“Dutch and I elected not to put her through the grueling treatments. We took her home and had six relatively normal weeks with her. Then the damn thing had a growth spurt. Symptoms appeared and progressed quickly until one morning she couldn’t swallow her orange juice. By lunch, other systems had begun to shut down. She would have had supper in the hospital, except that by then she had lapsed into coma. Early the following morning, she stopped breathing, then her heart beat one last time, and she was gone.”
Her gaze slid over to him and then toward the flames. “We donated her body for medical research. We thought it might do some good, maybe prevent other children from suffering the same rotten fate. Besides, I couldn’t bear the thought of sealing her inside a coffin. She was afraid of the dark, you see. Wouldn’t sleep without her night-light on. It was a little translucent angel, wings spread like a Christmas herald. I still have it and burn it every night myself. Anyway, I couldn’t fathom putting her into the ground.”
“We don’t have to talk about it, Lilly.”
“No, I’m all right,” she said, blotting tears off her cheeks.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’m glad you did. It’s actually good for me to talk about her, about Amy. My grief counselor emphasized how healthy it is for me to talk about it and to refer to Amy by name.” She met his steady gaze. “Curiously, after she died, few people would talk to me about her. Without quite looking me in the eye, they made euphemistic references to my ‘loss,’ my ‘sorrow,’ my ‘period of bereavement,’ but no one spoke Amy’s name out loud. I guess they thought they were sparing me sadness by avoiding the subject, when actually I needed to talk about her.”
“What about Dutch?”
“What about him?”
“How did he deal with it?”
“What do the gossips say?”
“That he developed a fondness
for whiskey.”
She snuffled a humorless laugh. “The gossips of Cleary are nothing if not accurate. Yes, he began drinking excessively. It began affecting his work. He started making blunders, which were dangerous to himself and his partners. He became unreliable. He had his hand slapped a few times, then was formally reprimanded, then demoted, which caused him to slip into a deeper funk, which caused him to drink more. It became a vicious downward spiral. Ultimately he was fired.
“Just today he said that if it hadn’t been for Amy, our marriage would have lasted forever. Perhaps he’s right. Death did part us. Her death. I’m afraid we became a cliché, the couple whose marriage couldn’t withstand the tragedy of losing a child. We were never the same. Not as a couple and not as individuals.”
She looked from the embers to Tierney. “Did I omit anything? Do the die-hard busybodies know the terms of our divorce settlement?”
“They’re working on it. In any case, they’re glad to have Dutch back among them.”
“What do they say about me?”
He gave a dismissive shrug.
“Come on, Tierney. I’ve got a thick skin. I can take it.”
“They say that you insisted on the divorce. Demanded it.”
“Making me a coldhearted bitch if ever there was one.”
“I haven’t heard it put quite that way.”
“But close, I’m sure. I would expect the Clearyans to side with their hometown boy.” She stared into the fire again, speaking her thoughts aloud as they came to her. “Divorcing Dutch wasn’t a decision I made out of anger or spite. It was for my own survival. His failure to recover from Amy’s death was preventing my recovery.”
She willed Tierney to understand what no one else seemed able to grasp. “I had become his crutch. It was easier for him to lean on me than to get professional help and heal himself. He became a liability I could no longer carry and still move forward with my own life. It wasn’t a healthy relationship for either of us. We’re better off without one another. Although Dutch still refuses to accept that the marriage is over.”
“Understandable.”
She reacted as though he’d jabbed her with the red-hot tip of the fireplace poker. “Excuse me?”
“Can you blame him for being confused?”
“Why would he be confused?”
“Any man would be. You divorced him. No, you demanded a divorce. Yet tonight, when you got in trouble, he was the first person you called.”
“I explained why I called him.”