Lovesick by James Driggers

Author:James Driggers [Driggers, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2015-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

6

Freddie tips a cup of steaming coffee into her saucer. It has been a week now that Isabelle has been dead, three days since they buried her and Mr. Odom and the stillborn baby. They buried them all in the family plot next to the Deegans. Jewel wanted to bury Isabelle with the baby, but Freddie would not allow it. She does, however, consent to a double headstone so that Jewel will leave her alone about the matter. Sitting on the porch, she can see the graves outlined by a wrought-iron fence from her rocker. Freddie tells Mr. Webb from the funeral home that due to the circumstances, they require only a graveside interment. Nothing at the church. Nothing at the funeral home. Jewel’s preacher conducts the service—reluctantly, Freddie thinks. He doesn’t know them, refers to Isabelle as Miss Odom. Miss Odom and her father. He does not mention the baby except in a passing reference to “all the young angels You have called home.” A few of the women from Jewel’s committee attend and serve supper afterward. Freddie wonders if they have drawn straws.

She thinks about Isabelle lying cold in the ground. She would not let Jewel bury her in a maternity smock. She bought a new dress. A blue summer dress that she gives to Mr. Webb. In the coffin, he had washed the blood off her face, out of her hair. She did not look sad as she slept there, her hair tied in a ribbon. Freddie had wanted to give her something, a keepsake to take with her, to keep her company, to let her know she would be missed. There was nothing of hers that she could think to give that would matter to Isabelle—no memento to mark an occasion, a bond between them. She decided to put in the record Isabelle had played for her. Jewel ridicules her for it, tells her it is pure folly. Freddie thinks about the young Mrs. Deegan who simply sat down after finding her husband hanging in the barn. Thinks about the sadness that rooted her to the ground, sealed her tongue forever. Freddie understands this now, understands why Mrs. Deegan had her own tombstone inscribed as well the day her husband was buried.

It did storm the night that Isabelle died, just as Freddie had thought. She knows now that whenever the wind picks up and there is the breath of dampness in the air, a rumble of thunder on the horizon, she will revisit that night.

The images pop in her head on a continual loop. Jewel collapsing in the sheriff’s arms. The harsh overhead light in Isabelle’s room. Isabelle in a pool of blood on the bed. Her baby, a girl, puddled between her legs. Abruption, the doctor had called it. The dislodging of the placenta before birth. The baby followed the placenta out instead of the other way round. It had drowned in its own blood and, for good measure, killed Isabelle in the process. No one is there to give the baby a name.

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