As Bright as Heaven(108)

“Your father asked me to come over this morning to help him move this man. I knocked at the back door, but I guess he couldn’t hear me.”

“Oh. Papa’s making some phone calls in the other part of the house. I’m sure he’ll be finishing up soon.”

Jamie nods and steps in all the way. He looks at the cadaver. “You did a nice job,” he says. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”

“You couldn’t tell what killed him,” I reply, downplaying my restorative work. “I’ve worked on far worse.”

He smiles a gentle grin. “You always did like to fix things.”

I’m sure Jamie intends for it to be a compliment, but it feels like some kind of indictment. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Not at all. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about you.” He steps closer to me so that he is now standing at my side, our elbows nearly touching. “I’m so sorry about Alex. I wanted to come see you a few days ago. Evie didn’t think it was a good idea.”

A lump instantly materializes in my throat at the mention of Alex’s name while my heart begins to beat a little faster at Jamie’s concern for me. “I don’t want it to be like this,” I whisper.

“Of course you don’t.”

“No one ever came for him,” I continue, almost as if I am saying this to the dead man who doesn’t know me at all rather than to Jamie, who seems to know everything about me. “I thought Alex was ours. I thought God had given him to us in exchange for taking Henry.”

“I know.”

“I thought that girl was dying. She looked like she was dead already. I thought she’d crawled off the sofa where I had first seen her and died on the floor in her mother’s room. I didn’t want to go in and see. You wouldn’t believe what I had seen already. The bodies in Uncle Fred’s hallway and on the stoop and in the viewing parlor. Always more and more.”

Jamie puts an arm around me, like we are comrades on the battlefield, like he knows exactly what I mean, because surely he does.

But he hadn’t lied like I had.

“I told my own mother that I didn’t remember where I had found him,” I say, my voice breaking and hot tears filling my eyes.

“Yes,” he says.

“I lied. To Mama. To Papa. To Evie and Willa. To Mrs. Arnold. The police. I lied to everyone. And look what my lying has done. I can’t fix this. There is no fixing this.” A sob escapes me.

He turns me around to face him. “Look at me, Maggie.”

I swallow a sob and force myself to meet his gaze.

“It is being fixed. Slow but sure, it’s being fixed, right now, right as we’re standing here,” he said. “It won’t happen in one day or one week or even one year. I’ve learned that in my years away. I came back from the war wanting everything to go back to the way it was before I’d left, the very moment I got home. But the war was real and terrible, and I was swept up into every ugly aspect of it. It is now a part of the story of my life, just like finding Alex is part of the story of your life, as is having to give him back. You want to fix what hurts the moment it starts hurting, but this time you’re going to have to embrace the slowness of healing. You’ll never be able to live with this part of your story until you realize you must make peace with what happened to you and your part in it. And that takes time.”

I know he is right. I know he is speaking to me out of his own experience, which was surely far more hellish than my own. But I don’t know how to go slow. I see something shattered and I want to glue it back together this second. And I don’t know how to accept my own part when it caused so much suffering.

“But what I did . . . ,” I begin, but I can’t continue.

“What you did may have had consequences that pierce you now,” Jamie says, “but just think for a moment what might have happened if you hadn’t found Alex that morning, if you had stayed home instead of going with your mother.”

“I don’t know. No one knows!”

Jamie tips my chin up so that I must look into his eyes and hear his words. “Isn’t it possible, even probable, that Alex would have died? Isn’t it likely he would have caught the flu from Ursula? Who would have come to his house that day if you hadn’t? Not the father—he was away at the war. Not the grandparents—they were estranged from their son and his family at the time. Not the dead mother’s extended family, because she didn’t have any. Evie told me this is how it was. I don’t think anyone else would have come that day.”

I had to ponder this a moment. I had saved Alex. Perhaps he was alive today only because I’d taken him back then. Perhaps, for now, the knowledge of that would have to be enough.

“You see?” Jamie said. “We only see a little bit of our stories at a time, and the hard parts remind us too harshly that we’re fragile and flawed. But it isn’t all hard. Your story isn’t all hard parts. Some of it is incredibly beautiful.”

He’s looking into my eyes now, and his hand is still on my chin. I can almost taste his lips on mine. When he doesn’t move in, I do. I bend toward Jamie to kiss him, and when I am mere inches away, he turns his head.

“You belong to another,” he says hoarsely, as though it hurts him to say it.