Chapter 33
My MotherHelper meeting starts in ten minutes and I haven’t left the house yet, which means I’m going to be late.
It’s an add-on meeting to accommodate a guest speaker, a holistic dietician who Kat told me is “amazing…her milk-making muffin recipe is a staple.” I told Kat I’d attend, and it’s too late now to back out.
There’s no time to change, so work outfit it is, minus my apron—a short-sleeved cotton dress faded from years of wear, my hair in a finger-swept ponytail, makeup-free. I look disheveled and I don’t care. I’m too distracted to worry about my fashion sense.
For the last hour I sat on the stool in my studio, taking shallow breaths, watching the painting with such focus that my eyes ached. Pinging between loosely plausible explanations for what happened, none of which held.
Is it me? Is it the painting? I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
I should tell someone what’s going on. Wyatt, at least.
I will, I decide—but later.
Now, as I reach for my bag at the front door I see my tattoo—the three dots glossy and skin-colored. No sign of anything amiss; no discernible pain. I’m suddenly glad for the biometric tracker, because it tells me that at least the baby is okay, which instantly brings down my heart rate.
Cutting through Colonial Park Cemetery will be fastest. It’s a gloomy day, the air muggy, the sky overcast and threatening a thunderstorm.
The type of weather where you can sense the electricity in the air, your fingertips tingling with energy.
I love a good thunderstorm in the South.
They can get wild, like nothing I experienced back home.
But too much rain leads to a host of problems, including dreaded flooding.
At least today’s storm isn’t supposed to be this type of drencher. I don’t even bother with an umbrella.
The cemetery saw its first dead buried in the early 1700s but has been a city park since 1896, about forty years after burials ceased.
There’s a meandering path through its middle, and benches for rest and reflection under moss-draped oak branches.
The graves are old, many of the stones crumbling and illegible now.
A large number of those buried in Colonial Park Cemetery died from the yellow fever epidemic, which gripped Savannah in 1820.
Clementine and I often walk through Colonial Park, a new grave marker catching her eye each time. “How did this person die, Momma? He was even younger than me!” She finds the idea of being buried—whole-bodied, in a coffin—curious, because that is not how it’s done anymore.
Neighborhood memorial centers, designed like beautiful museums, have replaced cemeteries.
Here cremated remains (the process evolved to be environmentally friendly) are interred in the wall behind name plaques.
Fountains babble and soothing nature sounds stream through speakers, creating a serene place to visit the dearly departed.
Poppy has such a plaque—her box of ashes so small it barely took up half the space—beside her grandfather’s, but that’s not where I go to visit her. I can’t feel her there.
There’s a sudden loosening of my left shoe and I see the lace has come untied. With a grumble, the community center still a five-minute walk, I sit on the nearest bench and bend to retie the shoelace.
The next thing I know, it’s teeming rain and I’m soaked to the bone.
I’m seated on the bench. My shoelace remains untied.
My wrist—specifically the area where the tattoo is—hurts again, like something is burrowing into my bone.
The pain is searing, hard to breathe through.
I massage my forearm, which seems to help a bit. My ponytail hangs in a dripping rope.
How long has it been raining like this?
Confused, I glance at my watch. See three calls from Kat and one from Margie. Then I notice the time.
I’ve been sitting on this bench for more than thirty minutes, but I have no recollection of those minutes passing. My dress clings to me, soaking wet, like a second skin. I’m chilled and shivering, my mind jumbled. Then something rises to the surface of my consciousness. Or rather, someone…
I wasn’t alone on the bench during the rainstorm.