were arrayed.
"Sometimes I come up here and just sit. For hours. It's so peaceful, don't you think?"
A life derailed. "Yes." Sad was what it was. Mary wished she hadn't come. The room was stuffy, and she broke into a cold sweat. She suddenly felt as if she might pass out.
"Would you like me to leave you alone here for a while?" Abigail asked. "It might be good for you."
Mary nodded, stifling the urge to run. What with the buzzing in her head, she wasn't all that sure she could make it out of the house under her own steam. "That would be nice," she managed.
"You can light a candle and say a prayer," Abigail said, motioning toward a cluster of red votives on the dresser. Mary had forgotten the Portmans were Catholic, and now she remembered Fiona saying her nighttime prayers, "so I won't get a venial sin on my soul."
Abigail left, gently closing the door behind her.
Mary sank down on the bed and put her head between her knees, fighting light-headedness. She'd lost consciousness twice in her life. The first time had been when Blythe told Mary her father was dead; the second was when she got shot. Finding Fiona's body that day in the woods had had the opposite effect, sending her scrambling and screaming for help.
It was too much for her, being in Fiona's room. Too immediate. Too real. For years she'd mastered the fine art of retreat, but she couldn't hide here.
She kept her head down until the blackness behind her eyes disappeared and her heart quit thundering. Gradually her breathing returned to normal. She leaned back, lowering herself against the pillow, her feet on the floor, and looked up at the canopy above her head.
There were the stars that glowed in the dark. She and Fiona had put them there one summer. A crescent moon dangled from a thread, and there was the tiny stuffed lamb with angel wings Mary had given Fiona for Christmas.
Life had been so perfect then. So innocent.
But not real, of course.
Lying there, Mary realized her own life had stagnated. Differently from Abigail's, but stagnated all the same. Something had shut off inside her the day she'd found Fiona's body. For years she'd understood that she was no longer the person she used to be, and that as time passed Mary Cantrell was fading, but she couldn't seem to summon the strength or will to do anything about it.
She and Fiona used to discuss the future. They talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up, what it would be like, and where they would live, where they would travel, what they would see and do and learn.
"I don't want kids," Fiona had told Mary one day. "Kids just get in the way."
Mary had been surprised, because she'd always seen herself getting married and having children. Now she had no plans.
Lying there took her back to the days when she'd thought about that kind of thing. Now she tried to picture herself with a child and found it difficult. Any existence beyond her current one seemed hard to imagine.
Dizziness gone, she got up and moved around the room, leaning close to the vanity mirror to look at the photos. One in particular caught her eye. It was of Fiona, Mary, and Gillian. Fiona and Mary were smiling happily. Gillian had her arms crossed at her waist, a scowl on her face.
Poor Gillian. She'd been so jealous of Fiona. It was a shame, because they could have had so much fun together, the three of them. But Gillian refused to share Mary with anyone, and Mary had refused to be manipulated by her sister.
Gillian thought Mary hadn't noticed, but her jealousy was impossible to miss. Gillian sticking out her tongue, and later, throwing the finger. Gillian never giving Fiona a chance. Once, when Fiona stayed the night at Mary's, Gillian put a laxative in her Kool-Aid and bugs in her pink sleeping bag. The next time she came, she left dog crap in Fiona's purse. It would have been funny if Gillian's pranks hadn't been so cruel and calculated.
For a long while, Fiona refused to stay the night at the Cantrell house, and Mary was relieved because she never knew what Gillian might try next-her jealousy was so out of control.
When Gillian got to high school she found her own circle of friends, and she and Mary didn't hang around together much unless it was a family function.
Mary lit one of the candles. She didn't pray, but she meditated, willing her mind to empty, allowing herself to drift… She began to sense the comfort Abigail had talked about, and it was with a touch of regret that she finally blew out the candle and left the room.
"You'll come back, won't you?" Abigail asked, downstairs.
"I'll try." Mary retrieved her coat from the back of the kitchen chair. The visit had been cathartic, but she wasn't sure she could do it again. "Would you mind if I walked in the woods behind the house?"
"Oh, my." Abigail put a hand to her throat, horrified. "Why would you want to do that?"
"I think about the woods sometimes. And dream about the tree house. I thought it might be good for me to actually see it again."
"I can't go into those woods. That's one place I haven't been able to go. I hate those woods." Abigail put a hand to her hair, as if to smooth a style that no longer existed. "Developers are always hounding me, wanting me to sell the land. You'd think I'd want to, the way I hate it. It's worth quite a lot, you know. But even though I can't go in there, I can't sell it either. And what do I need money for?"
What, indeed? To buy more gifts for a dead girl who could never open them? "Do you mind?" Mary repeated gently.
Abigail waved her hand, shooing her away, looking irritated now. "Go ahead, then. I just don't know why you'd want to."
"Dark light," her grandmother used to call the weird cast the sun took in the fall. Mary always felt a tug of sorrow whenever she noticed the change. She never knew if it was simply because it signaled the passage of time and the end of summer, or because the sun had been low on the horizon the day she'd come upon Fiona's body, the trees casting long black shadows.
Today was cool, the temperature in the high fifties. Where the sunlight cut through bare trees, it offered no warmth. It had rained the night before, and the fallen leaves had been packed into a soft, damp cushion beneath Mary's feet. The magnificent scent of earth drifted up to her, and for a moment she was a child again, experiencing the woods with the innocence that came before the bad times.
When she was young, the woods had seemed huge and endless-as big as a small country from one end to the other. With the jaded eyes of an adult, Mary could see that the property was not more than four acres.
She deliberately avoided heading toward where she'd found Fiona's body. Instead, she circled around the edge of the woods, following a faint path made by deer and other wild animals, until she finally reached the tree where they'd spent so much time.
It wasn't as big as she remembered either.
The tree house her father had built with the permission of the previous owners was still there, at least the floor and most of the walls. The windows were just a memory, the glass gone, probably shattered and buried by years of fallen leaves. Sometime during their middle school years, she and Gillian had attempted to spend the night in the tree house, announcing themselves brave and independent enough to survive the wilderness alone. Less than two hours into the evening, Gillian had had enough. When Blythe came to check on them, she ended up carrying her frightened, clinging daughter home with Mary trudging behind, disappointed but resigned.