Read Digging Out for Free Online

shadows under them. She doesn’t look tired. Something else? Drawn? Vacant? I have never seen her looking like this. It frightens me.
    “I want to sleep in yours and Daddy’s bed,” she says.
    I nod and start to get up, patting Beti’s head. She grabs hold of my hand and looks up at me. “Will you thank them all for coming, Beti?” I look around the room. “Tell them I’m very grateful, please.”
    She stands up, putting her arms around me. I hear her swallow. She pulls back. “You’ll be okay.” I almost laugh.
    Before I start up the stairs with Hannah, Donald reaches out and puts his hand on my shoulder. His grip is firm, steadying. “Alys, you know how I loved him. I love you, too.” He is Marc’s oldest friend. Donald and Marco ate tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut off and rode horses over the flat, dry hills near their childhood home.
    “I’ll call you next week,” he says. “When things have settled down a bit.” Next week won’t do. I need him now. I stare at him for a moment and then I turn away, starting up the stairs.
    Halfway up, holding Hannah’s small hand, I hear Dafydd. He calls up after us from the bottom of the stairs.
    “Momma, are you all right?
    I turn to look at his tall, slender body. How is his knee? My son’s dark hair is buzzed short now, making his blue-green eyes look even bigger than they usually look. We haven’t spoken much. Now I’m too exhausted to talk and too weary.
    I say, “I think so.”
    “Is Hannah going to sleep with you?”
    “You, too, Dafydd. I want you to sleep with us, too,” Hannah says.
    There is hardly a moment’s beat. “Is there room, Momma? Do you mind?” His voice sounds almost as small as Hannah’s. As if to explain himself, he adds, “Then Uncle Jack and Aunt Martha can use my room.”
    I know she needs my help, so I pull off Hannah’s shoes and remove her dress. She crawls under the covers as I undress, putting on one of Marc’s T-shirts. I throw Dafydd a T-shirt and a pair of sweats. He changes in the bathroom. Soon I am lying down between my two children, holding them, my arms wide feathered duck wings. I begin to hum the song Marc and I used to sing to each of them when they were tiny. Even after they have both shuttered down—Hannah next to me as close as she can get, and Dafydd on his side, back toward me, but still close, their small breathing sounds a comfort to me—I continue to hum quietly so as not to fly apart.

C HAPTER T WO
    A UGUST 17, 2002
    W hen first light breaks, I am staring at Dafydd’s sleeping profile in the early-morning half-light, and I remember my dream:
      A meadow. At first I am alone. But then a figure way off in the distance approaches. He is somehow familiar. I raise my arm, about to wave, when he calls out, “Alys!” He starts toward me.
      “Alys, it’s me, Evan.”
      When he is in front of me, he says, “I’ve missed you.” My eyebrows rise and I smile. “I have, you know. I’ve missed you every day of my life.”
    Certainly I have thought about Evan on and off through all these years. But I guarded against letting him in too deep or close. Of course it is obvious why I should be thinking of him now.
    My breathing is short intakes of air. I close my eyes, trying to deepen it, and hear Gram’s voice like a soothing mantra.
You do not have to think about the whole of life all at once.
I can see her standing by my hospital bed, feel her down deep in my guts like I did every lonely day after I knew Hallie was gone. Gram, how I wish she were here in the flesh with me right now.
Think only about the moment you are in. That’s all, Alys. That’s enough
.
    The moment I am in …
    I shimmy down the middle of the bed between my children and out the bottom. Everything in the room is just as it was two days ago,before I left for Colorado, including the pile of books next to the leather chair and Marc’s clothes strewn all over the chair.
    Downstairs in the kitchen everything is back in