I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(70)

May held up her hand. “Stop. You should have done just what you did.”

“But—”

“She deserved her chance at freedom and a good life. And she may get it, yet. She’s young and has got good doctors and has her baby to live for. Sarah shot her husband to save her baby’s life and her own. Any woman who can do that has a fighting chance at the very least.”

“She can’t die. She just can’t.”

May reached out and moved a lock of Edith’s damp hair off her cheek, a brusque, tender act that made Edith, for the first time since she was a little child, miss her mother, of whom she had not a single clear memory.

“Don’t let yourself get worked up,” said May. “It isn’t good for you.”

Impulsively, Edith took May’s hand. “May, I promised Sarah that if anything happened to her, I would make sure Steven ended up with good people. I swore he would never live with her husband’s family. She said they were fiends.”

“Then Steven will be raised by her husband’s family over my dead body,” said May. She stated it like a simple fact, and Edith thought that it was the very absence of malice in her voice that made her fearsome.

“Over mine, too,” said Edith. “But I might have to leave before—before we know if Sarah will get well. As soon as I get word from back home that it’s safe, I’ll need to go back. If I stay away too long, people will begin to wonder about me.”

“Wherever you are, Thomas and I will make sure you keep your promise to Sarah. You have my word on that.”

Edith smiled. “You remind me of my friend John, who brought Sarah and Steven to me. The way you keep so calm and certain, as if there’s a peaceful river running through you.”

May smiled back. “Oh, but really it’s fierce and wild. It’s all I can do to keep it in check. I’ll bet John’s river is that way, too.”



The next morning, when Edith came downstairs, May told her that Thomas was bringing Sarah and Steven home.

“Oh, but that’s wonderful,” said Edith, confused by May’s grave expression.

“No,” said May. “She’s still very, very sick. Thomas said she had no business being anywhere but a hospital.”

“Why then?”

“One of the student nurses who doesn’t know about what we do accidentally entered Sarah’s room with a tray of food, despite the quarantine sign. Thomas and another nurse, one of ours, were in there with Sarah. They had forgotten to lock the door, you see. It’s hard to do everything right when you’re exhausted, and that quarantine sign should’ve been enough, but it wasn’t.”

“Oh, no,” said Edith.

“It may well be nothing. Thomas said the student nurse just blushed and stammered an apology and left, but even so, he thought it best to bring Sarah home.”

Later that morning, Thomas carried her into the house in his arms, stepping gingerly, jarring her as little as possible, but Sarah’s face was gray with pain, and she winced with every step. Still, Edith believed she looked a little bit better than she’d looked during the drive to Canada, more lucid. When her eyes met Edith’s, she moved her mouth, and although no sound came out, Edith knew Sarah was saying thank you.

Thomas took Sarah into the downstairs bedroom just off the living room, a room more like a closet, windowless, and too small to contain more than a bed and a leather armchair. May had made up the bed and set a crib for Steven in her own bedroom. Thomas would spend nights in the armchair, keeping watch.

After Sarah fell asleep, Thomas came into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and his mother brought him a plate of food. In the daylight, his face was drawn, exhausted, but still remarkably boyish; Edith thought that if he was out of his twenties, it wasn’t by much.

But when he spoke, he sounded like an old man: “I wish to God I hadn’t had to bring her here. I wish to God.”

*

Two days passed without any word from John.

“I’m sure a letter is on the way,” said May. “Don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” said Edith.

Even so, that night, Edith did worry, and the worry sent her mind darting like a dragonfly, unable to settle. Because sleep was impossible, she drew on the robe May had lent her and went down the back stairs in the dark, her feet feeling their way on the worn, silken wood, her hand holding firmly to the banister. When she got to the kitchen, she gasped at the transformation night had wrought on the cozy room. Moonlight spilled like mercury through the black branches of the maple tree outside the window, figuring crazy shadows on the walls and on the strawberry-print tablecloth, shadows that writhed and rippled as the wind blew. The linoleum gleamed like steel and burned the soles of her bare feet with cold. Edith felt heavy and dark in the middle of the mutable, quicksilvered room, like a rock on the bed of a flowing stream, and, as she stood there, she was filled with the presentiment that something was about to happen, something frightening, that she was about to be tumbled loose by a current and carried away.

You’re ridiculous, she scolded herself, you’re safe here in this house, and, as noiselessly as she could so as not to wake Thomas or Sarah or the baby, she began to open cupboards, searching for a water glass, but before she found one, she heard, from outside the kitchen windows, what she instinctively recognized as the crunch of footsteps on frozen grass, and panic gripped her.