Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 23: Then

The baby would have to grow up without a mother. Sadie was an orphan, now. As I watched the unfamiliar faces milling around the funeral home last February, my mind kept returning to that awful truth.

Since they hadn't been able to locate Paula's family, Father Eagan stood at the head of the receiving line followed by Diana and the kind-eyed, middle-aged widower who'd been named Sadie's godfather.

Most of the people attending the wake were parishioners at St. Catherine's, which was located, either conveniently or morbidly depending on your point of view, directly across the street from this funeral home. They obligingly shuffled down the receiving line that started with Father Eagan and ended at the red velvet kneeler, the wooden pedestal, and the closed casket.

Paula was in there.

Four days earlier, she'd leaned forward over the third-floor railing of the busiest mall in the greater Boston area.

"I'm sorry for your loss," mumbled an elderly woman wearing a black pantsuit and an elegant cloche hat. It's what everyone said in the presence of a sorrow no words could ever describe. I'd overheard this woman repeat the same thing — "I'm sorry for your loss" — to Father Eagan, and to Diana, and now, for some reason, to me.

"I never got a chance to meet Paula," I said, and immediately felt rude for not wordlessly accepting this woman's misplaced condolences. Owen was chatting in the corner with a handful of acquaintances; standing toward the front of the room, I must have looked like part of the receiving line.

"Oh," said the woman, startled. "Well, I only met her once, at the christening." She grasped the strap of her shoulder bag. "So troubled. It's such a shame." She looked down at the ground and headed back in the direction of the coat rack.

I took a seat in one of the padded black folding chairs around the periphery of the room, so no one else would mistake me for one of Paula's family members. There wasn't a single person in that room who belonged in that category.

I wasn't about to tell Diana that I was "sorry for her loss," since I wasn't sorry for her and it wasn't even her loss. Mostly I was sorry for Sadie. She'd just lost the mother who'd never wanted her.

And I was sorry for Paula, even though I'd never met her. In addition to the single, yearbook headshot displayed in a gaudy frame by the entrance to the funeral home, I'd only seen one other picture of her. It had been taken during a period the previous spring when Paula had been sober enough to spend a lot of time with Sadie. In the picture, she was sitting in a pew at St. Catherine's, holding Sadie on her lap. They were dressed in matching, patterned Easter dresses and their blond heads were thrown back in shared laughter. The late morning sun sliced through the stained-glass windows, making their faces appear kaleidoscopic.

It must have seemed to Paula in that moment like everything was going to be okay.

But then the image of her face exploded in my mind. Her skull split open and her brain splattered across the mall floor, bloody chunks on shiny linoleum.

How many people had watched her body tumble downward and break like that?

"She made everyone in the mall a witness." The words came from over my shoulder and they matched my thoughts so exactly that I shivered. Of course, we were at Paula's wake, so people wanted to talk about the way she'd died. It really wasn't that surprising of a coincidence.

Still, I was curious who had been bold enough to say something other than, "I'm sorry for your loss" at a wake.

A few feet beyond the other end of the closed casket, two children, a boy and a girl, hovered over a round table that displayed the guestbook. Their wavy hair was the exact same shade, a color that might have been labeled Candied Yam on a paint chip.