The Beach Quilt (35 page)

“We've got thirty people packed in here now. We're at code limit, I'm afraid, if we're not already over.”

Cordelia glanced around The Busy Bee and nodded. Her mother was right. Things could get dangerous if they let any more people in.

“I'll stand at the door and explain that no one else can come in until some people leave. Who ever thought a quilt shop would need a bouncer?”

Cordelia managed a weak smile as her mother inched her way through the crowd.

She was the one responsible for this gathering of people on this cold winter evening. It had started when Sarah's headstone was put in place back in late October. It was a shiny pinkish marble. Cordelia figured it had cost a fortune, but how could you scrimp on your child's grave? Across the top, there was an engraved vine with flowers. Cordelia couldn't tell what kind of flowers they were, but Sarah would have known. Under Sarah's name there were the dates of her birth and of her death. Under that there were these words:
Beloved mother, daughter, sister.

She assumed that Mr. and Mrs. Bauer had decided on the order of those words. Cordelia wondered. Were they supposed to remember Sarah primarily as a mother? And why wasn't the word
friend
there as well?

Everything about the headstone—the very fact of it, its very solidity—had bothered Cordelia. It made her feel physically nauseous. Sarah was not hard. She had never really liked pink. Sarah was—she was not that block of marble.

It was this visceral reaction that gave her the idea of making a different sort of memorial for her friend. So she had asked anyone who cared—kids at school, neighbors, regular customers of The Busy Bee—to make a square fabric patch in memory of Sarah. When all the patches were collected, they would be assembled into a pieced, free-form quilt.

Already, in mid December, they had enough patches to make
two
large quilts, one that would hang in the shop and the other that would hang in the halls of Yorktide High. Many of the patches depicted Sarah's favorite flowers and birds and seashells and wildlife. A few featured Sarah's name written in elaborate stitching. Some quoted poems or the Bible. Stevie's patch had an absolutely perfect profile silhouette of her sister. Another particularly amazing patch showed a full-length image of Sarah, all done in bits and pieces of cotton and velvet.

Only Cordelia hadn't been able to make a patch in honor of her friend. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't decide on one image or one set of words that could adequately express what she felt about Sarah, or what Sarah had meant to her. So while Mrs. Bauer busied herself with the overall design of the disparate patches, Cordelia focused on collecting them.

This evening, a surprisingly big group of serious, talented quilters had gathered to begin assembling the final products. (Who knew that the women would have to work in shifts?) Mrs. Bauer said it was just as women had gathered for centuries to work and socialize and help one another through tough times. Cordelia hoped
someone
was being helped, because
she
certainly didn't feel any better.

Cordelia smiled at a woman she vaguely recognized and adjusted her glasses. She didn't know why she had made such a big deal about not wearing them. Given what had happened to Sarah—that awful, awful thing—it really was kind of embarrassing to admit she had been worried about looking dorky. She would rather be alive and the dorkiest person in the world than be dead.

Ever since Sarah had died—well, after the period of hysterical crying had passed—Cordelia had felt strangely subdued, as if there was a hazy coating on her feelings. She wasn't thinking properly, either; she had been unusually forgetful and distracted, even though she had been off the tranquilizers since October.

It was all supposed to be the result of grief—a counselor at school had told her that—and grief was something everyone experienced differently. Cordelia wished she were going through this grieving process much more quickly. Everything felt so—uncomfortable. She was very tired, physically and mentally, and she wanted very badly for life to feel normal again. It would be a new normal, she knew that, but still, it wouldn't be this feeling of
dis-ease
. She had found that term, used with the hyphen, in one of the articles she had read online about depression.

Ms. Todd, who owned the diner down the road, came over to where Cordelia stood by the refreshment table.

“I understand,” she said, “that making these quilts was your idea.”

Cordelia shrugged. “It seemed a nice thing to do.”

“More than just nice,” Ms. Todd said. “You're a good friend to remember Sarah in this way. Such a lovely young woman. Such a terrible waste.”

Cordelia swallowed harshly. Why couldn't people just leave her alone?! Now she was going to cry again and . . .

A call from across the room made Ms. Todd nod good-bye and hurry away.

Cordelia squeezed her hands into fists at her sides. Why did bad things happen? She had spent an awful lot of time since Sarah's death pondering this eternal question, but so far all she could come up with was that bad things happened because they just
did
. Life was random. You could choose to believe there was some plan to it all, formed by some great being with a moral purpose in mind, and maybe that would bring you some peace. But Cordelia thought that was just fooling yourself. It was better to enjoy, if you possibly could, every decent moment for as long as it lasted and always be braced for the not-so-decent moments that were bound to come along.

Like spending your birthday without your best friend for the first time in forever.

Without Sarah, there hadn't seemed much cause to celebrate. Still, her parents had insisted they mark the occasion; her mother had made Cordelia's favorite cake, with maple syrup frosting, and they had given her a gift card to her favorite clothing store at the mall.

Stevie had made her a beautiful, intricately woven, leather friendship bracelet. Cordelia had burst out crying when Stevie gave it to her, and that had made Stevie cry, too, and that had set Clarissa howling and circling at Stevie's feet in sympathy.

Thanksgiving, two days later, had come and gone in much the same subdued and tearful way. Cordelia and her parents had eaten dinner together and then gone to the Bauers' for pie and coffee. Cordelia didn't like being in the Bauers' house now. She especially couldn't bear to go into Sarah's old room, now little Henry's. Some of Sarah's stuff was still there, but her books had been moved to the living room to make space for all the equipment a baby seemed to require. Sarah's clothes, Stevie had told her, had been packed up and brought to Goodwill.

“Well,” Stevie had reasoned, “that's where she got most of them in the first place.”

Cordelia was brought back to the moment by Mrs. Castle from the local dry cleaners exclaiming, “He looks just like his mama!”

“Isn't it amazing?” Ms. Robinson, a teacher at the local grammar school, answered. “He has Sarah's chin and the shape of his eyes are just the same as hers.”

They were of course referring to Henry, who was strapped in his car seat atop the counter, watched over by Stevie. No one, Cordelia had noted, had said anything about the baby looking like his father.

Personally, Cordelia thought Henry looked pretty much like any four-month-old baby—cute and cuddly (now that he had gotten past that fragile space alien look of a newborn) and pretty much interchangeable with the next cute and cuddly baby. But she guessed it made people feel good to find a resemblance between a motherless child and his mother. And maybe someday Henry really
would
look a lot like Sarah. That would be wonderful. He could look at pictures of the mother he never knew and then look at his own reflection in the mirror and somehow, even a little bit, know her. And of course, she, Cordelia, would tell him all about Sarah, what a good friend she had been, how smart she was, and how she had someday wanted to be a nurse or a lawyer. Unless learning about his mother's unfulfilled dreams would make Henry upset....

How would any of them ever know what to do or to say without causing pain?

Cordelia gulped back tears and busied herself with straightening the stacks of paper napkins on the refreshment table. She often thought about how just days before Sarah had died, she had told Cordelia how peaceful and happy she felt. And Cordelia couldn't help but wonder if Sarah had somehow
known
that she was going to die, if she had known that she would not be called upon to raise her child, that she would be, in a way, set free. It was a macabre thought, Cordelia knew that, and besides, Sarah hadn't believed in things like premonitions and the supernatural. Like that dream Sarah had had earlier in the summer, the one in which she had died giving birth to Henry. It was all only coincidence. It was all only a big sick joke.

Cordelia looked out at the crowd at The Busy Bee and sighed. She wondered if life was always going to be sad now that she knew what death felt like.

“Cordelia, dear, do you know if there's more hot chocolate?”

It was Mrs. Bates, one of the store's oldest and most loyal customers, and a very sweet woman with a very sweet tooth.

Cordelia smiled. “I'll make another pot right away, Mrs. Bates.”

She hurried back to the tiny kitchen behind the shop, glad to be busy and hoping to escape her dis-eased thoughts.

It was Christmas Eve day. Stevie was staring out the living room window at the snow-covered lawn. Clarissa was perched on the windowsill, eyeing with concentration two cardinals futilely hunting for food on the smooth expanse of white. For half a second, Stevie thought she saw her sister standing where the lawn met the road, wearing her navy parka and old boots. And then, she was gone.

Well,
Stevie thought bitterly,
she hadn't been there in the first place, had she?

Tomorrow morning the four of them—not five—would go to church. The Kanes would be there as well, and the two families would sit together. Stevie dreaded the minister mentioning Sarah in his sermon, but she half expected that he would. Sarah's death seemed to have affected just about everyone who had known her even a little bit. Stevie and her parents couldn't go anywhere without someone giving them a sympathetic nod or coming up to offer a word of condolence or worse, not so subtly pointing them out to a companion. “There's the Bauer family,” Stevie imagined them saying. “You know, the ones whose
unmarried teenage daughter
died in childbirth.”

Stevie sighed and looked over at the tree her father had gamely brought home the week before. Clarissa had immediately scampered up to the very top and sat swaying under her own weight for a moment or two. Then she had jumped straight down to the floor six feet below. Stevie had barely been able to raise a smile.

She and her mother had decorated the tree with the old family ornaments, but it was a somber undertaking, without the usual giggles and reminiscences of past holidays. Henry had lain in his car seat nearby, watching them intently. The way he stared at people, as if he were really listening and understanding what they were saying, reminded Stevie a bit of the way Sarah would focus when she found something really interesting. But maybe she was imagining the similarity.

Anyway, since Sarah's death, Stevie had come to realize that life was just too horribly short and unpredictable to keep an important truth about yourself a secret. So she had decided to come out to her parents right after the holidays. Cordelia had offered to be there for support, but Stevie didn't feel she would need any. Her parents were wonderful, loving people. She was not afraid. And once Stevie had told her parents, Cordelia would be free to share the truth with hers.

It did make her sad that Sarah would never know who she really was, as a whole person. But there was nothing she could do about that. Once or twice since Sarah had died Stevie had tried to talk to her, but it had been a failure. Sarah was gone forever. She was beyond reach. At least, Stevie didn't know how to find her, except for those few times her image would flash before her eyes and then flee.

Stevie heard Henry cry from his room—once Sarah's room—and then heard her mother call, “I've got it!” In a moment all was quiet again. Her mother might have given Henry the little stuffed bunny he loved so much. Stevie wished he didn't like Justin's toy more than Cordelia's stuffed lion. Maybe the lion was just too big for his little hands. Maybe before long Henry would reject the bunny his jerk of a dad had given his mom. One could only hope.

Stevie's gaze rested on a family portrait the Bauers had had taken a few years back. It was a nice enough photograph, but that family no longer existed. There was a new family now. Stevie had gone from younger sister to older sister in seconds; her role in the family dynamic had drastically changed, and in a way she deeply regretted. She would give anything,
anything
to have Sarah back. She would never say it aloud, but she wished that Henry had been the one to die. That would have been terribly sad, but it would have been less heartbreaking, less earth-shattering than losing her beloved sister. She could see no reason, no
meaning,
no
purpose
in Sarah's death. Nothing was better for the Bauer family now. Who had decided it was time for Sarah to leave them?

No, it just didn't make sense.

Clarissa leaped from the windowsill and went bounding from the room. She had been intensely curious about the baby at first, even a bit frightened, but within weeks she was taking naps at the foot of his cradle, and crying when he cried, and watching intently when he was bathed or fed. In fact, Clarissa was doing a better job of accepting the fact of Henry than Stevie seemed capable of doing.

Stevie rubbed her eyes. She couldn't wait until this stupid holiday season was over and she could stop pretending that she believed in happiness.