“No! God, what you must be thinking and feeling—”
“I don’t know what I’m felling, to be honest,” Emma said honestly.
“What do you mean you don’t know how you feel?” Amanda asked wildly. “You must be furious at me. At Colin, too.”
“I don’t care about Colin, Amanda,” she seethed.
She’d only been telling the truth about her bewilderment, though. Nothing and no one felt certain to Emma anymore. Even she herself had become a mystery in this past week. One thing of which she was certain: she felt no flaming jealousy when she thought of Amanda and Colin together, which seemed pitiful more than anything. Mostly, she felt a scoring sense of loss. She didn’t want to feel betrayed by her sister, given the fact that she now realized it’d been a mistake to stay with Colin.
But she did.
And she felt lonely, she realized. She’d never felt so alone in her life, even after her mother had died. It suddenly seemed that everyone was capable of entering a world of forbidden passion, while she herself was left behind, an outsider, too afraid to enter that complicated, bewildering place.
She’d been honest with Amanda about the lack of jealousy. It was Amanda she worried she’d lost more than her safe relationship with Colin. Exactly what had gone through her sister’s head when she came to the conclusion that being with Colin was more important than her relationship with Emma?
Things were still rattling around precariously in Emma’s world later that evening as she spoke to Cristina.
“Would you like me to turn on the television?” she asked Cristina. She could use a little mindless distraction. Between lack of sleep and the most disturbing dreams when she finally had gone under for a meager few hours, she was feeling less than her sharp, feisty self.
“No. There’s been something I’ve been meaning to speak with you about,” Cristina said. “Remember when I asked you if you were going to preach to me about God and repentance and fire and brimstone?”
Emma grinned as she sat in the upholstered chair next to Cristina’s bed.
“Well, I don’t remember it precisely that way, but yeah . . . in general.”
“And you said you never preached to people because you don’t like to be preached to,” Cristina recalled. Emma nodded. “You sidestepped the issue.”
“What issue?”
“Of whether or not you believe in God. Are you religious?” Cristina inquired. Her thicker than usual accent informed Emma she was growing tired.
“I don’t think so, not in the classic sense. I’m very spiritual, though.”
“Why?” Cristina demanded.
“I’ve seen things. Experienced them.”
“You’ve experienced a lot of death,” Cristina filled in for her. “Because your mother was a nurse in that old folks’ home and you used to spend a lot of time with all those—what’s that charming word you Americans use—geezers,” Cristina recalled what Emma had told her when they conversed a few days ago.
“They weren’t just old people. Many were my friends.”
Cristina shook her head on the pillow. “It wasn’t right, for such a young girl to be exposed to so much disease and death. There’s something twisted about it. It was wrong of your mother to allow it to happen.”
“You say it was twisted because you’re afraid,” Emma said quietly.
Cristina glanced at her incredulously. “How can you sit there, a girl of twenty some odd years, fresh and dewy as a bud still on the rosebush, and say something like that to me?” she demanded hoarsely.
“I can say it because I know. There’s nothing to fear, Cristina.”
For a few seconds Cristina just stared at her in openmouthed awe. Emma saw the doubt slink back into her expression.
“Look at me,” Cristina demanded bitterly, glancing at her frail body beneath the sheets. “I’m skin and bones and seeping sores. My insides are being eaten away by cancer. How can you say death isn’t twisted and awful?”
“It is awful at times. Painful. Scary. But one never sees life more clearly than when death approaches. And maybe that’s the biggest gift of death—life’s final gift—if we can accept it.”
A shudder went through Cristina. “You say you’re not religious, but you certainly sound like you want me to repent of my sins before I go.”
Emma smiled. “I don’t know if I’d call them sins, necessarily, but if you have something you want to talk about, I’ll listen.”