In Hovering Flight. Joyce Hinnefeld

guilt and love aren’t so easily separated, Addie. Another thing Scarlet considered saying, but didn’t.

      Both Cora and Lou knew, early on, that Addie had refused to consider any treatment this time around. Lou fought valiantly, via an endless stream of phone calls, to persuade Addie, then Tom, then Scarlet, to try to change her mind. “Stupid, misguided, namby-pamby environmentalist bullshit,” were her exact words, her parting shot at Scarlet at the end of their last phone call. Followed by this: “You’re letting her commit suicide, Scarlet. I hope you can live with that.” It was clear she’d had quite a lot to drink.

      But what could anyone do? This time Scarlet stayed out of the way. This time she didn’t want her tears to force her mother back into the multiple agonies, for her, of chemotherapy. For most of the fall she hid out in her apartment in New York, tending to other things there. Eight months ago—even two months ago—she never would have dreamed that she’d be in Cider Cove the morning after Addie’s death, longing for her, physically longing for her, as if she were a child again. Eight months ago, before a series of unexpected events, Scarlet had told herself it was Addie’s decision, no one else’s.

      What is it, when someone says no to all her doctors have to offer? Some pinpointable stage in the process of dying? Angry self-destructive-ness? Resigned despondency? Peaceful acceptance?

      Probably a bit of all those things, Addie had told Scarlet and Tom two weeks ago, clearly uninterested in pursuing the question further. And then she’d laid out her instructions for what she ardently hoped they would do with her body when she died—making it clear, when she’d finished, that she didn’t wish to talk about her death any longer.

      So now they are left to decide for themselves what to make of it all. For people like Dustin, Scarlet imagines, it’s easy: Addie’s death was a suicide, yes—a deeply principled one. Martyrdom, actually, in the eyes of Dustin and Addie’s other followers. It’s easy for them to see her death this way, Scarlet thinks, because, of course, she isn’t their mother. Which, at this moment, she desperately wishes these scattered children of the art world and the environmental movement would remember.

      The sound of Dustin’s sawing—now a steady whine—has become grating. Scarlet desperately needs a cup of coffee.

      “Doesn’t he have a mother of his own?” she asks, her voice cracking.

      Cora just looks at her, saying nothing. Waiting. There are more tears, Scarlet can see, at the corners of her eyes.

      She has always waited like this for Scarlet.

      And as always, in the warm light of Cora’s gaze, Scarlet begins—rapidly—to melt.

      “I’m pregnant,” she says.

      “I wondered,” Cora answers.

      And then Lou opens the screen door and pulls a chair up to join them.