Winter Garden

Nina wanted to say she’d do it—make one last effort—but now that she’d decided to leave, she was like a Thoroughbred at the starting gate. She wanted to run. “I’ll go pack. ”

Late that night, when Nina’s few things had been put in her backpack and stowed in the rental car, she finally went in search of her mother.

She found her wrapped in blankets, sitting in front of the fire.

“So you are leaving,” her mother said without looking up.

“My editor called. They need me for a story. It’s terrible, what’s happening in Sierra Leone. ” She sat down on the hearth; her body shivered at the sudden heat. “Someone needs to show the world what’s happening there. People are dying. It’s so tragic. ”

“You think your photographs can do that?”

Nina felt the sting of that remark and the insult. “War is a terrible thing, Mom. It’s easy to sit here in your nice, safe home and judge my work. But if you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d feel differently. What I do can make a difference. You can’t imagine how some people suffer in the world, and if no one sees it—”

“We’ll scatter your father’s ashes on his birthday. With or without you. ”

“Okay,” Nina said evenly, thinking, Dad understood, and hurting all over again.

“Good-bye, then. Happy Christmas to you. ”

On that note, Nina left Belye Nochi. At the porch she paused, looking up the valley, watching the snow fall. Her practiced eye took it all in, cataloging and remembering every detail. In thirty-nine hours, it would be dust that rained down on her shoulders and swirled around her boots, and the images of this place would bleach out like bones beneath a punishing sun, until, in no time at all, they’d be too pale to see at all. Her family—and especially her mother—would become shadowy memory beings whom Nina could love . . . from a distance.

Six

In the weeks following her father’s death, Meredith held herself together by strength of will alone. That, and a schedule as tight and busy as a boot camp recruit’s.

Grief had become her silent sidekick. She felt its shadow beside her all the time. She knew that if she turned toward that darkness just once, embraced it as she longed to, she’d be lost.

So she kept moving. Doing.

Christmas and New Year’s had been disastrous, of course, and her insistence on following tradition hadn’t helped. The turkey-and-all-the fixings dinner had only highlighted the empty place at the table.

And Jeff didn’t understand. He kept saying that if she’d just cry she’d be okay. As if a few tears could help her.

It was ridiculous. She knew crying wouldn’t help, because she cried in her sleep. Night after night she woke with tears on her cheeks, and none of it helped one bit. In fact, the opposite was true. The expression of grief didn’t help. Only its suppression would get her through these hard times.

So she went on, smiling brightly at work and moving from one chore to the next with a desperate zeal. It wasn’t until the girls went back to school that she realized how exhausted she was by the pretense of ordinary life. It didn’t help, of course, that she hadn’t slept through the night since the funeral, or that she and Jeff were having trouble finding anything to talk about.

She’d tried to explain it to him, how cold she felt, how numb, but he refused to understand. He thought she should “let it out. ” Whatever the hell that meant.

Still, she wasn’t trying very hard to talk to him, that much was true. Sometimes they went whole days with little more than a nod in passing. She really needed to try harder.

She rinsed out her coffee cup, put it in the strainer, and went to the downstairs office he used for writing. Knocking quietly, she opened the door.

Jeff sat at his desk—the one they’d bought at least a decade ago, dubbed his writer’s space, and christened by making love on it.

You’ll be famous someday. The new Raymond Chandler.

She smiled at the memory, even as it saddened her to think that somewhere along the way their dreams had untangled, gone on separate paths.

“How’s the book going?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.

“Wow. You haven’t asked me that in weeks. ”

“Really?”

“Really. ”

Meredith frowned at that. She’d always loved her husband’s writing. In the early days of their marriage, when he’d been a struggling journalist, she’d read every word he wrote. Even a few years ago, when he’d first dared to try his hand at fiction, she’d been his first, best critic. At least that was what he’d claimed. That book hadn’t sold to a publisher, but she’d believed in it, in him, heart and soul. And she was glad that he’d finally started another book. Had she told him that? “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she said. “I’ve been a mess lately. Can I read what you have so far?”