“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’ll go find out for you.”
“Please don’t be long.” Portia’s tone belied the politeness of her words. “He gets so cranky when he’s hungry.” She saw somebody behind Grace and lit up. “Delilah! Darling!”
Grace watched her waft across the room. She was beautiful, there was no doubt about it, but to Grace it had always seemed a cool, precise kind of beauty: her hair smoothed back, her outfits always crisp and formfitting. Grace had met her around her father’s office a couple of times before — well, before it happened — and remembered feeling intimidated by her glossy kind of perfection. Like Portia had read a memo on how to be a woman that Grace couldn’t even decipher.
She’d never suspected for one moment what was to come.
The room was suddenly unbearably hot; her wool tights prickling against her skin. Grace retreated to the kitchen, but there was no sign of the caterer.
“You must be one of the daughters.” An older woman squinted at her through wire-rimmed spectacles. “Helena, isn’t it?”
“That’s my sister, I’m Grace,” she corrected, but the woman was already beckoning over a group of proper-looking guests in starched shirts and high-necked blouses.
“This is one of them. You know, the girls from his first marriage.” She said it with a hushed voice, like it was a scandal.
One of the men assessed her curiously. “You can’t really see it, not like with Dashwood.”
“Oh, I know!” the woman exclaimed. “That boy is the spitting image of his daddy. You have your mother’s looks,” she added, patting Grace absently on the arm.
They were wrong. Both girls looked like their father, he had always said so. Grace had his eyes and his laugh, and Hallie shared his smile. But Grace didn’t bother correcting the group; to them, there was no way two black girls could look like their white father. They may not have been half as dark as their mother — second-generation Nigerian, by way of Philadelphia — but Grace had learned years ago that there were some people who would never look long enough to register the difference. Black was black, regardless of shade or hue.
“Such a tragedy. You at least had time with him,” another woman told Grace. “And poor, poor Portia . . .”
“Poor Portia,” they all echoed.
Grace tried to catch her breath. Her head was throbbing now, and the crowd seemed to close in on her, a mass of dark tailored clothing and insincerity. “Excuse me,” she murmured, backing away, but the moment she stepped back into the living room, she was accosted by Portia’s impatient call. “Grace? Grace, the puffs!”
Grace quickly turned to head the other direction, but bumped straight into another guest.
“Grace, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” The woman crushed Grace against her generous chest. She was an artist friend of her mother’s, Grace remembered, a wild-haired woman with a penchant for spoken-word poetry and healing crystals. “You must be devastated. Wrecked!”
Grace struggled to breathe.
“Let it out, I always say. You have to let it all out!”
“I . . . I can’t. . . .” Grace pulled away, gasping for air. “I’m sorry, I have to . . .” She turned and dashed toward the back kitchen door, the woman’s words calling after her.
“Work through the pain, sugar!”
Outside, it had begun to rain, a misty drizzle that clung to Grace’s face as she hurried across the overgrown lawn and into the thicket of elm trees at the back of the yard. The trees were wide and shady here, a natural hideaway out of view from the house.
Grace made straight for the largest tree and scrambled up the ladder nailed to the side of the gnarled bark. The tree house had been her father’s pride and joy, the greatest achievement of a man who could barely replace a blown fuse. It was simple, sure — a sturdy floor lodged over the V of two wide branches, planks hammered into uneven walls, a dripping roof — but it was hers. Grace had spent hours up here as a child, cataloging leaves and bugs into her notebooks, while Hallie danced around with the fairies below, and staged dramatic readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, her father had brought up a telescope, and shown Grace her first glimpse of the infinite possibility of the night sky: that the random scattering of stars was actually a precise moving equation, a million forces pinning the whole universe together.
Grace pulled an old blanket from the chest in the corner and settled cross-legged on the damp floor, looking out through the trees to the city below. From here, the world was shrouded in thick white mist, only the vague outline of the bridge visible in the distance. Grace shifted, and heard the rustle of paper in her pocket. Her poem.
She pulled it out, crumpled and creased, but didn’t unfold it. She didn’t need to.
“ ‘When I am dead, my dearest,’ ” Grace began, her voice soft. “ ‘Sing no sad songs for me.’ ”
She’d learned it in fourth grade, for an intramural speaking contest. Her father had helped her, drilling the lines every night with the promise of a dollar to spend at the bookstore for every time she made it through without an error. In the end, she’d lost the competition to a whey-faced girl reciting a limerick about her dog, but it didn’t matter; Grace’s father had presented her with a beautiful leather-bound guide to the night sky, illustrated with every constellation. Roxy Heatherington could keep her silly certificate; Grace had won the prize that really mattered.
“ ‘Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree.’ ” Her voice was stronger now, the lines spilling from her lips with barely a conscious thought. “ ‘Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet, and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget. . . .’ ”
Grace paused, the words catching in her throat. She hadn’t grasped it as a child. This was a poem about death. About what happened after we were gone — or didn’t happen. Was her father dreaming through his twilight? Did he remember, or was there nothing left of him with which to even think? Hallie was the one who believed in spirits, in souls; Grace had always believed in science instead.
“Rossetti, right?” A voice came from below. Grace made a startled noise, and grabbed the door frame to stop herself from tumbling right out of the tree.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Grace caught her breath and peered down. A teenage boy was staring up at her. Hallie’s age, maybe a little older, wearing a black jacket with something under his arm. He had square-rimmed glasses, his brown hair already tufting in the rain. “I always liked that one,” he added. “The poem, I mean. And ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep.’ Mary Elizabeth Frye, I think.”