Sunshine

“I do not have much time, my dear,” she said. “Forgive me. But I had to come when I heard you weeping. When I understood what you wept for.” She picked up my hands—in a gesture very like Con’s—and then held them together, as she had done long ago, when she had taught me to change a flower into a feather. “Constantine is telling the truth,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with your hands. There is nothing wrong with you. Except, perhaps, that you came into your strength too quickly, and all alone, which is not how it should happen—if it is any comfort, this is not the first time it has happened this way to someone, and it will not be the last—and yet if it had not happened that way to you, you might not have done what you did, partly because you would have known it could not be done. And so you would have died.”

“Would that have been so bad?” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Mel would have mourned, and Aimil, and Mom and Charlie and Kenny and Billy…even Pat, maybe. Even Mrs. Bialosky. But— would it have been so bad?”

My grandmother turned her head to look out at the lake, and again I was reminded of Con, of the way he turned his head to look through the curtains. She was still holding my hands. “Would it have been so bad?” she said, musingly. “I am not the one to answer that, for I am your grandmother, and I love you. But yes, I think it would have been so bad. What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing—a very hard thing—or you would not have to ask if your failure and early death would be so bad a thing to happen instead. But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?”

“Which difficult things?” I said bitterly. “There are so many of them. Right now it feels as if they’re all difficult things.”

I waited for her to tell me to pull myself together and stop feeling sorry for myself, but she said: “Yes, there are many difficult things, and they have been almost too much for you—too much for you to have to bear all at once. Remember what Constantine told you: that he too is shaken, for all that he is older and stronger than you are.”

“Con is a vampire” I said. “He’s one of the difficult things.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Pat says that we have less than a hundred years left,” I said.

And for a third time she reminded me of Con, in the quality of the silence before her answer. But she sighed like a human. “Pat is perhaps a little pessimistic,” she said.

“A little!” I said. “A little!”

She said nothing.

We sat there, her warm hands still holding mine. I was waiting for her to tell me everything was all right, that I would be better soon, that it would all go away, that I would be fine. That I would never have to look at another vampire again. That we had all the time we needed, and it wasn’t my battle anyway. She didn’t. I heard the little noises that the lake water made. I felt the pieces of my severed loyalties grinding together. Of the fragments of me.

I thought about the simplicity of dying.

At last I said, and surprised myself by the saying: “I would be sorry never to see the sun again.” I paused, and realized this was true. “I would be sorry…never to make cinnamon rolls again, or brownies or muffins or—Sunshine’s Eschatology. I would be sorry never to work twenty hours straight on a hot day in August and tear off my apron at midnight and swear I was going to get a job in a factory. I would be sorry never to leave my stomach behind when Mel opens the throttle on this week’s rehab project. I would be sorry never to tell Mom to mind her own damn business again, never to have Charlie wander into the bakery and ask me if everything is okay when I’m in rabid-bitch mode, not to make it to Kenny and Billy’s high school graduations, supposing either of them manages to graduate. I would be sorry never to reread Child of Phantoms again, never to argue with Aimil about Le Fanu and M. R. James, never to lie in Yolande’s garden at high summer…” Wonderingly I said, “I’d be sorry never to hear the latest SOF scuttlebutt from Pat again.”

I paused again, longer this time. I almost didn’t say it. I whispered: “I would be sorry never to see Con again. Even if he is one of the difficult things.”

I woke with tears on my face and Con’s hair in my mouth. I don’t think any of me moved but my eyelids, but he raised his head immediately. I sat up, releasing him from dreadful servitude. He rolled to his feet at once, and drew the curtains back. Night had fallen.

“It’s dark out,” I said unnecessarily.