“Tomorrow?” Estelle’s heart sank at the prospect of spending all day and night in the open. “Does he have an ATV or something? We’ll need to carry Annie to the nearest road to meet an ambulance.”
“Just hang on for another day. The volcano is still spilling out smoke and ash, or I’d come get you myself.”
Hang on. Easy for him to say, with dry clothes and a nice warm office. And coffee.
She pasted on a smile and hoped it looked genuine as she ducked under the tarp shelter to join the others. “Central says the state troopers will be here tomorrow.”
Annie’s lips moved in prayer.
Estelle tried to stay cheerful. “How about some breakfast?” She broke a protein bar into bits to share between them. They were stale, dry, and crumbly and did little to fill their bellies. Annie said she was full, and Sera said they tasted good. Liars, both of them.
Estelle would have been happy just to rest quietly, but Sera chivvied them into games of I spy and twenty questions. She’s still trying to fix things, Estelle thought. Is that how Sera had spent her life, trying to cheer up her chronically depressed mother? What a burden for a child to take on.
When the games palled, Sera filled in the gap in conversation with a long ramble about last February’s Mardi Gras celebrations, describing all the masks, costumes, parades, and parties that had brightened the end of winter.
“My dance team marched in six parades this year,” she said. “Two were in the rain, and one was even colder than this.”
“I’d like to have seen it,” Annie said wistfully.
Sera jumped up. “Why not?”
While Estelle clapped rhythm, Sera performed her dance routine. Strut, strut, sashay left, sashay right. Sling the hair, fling the arms, prance and point, turn and bend. She ended with a whoop, to Estelle and Annie’s applause.
Annie laughed. “Your mother must have been so proud.”
Sera’s shoulders drooped. “I hope she was. That was the last time she saw me dance.”
Annie reached out a hand. “She sees you, dear. She’s watching you from heaven.”
“Is she?” Sera’s eyes flashed. “Father Roberts didn’t seem so sure.”
There it was again. The quick pivot from helpful teen to angry, betrayed daughter.
“Father Roberts is an ass,” Estelle said.
To Annie’s startled look, she explained, “My sister died by suicide. The priest had some harsh words to say in his homily. Totally unnecessary, theologically out of date, and terribly hurtful, especially with Sera and my parents sitting right there. I cornered him afterward and gave him a piece of my mind, the old bastard.”
“Ah.” Annie turned sympathetically to Sera. “Don’t you worry, dear. Your mother’s at peace now and watching over you. The good Lord knows a person’s heart better than any priest.”
Sera shook her head. “The good Lord must know more than me, then. I never understood why she was so depressed. We weren’t poor. I tried to be a good daughter. Why couldn’t she ever just be happy?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Estelle said. “Depression is an illness. She couldn’t control her feelings any more than a cancer patient can control her tumor.”
Sera looked up, tears lining her eyes. “When I slipped down the ice today? I was never so scared in my life. I was falling for what, two seconds? Mom chose that. She didn’t just stand on the railing and let herself fall into the Mississippi. She ran to the railing. Purposefully, deliberately, even though people tried to stop her. Like she couldn’t stand to be alive one more minute. She chose to jump fifty feet into cold water, knowing she’d never come up except as a wet, disgusting corpse. How could she do that?”
Estelle put an arm over Sera’s shoulder, at a complete loss for what to say.
Annie said, “My baby brother killed himself.”
Estelle looked up in shock. “I’m sorry, Annie. I didn’t know.”
“It was a long time ago. Just out of school, he was. Got laid off, broke up with his girl. But so what? Folks get laid off all the time. He had family, a place to live. He could have worked anyplace, done anything, found another girl.”
Sera leaned forward eagerly. “That’s the problem. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Annie smiled sadly. “You never know what’s in somebody’s heart. Even if you knew, it might not make sense to you. You just have to make peace with not knowing and trust the good Lord. He knows, and He understands. Your mother chose her time, that’s all. Like my brother chose his.”
“She might have waited till I graduated high school,” Sera grumbled.
“And then you’d have wanted her to wait until you were married,” Annie said. “And after that, until your babies were born. It’s never going to be the right time to lose your mother.”
Sera sniffed. “Now there’s nobody to remember my first day of school or the time I broke my arm. I can’t ask her about my dad or what I was like as a baby.” Her gaze wandered to the distant hills. “I think about it all the time now. Dying.”
Estelle took her hand. “Dying’s the most natural thing in the world, but most of us go through our days as if death doesn’t exist. It’s a defense mechanism—if we worried all the time about how life ends, we’d forget to live.”
“When my brother chose to die,” Annie said, “it made me think about whether I should choose, too. I thought about dying for a long time. But then I chose: I chose to live. Not just to drift through life, floating downstream like a fallen leaf, but to live, to fight, to swim upstream if I had to. Like a
