Grandpa shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess anything could be a name. I’ll give them what we have and hope more comes from him over time. For now, everything will stay as is.”
“But what about the poison? Did he say anything, give you any clues to what might have happened?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Dr. Patrick believes he won’t accept that. He’ll only accept being sick.”
I thought a moment. “So someone he trusted might have done it?”
“Maybe.” He paused and then added, “That’s what Dr. Patrick thinks.”
“How horrible.”
“Yeah, it’s a mess.” He stood up. “Get started if you want. We’ll finish after dinner tonight, unless you had other plans. It is Saturday night.”
“No, I’m staying home to do this. With you,” I added. “And we’ll have our usual celebration dinner.”
He smiled, and then he came over and kissed me on the cheek. “Sometimes I think I’m looking right at your mother and I’m twenty years younger.”
The tears that came to my eyes wouldn’t let me speak. I watched him leave, and then I turned back to the tree and to Willie’s toy village. How could anything so beautiful cause someone to panic?
Where had he been?
What had happened to him?
Did I want to know? Maybe it was better to leave it all in some sort of limbo. On the other hand, what right did I or any of us have to keep him from his family?
Even if they didn’t want him? I asked myself.
How could they possibly not want him? But why weren’t they looking for him?
Maybe they were all dead.
These gruesome thoughts were discordant notes rung in the presence of our Christmas tree and the electric trains and tiny village. I plugged everything in and watched the trains start around slowly. Willie’s look of joy lit up my mind and pushed those dark thoughts away. My doing what he loved brought him back beside me.
Of course, he faded away again.
After you lost someone you loved, memory was a painful thing, even for the dead.
Thornton Wilder was right in his play Our Town. We had read it last year aloud in class, and everyone, even the boys, had tears in their eyes when Emily Webb returned to watch the living. The narrator warned her not to. He said the dead gradually lost interest in the living. They went on to something else, and memory only slowed that down. She would only suffer more.
I had to go on to something else.
And maybe Count Piro also had to.
Maybe he would reach out for my hand and let me help him step out of the darkness.
Would I take hold?
18
“How pretty. There’s a phone call for you,” Myra said. She had come up behind me without my knowing and stood silently for a few moments taking in the work on and around the tree that I had completed.
“The phone rang?”
Aaron had said he would be calling, pressuring me to do something with him, but I thought he would at least wait until tomorrow.