“You’re letting her go like that?” Susie asks March.
“Letting her?” People who haven’t had children have the oddest ideas.
“Can we just go to the funeral and get this over with?” Gwen says in her froggy voice. Before coming outside, she sneaked a cigarette in the bathroom, then doused herself with some Jean Naté she found in the medicine cabinet which she thinks has gotten rid of the scent of smoke.
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Susie says, getting in behind the wheel. “Let’s not let Judith’s funeral take up too much of your precious time.”
“Exactly,” Gwen says. She’s flipped down the visor in order to get a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She wishes for two things: bigger eyes and a thinner face. She can’t abide her own reflection, so how could anyone else? Maybe her mother and that stupid Susie aren’t so wrong when they judge her. Cutting her hair was certainly a mistake, she sees that now. Her look is so wrong it’s almost a joke. She’d like to be the human equivalent of an Afghan hound. Instead, what she sees is a beagle looking back at her.
“Do you mind?” March says.
Scrunched in next to Gwen, March has to struggle to push the visor back up so it won’t jab either of them in the eye as they ride along the bumpy back road. This day is going to be awful. It’s the sort of day you wouldn’t mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.
“I can’t believe Judith is really dead,” March says. “She took care of everyone and never complained. I can’t think of a single selfish thing she ever did. Not ever. She was the greatest.”
“She was something, all right,” Susie concurs.
March might have called Susie on a statement like that, but the road has become so bumpy Susie is concentrating on navigating past the ruts. And anyway, Susie always took pride in being cryptic. What is that supposed to mean? March was always saying when they were younger and thrown together for the day, and Susie would always look at her as if March were crazy and any implications sprang from March’s own unreliable imagination.
“This is where my rental car died,” March says as they approach the deepest of the ruts.
“Then hold on,” Susie says, and for old time’s sake she floors the gas pedal for a real roller-coaster ride.
“You guys are nuts,” Gwen shouts, but Susie and March, supposedly older and wiser, pay no attention to her. For a little while at least, as they shake and rattle over the bumps, they manage to forget today’s destination. They forget how long it’s been since they’ve walked down this road, arm in arm. They were fierce and fearless girls back then, in their jeans and boots and sweaters, and March, for one, was absolutely confident of what her future would bring: total happiness and true love, that’s what she wanted. Nothing more or less would do, just as no other place would ever be home: nowhere but the hill would ever be as comfortable or as beautiful or as real.
Susanna Justice suddenly steps on the brakes, hard, so they’re all snapped back by the force of their seat belts.
“Do you believe that goddamn thing?” Susie says, as a rabbit runs right in front of them.
This landscape is definitely real, if nothing more. From the minute March woke this morning, in the old bed where she’d slept for thousands of nights, she knew coming back had been a mistake. She opened her eyes, and already she was thinking of Hollis. When she saw the lattice of frost on the inside of her windowpanes it was exactly as if she never had left. Her room was always the chilliest in the house. Often, she would find that the tumbler of water she’d left beside her bed had frozen solid. She remembers how she would hold the glass up and breathe on the ice until it melted into streams that spelled out Hollis’s name.
The first thing she did today, after she pulled on her navy-blue dress and a black sweater, was go downstairs in her bare feet and try to phone Richard. From where she stood, by the telephone table, she could see Gwen, asleep on the couch in the little sewing room. She could see through the oval window, past the garden and the trees. Her heart was racing, that was the silly thing. She had begun to make a bargain with herself, the kind that women who are in love with the wrong man always resort to: If Richard answered by the fifth ring, she would be all right. She would be perfectly safe, and safety, after all, was what she had opted for, even though she was back here looking out at the apple trees she used to climb. And then she’d realized how early it was in California, only a little past three a.m., and she’d hung up quickly, but she’d been all right without talking to him; she’d made tea in one of Judith’s pretty ceramic pots and in no time she was fine.