The Year of Luminous Love (44 page)

On April fifth, Arie awoke feeling alert and without pain. She asked for pancakes and Patricia rushed to the kitchen to whip up the meal. Arie ate heartily, better than she had in months, getting up and going to the table to sit and eat with her mother and father.

When the hospice caregiver arrived, she beamed smiles, urging Arie to do whatever she wanted all that day for as long as she felt like it. Arie asked to be taken outside, and Swede bundled her up, tucked her into a wheelchair, and pushed her around the yard and flowerbeds already blooming with sunny yellow daffodils. The weather was cool but the sun warm—the month of April at its best. Something akin to joy bubbled up inside Arie during the stroll. The world was beautiful, too beautiful to leave, and yet she knew she was ready to go. Not resigned, but ready. She could tell the difference.

In the late afternoon, Eden and Ciana came together to
visit. “You look fabulous!” Eden told Arie when she saw color in her cheeks.

“It’s been a good day,” Arie said, bundled in a spring quilt on the sofa.

Ciana said, “I hope you have many more.”

“No guarantee, but it sure would be nice. I’m sick of being
sick
. I haven’t felt good since we were in Italy.” Her expression went dreamy. “That was the best time of my life.”

“Mine too,” Eden chimed in.

For Ciana, it had been the best and the worst of times. “I loved being with my best friends,” she said truthfully.

“Request time,” Arie said soberly before quickly adding, “I don’t want the two of you moping around and acting all sad and gloomy after this is all over for me.”

Panicked glances darted between Ciana and Eden.

“I’m serious. Get busy with your lives and have a good time. Eden, go find Garret. Ciana, tell Jon Mercer you love him.”

Ciana went wobbly, queasy, as guilt and shame coursed through her. “What are you talking about? I don’t love Jon.”

In spite of Ciana willing Eden to endorse her words, Eden said nothing.

Arie took Ciana’s hand. “I didn’t know how you felt about him until Eric’s wedding. I never had a clue, I swear. Because if I had known …” Her voice tripped. Ciana started to speak, but Arie shook her head. “Let me finish. Maybe I didn’t want to see, but that night when you two were dancing and the new year came, it was like scales fell from my eyes. The way he looked at you, and the way you looked at him … it was a blinking billboard. You love each other.”

“I … I didn’t. I never—”

“I know,” Arie said, tears in her eyes. “You didn’t want to
hurt me.” Arie took short hiccuping breaths, pressing Ciana’s hand tenderly to her cheek. “I wish you’d have told me.” She looked into Ciana’s face. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”

Ciana fought for composure.

Arie smiled. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Truly. The heart wants what the heart wants. No regrets.”

Arie echoed Jon’s words, and Ciana realized she had no regrets either. Nothing could change the past.

“Now shoo,” Arie whispered. “This room will be swarming with relatives soon. Make a clean getaway while you can.”

She lifted her arms and Ciana and Eden leaned down to hold her one last time. This was goodbye, and all three of them knew it. A log in the fireplace, burned through its center, thumped down over the andirons and they glanced over in unison. A shower of golden sparks danced upward like spirit sprites, becoming a metaphor for Arie’s life—intense and sparkling. And far too brief.

Arie was seeing her living room and the people clustered around her hospital bed from the most unique perspective—from above. She hovered close to the ceiling, marveling at how small and wasted she looked on the bed. Was she dreaming? People were crying. Her mother, her dad, Eric and Abbie, Aunt Sally and Aunt Ruth. They were all so sad. She wanted to tell them she was fine, light as a feather, like a bird with its hollow bones, rising, floating over the bed and looking down on the scene. And she felt … what? Safe and warm and peaceful.

The voices below grew fainter, and it was as if she were hearing them from far away, through a mask, or a tunnel. Ever so slowly, her air body began to turn over so that she saw the
ceiling and the poster of the Sistine Chapel, so close that the ink pixels on the paper became geometric shapes. So close she saw the colors as vibrant flares. She watched, transfixed, as the poster turned translucent. And just as it began to fade into nothingness, Arie Winslow reached out and touched the face of God.

The
Windemere Journal
, the small hometown newspaper wrote in an editorial:

Ciana wasn’t surprised. The town felt invested in Arie, its sweetheart, a pretty little towheaded girl with generational lines that went deep and wide. And now she had been placed in a gleaming white casket lined with pale pink satin, dressed in her favorite pink jewel-studded rodeo jacket. Her head rested on a lace pillow, and her hand held a small carved wooden horse, a beaded string hanging from the neck; she had
insisted that it be buried with her. Only Ciana knew why, recalling the day she’d first seen it, half formed, in the hands of its creator.

Early on the day of the funeral, Ciana rose, then washed and groomed both her horses. A sleepy-eyed Eden found Ciana in the barn and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Couldn’t sleep, decided to come prepare the horses for the procession.”

“You’re bringing the horses? Why?”

“A sign of respect. I’ll ride mine and lead Sonata. Before Caramel, Arie rode this one.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Ciana looked solemn. “Bring us some coffee. Mom should have it brewing by now. And come help me braid Sonata’s mane and tail with this black ribbon.” She reached down and lifted a silky spool. “I want Sonata to look her finest.”

Eden looped the ribbon through her fingers, blinking away tears. “My honor. Back with caffeine in a minute.”

Once the horse was ready, they went into the kitchen and a hot breakfast. No one felt like eating, but Alice Faye insisted. She looked red-eyed, and tired and said things like, “Arie’s poor parents,” and “How does a mother bury a child?”

Ciana showered and dressed in cowboy black—black jeans, black shirt, boots, and hat. Eden wore a simple black dress and jacket and pulled her hair into a severe bun. Ciana loaded the horses into her trailer and drove to the big Baptist church downtown. Her mother and Eden followed behind in Eden’s car.

After a celebration of Arie’s life, pallbearers led by Eric and Swede loaded the pearl-white casket into the hearse. From there the seemingly endless procession wound through the streets behind the limo holding Arie’s immediate family.
Following that car, Ciana rode her horse and led Sonata, with the dressed-out horse wearing the ornate black and silver Mexican saddle, empty of the rider who would never return. The town would long remember the sight and sound of slow clopping polished horse hooves all along the slow journey to the cemetery.

At the entrance, Ciana dismounted, grasped both horses’ bridles and walked them the distance to the graveside, a beautiful spot on a hill, near an ancient oak tree. The ground had been left wild, and bright purple and yellow flowers carpeted the hillside. Arie would have loved the space. Blue sky above was shot through with sunlight, and a soft April breeze ruffled the mantle of flowers across the casket. Eden came alongside Ciana, encircled her waist and whispered, “Reminds me of Italy.”

Ciana agreed, pricked by unbearable sorrow but also comforted that at least one of Arie’s dreams had come true. She also thought of her grandmother, buried in another part of the same cemetery, and her father and grandfather, adjacent to Olivia. Four people she had known and loved were gone before she would turn twenty in July. And one, Jon Mercer, was among the missing.
Life is better left to chance
. The song’s refrain ran through her head, and she wondered what “dance” lay ahead for them all?

Rule of thumb: Don’t plant until mid-April, when frost is most likely finished for the winter. Harvest in mid-October before the first killing frost of autumn. Farmers followed the rule faithfully, and Ciana was no exception. In the middle of April, she plowed the fields she meant to plant, turning the rich clay soil to ready it for seeding. As she made the furrows, she grieved for Arie but also found comfort in the smell of fresh dirt greeting warm sunlight. Therapeutic. And watching the soil turn into green fuzz as the seeds sprouted and grew delivered hope for the spring and summer months to come.

Ciana had several surprises over the months too. The first and best was when Alice Faye, still sober and faithfully attending AA meetings, broke the news that Hastings had hit a bump on his subdivision project via the Tennessee legislature. The snafu required an issue that the politicians would need to vote on, but since they wouldn’t be reconvening until the fall, the Bellmeade Estates project was at a standstill. Her mother
and half the town—the half that wanted the project—were disappointed, but Ciana felt as if she been handed a reprieve. “It just pushes our decision down the road,” Alice Faye told her daughter. “Sooner or later, you’ll have to decide.”

Of course, Ciana had already decided. Her mother had just refused to hear her.

Ciana also rented out her empty barn’s stalls. With Caramel gone, and with Firecracker and Sonata housed in two stalls, she wielded a hammer to new lumber and created two more. The boarding money helped cover extra and unexpected costs. She reopened pasture land for the new horses to graze, planted additional fields of alfalfa to sell after harvest, and hired Clyde Keating, a boy just out of high school and the size of a heifer, who was planning on attending University of Tennessee in Knoxville on a football scholarship. Come August, he’d leave for football camp, but until then she paid him for a prodigious amount of muscle power. Clyde took a shine to Eden, becoming tongue-tied every time she came into view.

“You have an admirer,” Ciana teased Eden.

Eden just rolled her eyes.

One week, Ciana couldn’t cover Clyde’s cash-only paycheck. She was frantically hunting through cookie jars and under sofa cushions when Eden asked what was going on. Ciana told her and rushed off to the barn.

Eden followed her. “Good grief, why haven’t you asked me for it?”

“You pay rent already,” Ciana said, pawing through the change jar she kept in the tack room. “This is my problem.”

“Wait here,” Eden said. She returned quickly and handed Ciana ten one-hundred-dollar bills.

Ciana stared at the money, openmouthed. She threw up her hands. “I won’t take your house money.”

“It isn’t my house money.”

“Then where—”

“Tony’s drug money.”

Ciana’s eyes widened. “When? How?”

“Don’t ask. I can’t stick it into the bank without accounting for it come tax time, so it’s tucked away for rainy days. I think today qualifies as ‘rainy.’ Take it.”