For Love by Sue Miller

Author:Sue Miller [Miller, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408857595
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART III

CHAPTER IX

In the confusing aftermath of a tragedy, of any terrible event, we sometimes try to make sense of it by finding a way to blame ourselves. It seems to Lottie in the afternoon after Jessica has died that Ryan is feeling something like this – responsible, and miserable on that account. After he’s come back from the hardware store and they’re working mostly silently together at the back of the house, she remembers abruptly a time when he was three or four and she was grocery shopping with him. Someone had spilled coffee beans in a corner of the store, and he kept wanting to return to that spot, to look at the mess. Finally he had asked her in a hushed voice, ‘Did I do that?’ She had felt such a sweep of compassion, such an aching familiarity with this sense of oneself, that she knelt and held him tight for a moment before she could tell him, ‘No, of course you didn’t.’

It’s only more slowly as the long afternoon wears on that she realizes she is doing it too. That she is calling up again and again those few moments when her actions might have had something to do with what happened. She remembers her anger when she told Elizabeth she ought to call Cam, that he still lived nearby. Perhaps that was what had set it all in motion. Or perhaps if she’d left when she was supposed to, she thinks, some element in the equation that added up to Jessica’s death would have been different, and the girl would still be alive.

When she catches herself, she makes herself stop. It’s absurd. She knows this.

But she does keep calling Cam through the afternoon. He’s never home or at the store, but she talks to Maeve twice more. The second time, he’s called there again, and Lottie feels the same sweep of lightness, of relief, she felt earlier at this news: he is safe, he is all right.

It’s only a few minutes after this call that Elizabeth comes over to ask Lottie to drop by her house later in the evening; and this may be why Lottie so readily says yes.

It would help them out, Elizabeth says. She’s breathless, apologetic, and confusing in her attempts to explain everything. If Lottie hadn’t read her letter to Cameron, she might not even be able to understand what Elizabeth is saying. But what she gathers, after Elizabeth has explained Lawrence’s call from the airport, his sudden arrival in the afternoon the day before, is that Elizabeth has used her, Lottie, as a kind of cover for Cameron’s appearance last night.

‘Lawrence said, “What was he doing here anyway?” – you know, late in the evening, long after the accident. And I said that one or the other of you popped over all the time, that we’d done lots of stuff together this summer.’

She’s standing with Lottie in the front hall. Ryan is still outside. ‘So it would just give me some credibility if you’d come over tonight and have some coffee and dessert or whatever.

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