The Time Keepers

Chapter 40

CHAPTER 40 Long Island, 1979

L OVE AND SADNESS TWISTED TOGETHER FOR G RACE. S HE FELT lucky she had married Tom. They had two healthy daughters and a home she was proud of. And yet, sometimes at night she’d find herself back at the river behind her childhood home, the waves crashing over the rocks, not loud enough to mute the sound of her mother crying in the bedroom.

She hated when these bouts of depression hit her. It felt like her heart was being strangled, obfuscating everything she knew to be good in her life. She became sullen and moody and snapped more at the girls than they deserved, and when Tom reached for her in the night, she pushed him away.

On some of those nights, she would do math in her head, calculating how old Bridey would be had she gone on to live and how many things had died when she drowned. As a child, she’d only seen it from her perspective, the change in her parents’ marriage, the gray veil that came over her mother’s eyes, her father’s sadness that he wore like the rain jacket he wrapped his baby girl in when they pulled her from the river. But now, as a mother and a wife, Grace mourned her sister’s death in another way. That Bridey never had the chance to marry and fall in love or to have children. Everything that had brought Grace joy later in life seemed tinged with a bittersweetness, knowing her sister had been robbed of also experiencing it. And although she knew as an adult that it was wrong to blame herself for a tragic accident, especially when she had only been a child herself when it happened, the fact that she had been making daisy chains when her sister fell into the river still haunted her.

Her daughters knew so little about her sister. Grace didn’t want to burden the children with the pain of knowing how she drowned. She had waffled during her first pregnancy to name Katie after Bridey if the baby was born a girl, and then again with Molly. After much contemplation, though, she decided against it, thinking it too much of a weight to put upon a child. But she didn’t anticipate the deep emotions it would continue to stir in her as the years passed. Molly was now several years older than her sister had been when she died, and there was so much of her daughter that reminded Grace of her sister. The laugh, the curiosity, even the love of animals. Grace had been seriously considering getting the girls a dog next year. They all loved Hendrix, Jack’s black Labrador who came into the shop when he worked at night. He was such a gentle animal, she thought perhaps if they had a dog of their own, it would knit the girls closer together.

She’d have to make the decision sooner or later; after all, Katie was only home another two years before she would go off to college. Time was going by too fast. She needed to remind herself that it was not good for her be pulled back to the sadness of her past. Her father-in-law’s favorite words circled inside her. “Time must move forward.” It really was the only way to survive.