But one July morning, Douglas and the locomotive arrived at the crossing at almost the same moment. Impatient to be on his way, he tried to cross, but this time, he wasn’t fast enough. Douglas was dragged along the tracks until the engineer could bring the train to a stop. The horse was killed and the buggy was smashed to smithereens.
Adam Hunt, their neighbor and Douglas’ closest friend, brought her the devastating news. A large, quiet man, ginger-haired and with a quick smile that lightened his deep-set eyes, Adam was weighted down by his own shock and sorrow. She saw it written across his face, plain as could be, before he ever spoke a word.
“Be brave, Annie,” Adam said. He told her as gently as he could and caught her in his arms as she swayed and fell. He carried her to her bed and sent one of the smithy boys for Dr. Grogan, then stayed with her until he arrived. Later, he went to Carter’s Pharmacy for the medicines the doctor prescribed, then waited to see if anything else was needed.
But Annie was in her seventh month, and her husband’s death was more than she could bear. That night, the pains began. She went into early labor and the next morning gave birth to Douglas’ child, a tiny boy who never drew a breath.
Her husband was gone and her baby, as well. Between one day and the next, within just twenty-four short hours, Annie’s life was utterly changed.
• • •
TIME heals all wounds, people said. But people were wrong.
Three years later, Annie was still learning to live in Douglas’ absence: to sleep in an empty bed and eat at the table by herself and try to imagine a future alone. She often remembered what Gramma Anne had told her when she was learning to make bobbin lace. Still a young girl, Annie would lean against her grandmother’s chair, watching the gnarled hands pick up first this bobbin, then that, weaving them under and over, over and under, so quickly that Annie’s eyes could scarcely follow.
“Magic,” Annie whispered, as the pattern of tiny flowers and birds appeared, mysteriously, in the lace. “Gramma, it’s magic!”
Her grandmother’s smile lifted the corner of her mouth as her hands continued to move. “Well, yes, it’s a little bit of magic. But more, it’s paying attention. And understanding the pattern so well that your fingers know what to do before your mind can tell them.” Her swiftly moving hands stopped, reversed the last two overs-and-unders, and did them again, the right way. She gave Annie a serious look. “And catching the little accidents before they get to be big ones. Sometimes you can work the mishaps into the pattern and make something new.”
After Douglas’ death, Annie often thought of her grandmother’s words. Sometimes you can work the mishaps into the pattern and make something new. It could be a rule of life, too. But like any rule, it was easy to put into words and harder to put into practice. What could be the pattern of a life that seemed to promise so much—a caring husband, a baby son—and then be so suddenly, so tragically altered?
Sometimes, when her grief was the sharpest, Annie would take down the wooden casket with the flower carved on the lid. The flower was Queen Anne’s lace and the casket was walnut, Gramma had said, made by her father—Annie’s great-grandfather—in Massachusetts, just after the Revolutionary War. Annie kept the casket on the tall pine chest of drawers in her bedroom. It held Gramma Anne’s collection of treasured pieces of laces, some of them brought from the Old Country. When she felt terribly sad, Annie would open the casket and take out the pieces one by one, appreciating the techniques and the expert workmanship, admiring the intricate patterns, loving each one because it had belonged to her grandmother.
But most of all, Annie loved the laces because each of them told a story—a woman’s story. There was the fine, intricately embroidered net veil that Gramma’s mother had made to wear as a bride. The crocheted lace for the nightgown she wore on her wedding night and gave to her daughter. Gramma’s best lace cap. The delicate collar and cuffs that Annie’s mother had crocheted. The tiny cap Annie had made for the baby she had lost, the ivory lace as fine as cobwebs. Gramma had often said that the experiences of a woman’s life—hope and joy and love, pain and despair and grief—were stitched and woven and twisted and knotted into the lace she made and wore, and that those feelings lingered there like a faint perfume. The fragile ghosts could sometimes be felt much later, she said, by the right wearer, under the right conditions. Annie understood that, for she could no longer bear to wear the jet-black collar and cuffs she had made for her best dress during the year after Douglas died. Just a touch of the lacy whorls and black-beaded florets, and she was almost overwhelmed by the grief that had drowned her the whole of that year.
And life itself was like a lace, Annie thought as she turned the pieces over in her fingers, looking at the patterns, holding them up to the light. Lace was a delicate pattern of threads and spaces, sometimes familiar and expected, sometimes surprising. Life was a fragile weaving of words and actions and intentions around the absences that love—and hope and imagination—could fill with a magical promise for the future.
But in her life now, those spaces were merely empty, or filled with the sadness of loss and
