The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(98)
“Because if you’d stopped hoping, you wouldn’t work so damn hard to give this day, or better days, to others.” She stands on tiptoe to drop a kiss on his freshly shaven cheek and walks off to rejoin the others.
“Hope is such a strange thing, Eliza,” Bran whispers.
“Yes.”
He reaches for my hand and I lace our fingers together, and we follow after Inara.
Faith was actually buried two weeks ago, with Bran and his parents and Lissi present, but Xiomara didn’t want that kind of funeral for her baby girl. She wanted something more joyful, without the sight of the too-small coffin. Today, therefore, is the unveiling of the tombstone. When they learned who the marker was for, the memorial company refused to accept payment for it and promised it in half the usual time. They said Faith had waited long enough.
It’s been almost a month, and I’m still struck by the extraordinary kindnesses people are capable of, not just for the Eddisons but for all the families. There have been cruelties as well, and harassment of all sorts, but the sincere kindness of strangers has been unfathomable in many ways. I know Illa reached out to Laura through the Wyatt family’s lawyer to extend a sympathetic shoulder. After all, Illa was married to her husband through much of his atrocities and never knew about them until after his arrest. She knows better than most what it is to feel that shattering responsibility even when it isn’t yours to bear.
“Listos?” Xiomara asks once we’re at the top. Without letting go of my hand, Bran threads through the gathering until we’re standing with his parents. “Bueno.” And with that, she and Paul take hold of the heavy lavender sheet over the marker and whip it away.
Lissi, Stanzi, and Amanda all let out startled giggles, clapping their hands over their mouths sheepishly. “It’s pink,” Lissi mumbles helplessly. “Oh, Tía, she’d love it.”
It is pink, a mottled sort of rose and carnation, with Faith’s name in large letters just below the curved top. There’s a circle cut out of the stone beneath her name, all the way through, and below that, the years of her birth and death. We don’t actually know what day she died. The journals she managed to keep—and keep secret—ended some months before her probable death. Whether she ran out of notebooks or simply got too sick to continue writing is something we’ll never know. They haven’t been released from evidence yet; I don’t know if Bran will ever read them, to be honest. Some things are better left unknown. Underneath the years is an elegant inscription in English, the Spanish version just below it.
“Is that . . . is that The Lord of the Rings?” I whisper.
Bran nods. “From one of Sam’s songs. I read to her every night. We’d already worked our way through The Hobbit and most of the trilogy. Sam was her favorite. She said of course he’d go to Mordor with Frodo. They were friends.”
Looking at her best friends wrapped around each other for comfort and support, I think she was in good company with that belief.
Ian comes forward, carefully kneeling in front of the stone with a cloth-wrapped something in his hands. He folds back the layers of fabric to reveal a small suncatcher, a nonglittery version of Faith’s necklace. They’ve been packing up his studio, aware that it would quickly become too dangerous for him to work the glass and kiln, even supervised. Very likely, this is Ian Matson’s last creation. With Bran’s assistance, he attaches it to tiny hooks within the open circle of the tombstone.
Oh, that’s perfect.
Ignoring the spitting mist, the extended family spreads out tarps and blankets and unloads the army of picnic baskets. Amanda settles next to Lissi and Stanzi, Lissi’s toddler on her lap, and opens a can of ginger ale. “Do you remember when Mrs. Santos was out on maternity leave and we had that horrible substitute? The one who was always so mean to the girls?”
“And Faith got all the boys to agree not to raise their hands, so he’d have to call on girls,” laughs Stanzi. She sprawls out across one end of that blanket, draped over her friends and fiancé in equal measure. “He called on the boys anyway.”
“And every time they said they didn’t know the answer.” Lissi grins, leaning back against one of the wheels on her chair. “It only took us, what, three weeks to break him? The librarian came to watch over us until Mrs. Santos returned.”
“I remember the night Faith talked us into letting her watch a horror movie while we were watching her,” Rafi offers, handing Bran a beer, even though it’s barely nine in the morning. “There’s Brandon, me, Manuelito, scared out of our minds and jumping at every sound and shadow, and little Faith is sitting there shaking her head, bored out of her mind. Wasn’t scared at all.”
The hilltop is alive with laughter and chatter, a mixture of Spanish and English. One of Xiomara’s cousins converted to Judaism to marry her husband, and she and Illa settle happily into a comparison of Yiddish and Ladino. Shira gloms onto Cass and Mercedes, who she’s met a few times and heard of endlessly, and Mercedes’s girlfriend, Ksenia. They sit with a handful of cousins telling stories about one of Faith’s trips to Puerto Rico, and how frustrated she got at strangers assuming she was a tourist, asking where her family was, and how quickly her frustration turned to mischief. Shira follows along with the English, watching wide-eyed during the frequent drifts into Spanish, but Ksenia speaks softly in her classroom-classical Spanish with a Ukrainian accent.