The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 24: The Green Dress

She didn’t come in right away.

The knob turned and stopped, turned and stopped, like someone testing a stove. When the door finally opened it did so by about a foot. Colleen stood in the gap with a paperback held against her chest, the upside-down one, and a canvas bag over her shoulder that had clearly been slept in on a plane.

She wasn’t the girl in the green dress. I felt Maggie see that, felt it land.

Forty-five years old. Hair cut short and going gray in a streak she hadn’t bothered to hide. Her mother’s jaw, exactly, set at the same angle. Crow’s feet, a sunburned nose, the hands of someone who worked outdoors or at least wanted people to think she did. She had on a wrinkled linen shirt and no makeup, and under her eyes the skin was the color of a bruise two days old.

Oh, Maggie said, so softly that I almost didn’t catch it. Oh, there you are.

“Hi, Mom,” Colleen said.

“You look tired.”

It was the stupidest thing to say, and it came out of the old woman’s mouth like a reflex. Colleen laughed, once, a wet bark, and pressed the back of her wrist against her nose.

“I took the red-eye. Two connections. There was a baby.”

“Sit down before you fall down.”

She sat, in the visitor’s chair Dr. Reyes had used, on the very edge of it with her knees together and the bag in her lap. The book was still in her hands. Neither of us looked at it. The oxygen hissed. Somewhere down the hall a call light chimed and stopped.

I pulled all the way to the back of the head. It’s an odd feeling, giving up the front of a body you’ve been steering for three days, like stepping out of a car you’re driving and letting it roll. Maggie came forward into the empty seat. I felt her take the weight of the old hands, the thin ribs, the voice.

She said nothing for a long minute. Neither did Colleen.

“I said a terrible thing to you,” Maggie said.

“Mom—”

“Let me. I won’t be able to do this twice.” She drew a breath through the cannula. “It was March. The kitchen on Alder Street. You had a folder with colored tabs, and I turned around with a plate in my hand and told you that your father didn’t know who you were, so what did you care where he died.”

Colleen’s face didn’t move.

“I’ve known the words for about a day. Before that I only knew the shape. I’ve spent fourteen years sure I was the injured party.” The papery voice shook and steadied. “I wasn’t. I was afraid of being alone in that house, and I wanted a reason that sounded better than that, so I took the cruelest one I could find and handed it to you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Colleen. I should have gotten on the plane.”

The silence afterward had a different quality from the ones before it. It was like the moment after a heavy thing finally lands on the floor.

Colleen put the book down on the blanket. She did it slowly, the way you set something down when your hands aren’t sure they can be trusted.

“I didn’t come to the funeral,” she said.

“I know. I didn’t call.”

“No. You don’t understand.” She was looking at the wall above the bed, not at Maggie. “I got the message from the lawyer on a Thursday. I booked a flight that night. I got to the airport in Phoenix two hours early. And I sat at the gate for the whole boarding, and I watched them close the door, and I didn’t stand up.” She wiped her face with her palm. “I told myself you’d have been glad if I stayed away. That you’d made your choice. But the truth is I was scared you’d say it again. In front of everybody. Over his coffin.”

Oh, Colleen, Maggie whispered, inside, where only I could hear.

“I let you bury him alone,” Colleen said. “And I’ve been angry about it for eleven years, like you’d done it to me.”

Neither of them moved. Two women, three feet apart, each holding the other end of the same thing, and neither had picked a side of it to be sorry for first.

Then Maggie did something I hadn’t expected. She lifted her right hand off the blanket, a thin, shaking, spotted hand with a hospital band hanging off the wrist, and held it out flat, palm up, over the space between them.

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, I think.

Colleen looked at it for a long time. Then she put her hand in it.

***

The letter was in the nightstand drawer, where Maggie had left it. It took a while to get it out, because both of us were crying by then and neither of us could see the knob.

I want to read it myself, Maggie said.

Then I’ll get out of the way.

I let go the rest of the way. I’d been holding the borrowed eyes steady, adjusting for the cataracts, squinting for the tight handwriting. Now they were hers entirely, and I felt her draw the page up close to her face, and the loops of looping blue ink swam into focus for her and not for me. I could only hear.

She read it in her head first. I knew because her lips moved. When she got to the middle of the second page she stopped and made a small, startled noise, half a laugh.

“What?” Colleen said. “What is it?”

“You still write your g’s like your father.”

Colleen’s eyes went bright and wet. “That’s what you got out of it?”

“It’s what I got out of the first line.” Maggie laid the page on her chest and breathed. “The rest I’ll read slowly. If you’ll sit with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I know. This time I mean it.” Colleen leaned forward and took her mother’s hand again, and her voice dropped to something I knew from my own kitchen, in a time I couldn’t see. “I’ll be here when you wake up. And the next time. And the next.”

Maggie closed her eyes. Her breath went out of her, long and slow and uneven, and I felt something in the borrowed body settle, a bone-deep loosening, as if a long clenched hand had finally gone slack.

I think I’m tired now, she said, to nobody, to me.

I know.

Is that all right?

It’s all right.

At the window, the light went amber. The Intercessor was standing in it with his hands folded in front of him, and for once he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the two women on the bed, and his face, whatever was left of it, had gone completely still.