As Bright as Heaven(114)

He heads back to resume the work we were doing when the doorbell rang, but I want to fling open the door and run across the boulevard to the accounting office. I want to tell Jamie. Because this is what lovers do. When something good happens, and even when something bad happens, you want to share it with the person who holds your heart.

I will help Papa move the deceased woman into the parlor. I will make sure she looks as peaceful as a dreamer. I will position the flowers so that she will appear to have merely been found napping in a garden among the butterflies, and then I’ll run across the street to Jamie. When Willa comes home from school I’ll tell her that Alex is coming back to us, and maybe she will at last let go of the anger she guards like a prized possession. And when Evie comes home tonight, I will tell her, and I’ll ask how her grand experiment is going so far.

I don’t know what Alex’s return will mean for me and Jamie. Who can ever say to the letter what the future holds? It is the same with Evie and this man named Conrad whom she loves. We are all doing the best we can with what life hands us. That’s all we’ve ever been able to do. This is how we live our story.

Papa and I move the deceased woman into place. I look down at the body in the casket and tighten a curl on her forehead, straighten a fold, reposition a hand. There.

She is ready.





CHAPTER 68



? February 1926 ?





Willa


I set Mama’s hairbrush down on my dressing table as I stare into the mirror at my fifteen-year-old self. Fifteen! Finally. I used to think the space between the beginning of a year and the end of it stretched across time as far as one end of the sky to the other. But here I am, saying hello to fifteen, and it seems like just yesterday I was turning fourteen. I remember Mama saying to me once, when I told her everything took too long, that there’d come a day when I thought time went by so fast, I could barely catch my breath.

I didn’t believe her then, but I’m beginning to think maybe she was right. The new year is only a month old, and already it seems like it’s a vast improvement over the year we just had.

For one thing, Alex is back where he belongs. And not only that, but Ursula lives with us now, too. When Papa told me he was going to invite her to come take Evie’s room, my first thought was I didn’t want to have to share Alex with her. She is his actual sister, after all. But Papa said—and Evie and Maggie agreed—that Ursula had suffered too much in the past to be stuck with Rita and Maury in New Jersey all by herself. They’re not even related to her. The whole point of reuniting Alex with his family was to reunite him with her. And so it just made sense to ask her if she wanted to come live with us, too. And of course, Ursula did. She came two days after he did. And now that she no longer must work for a living, she’s not somebody’s maid anymore. She’s back in school. She’s way behind, though, so she’s in the same classes with me, even though she’s a year older.

Truth be told, I like Ursula. She’s kind of like Maggie, only not as bossy, and kind of like Evie, only not as smarty-pants. Since we have the same classes, we can study together, and she can help me with geometry, which I hate, and I can help her with French, which she’s terrible at.

And Alex? He’s just so happy to be home and to be Alex again—not Leo—and to have Ursula right next door in Evie’s room, and to be able to go across the street to the Sutcliffs’ for banana pancakes on Saturdays. He sees his father on Sundays, sometimes for overnights. His stepmother’s name is Trixie, which is a pretty fun name if you ask me, but she’s shy and quiet. I don’t think she knows what to make of all us Brights. Still, her and Cal’s baby is adorable. His name is Steven. I thought seeing Alex go off with Cal on weekends would make me mad, but it doesn’t because he always comes home to us.

Maggie and Jamie are courting now, which would have been weird when she was thirteen and he was twenty-one. But now that she’s going to be twenty-one in May and he’s already an old man at twenty-eight, no one cares. I can see why she loves him, though. He’s nice to her and Papa likes him. I think Papa likes him better than Palmer. Poor Palmer. Maggie broke his heart like you wouldn’t believe. Good thing there are plenty of eligible girls in Manhattan to help him forget her. Maggie feels bad about hurting him; I asked her if she did. But she told me it would have been more cruel to marry him when she loved someone else. I think when Maggie and Jamie marry, they will get their own place, but it won’t be far. Like maybe just down the street. I don’t think Maggie can be happy without Alex around. He’s more than just the baby she found all those years ago. He’s the proof that out of a great pile of ashes you can still find something that the fire didn’t take.

Evie just got married to that man whose first wife was a patient at the asylum. It was the shortest, quietest ceremony ever. Evie and Conrad just showed up at the courthouse in some new clothes, said their vows, and voilà, they were married. But first Conrad had to go all the way to Mexico to get a divorce so that he could marry Evie. His first wife, Sybil, is as crazy as they come. I’ve met her. Evie—if you can believe this—takes care of her when she’s not working at the asylum. In their house. Do you understand what I’m saying? Sybil, the first wife, lives in the house, too. Right there with her former husband and his new wife, who is Evie. Sad, pathetic Sybil sleeps down the hall from where Conrad and Evie sleep, in the room that used to be her bedroom. But Sybil is so far gone, she doesn’t care. Can you imagine? She is like a walking paper doll. She’s flat and empty.