City of Light by Lauren Belfer Page B

have an argument, sometimes they say things simply for the sake of the argument. It’s called a ‘rhetorical device.’ Your mother didn’t actually mean that people would picnic on the riverbed at the Falls, she was just saying that to make a point. It’s an absurd idea anyway. No one could take that much water, it’s not possible to build a power station that big. You’d need a hundred power stations. Besides, the state has to grant your father’s company options to use the water; the government would never grant options to use all the water.”
    She gave me that look young people have when they conclude that adults are beyond stupid. “You don’t know what happened, do you, that made my mother die?”
    “Grace, I do know,” I said firmly.
    Last year, Margaret had become pregnant. Grace and I had discussed this before. Of course Grace didn’t know a crucial fact: that Margaret had not actually given birth to her , and this was a fact which I hoped Grace would never learn. Margaret was thirty-four, considered old to have a first child, and the pregnancy was difficult from the beginning. More than once Dr. Perlmutter had been called in when there was fear that she would lose the baby.
    “I was here, remember?” I asked more sympathetically. “Your mother gave birth to her baby before the baby was ready, and the baby died, and your mother got sick from it.” Even now, I choked at the memory. Margaret, dead in childbirth, like too many women I’d known through the years.
    “No, before then. Sometimes I think I made her die, Aunt Louisa. She loved me so much, and I—”
    Tears smarted in her eyes. I put my arms around her, and as if I’d finally given her the permission she’d been yearning for, she began to cry full out, leaning against me and reaching up to grip my shoulders.
    “Sweetheart.” Gently I stroked her hair. So this was the anguish that had caused her words to Millicent. “The sickness killed her. Her death had nothing to do with you. This happens so often. You know families at school where the mother has died, don’t you?”
    She nodded, even as her face was pressed against me.
    “And then the children always think their mother’s death is their fault—you can ask them at school. But it’s not their fault, Grace. Try to believe me. It’s not.”
    She pushed away a bit to look up at me. “But, Aunt Louisa, it wasn’t … I mean …” She struggled to speak.
    “Don’t worry, Grace. Everything’s going to be fine.” I squeezed her shoulders.
    “But I miss her so much.”
    “I do too. But I know she’d want us to be looking forward, to the future, not backward. She’d want us to try to be happy. Can you try to be happy for her?”
    “Are you happy, Aunt Louisa?” I couldn’t answer. “Are you?”
    “I’m not happy, Grace,” I admitted slowly, “but I’m doing my best. I’m trying to live the kind of life she’d want me to live.”
    Grace gazed off, thinking. “Well, I guess I’m trying to do what she wanted. I guess maybe she would be proud of me now.” Eagerly she looked at me. “Shall I tell you the reason?”
    Why did I have to speak at that moment? Why couldn’t I just listen to what she might have told me? I berate myself, over and over. I thought I understood. I thought I was comforting her. I thought I knew everything, but my imagination had failed me.
    “I already know. Because you’re a good girl and you work hard at school.”
    Abruptly Grace pulled out of my arms and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I hate electricity. Don’t you, Aunt Louisa? Joan of Arc didn’t have electricity.”
    “That’s true, Grace. I was just telling your father that Joan of Arc was one of my heroines, when I was your age. I used to pretend that I was Joan of Arc.”
    “You did? How wonderful,” she said with trembling glee. “I figured out today that all the people I ever loved to read about in history never had electricity. They always had candles. Queen