Clara (37 page)

Perhaps the next night or the one thereafter she spoke with Albert and he told her happily that he had bought a new motorcycle for them. A new Norton, he said. And on it they could ride through the hills again, together again, just the two of them, she snuggling up to him with her arms around his middle. He was waiting for her, he said.

She wanted to kiss him and hold him, but he was moving away.

Wait! she called out. Wait for me. I want to be with you.

WILLA ARRIVED AT NOON
by taxi from Innsbruck airport. She was tired from the interminable flights and the lineups, but she was also excited. She was pleased because she had been able to find the quote her mother had been looking for.

It was from a collection of letters literary friends had written to one Mme Louise d’Épinay in the mid-eighteenth century. The quote was from Abbé Ferdinando Galiani:
“The important thing, Madame,”
the abbé had written,
“is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”

She arrived at the house and used her key. She hurried up the stairs, opened the door and called out. “Mom! Where are you?”

The door to the bedroom opened and there was Emma, pulling sheets off the bed. She was weeping.

Later at the Catholic hospital, Willa stood at the open door and looked into the empty room. She had needed to see, to help her understand.

But there was nothing. Bright daylight on the bare mattress. The glass-topped bedside table. The cheap wooden chair. All empty except for the silver pictureframe still on the table.

A nun in a blue and white habit came along the hall carrying an armful of laundry. She saw Willa and stopped. Looked at the number on the door and then at Willa.

“Our patient number seven,” she said. “She was not with us for long. We hardly even knew her name.”

“She was here only a few days. I missed her. I flew in from Australia as soon as I could.”

The nun nodded and waited. “That’s a long way,” she said then. “And you are?”

“Wilhelmina Leonhardt. Her other daughter.”

“Ah. I see. Your sister was here.”

“Not when Mom died. None of us was.” Willa wiped her cheek with the inside of her wrist. “I spoke with her just a few days ago.”

The nun stood watching Willa’s face. After a while she said gently, “The dying often choose their time. It’s as if they came to a place where the dead need them more than the living, and they want to let go. I’ve seen it when they ask people to leave the room so they can die unobserved. They close their eyes. They make the decision. They withdraw.”

“They do?”

“They do.”

The nun stood a moment longer. “Don’t forget that little picture,” she said. She touched Willa’s arm lightly and walked away.

MY SPECIAL THANKS
for support and encouragement with
Clara
go out to Heather, to Aunt Thea in London, and to Laverne Barnes in Vancouver. Thanks also to Michael Tait in Toronto, and a big Thank You to Ellen Seligman, my publisher, and to Lara Hinchberger, my editor on this novel. All the people who over two generations have added documents and photographs to the file mentioned in the Author’s Note at the beginning of this book have now passed on; I am indebted to them all.