“Ansel was here, too?” Lavender asked. “He found you?”
The question inflated, metastasized.
“I found him, actually.” Blue picked at her nails, a chipped periwinkle. “I invited him here.”
“I’m ready, sweetheart. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
“Before I say anything,” Blue said, “you should know that I was happy to meet him. He was happy to be here. He helped us around the house, didn’t ask anything in return. We closed up the restaurant with my mom, laughed into the night. It was easy, with him. Almost like having my dad back again. Sometimes, when I think about what he did, who he is, I still don’t want to believe it.”
“Go on,” Lavender said.
An anguish arrived on Blue’s face, sweet and pained, pleading apologetic.
“I’m sorry,” Blue said. “I’m so sorry to tell you this.”
*
The night was an open sore. The heart was an organ that beat on and on. The trees creaked their unanimous sorrow.
*
Lavender slept fitfully. She dreamed episodically of women she did not know, strangers in the distance, naked and screaming. Downstairs, the industrial refrigerator grumbled like a starving belly. Blue’s words hovered, menacing little ghosts over the unfamiliar bed—she had only told Lavender the outline of the story, no real details, but it ballooned monstrous.
She could not picture it. Lavender could not picture the little boy she had known doing any of the things Blue described. She could not imagine him waiting in a prison cell, counting down his days. She could not fathom that word. Execution. The man who had grown from her child felt as distant as the cucumbers she’d planted last summer and failed to bring to fruit.
When the bed became a cage, Lavender crept into the hall. Early morning, still black. Blue’s bedroom door was cracked open—a beam of moonlight shone onto the lump of her, illuminating. Her face was peaceful in sleep, so devastatingly young.
Give yourself a moment every day, Harmony had suggested once in group therapy. A single moment in which you are absolved of all responsibility.
How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?
Lavender slid to the floor outside Blue’s bedroom, her knees cracking like gunshots all the way down. There were people who could look atrocity in the eye and keep marching forward—people who did such things by choice. But atrocity was not a thing Lavender could afford to consider. Blue’s breath came steady and even through the door, like the flow of some earthbound tide. It seemed, then, that mothering did not have to be so rigid. There was no arc to it, no frame through which it ended or began. Mothering could be as simple as this: a woman and her very own blood, breathing in tandem through the darkest heart of night.
*
The rest of Lavender’s visit passed quickly, brimming with novelty. Blue twined a steady arm through Lavender’s—they took walks around the lake, naming the trees. Blue showed Lavender her collection of little treasures: a perfectly round acorn, a tiny glass-blown statue of a sheep, a diamond earring with a broken setting she’d found in Central Park. In these objects, Lavender could see her granddaughter’s softness, her pristine strangeness. Blue promised she would come to Gentle Valley soon, where Lavender guaranteed a pan of Sunshine’s famous cinnamon rolls. They posed for a selfie, Blue’s phone outstretched as they pressed their temples together, grinning against the backdrop of the mountains.
On Lavender’s last night in the Blue House, Rachel joined them at the bar for a whiskey. Glazed and sleepy, tipsy with laughter, Lavender began to talk. Blue and Rachel listened attentively, silhouettes perched curious. As she told them everything she could remember—the sparkling and the hideous, the fond and the searing—a fraction of her life’s weight seemed to lift with the words. This was the gift of the young, Lavender thought. They had the strength to carry.
“Ansel had this idea,” Blue said, after Rachel had gone to bed. Lavender leaned back against the bar’s pocked mahogany, her glass empty. “He talked about it a lot: the other worlds that might exist, if you changed just one tiny choice. The infinite universe, or whatever. I still think about it sometimes—how things might have been different, if I’d never found Ansel. If I’d never invited him here.”
“I ask those questions, too,” Lavender said.
And it was true: Lavender no longer wondered about the farmhouse, or California, or any of the choices she made to save herself. Those had been necessary. But she would always wonder about the letters, the hundreds or thousands she’d written in her head. Dear Ansel. What would have happened, if she’d sent just one? Lavender wondered if she could have made the difference. If her child had only needed his mother.