One Saturday, when Sally was buying vitamin C, the drugstore girl slipped her a piece of white paper along with her change. Help me, she had written, in perfect script. But Sally could not even help herself. She couldn’t help her children or her husband or the way the world had spun out of control. From then on Sally would not shop at the drugstore. Instead, she had everything they needed delivered by a high school boy, who left their order on the bluestone path—rain, sleet, or snow—refusing to come to their door, even if that meant forfeiting his tip.
During that year, Sally let the aunts take care of Antonia and Kylie. She let bees nest in the rafters in July and allowed snow to pile up along the walkway in January so that the postman, who had always feared that he’d break his neck one way or the other delivering mail to the Owenses, would not venture past their gate. She didn’t bother about healthy dinners and mealtimes; she waited until she was starving, then ate canned peas out of the tin as she stood near the sink. Her hair became permanently knotted; there were holes in her socks and her gloves. She rarely went outside now, and when she did, people made sure to avoid her. Children were afraid of the blank look in her eyes. Neighbors who used to invite Sally over for coffee now crossed the street if they saw her coming and quickly murmured a prayer; they preferred to look straight into the sun and be temporarily blinded, rather than see what had happened to her.
Gillian phoned once a week, always on Tuesday nights, at ten o’clock, the only schedule she had kept to in years. Sally would hold the receiver to her ear and she’d listen, but she still wouldn’t talk. “You can’t fall apart,” Gillian would insist in her rich, urgent voice. “That’s my job,” she’d say.
All the same, it was Sally who wouldn’t bathe or eat or play pattycake with her baby. Sally was the one who cried so many tears there were mornings when she couldn’t open her eyes. Each evening she searched the dining room for the deathwatch beetle who’d been said to have caused all this grief. Of course she never found it and so she didn’t believe in it. But such things hide, in the folds of a widow’s black skirts and beneath the white sheets where one person sleeps, restlessly dreaming of everything she’ll never have. In time, Sally stopped believing in anything at all, and then the whole world went gray. She could not see orange or red, and certain shades of green—her favorite sweater and the leaves of new daffodils—were completely and utterly lost.
“Wake up,” Gillian would say when she called on her appointed night. “What do I have to do to snap you out of it?”
Really, there was nothing Gillian could say, although Sally kept on listening when her sister called. She thought over her sister’s words of advice because lately Gillian’s voice was the only sound she wanted to hear; it brought a comfort nothing else could, and Sally found herself positioned by the phone on Tuesdays, awaiting her sister’s call.
“Life is for the living,” Gillian told her. “Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I’m saying. Please.”
Sally thought long and hard each time she hung up the phone. She thought about the girl in the drugstore and the sound of Antonia’s footsteps on the stairs when she went up to bed without a good-night hug. She thought about Michael’s life and his death, and about every second they had spent together. She considered each one of his kisses and all the words he had ever said to her. Everything was still gray—the paintings Antonia brought home from school and slipped beneath her door, the flannel pajamas Kylie wore on chilly mornings, the velvet curtains that kept the world at bay. But now Sally began to order things in her mind—grief and joy, dollars and cents, a baby’s cry and the look on her face when you blew her a kiss on a windy afternoon. Such things might be worth something, a glance, a peek, a deeper look.
And when a year had passed, to the very day, since the moment when Michael had stepped off the curb, Sally saw green leaves outside her window. It was a delicate vine that had always wound its way up the drainpipe, but on this day Sally noticed how tender each leaf was, how absolutely new, so that the green was nearly yellow, and the yellow rich as butter. Sally spent a good portion of her days in bed, and it was already afternoon. She saw the golden light filtering through the curtains, and the way it spread out in bars across her wall. Quickly, she got out of bed and brushed her long black hair. She put on a dress she hadn’t worn since the previous spring, took her coat from the hook by the back door, and went out for a walk.
Again it was spring, and the sky was so blue it could take your breath away. It was blue and she could see it, the color of his eyes, the color of veins beneath the skin, and of hope and of shirts pinned to a laundry line. Sally could make out nearly every shade and hue that had been missing all year, although she still could not see orange, which was too close to the color of the faded stop sign the teenagers never saw on the day Michael was killed, and she never would again. But orange was never a great favorite of Sally’s, a small loss, considering all the others.
She walked on, through the center of town, wearing her old wool coat and her high black boots. It was a warm and breezy day, too warm for Sally’s heavy clothes, so she draped her coat over her arm. The sun went through the fabric of her dress, a hot hand across flesh and bones. Sally felt as though she’d been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens. For the first time in ages, Sally thought how pleasant it would be to speak again, to read bedtime stories to her daughters and recite a poem and name all the flowers that bloomed early in the season, lily of the valley and jack-in-the-pulpit and purple hyacinth. She was thinking about flowers, those white ones shaped like bells, when, for no particular reason, she turned left on Endicott Street and headed for the park.
In this park there was a pond, where a couple of horrid swans ruled, a playground with a slide and swing, and a green field where the older boys held serious soccer matches and baseball games that went on past dusk. Sally could hear the voices of children playing, and she walked into the park eagerly. Her cheeks were pink and her long black hair flew out behind her like a ribbon; amazingly enough, she had discovered that she was still young. Sally planned to take the path down to the pond, but she stopped when she saw the wrought-iron bench. Sitting there, as they did every day, were the aunts. Sally had never thought to ask what they did with the children all day while she stayed in bed, unable to drag herself from beneath the covers until the long afternoon shadows fell across her pillowcase.
On this day’s outing, the aunts had brought their knitting along. They were working on a throw for Kylie’s crib, made out of the finest black wool, a coverlet so soft that whenever Kylie would sleep beneath it she’d dream of little black lambs and fields of grass. Antonia was beside the aunts, her legs neatly crossed. Kylie had been plopped down on the grass, where she sat motionless. All of them wore black woolen coats, and their complexions seemed sallow in the afternoon light. Antonia’s red hair looked especially brilliant, a color so deep and startling it appeared quite unnatural in the sun. The aunts did not speak to each other, and the girls certainly did not play. The aunts saw no point in jumping rope or tossing a ball back and forth. In their opinion, such things were a silly waste of time. Better to observe the world around you. Better to watch the swans, and the blue sky, and the other children, who shouted and laughed during wild games of kickball and tag. Learn to be as quiet as a mouse. Concentrate until you are as silent as the spider in the grass.