Chapter 5
She was touch and go for most of six weeks. No blood of the saints to quicken her recovery this time. She wasn’t at Donna’s
funeral in April, but she was able to attend the remembrance in August, at the Rackham College chapel. The Reverend Erin Oakes
delivered the eulogy. She was as slim and pretty as ever, although her close-cropped hair was as silver as whitecaps in moonlight.
The reverend said Donna McBride had been angered by suffering and outraged by cruelty . . . and her anger, in turn, made her
suffer; her outrage made her cruel. Donna, she said, drank hate’s poison and hoped it would sicken her enemies; Donna had
committed a thousand crimes to atone for the one she hadn’t stopped, couldn’t stop, because she had been just a child. Maybe
she had never stopped being that child, in some way. But she had loved her friends as intensely and completely as she hated
the rest of the world, and that love counted for something. It had kept her from consuming herself . . . as the worst always
do.
It wasn’t a pleasant account of one woman’s life. But there was truth in it, a recognition of all Donna’s pain and resentments
and mistakes, and Gwen preferred that to a lot of comforting blab about some version of Donna that had never existed. It did
Donna no kindness to falsely remember her. Maybe there was even some mercy in it, that Erin Oakes could look upon Donna’s
life the way a mother might look upon a child’s skinned knee. And in the end, Donna had stood with them. Gwen knew it, even
if no one else did. At the end, Donna had thrown off her whole ugly life like a rotten coat, which was, in a way, a thing
as astonishing as seeing a dragon swallow its own tail.
Tana and Allie sat in the front row, and when they walked out, they were holding hands. Allie had a limp—a block of stone had crushed her foot, and it had not recovered—but Tana helped her along, every step of the way, and now and then Allie placed her head on Tana’s shoulder and laughed.