She had to get out of the stays, she couldn’t breathe … She tore the straps off her shoulders and squirmed out of the half-fastened corset, gasping for air. Threw off her skirt and petticoat and leaned against the wall, heart still galloping. Air.
Sweating and trembling, she flung open the door and started up the stairs to the open air of the unfinished attic.
ROGER SAW BRIANNA go white, then turn and stumble out of the kitchen, knocking into the propped-open door so it swung heavily shut behind her.
He made his way through the crowd as fast as he could, but she was gone when he pushed out into the hall. Maybe she’d just needed air—God knew, he did; the night-chilled breeze rushing in from the yard was a huge relief.
“Bree!” he called from the doorstep, but there was no answer—only the shuffle and murmur of visitors making their way up the slope by the flickering of a pine torch.
The surgery, then—she must have gone to look at the children …
He found her, finally, in the house. High up in the open air, clinging to one of the uprights of the timbers framing the unfinished attic, a white shadow against the night sky.
She must have heard him, though he tried to tread lightly; only a single layer of boards served （for the moment） as both the ceiling of the second floor and the floor of the attic. She didn’t move, though, save for the flow of her hair and her shift, both rippling in the unsettled air. There was a late thunderstorm in the neighborhood; he could see a mass of steely cloud boiling up behind the distant mountain, shot with constant vivid cracks of lightning. The smell of ozone was strong on the wind.
“You look like the figurehead of a ship,” he said, coming close behind her. He put his arms gently round her, covering her from the chill. “Ye feel like one, too—you’re so cold, ye’re hard as wood.”
She made a sound that he took as an indication that she was glad to see him and acknowledged his feeble joke but either was too cold to talk or didn’t know what to say.
“Nobody knows what to say when something like this happens,” he said, and his lips brushed a cold white ear.
“You do. You did.”
“Nah,” he said. “I said something, aye, but God knows—and I mean that, by the way—whether it was the right thing to say, or if anything ever could be, in a situation like that. You were there,” he said, in a softer voice. “Ye got help, ye took care of the bairns. Ye couldn’t have done more.”
“I know.” She turned to him then, and he felt the wetness on her cheek against his own. “That’s what—what’s so terrible. There was nothing to—to fix it, to make things better. One second she was there, and then …” She was shaking. He should have thought to bring a cloak, a blanket … but all he had was his own body, and he held her as close as he could, feeling the solid life of her trembling in his arms, and felt a terrible guilt at his relief that it hadn’t been—
“It could have been me,” she whispered, her voice shaking as much as her body. “She wasn’t ten feet away from me. The bear could have come from the other side, and—and Jem and Mandy would be or-orphans t-tonight.” She let out a small, suffocated sob. “Mandy was right by my feet, five minutes b-before. She—it could have—”
“You’re freezing,” he whispered into her hair. “It’s going to rain. Come down.”
“I can’t do it. We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “We shouldn’t have come here.” And letting go of the upright, she bent her head on his shoulder and cried, pressing hard against him. The cold had seeped from her body into his, and the cold pellets of her words lay like frozen buckshot in his mind. Mandy.
He couldn’t tell her it would be all right. But neither could he leave her to stand alone here like a lightning rod.
“If I have to pick ye up, I’ll likely fall off the roof and we’ll both be killed,” he said, and took her cold hand. “Come down, aye?”
She nodded, straightened, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shift.
“It’s not wrong to be alive,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you are.”
She nodded again, raised his hand to her cold lips, and kissed it. They made their way down the ladder in the dark one after the other, each alone but together, toward the distant glow of the hearth below.
30
You Should Know …
WE BURIED AMY THE next day, in the small, high meadow that served the Ridge as a graveyard. It was a peaceful, sunny day, and every step through the grass revealed some flash of color, the purples and yellows of asters and goldenrod. The warmth of the sun on our shoulders was a comfort, and Roger’s words of prayer and commendment held something of comfort, too.