Chapter 9: The Woman at the Gate
I knocked on the open door.
Marianne looked up from her conversation with Sophia.
"There's someone who wants to see you," I said.
"If you're ready.
You don't have to be."
Marianne was quiet for a moment.
"Rose?"
"She hasn't left."
Something crossed Marianne's face — complicated and old, the expression of someone who had been carrying a feeling for a long time without a place to put it down.
"Send her in," she said softly.
I went to the family waiting room.
Rose Mendoza was in the corner chair, her canvas bag on her lap, her head resting back against the wall.
She was not asleep.
Her eyes opened the moment I stepped through the door.
"She wants to see you," I said.
Rose stood up carefully, the way older people do when they've been sitting too long.
She smoothed her gray shawl.
She picked up her bag.
She looked at me with an expression I recognized — the look of someone who has been told good news and is afraid to believe it yet.
"I owe you an apology," I said.
"At the cemetery.
I should have let you in."
Rose looked at me for a moment.
"You were grieving," she said.
"People do things when they're grieving." She paused.
"I've done worse."
She walked past me toward Marianne's room.
I stayed in the doorway.
I did not go in.
What happened in that room was not mine.
Through the window, I watched Rose stop at the foot of the bed.
I watched Marianne look at her.
I watched Rose set her canvas bag down on the chair and reach inside and take out a photograph — small, old, the color slightly faded — and hold it out.
Marianne took it with both hands.
I couldn't see what was in the photograph.
I didn't need to.
Sophia slipped out of the room and stood beside me in the corridor.
She leaned her head against my shoulder the way she had when she was small.
"Is Mom going to be okay?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"She's going to be okay."
"Are you?"
I thought about it honestly, which was something I had not done in several days.
"Getting there," I said.
Sophia was quiet for a moment.
"Grandma Eleanor called me this morning.
From her attorney's office."
I looked down at her.
"What did she say?"
"She said she was sorry." Sophia lifted her head.
"She said it like she meant it.
I don't know if she did."
"Neither do I."
"Should I call her back?"
I thought about the cemetery.
The fog.
The rosary in the mud.
The casket tilting in the dark.
And then I thought about the woman in that room, sitting with her daughter for the first time without a gate between them.
"Not yet," I said.
"Give it time."
May you like
Sophia nodded.
She took my hand and held it, and we stood together in the corridor while the morning light came through the window at the end of the hall, and neither of us said anything else, because there was nothing else that needed saying right now.
