I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(29)

“I won’t sell it,” I said, so quickly that my mother gave me a surprised glance, and even Eloisa Dunne’s eyes widened briefly and blinked once in her otherwise motionless cameo face.

“‘Sometimes, in order to hold your own, you need a place of your own,’” I said. “Oh, Edith.”

“Clare?” said my mother, frown lines between her eyes.

“It’s what she said to me. Light and space all my own. A place to breathe easy. I told her I used to carry my safe place around with me like a turtle, but then, when I got involved with Zach, I somehow stopped.”

I stared at my mother in wonder.

“So she gave you one,” my mother said, softly. “An almost total stranger talked you out of your engagement to the wrong man and then gave you a safe place to go. Unbelievable.”

“Yes. It is unbelievable.” I thought for a moment. “Or it should be. Somehow, though I didn’t expect this at all and I know it’s rare and even sort of crazy, it’s somehow believable anyway. Because of Edith. Because of how she was.”

“How was she?” asked my mother.

“I don’t know. Bigger than the rest of us. Overarching. More part of things than regular people. And more knowing.”

“Maybe because she was dying,” said Eloisa Dunne.

I stared at her. With her foggy, faraway eyes and turned-inward expression, she suddenly didn’t look like a robot at all.

“My mother did that, in her last days,” she went on. “Became intuitive, as if she’d tapped into some cache of understanding the rest of us couldn’t get anywhere near. And she was so peaceful. I’m sure she didn’t actually glow. But in my memories of her, she’s glowing.”

The three of us sat there, considering whether death’s nearness could transform a person, whether it could maybe turn their personal borders watery and permeable so that more of the world got in. Eloisa was the first to snap back to herself. She slid a manila envelope out from under her stack of legal papers, unfastened it with one quick motion, and handed it to me.

I looked inside. Keys, a lot of them, each one tagged. I turned the envelope over and spilled the keys onto the conference table, then fanned them out with my hands. Front door. Back door. Cabinet One. Cabinet Two. Fireproof box. And so forth.

“I wonder,” I said, slowly.

“What do you wonder?” asked my mother.

I smiled. “I’m going to sound crazy again, and maybe it’s just me projecting all of this stuff onto Edith. Probably. That would make sense. But anyway, I feel as if, in addition to giving me the house, she’s giving me herself. I think she wants me to discover who she was.”

“And you wonder if one of these keys—?” said my mother.

“Exactly. I wonder if one of them will unlock Edith. I hope so. I had exactly three encounters with her, none of them long, but I hope so. I hope so so much.”





Chapter Eleven

Edith





August 1952



It was during what they both knew would be their last canoe trip together that Joseph made her promise to live.

“And by live I mean all the way, with all your heart and soul.”

“If there is any of either left,” she said, but she canceled out the rueful words with a broad smile because she would not, could not, had sworn not to since he’d first fallen so ill, give him cause to fear for her.

“My precious Edie,” he said, “you must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that’s who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it’s what makes you happiest.”

“Not to someone,” she said, firmly. “And you may as well not even try to talk me out of that, mister, because you won’t, not if you throw every ounce of your charm at me. You are my only someone. I will stay devoted to you and to no one else, ever. That’s that.”

He eyed her skeptically. “I’m not so sure, but never mind. Something then. Find something. Of course, the world should cherish you in return, but that will take care of itself. Nothing in the wide world is easier than loving you.”

“Says you,” she teased.

Joseph laughed and she could see his features tighten with pain, watched his right hand grope vaguely at his back, felt the canoe move side to side as he shifted his big, newly angular body in search of the comfortable position she knew he wouldn’t find, and there it was: the sensation of spinning on a cliff’s edge, the tearing, metallic screech of losing him forever gripping the back of her throat. She looked away from her husband, squinted at a bird flying low above the water until she felt the canoe’s wobbling cease.

She pointed. “A shearwater. Not a very elegant bird, really, all that stiff-winged teetering, like a seesaw.”

“Unlike you, my elegant bird,” said Joseph, reaching for her hand. She set down her oar and clasped his hand, which had grown thinner but was somehow still square and strong and familiar.

It was she—and not the nurse but the lover—who had noticed the first symptoms: the faint yellowing of his eye whites and skin (she saw it earliest on the pale places untouched by sun, like a pollen stain on the smooth skin across his hip bones and the tops of his thighs), and a new articulation of his ribs and cheekbones and spine and wrists. Such slight changes, but she had taken his body apart—focusing on one tiny piece of him at a time—and put it back together so often, with her camera and her eyes, and had mapped the intricate, stretched-out landscape of him with her own bones and muscles and nerve endings so many times and with such absorption that she detected what most people would have missed.