(The title of this post may ring a bell for those who remember the old daytime soap operas. I used to watch them with my mom.)
The countdown continues toward the release of That the Dead May Rest! Since I haven't posted the cover in a while, here it is again.
First up: Emma. If you've been following along, you'll have read the post where I briefly introduced her. Here's the second scene from her POV (point of view), which comes immediately after our introduction to Rosie in yesterday's post.
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Emma was trying to write a letter to her son. If people knew, they’d shake their heads and say sympathetically that she must be too grief-stricken, or simply too old, to know how pointless it was. But what else could she do?
When Robert was alive, she had somehow thought it a better use of her time to clean the house, or look at pictures of her ex-husband, or do exercises, or search for new clients, or do any number of things rather than to write to him. There would always be time later. She might deserve the agony that made up her days and her nights, for so idiotically assuming there would be time.
It was still hard to find things to say when she no longer had news to tell him, or new books to recommend, or any advice to give. Nor could she ask him about his day, or his job, or whether he had gotten serious about some woman, or when he would come to see her.
If she had written to him then, when he was still there to read it, would he have written back? What would he have said? Would his letters have been impatient, as he sometimes had been when she phoned him more than once a day? Or would he have been kind? If she closed her eyes, she could almost see his jagged handwriting slanting across the page, starting with Dear Mom. . . .
She closed her eyes, imagining it, and didn’t open them until she felt a strange spasm in her hand, almost as if her pen had twitched. On the page, under her own cramped handwriting, there was a line slanting down from left to right, a line she hadn’t meant to write. A line starting with an uneven shape, a sort of squashed circle, almost like a D.
Was she seeing things? Was the twitch in her hands the beginning of some sort of seizure? She should be frightened, but she was too tired to care. She left the letter on the table and shuffled to her bedroom. There was nothing, after all, more worth doing than to sleep.
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A little later, Emma tries again.
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An evening and night of fitful, interrupted sleep had left Emma both exhausted and restless, a miserable combination. She tried cleaning house, but could only manage the energy for the easiest jobs — the jobs she did more often, which didn’t need doing again. She reread her grocery list and added a couple of items she might never use, then one more that she almost never allowed herself — dark chocolate truffles. Maybe biting into a truffle would remind her what it felt like to enjoy something.
And then she gave up on all these useless ways of stalling, and sat down to write that letter to Robert.
She reached for the pad of stationery she’d been using, almost down to the last sheet, and saw that she hadn’t torn off the spoiled sheet from last time. She should call her doctor and get examined for conditions that could cause seizures. As she picked up the pen, she held it in the air for a minute, and then two. No tremors, no shaking. She got rid of the spoiled sheet, pulled the fresh sheet toward her, and started to write.
Dear Robert,
Last fall’s leaves are still on the lawn, and how I wish
The pen jerked across the page again. And then, as she gripped it so tight her fingers hurt, it spelled out, in barely legible letters,
Mom Mom it’s me
She almost dropped the pen, but managed to catch it. She brought it to her lips and kissed it, then held it point down on the paper again, whispering, “Robert, oh, Robert, where are you?” But it didn’t matter, because now she knew that he was somewhere. “Never mind that, oh, my darling boy, what did you want to say?”
Mom, we need your help
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Today's preorder link is for Amazon.
Next time: Janna dreams about her sister -- and about tarot cards.
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