Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (24 page)

“Okay.” She studied him, concerned. “But I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back to help.”

“I’ll take care of it on my own.”

Carly followed him downstairs. “But there’s so much to sort through. It’s too much for one person.”

“I said I’ll take care of it,” he said harshly. Carly raised her hands in a small gesture of surrender and shook her head as if to say it made no difference to her.

Carly returned two weeks later with a carload of boxes and garbage bags. Russ was pleased to see her and agreed that they should get started on the quilt studio, but he was actually just about to leave for Pike Place Farmer’s Market. He would be glad for her company if she wanted to join him. Carly assented, and they spent the day seeing the sights and shopping for ingredients for their supper, which they prepared together. Russ asked her about work and her fiancé, and circumspectly asked if they had resumed planning their wedding. Although Russ had long privately considered Carly too young to get married, Elaine would not have wanted Carly to postpone her happiness for the year of mourning Carly seemed to believe was necessary. For his part, Russ saw no point in observing a symbolic year of mourning to suit social conventions. They would always mourn Elaine. One year or two years or ten years later, they would still mourn. To pretend that everything would be resolved on some arbitrary date was ridiculous.

“If you’re postponing the wedding because you’re having second thoughts, that’s one thing,” said Russ, after Carly gave a tearful account of her fiancé’s bewildered unhappiness at her reluctance to set a new date. “You should take that time. But if
you’re doing it for your mother, I really think you ought to reconsider.”

“I know I want to marry him,” said Carly. “I just can’t imagine getting married without Mom there. How can I celebrate when she’s gone?”

“We’ll have to figure out a way,” said Russ quietly. “Your mother would be very annoyed if we never celebrated anything ever again just because she’s not here to enjoy it.”

Carly actually managed a laugh. “She’d be furious. Can you imagine what she’d say?”

“All too well.”

They laughed together. Carly wiped her eyes and said she would call her fiancé as soon as she got home so they could choose a new wedding date.

They washed the dishes side by side. Afterward, Russ walked Carly to the door to say good-bye. Unexpectedly, she hugged him.

“I never thanked you for marrying my mother,” she said, her voice muffled as she buried her face in his shoulder.

“Well …” Russ patted her on the back. “It’s not something you need to thank me for. I was glad to do it. Thank you for letting
me
marry
her
.”

“It’s not like I could have stopped her.” Carly lifted her head so he could see that she was teasing. “I’m glad she was married to you when this happened. If she had still been married to my dad—well, he would have been totally useless. But you saw her through. You eased her way.”

His throat constricting, Russ held Carly tightly.

When Carly opened the door to leave, she spied her car in the driveway and, through the windows, the boxes she had brought. She shot him a look that was mildly accusing. “We were so busy, we forgot about Mom’s quilt studio.”

“I guess we did. I’ll get around to it. Maybe you could leave the boxes.”

She did, and a few days later, she called to ask if he had sorted out the quilt studio yet.
Sorted it out?
Russ thought. He could not even open the door. “I haven’t had a chance,” he told her. “I’ve had a lot to do, catching up at work after the time off. You know.”

“Yes, Dad,” she said. “I know.”

The last time she had called him Dad was at her high school graduation.

When he returned home from work the next day, he found a tentative, apologetic message on the answering machine. Elaine had been participating in a round robin quilt project with some friends from the Internet, the caller explained. When a member received another member’s quilt block, she was supposed to add a border and mail it on to the next quilter in the circle. The person after Elaine had not received any packages in months, and three of the round robin quilts were missing. They had heard about the “recent tragedy,” and hated to bother him about something so trivial, but they wondered if perhaps the quilt tops could be located among Elaine’s belongings and sent on their way. The caller left an address.

Russ searched through the pile of unopened mail on the credenza in the foyer and found one large, padded envelope addressed to Elaine. Inside was a red, brown, green, and ivory quilt, partially completed, with a complicated star in the middle and two surrounding borders, one of squares, one of flowers and leaves. Russ tore open every envelope addressed to his dead wife, and although some contained fabric or quilt blocks, none but the first met the description the caller had left on the answering machine. He climbed the stairs, touched the door to her quilt studio, and let his hand fall to his side. Then he went to his bedroom and dialed the phone.

“Hello?”

It was Christine, not Charlie. That made it easier. “Christine.” He cleared his throat. “Christine, it’s Russ. I need your help.”

She arrived early the next morning, before he had eaten breakfast. That was his fault, not hers; he had sat at the table lost in thought without taking a bite for at least a half hour before her car pulled into the driveway. He scraped his clammy eggs and bacon into the trash and let her in.

Christine gave him one long, wordless hug, then held him at arm’s length and gave him a searching look. “You stopped shaving?”

His hand flew to his jaw. “Yeah. Well. Sometimes I forget.”

“You look like you’re growing a beard.” She smiled, wistful and sad. “It looks good on you.”

He mumbled a thank you and led her upstairs. Christine pushed open the door to the quilt studio without giving him a chance to prepare himself, as if ignoring his need to steel himself would make the need vanish. “Should we find the round robin quilts first?” she asked, standing in the center of the room. Her gaze fell upon the design wall and lingered there.

“Sure,” said Russ. He went to the stack of envelopes on the table beside Elaine’s sewing machine. They held letters full of condolences and well-wishes and assurances of the senders’ prayers. They turned Russ’s stomach and he threw them in the trash.

Christine soon found the round robin projects neatly folded on Elaine’s worktable. Russ set them aside to mail later and began assembling the collapsed cartons Carly had left. He opened the closet door, scooped up armfuls of folded fabric, and dropped them into an open carton. Christine did the same with the shelves of quilting books.

“What do you want to do with all this?” asked Christine when they had filled several cartons.

“Donate it. Give it away. Throw it away. I don’t care.”

He was conscious of Christine’s silence, but at that moment he
truly did not care what became of his wife’s treasured accumulation of fabric and patterns. Now that he had finally broken through whatever had kept him from entering that room, he wanted to strip it bare of anything that reminded him of Elaine. She had called the quilt studio her haven, her sanctuary, but it had not saved her. She had not even been able to climb the stairs to reach it in the end.

He packed her sewing machine into a box and stuffed smaller pieces of fabric around it for protection. Sorting out her unfinished projects was harder, especially when he came upon the partially completed quilt with the log cabin blocks and the stars, the last quilt she had begun before her diagnosis. He recognized pieces from quilts he knew well—two for his nieces, one for Alex, one for their own bed—extra or imperfect blocks she had not been able to use but had been unwilling to discard. He found a stack of twenty small quilt blocks made up in old-fashioned looking material, each pattern different, from a class she had taken years before. Christine discovered a binder Elaine had kept of useful tips her Internet quilting friends had exchanged by email.

“Email,” said Russ, suddenly remembering. He switched on the computer and checked her account. She had more than fourteen hundred email messages waiting. The last was a warning from her ISP that her account was full.

“I can’t write back to all these people,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” said Christine. She sat down and began typing. He hesitated, but returned to his own work, and before long Christine announced that she had sent one message to everyone in Elaine’s address book letting them know that she had died. “There’s no good way to deliver this kind of bad news,” she said. “I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to anyone.”

“Most of them probably know already,” said Russ, sealing a carton with heavy tape. “I think someone posted a link to her obituary on a message board.”

The hours passed. They took a break for lunch; Russ made sandwiches and listened to Christine’s news about Charlie and the kids. Christine seemed to want to tell him something else, but hesitated on the brink of speaking. He was getting used to that. Everyone wanted to comfort him, to find the right words that would bring him solace. He knew there were no such words.

It was harder to return upstairs than he had expected. He had thought the shock of pain would wear off from the sheer physical effort of putting away a life. Instead he had to force himself through the doorway of the room. And suddenly he understood why: The cancer quilt gaped like an open wound from the design wall.

Angrily, he snatched the fabric pieces one by one and stuffed them into a plastic bag.

“Careful,” said Christine.

“Why?” He scraped the last pieces to the floor roughly. “What’s the point? What was the point of any of it?”

“Oh, Russ. You don’t mean that.”

But he did. He wished he could articulate his anger, his demand for some divine justification for what had happened. Elaine’s death was beyond unfair. God should not allow someone who had devoted her life to easing the suffering of others to die in pain. God should not have brought Russ and Elaine together just to shatter his heart by taking her away. All their dreams, all their plans, every word of tenderness, every gesture of affection, every kiss, every hope, every moment had been an empty promise, a tease, a waste.

Hollow and cold and helpless, he closed his eyes and let the bag of black and red and green fall to the floor.

Christine took it up. He watched as she gently picked up the remaining pieces of the quilt from the floor, brushed them off, and placed them carefully into the bag. She zipped the bag shut and put it in one of the last open boxes, where it quickly disappeared amid the abandoned quilting tools.

At last they finished. They packed up the last carton and sealed it, and as he straightened, Russ realized that he was exhausted, flooded with the kind of bone-aching weariness that usually followed a much more physically arduous day.

“What should we do with these?” asked Christine, gesturing to the cartons and boxes they had carried downstairs and stacked in the foyer. He wondered if she knew it was a different question than the one she had asked before.

Christine had driven her minivan, so he said, “If I help you load, will you take them?”

“Take them where?”

“Goodwill. St. Vincent de Paul’s. Wherever.”

“But Russ …” Christine looked around, then gestured to the box containing Elaine’s sewing machine. “What about that? Don’t you want to save that, at least?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Mending? Maybe you should save it for Carly.”

“Carly already took what she wanted to keep. If you want it, take it.”

“I don’t want it. I just thought …” She shook her head. “Quilting was such an important part of Elaine’s life. I thought maybe you would want to keep something of that.”

“I don’t.” He hefted the largest box in his arms and carried it out to her minivan.

He woke shortly after two A.M., shaking and sick at heart. The covers were soaked in sweat. He pushed them aside and stumbled downstairs to the kitchen, where he poured a glass of water and tried to stop shaking. He ached for Elaine.

Back in bed, he struggled for sleep. At seven the alarm clock roused him from a restless doze. He showered and dressed for work, but his heart seemed to be pounding unnaturally hard, as if he had sprinted up four flights of stairs. In the hallway, he paused
by Elaine’s quilt studio. The door was ajar; he pushed it open and took in the emptiness. Only the design wall remained, white flannel marked with a faint blue grid. A wave of grief swept over him and he pulled the door shut.

He needed to fill that space, he told himself as he drove to work. An exercise room. A home theater. Storage. All day he forced himself to consider alternatives rather than imagine the room without Elaine.

Two nights he wrestled with insomnia, fighting off memories of Elaine. On the third morning, he woke to the sounds of his own weeping. Ashamed, he snatched up the quilt and wrapped himself in it as he sat on the edge of the bed. He buried his face in the quilt and imagined he could still smell Elaine in it.

He picked up the phone and called Christine. The oldest boy answered; Russ asked for his mother with his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. When she finally came to the phone, he said, “Where did you take them?”