Текст книги "Fear Itself"
Автор книги: Duffy Prendergast
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
4
Because our house was considered a crime scene the hotel was our home for several more nights. For Sarah this was a treat. On Monday morning she went swimming in the Olympic sized indoor swimming pool with its warm water which looked as though it had been dyed with a mixture of blue and green food coloring. The building that housed the pool was actually an enormous greenhouse, attached to the hotel structure as it was, with clear glass panels from floor to gabled ceiling and humid tropical air, with potted palm trees, beautiful blooming white Bamboo Orchids, green and red Ti plants and colorful Bird of Paradise. I sat and watched Sarah do what she considered dives but were actually belly-flops and half summersaults. The weather was unusually sunny, if not warm, so inside the faux tropic we lost ourselves for a few hours.
After Sarah’s morning swim we returned to our room by way of the stainless steel walls and the low hum of the creaky lobby elevator. I sat on the edge of the bed and I lifted the receiver of the lime-green push– button telephone which rested on the night– stand and I spent my day phoning: phoning Sarah’s school to let her teachers know the reason for her absence (The principle, Mrs. Tercek, who had of course watched the news and was already aware of Catherine’s death, was too polite and too understanding, her nasally voice pryingly); phoning my employer to keep abreast of my work and to keep my supervisor informed of my status; phoning a lawyer named Jack Nicholson—no joke…Jack Nicholson—who my boss insisted was “the best criminal lawyer in Ohio”; phoning the coroner to find out when Catherine’s body would be released for the funeral arrangements (no clear answer was given, of course); phoning the funeral parlor to inquire as to the costs involved and the payment arrangements available to me for the whole funeral process from pick-up to interment; phoning Amber (temporarily out of service); and finally, phoning the police station to find out if they had determined the cause of Catherine’s death, inquiring as to whether or not we could return to our abode (we could not), and whether or not they planned to incarcerate me any time soon (the answer was deliberately vague). All the while Sarah quietly but cheerfully watched cartoons and colored the pages of a coloring book almost the thickness of a phone book and paid no attention to my labors.
Sarah’s youth and innocence, I supposed, had spared her from the constant quotient of the pain of our loss. I, on the other hand, was fatigued to the point that I yawned long open-mouthed yawps on a continuous basis, sometimes in mid-sentence, and my body felt like a bag of sand my mind was condemned to drag from chair to bedside to bathroom and back again in a solemn attempt to maintain my focus on my various tasks. The only benefit I derived from my day, aside from the little fruit of my labor, was that I was so distracted that I hardly thought about how much I missed Catherine.
To be honest, though, I was a bit disturbed by the fact that Sarah was so easily able to remove herself from Catherine’s departure; but I was also relieved that she was not burdened as I was with the crushing weight of our rapidly collapsing universe. Besides, I thought, who was I to judge her? She would grieve in her own way and time, and if God saw fit to soften the blow to this beautiful flower of mine, who was I to scrutinize?
Sarah was a unique child. At home she was in her comfort zone. She would talk as though she were a little adult about the strangest things. But at school her teachers complained that Sarah was shy and reluctant to be called upon to answer questions in class. Sarah was so afraid to draw any attention to herself that she once peed in her pants while squirming at her desk hoping for the bell to ring so that she could rush to the bathroom. A boy sitting next to her stood up and laughed at her and yelled out to the teacher that Sarah had peed on the floor. Sarah cried in embarrassment as her classmates chuckled and jeered. The teacher did her best to comfort Sarah and she telephoned me on my cell phone to bring Sarah a change of clothes. Later that day, despite her shy demeanor, Sarah walked up to that boy in the playground and kneed him in the testicles and asked him, while he was wreathing in pain on the pavement, if he still felt like laughing. Sarah’s teacher called me again and asked me to come pick Sarah up at school for the obvious disciplinary purpose.
And when I say that Sarah needed me, you must understand the bond we’d shared since her harrowed birth to truly understand how much she needed me and I her. She was born blue, with a broken heart. Her heart was underdeveloped. The lower two chambers of her heart were undersized and the natural opening between the chambers that should have allowed blood to flow did not exist in her heart. When the doctor lifted her from between
Catherine’s parted legs Sarah was the color of a blueberry. The doctor didn’t say a word. She didn’t say “It’s a girl!” or “Congratulations!”
She just went to work on Sarah to get her breathing. She held her up in the air by her ankles and smacked her little bare bottom, then she walked over to a side table and laid Sarah down on a blanket and she started to gently pump Sarah’s chest with her palm. She blew breaths into her tiny mouth while she pinched her nose. A nuclear war could have occurred in the time it took for Sarah to howl her first cry and I wouldn’t have known about it. Everything happened in slow motion. The delivery room went silent, as if someone had hit the mute button on the remote. I mean I couldn’t hear a sound until Sarah began to wail.
The last time I had had that feeling was during the first of Sarah’s surgeries to repair her damaged heart. Just as the doctor held the mask over her face to put her under Sarah screamed “No!” and then begged me “Please daddy, no, please daddy no.”
“It’ll be alright honey. I’ll be right here with you.” I said as they forced the anesthetic mask over her face and her eyes opened wide in sincere terror. Sarah was four years old at the time. If she had died during surgery I would have died along with her.
Catherine often complained because I would let Sarah fall asleep in our bed. I would, of course, carry her to her own bed soon after she had drifted off to sleep, but Sarah would slip back into our bed in the morning. You can imagine how this affected our love-life, and I knew that it wasn’t the healthiest thing for Sarah’s emotional growth either, for Sarah to spend so much time with me, but I had come so close to losing her at birth and during the ensuing surgeries that I just wanted to hold her whenever I had the chance. Catherine’s rants only served to make Sarah jealous.
Okay, so my marriage wasn’t perfect, but whose marriage is? That was the only real problem Catherine and I had ever had.
* * *
Time passed amazingly fast during my phone-fest and before I could begin to relax it was dark outside.
Sarah and I could have gone out and eaten fast food, but by that time it was, after all, dark outside, and I wasn’t sure if Sarah’s companionship would stave off the demons; and besides I had more credit at my disposal than cash, so we ordered room service: a simple feast of grilled American cheese on white toasted bread and chicken soup. A stainless steel serving cart was wheeled into our room by a lanky pimple faced teenage boy in a hunter– green uniform, including a dink, with orange– red hair and a rash of freckles sprinkled over his arms, neck and cheeks. He waited impatiently, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, removing his cap and running his fingers through his spiked hair, while I surveyed our meal, signed the receipt and applied a reasonable tip to the bill. Sarah cowered shyly behind me while the boy bellman playfully peeked around me and smiled.
We ate ravenously at the round wooden table beneath the cheap brass chandelier with the florescent bulbs protected by the clouded glass globes by the window overlooking the parking lot. I did not realize until the scent of the melted cheese reached my nostrils that I was famished, and I supposed that Sarah was as well. I began my meal by sipping my soup from a stainless steel soup spoon but soon found myself dunking my sandwich into the soup and swallowing large tufts of melted processed cheese and bread dripping with broth. I polished off my bowl of soup by pouring the contents into my gullet straight from the white porcelain saucer. When I was finished I guiltily eyed Sarah’s remaining meal with envy but I suppressed my urge to steal her food until she had consumed all but a length of crust which she cast aside as unpalatable. I proved to her that the scrap she had discarded was in fact edible.
After I had sopped up the last of Sarah’s soup gravy with the crust I had stolen from her and absorbed the last of the buttery crumbs of our meal with the tips of my fingers, I tucked Sarah into our bed and laid down beside her and stared at the ceiling (it had become as familiar to me as I supposed the Mona Lisa was to Leonardo Da Vinci).
“Can we stay here Daddy? I had fun today.”
“We’ll see.” It was easier to be ambiguous than to engage her with an explanation.
“Can we go swimming again tomorrow?”
“Sure, if we get up early.”
“I wish Mommy could come here and live with us. We could go swimming every day.”
“That would have been nice.”
Sarah slid up next to me and put her arm over my chest. “But now I have you all to myself lover.” She said.
This statement caught me off guard. The knot in my stomach tightened just a bit, like a tourniquet on a gushing wound. Not, as one might suspect, because of Sarah’s reference to me as lover, but rather because she had found a benefit to Catherine’s death. Her words were a bit too Oedipal in nature.
The fact that Sarah called me “lover” might sound outrageous to the outside observer, but it was a term of endearment born of innocence. I have never and would never damage a child in such a way as her reference might suggest.
The fact of the matter was that one of my favorite, and therefore one of Sarah’s favorite, means of recreation was watching old black and white movies. Sarah would actually look forward to movie nights. Of course we made a major event of these frequent occasions fraught with healthy snacks such as popcorn soaked in real butter, bottomless colas, potato chips, pretzels, corn twisters and candy-bars. Sarah referred to these occasions as “dates” wishing apparently to duplicate the intimacy, of which she was obviously excluded. Sarah and I would cover the blue leather sectional couch, in our oak-shelved book-packed den that housed our twenty-nine inch television, with feather– pillows and quilted blankets. We would get comfortable with her on my lap and all of our amenities, including the remote control, on the wooden side table normally reserved for the jade chess-board. We would turn the lights off, of course, and we would watch what Sarah referred to as “black” movies until I slumped down deep into the sofa and dozed off and Sarah fell asleep on my chest.
Once, while watching an old musical, The Big Shakedown, Renee Whitney who played Mae Larue said to Richard Cortez who played Dutch Barnes “Hello lover” as Renee flared her thick eyebrows seductively. Sarah giggled and looked up at me. “Hello lover!” she said with just the right amount of flare and sass so that she tickled me to the bone. The way she flared her eyebrows when she repeated Renee’s line as well as at her ignorance to the meaning of what she had just said! Sarah looked so adorable. On subsequent movie nights, when we were alone, Sarah would say “Hello lover” just to get a tickle out of me, and I would chuckle and say it back to her, doing my best to flare my eyebrows as Richard Cortez would have done and doing my best to imitate his distinct gangster accent; a pathetic attempt I assure you but it made Sarah giggle and that is all that mattered. So, when we were alone together Sarah sometimes called me “lover” to make me laugh or to lighten my mood.
Sarah’s suggestion that she would have me all to herself caused a shortness of breath in my lungs and a tightness in my chest.
I knew that I would have little room to breath for a long time.
I looked over at Sarah who had fallen asleep at this point. Thank God for that; for my eyes began to pour all over her as I pulled her to my side and held her. I could not let her down. I could not let myself be weak. Not in front of her. I needed to be strong so that she bore none of the burden. She was a mere child and did not deserve to bear the massive cross that I was to carry.
Sarah would have me all to herself. If Sigmund Freud were with me he would have suggested that Sarah had killed Catherine to have me all to herself. Absurd, I know, but the thought did occur to me. But of course what would a seven year old child know of murder or its conveyance? Nothing, of course. But she would have possessed the naiveté to see the advantage in it.
5
Upon returning home the next day, I pulled into my driveway, the obvious signs of the intrusive blue invasion having mysteriously disappeared like water down a storm-drain, I felt as though spying eyes were upon me; in the wood surrounding my home or peering from behind parted curtains or peeping from behind parked cars in one of my neighbor’s driveways. I could hear a buzzing in my ears churning like the stir of bees in an agitated hive emanating from somewhere in the back of my scull.
I pulled Sarah, startling her awake from a sound sleep, across the console in preemptive defense from whatever was lurking whether real or imagined. She was still half asleep, tired no doubt from her morning swim. I made my way down the walk, stepping over, like a novice ballet dancer, an overturned skateboard and a landscape cinder, and opened the screen door with my free hand. I struggled to get my key into the front door latch while baring Sarah’s weight on my shoulder and darting my eyes from the lock to the bushes to the car and back to the lock. I really was a bit paranoid. But there was a killer on the loose, as far as I knew, and I didn’t want one of us to be the next victim.
I turned the key and nudged the door open with my knee and was welcomed by the odors of a house left unattended; the tang of dirty dishes still covered in globules of hardened grease and rotting chicken flesh, the remnants of our last supper; the once crispy residue of the soaking skillet left to soften overnight in an inch or so of water to decrust the leavings of our side-dish of potato pancakes; the musty smell of funky sweat-socks left over from a session of driveway basketball, one-on-one with a neighbor boy a third my age; and the faint medicinal smell of whatever trace forensic chemicals, imagined or real, that were left behind by the police investigative unit that had turned my house upside-down seeking clues with which to incriminate me. The living room was dark (the shades having been redrawn) except for what little light sifted through the white Venetian blinds that guarded our windows like flattened razors and the flicker of the florescent table lamp on the round glass table that sat in the far corner next to the entertainment center. The house was silent except for the hum of a cheap electric clock, simple and round with a gold rim and black letters on a white background, which sat atop the oak fireplace mantle.
I laid Sarah on the couch but she sat up, her sleep having worn thin. She patted the blue leather-covered cushion beside her, “Snuggle me.” She said.
“In a minute honey.” I resisted the guilt of a missed opportunity to comfort her in her most vulnerable state. I grabbed the television remote and found a cartoon and Sarah’s attention was quickly diverted.
I slipped into the hallway and leaned against my bedroom door-frame and stared at the spot where I had last made love to Catherine. The impression of her body appeared still on the side of the mattress where she had died, although the bed-sheet was missing; evidence I supposed. On my nightstand stood the quarter-empty bottle of scotch that I had drunk during the course of our last evening, Catherine’s and mine, of making love. The glass sat next to the bottle, half filled still, and I could taste the acrid flavor of whiskey condensed in the dry air of our house. On Catherine’s nightstand the decanter which held her alcohol of choice, white wine, was gone, along with the wine-glass she had used.
Poison, I thought? Why else would they take it?
I stepped into the room and I sat on the edge of the bed staring at the nightstand and wondering about the vacancy of its contents; wondering what the police had found; wondering how they would try to pin her death on me. I was the husband; therefore I had killed her. That would have been my first thought as an impartial interloper. And my fingerprints would be on the decanter. I brought the wine from the fridge. My fingerprints would also have been on the glass. I poured her first glass of wine after lighting the plum scented candle and placing it on her nightstand. The candle was also missing. If Catherine were poisoned what kind of potion could it have been that she would not have detected it through the wine?
Just being in the room made me yawn with the exhaustive weight of Catherine’s absence. I pulled my pillow from my side of the bed (Catherine’s pillow, I noted, was also missing) and I laid back settling my head on the cool pillow case. I pulled my cell phone from my pants pocket and I dialed Amber’s phone number for the umpteenth time. I was startled to hear it ringing and I closed my phone, shutting it off, not knowing what I would say to her, my mysterious murderous phone lover?
I dialed Amber’s number again. I had to know.
“Hello lover!” Were her disturbing words. I never mentioned to Amber the private joke I shared with Sarah.
But still the sound of Amber’s voice, as a reflexive reaction like a spark to gunpowder, un-willfully aroused me. Her voice was the equivalent of sex; of dirty words and sentences whispered in quiet, safe, alone places; words, which when spoken in person, invoked a blush of discomfort, as if unnatural, a part of a blue movie. But the sound of her voice invoked a noxious mixture of both delectation and disturbed morbidity. Her voice to me now that I had reason to question her character represented both euphoric exhilaration and murderous malfeasance; life and death.
“Where have you been?” My voice was parched and choked, the sound of her voice having scorched the saliva from my mouth. I withheld my desire to ask her if she had killed my wife. I wasn’t utterly sure that Amber had not had a hand in Catherine’s death. I wasn’t yet sure if I was angry with her; if I had reason to be angry with her; if I had reason for wanting her to die an agonizing death of retribution.
“Why? Did you miss me?” Her voice was deliberately low and gravely. She was trying to sound sexy but her tone was tinny and cautious.
“Of course I missed you,” My voice was purposely monotone. I didn’t want to betray my mistrust, and I didn’t quite know how to ask what I had to ask. She had a way of disarming me; of turning me into a little boy; a submissive. But being sex talked in the bed that I once shared with my wife was just wrong. Letting myself be sex-talked at all was wrong and now brought on pangs of guilt and made me angry with Amber for enticing me and angry at myself for being weak enough to be enticed.
“Does little Mathew want to come out and play? I’m alone and I’ve misplaced my panties. What to do…what to do?” She drew a deep breath and exhaled as if exhausting a gust of cigarette smoke. “Just the sound of your voice makes me hot, lover. Do you feel up to the task, Mathew? Are you excited?”
“No.” I lied.
“We’ll have to do something about that. Goddd, the sound of your voice… I’m so wet Mathew. We haven’t done this in days! Tell me what you’ll do to me Mathew. Be a good boy and make love to me with that sexy voice of yours.”
“Catherine is dead.” I didn’t know how else to package my words, but her attempt to arouse me made me feel pathetic. Besides Amber wasn’t letting me get a word in edgewise. The phone went silent. “Are you still there?” I asked.
“Mathew, ‘Catherine’s dead’ is not going to get me off.” Her tone was sarcastic and no longer sexy.
“She is dead. The police think that I killed her.”
“That’s terrible.” Her voice rose in pitch to an un-sultry crescendo. “You’re serious, aren’t you Mathew?”
“Yes.” I was deliberately succinct. I wanted to hear her ramble; to get a sense of her demeanor; to judge her by her words and the tone of her voice; innocence or guilt.
“Oh Mathew, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was normal; concerned; higher pitched. Amber the friend had taken over the conversation. “If I had any idea I would never have…said what I said. But how can they think that you killed her? You’re a sweetheart. You wouldn’t hurt a soul. How could they think such a thing?” “I don’t know.”
“Oh Mathew, is there anything I can do for you. I am truly sorry. I know that we’ve never met in person, but I feel as though I’ve known you all of my life. I mean we’re friends, right?” She drew an empathetic sigh,
“Mathew, I can’t imagine how you must feel; and your daughter. The poor thing…”
“I know. It’s okay.” I drew a deep breath. As unscientific as my method was, I could tell that Amber hadn’t a clue. I could tell that she had nothing to do with Catherine’s death. “But the police have brought you into this. They think that I killed Catherine to be with you.”
“How smart of them.” Amber drawled out the vowels in a flippant tone.
“They never called you then?”
“How could they have? My cell phone’s been out of commission for almost a week; something about not paying the bill. Anyway, it’s Charlie’s fault whatever it was. And I don’t have a landline…Oh Goddd!” she gasped, “Charlie! Do you think they might have spoken to Charlie? He’s been acting so strange. He’s been giving me dirty looks. He hasn’t spoken to me for a few days now! God, I hope they haven’t talked to Charlie! He’d kill me if he knew about us.”
“Calm down Amber. It’s okay. How could they know anything? All they know is that we’ve talked; the phone record. We’ve conducted business. That’s all.”
“Oh, yeah…I suppose your right. I don’t know what’s gotten into Charlie lately.” “The police told me that you came to Cleveland.”
“How theatrical. And you believed them I suppose?”
My silence betrayed me.
“Thank you very much Mathew!” I could tell that she was hurt.
“I feel awful for believing them, if that makes you feel better.”
“Of course it does.” I could sense her smiling. “That seems a little over the top though. Did they think they were making a television show? I mean how dramatic!”
“I don’t know. They had me wondering.”
“You didn’t really think that I…” She laughed softly with a girlish sort of giggle,
“Mathew, really. Did you think that little ole Dorothy flew down from Kansas in her house, riding a cyclone, and landed on the wicked witch of the north? Come on now Mathew, you’re not being serious?”
“I only wondered for a moment. The cop was pretty convincing.”
“It sounds so ridiculous Mathew.” She drafted a deep sigh. “You must be devastated though. I know you loved Catherine very much. I hope you don’t feel guilty about what we did. They were only words Mathew. We didn’t actually fuck you know.”
“In my mind we did.”
“Mine too, but that doesn’t count, now does it?”
“Well…”
“Come on now, does it?” “No, I guess not.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve wanted to screw your brains out since I first spoke to you. Something about that low sexy voice of yours. But it’s not like you live around the corner lover. I’d cheat on Charlie with you in a heartbeat. But words are words. You shouldn’t feel guilty. You said yourself that our little tryst had made you fall in love with Catherine all over again.”
“It did. Not that we were having any real problems, but we were getting bored with each other.”
I heard a door clang shut over the telephone. “That’ll be Charlie. I have to go. But call me if you need to talk lover; any time.” Her voice was reduced to a hurried whisper.
The line went dead.
* * *
Catherine’s wake was a one night stand. I didn’t expect a great many people to come because Catherine had drifted apart from most of her childhood friends and we had only a few mutual friends. We mostly kept to ourselves. I expected her parents to come, as well as her older brother Tom who lived in Denver Colorado and a few of our respective workplace friends, my boss, her boss, and a few others; beyond that, a curious neighbor, perhaps, but not much else.
Sarah and I sat on two tarnished brass metal frame chairs with mustard colored cushions near the threshold of the parlor where Catherine’s body lay in a shiny marble-grey colored polymer casket with brass colored handles (the best of the economical line and a steal at nine-hundred dollars, said the clerk, as though he were selling convertibles instead of caskets). The room was decorated in nineteen sixties yellows and oranges. A small electric organ sat in the corner of the partition that separated us from the other half of the parlor where a Mr. Francis Thomas lay silently in wait for his wake. The high ceilings were adorned with white plaster crown moldings laced with angels holding hands and otherwise spiritually occupied with harps and trumpets and swords. The carpet was a commercial grade the color of blood speckled with yellow and orange which matched the painted yellow walls. There were no windows and as such the odors of embalmed bodies from multiple generations of the dead must have been trapped inside the walls, floors and ceilings of the rooms, much like the endless parade of corpses themselves were trapped inside their respective coffins. The room was lighted with small, inexpensive garish brass chandeliers evenly spaced about ten feet apart in rows of two. Some recorded organ music hummed softly and mysteriously from speakers hidden from our view. The musical arrangements were the sort of dreary organ pieces you’d expect to hear in a Belalagosi horror movie.
Catherine lay in her coffin with eyes closed in her favorite blue dress, a flowing silk party gown with white lace adorning the cuffs neck and hem-line. Her face was heavily made with cover-up and eye-shadow and mascara. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was done to cover up the damage done to her during her autopsy. The image of scalpels and saws and liquid filled syringes sucking the fluids from Catherine’s vacant shell played in my mind; ashes to ashes, my sole consolation. They must have cut her up good in search of clues with which to coral the sole suspect of the crime: me. Her face never needed make-up of any sort, although Catherine often wore a bit of blush on her cheeks and some pink lipstick.
The picture I provided to the mortician would surely have born this out. Catherine’s hair was wavy and her thick dark locks flowed down across her bosom. She was beautiful in death despite the mortician’s best efforts.
Sarah was attired in a lacey black dress that Catherine’s mother had had delivered by phantom express or some such means. It showed up on our doorstep in a plain brown box, taped with duct-tape, on the day we were permitted to move back home. It came with a pair of dull black flat shoes and a pair of dark grey socks and a black sun-bonnet with a grey ribbon. I battled my instinct to pitch the clothes into the trash receptacle out of spite; but truth be told I was too exhausted with grief to assemble an outfit for Sarah on my own, so I set my ego aside and I succumbed to Catherine’s parent’s wishes. Sarah looked awkwardly cheerful in her bleak ensemble. When Catherine’s parents arrived Sarah smiled as she ran to them.
“Gramma!” Sarah hugged Rita with delight, as if she were greeting her at a wedding.
Rita, Catherine’s mother, glared at me as she hugged Sarah. Rudy, Catherine’s father, averted my eyes and hung his head low. I had had a pretty good relationship with Rudy before Catherine’s death and I wanted to talk to him, to explain to him that I had not killed his precious little girl. But I could tell by the droop of his head that he was not permitted to talk to me; that such an act would be considered treasonous and punishable by emotional banishment; a sentence that Rudy was not willing to risk.
My boss, Tom Mills, followed Rita and
Rudy into the parlor and the usual condolences followed along with an obligatory reassurance and support for me. To my surprise a line of visitors soon formed and the parlor was filled with the low muffled murmur of mixed conversations; hearty greetings between parties who, lost in the moment, had forgotten that they were at a wake; subtle sniffles of grief from friends of Catherine’s as they recounted childhood memories with thick southern accents; whispers of murder and suggestions, spoken too loudly, of the probability of my guilt. There were, of course, the obligated guests who whisked in and out as quickly as they could sign the guest register. The truth is that the evening could not have ended soon enough for me. Sarah flitted about like a sprite, too joyful for the occasion; but I was want to admonish her – happy for her that she was not in the throes of grief. I overheard Catherine’s brother Tom, who bumped around in a battery– powered chrome wheelchair, mention to Marianne that Sarah “did not appear to miss her mother too badly”, but rather than reprimand him as I would have liked I opted instead for peace.
Later after the family priest, a portly balding piggish man by the name of Father Johns, had conducted a solemn service and all of the guests had gone home I watched as Sarah glided up to Catherine’s casket, with her all too gleeful demeanor, stop and stare for the first and last time at her mother. She looked at Catherine quietly and after a few moments she started to cry, and then to sob. She turned and ran to me leaping up into my arms and continued to cry on my shoulder in subdued sniffles.
