I stayed behind with Bernadette. For a long time, neither of us spoke. My head ached. My eyes burned. My stomach was a sour ball of fire."I'm sorry," Bernadette said,"about your son."
I touched her arm, the way she might have touched mine. "I'm sorry about what Dr Matt did to Leon."
"He almost killed me, too, you know. I can't have anymore children." she made an odd, rueful face, as if she'd broken something meaningless and small: a cup, a glass of figurine. "But I just couldn't hate him anymore.
"But you do," I said. "Of course, you do. Anybody would."
"I forgive him, Meggie," she said. "i forgave him years ago."
"Well, what if he hadn't been sorry?" I said, and I thought of gaylee's daughter. I thought of Jeanie, alone in the world. I thought of Cindy Ann at her kitchen table, drinking wine, breathing air, while Evan's body rotted in the ground.
"He wasn't sorry," Bernadette said. "He never apologized, not once. To this day, he insists it was all accident, a misunderstanding involving procedure. i forgive him for that, too. I forgive him. Me. This has nothing to do with him."
My teeth were chattering wildly. "Jeanie was right," I said. "you are deluding yourself. No one can forgive something like that."
Bernadette's face in the moonlight: pale. Her hair, in its braids, a corona of fire. Behind her, a flurry of stars filled the sky. "Hasn't anyone ever forgiven you," she said, "for something you shouldn't have done?
Something you have failed to do?"
She could have been painted on velvet. She could have been a vision, described in a papyrus scroll. she
could have been looking into my heart and reading every last thing ever written there.
"Not like that," I said.
"Are you certain?"she said.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. Got up. walked away.
