If You Believe

With great effort, Rass opened his eyes. Mariah was standing beside the bed, holding his hand. Her eyes were teary, red-rimmed pools of agony against the ashen pallor of her cheeks. "Mamas here," he said softly.

"Oh, Daddy . . . "

"We love you, Boo. "

Tears filled her eyes but didnt fall, and somehow that hurt Rass more than anything he could imagine. "Let yourself cry. . . . "

Shell be okay.

Rass felt, rather than heard, Gretas words, and they filled him with a quiet, steady peace. The hot white light moved toward him, filled his body with shimmering, joyous heat. He felt his eyes flutter shut, felt his breath exhale one last time.

Then suddenly he was in a different place, enfolded in the arms of the only woman hed ever loved.

Chapter Twenty-two Winter came to the funeral.

In the gray, soulless sky, the sun was a dull golden globe without power or heat.

Snow lay heaped on the feike line and bare tree limbs, encasing everything in an icy layer of translucent white. A freezing wind lashed down from snow-covered hills and barreled across the plain in a howling, mournful dirge.

Mariah moved stiffly forward, her chin tilted, her eyes painfully dry. Every crunching footstep was a brutal, heart-wrenching reminder of where she was going today, what she was doing.

She held up the back end of the pine casket. The hastily skinned wood abraded her skin, poked into the soft flesh of her palm. Dully she realized that she should have worn gloves.

Ahead, Jake and Mad Dog moved with the same stiff-backed reluctance, their heads bowed, their breath coming in great pluming streaks. Mad Dog held the right side of the casket; Jake, the left.

Together, step by halting, heavy step, they made their way across the silent, fallow farm, and up the hill to the knoll where Greta and Thomas lay. Wind whipped through the stark, bare branches of the oak tree, rattling the limbs. The iron settee creaked and moaned at the force of it.

"Okay," Mad Dog said quietly. "Lets put it down. " The three of them bent and set the casket on the frozen, snow-covered ground. It hit with a muffled thud that echoed forever in the crisp silence.

Mariah straightened. The first thing she saw was the hole Mad Dog and Jake had dug last night.

Pain shot through her, hit her so hard, she staggered. She tried to push the obvious thoughts from her mind, but she wasnt strong enough. She didnt want her daddy going in there. . . . It was so cold and dark and . . . final.

She jerked away from the box, from the hole, and stood apart from everything, stiff and alone. Cold air buffeted her face, whipped thin strands of hair across her unprotected cheeks. She didnt pull the furred collar of her gossamer coat around her throat; she didnt care.

It felt as if she were being slowly, cruelly twisted in half. Every breath hurt, her eyes burned with the need to cry, but still she couldnt. Just like before, like always, the tears were locked in her chest in a throbbing, scalding ache.

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to find some impossible warmth.

"Mariah?"

With great effort, she lifted her head. And found Mad Dog standing in front of her.

"Mad Dog. " His name slipped out in a whisper of longing. With some distant part of her mind, she thought how easy it would be to go to him right now, to wrap her arms around him and let him comfort her.

But the effort was too much for her. She felt icy cold inside, as dead as her father.

As if there were nothing beneath her skin but broken glass, nothing in her heart at all.

She no longer wanted anything to do with Mad Dog, or Jake, or anyone. She just wanted to be left alone with the memories of her father, left alone with the hammering grief that kept her wide-eyed all night and half-asleep all day. She didnt want to talk to anyone, or say anything, or hear anything.

&nbs

p; She wanted to die.

"Mariah?" he said again.

She stared at him, feeling nothing. "What?"