Her father waited, perfectly still before a snaggle of battered geraniums, tall in his nubby brown suit, his hands held out and stiff. He was uncompromising; he could wait forever. Suddenly he clapped his hands together in a trap, then folded down onto one knee. Flecking his head to one side, beckoning her over. He held his cupped hands to her ear. From inside came a stifled, frantic vibrato. "A bee," he said, smiling down at her like a god. "It won't sting me. I know which ones to catch." The bee buzzed and buzzed in its cramped black cave. Slowly her father opened his blunt fingers. The bee shot out, sputtering like a backfiring motor; it droned again and was gone.

She watched it fly, amazed.

Her father watched it too, grinning. Then he tugged one of her sun-blonde plaits and stood, his broad hand cantilevered on his knee.

The cathedral was humming with holy, golden judgment. It sizzled at the back of her eyes. She held their bags from Jaeger and the toy shop, the library renewals for Ted that she'd forgotten to drop off at the car before they entered the church. Her mother was gawking at the long Gothic ceiling in the nave. All that light pouring in. Sylvia was ill; it was making her ill. The barefoot saints muttering at the door, the honeyed light bucketing down on all their heads. All that sorrow, all the wringing of hands. What made all that gold so bright was the blackness yawning behind it.

She stepped quickly out of the pew where she was resting the bags. "Mother, let's go." She took hold of her mother's elbow, began pulling her down the side aisle and out of the cathedral. "I have to go home. I have to go now." Confused, her mother fumbled for the toy bag and the library books, trying to help. She jerked her mother's arm, gripping it hard. "Forget it. Let's just go."

"They are fine. But I'm not fine." Sylvia stares now at the traffic signal. Stop, it says. Stop,

Her mother is watching Sylvia with mounting fear, holding her face steady, trying not to betray her own flailing emotions. Is it back? Is it over?

"I have everything," Sylvia says, her voice breaking into little chunks. The light turns green, and she eases the clutch, turning right onto the road that lies along the river, waving her arm cursorily out the window to signal. "I never thought I would have all this. My beautiful children," she says. " My husband. I have everything. My house and my writing. I never thought I would have it."

"But of course you were going to have it, my darling," Aurelia blurts, reassured by what she misreads as a simple overflow of emotion. "Of course you were."

"No --" Sylvia says. "I wasn't going to have it. I didn't think I would ever have it. I was afraid I was going to have nothing." She pauses, bracing herself for the words her mother has never been willing to hear. "That's why I broke down. That's why I tried to kill myself."

There is a moment of thick, airless silence.

"But that's over now, Sylvia," Aurelia finally replies, her words measured and motherly, calmly declarative. "That was so long ago. You put so much pressure on yourself. You didn't really want to die."

"What?" Sylvia says, incredulous. "What?" she says, stabbing furious glances in her mother's direction while watching the road. "Of course I wanted to kill myself! I wanted nothing else but to kill myself."

Aurelia's face drains of all color.

"You know I did, Mother. You know I did," Sylvia says, her voice both pleading and insistent. "That's why you locked up the knives. That's why you locked up my sleeping pills."

"No, Sylvia," says Aurelia, scrambling. "You didn't really. You didn't really want to die. That's how you gashed your head, that's why you've got this scar --" She reaches toward Sylvia's temple to brush aside her bangs with a finger. But Sylvia's arm flies reflexively off the steering wheel to block her mother's touch. Aurelia recoils, stunned; her face begins to melt off its bones. "Sylvia, no," she insists, her eyes brimming. "You were trying to get up. You were trying to help yourself, you were vomiting up the pills. You were crying. That's how we found you."

"I was dead for three days!" Sylvia cries out. She swings the wheel and pulls over, the tires spitting stones on the narrow grassy shoulder of the road as she brakes at the edge of the river. "How can you deny it? I was dead for three days under your house! The only thing I did wrong was to take too many sleeping pills!" She glares at her mother, who is trying not to cringe. Aurelia's eyes are glossy with tears; she is too frightened to cry.

"I was trying to help you," Aurelia trembles. "We were all trying to help you. You were so hard on yourself."

"Help me!" Sylvia says, shrill, disdainful. Her voice has grown rich, echoing; she feels it moving over a dark plane, blank and windswept. "You killed. You're the one who gave them permission to electrocute me. You told that quack doctor to give me the shocks."

"No," Aurelia says, quietly beginning to sob into her chest. "No. I was trying to help you. Everything I've ever done has been for you."

"Help me?" Sylvia repeats, bitter, her voice caustic with mocking sarcasm. "You won't even admit what happened. If you won't admit the truth, how can that help me?"

Aurelia is slumping against the door, holding her purse over her chest, quietly crying. Sylvia's hands are still on the steering wheel as she watches her mother's collapse. She is breathing fast, her heart pumping. She's aghast, amazed by the ominous force of the words as they come out. "I should be dead, Mother. I'm living a resurrected life. Everything I have is a miracle. My whole life is a miracle --"

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