After a while she would begin screaming with the pain, as Zelda had done, and then she would start wetting the bed, and finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. It was Zelda’s revenge.

No one could talk Rachel out of this belief-not her mother, her father, or Dr.

Murray, who diagnosed a mild backsprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some-Louis, for instance-would have said) to stop behaving so badly. She ought to remember that her sister had just died, Dr. Murray told her; her parents were prostrate with grief and this was not the time for Rachel to make a childish play for attention. Only the slowly abating pain had been able to convince her that she was neither the victim of Zelda’s supernatural vengeance nor God’s just punishment of the wicked. For months (or so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel’s hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back.

She had not attended Zelda’s funeral or any funeral since.

“If you’d told me this before,” Louis said, “it would have explained a hell of a lot.”

“Lou, I couldn’t,” she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now. “Since then I’ve been… I guess a little phobic on the subject.”

Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.

“I can’t… seem to help it. In my mind I know you're right, that death is perfectly natural-good, even-but what my mind knows and what happens… inside me…

“Yeah,” he said.

“That day I blew up at you,” she said, “I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea… a way of getting used to it… but I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Louis.”

“No apology needed,” he said, stroking her hair. “But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.”

She smiled. “It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that’s poisoned part of me for years.”

“Maybe you have.”

Rachel’s eyes slipped closed and then opened again.

slowly. “And don’t blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills-Zelda’s bills-were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off.

On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.

“Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda’s death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan, and since then he’s never looked back. But that’s why they’ve always been possessive of me, I think. It’s not just because I’m the only one left-”

“It’s guilt,” Louis said.

“Yes, I suppose. And you won’t be mad at me if I’m sick when they bury Norma?”

“No, honey, I won’t be mad.” He paused and then took her hand. “May I take Ellie?”

Her hand tightened in his. “Oh, Louis, I don’t know,” she said. “She’s so young-”

“She’s known where babies come from for a year or more,” he reminded her again.

She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips.

“If you think it’s best,” she said finally. “If you think it won’t… won’t hurt her.”

“Come over here, Rachel,” he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis’s bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay, and she slept again.

33

“For man-and woman-is like the flowers in the valley, which bloom today and are tomorrow cast into the oven: the time of man is but a season; it cometh, and so it passeth away. Let us pray.”

Ellie, resplendent in a navy blue dress bought especially for the occasion, dropped her head so abruptly that Louis, sitting next to her in the pew, heard her neck creak. Ellie had been in few churches, and of course it was her first funeral; the combination had awed her to unaccustomed silence.

For Louis, it had been a rare occasion with his daughter. Mostly blinded by his love for her, as he was by his love for Gage, he rarely observed her in a detached way; but today he thought he was seeing what was almost a textbook case of the child nearing the end of life’s first great developmental stage; an organism of almost pure curiosity, storing up information madly in almost endless circuits. Ellie had been quiet even when Jud, looking strange but elegant in his black suit and lace-up shoes (Louis believed it was the first time he had ever seen him in anything but loafers or green rubber boots), had bent over, kissed her, and said: “Glad you could come, honey. And I bet Norma is too.”

Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed.

Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace.

“Will the pallbearers come forward?” he asked.

Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically. She looked scared. “Daddy!” she stage-whispered. “Where are you going?”

“I’m one of the pallbearers, honey,” Louis said, sitting down beside her again for a moment and putting an arm around her shoulders. “That means I’m going to help carry Norma out. There are four of us that are going to do it-me and two of Jud’s nephews and Norma’s brother.”

“Where will I find you?”

Louis glanced down front. The other three pallbearers had assembled there, along with Jud. The rest of the congregation was filing out, some of them weeping.

“If you just go out on the steps, I’ll meet you there,” he said. “All right, Ellie?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just don’t forget me.”

“No, I won’t.”

He got up again, and she tugged his hand again.

“Daddy?”

“What, babe?”

“Don’t drop her,” Ellie whispered.

Louis joined the others, and Jud introduced him to the nephews, who were really second or third cousins… descendants of Jud’s father’s brother. They were big fellows in their twenties with a strong facial resemblance. Norma’s brother was somewhere in his late fifties, Louis guessed, and while the strain of a death in the family was on his face, he seemed to be bearing up well.

“Pleased to meet you all,” Louis said. He felt a trifle uncomfortable-an outsider in the family circle.

They nodded at him.

“Ellie okay?” Jud asked and nodded to her. She was lingering in the vestibule, watching.

Sure-she just wants to make sure I don’t go up in a puff of smoke, Louis thought and almost smiled. But then that thought called up another one: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. And the smile died.

“Yes, I think so,” Louis said and raised a hand to her. She raised hers in return and went outside then in a swirl of navy blue dress. For a moment Louis was uneasily struck by how adult she looked. It was the sort of illusion, no matter how fleeting, that could give a man pause.

“You guys ready?” one of the nephews asked.

Louis nodded; so did Norma’s younger brother.

“Take it easy with her,” Jud said. His voice had roughened. Then he turned away and walked slowly up the aisle with his head down.

Louis moved to the back left corner of the steel-gray American Eternal coffin Jud had chosen for his wife. He laid hold of his runner and the four of them slowly carried Norma’s coffin out into the bright still cold of February first. Someone-the church custodian, he supposed-had laid down a good bed of cinders over the slippery path of tamped snow. At the curb a Cadillac hearse idled white exhaust into the winter air. The funeral director and his husky son stood beside it, watching them, ready to lend a hand if anyone (her brother, perhaps) should slip or flag.