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not come up again, at least
    not until long after. None of the children she was with
    had seen it happen, or none would ever admit to seeing
    it, but then they were only ten or so, as she was, and
    all had been forbidden to take their boats into that
    stormy water, as she had been. They had been playing
    in a neighbor’s yard after a birthday party, only three
    houses up the beach, and had slipped off and taken
    their little Sunfishes out while the adults were having
    their own lunch on the patio, behind heavy plantings.
    I was off the island that day, at the dentist in Charles-
    ton. I never blamed Marjorie Bell or her housekeeper;
    Kylie had never disobeyed us before in regard to the
    Sunfish, nor had the other children disobeyed their
    parents. Island children have water safety drilled into
    their heads almost before they can toddle. We will
    never know what started it all, what child dared the
    others, who first leaped to the dare. Kylie, in all likeli-
    hood. It doesn’t matter. The children were so traumat-
    ized by it that more than one of them gave

    Low Country / 37
    away their Sunfish, or let their parents sell them, and
    one family moved away from the island.
    I have always wondered if she looked up just before
    the boom hit and saw the dazzle of summer light on
    her window, saw the roof and trees of home.
    I wondered now what she would be wearing if she
    had lived, what I would be picking up from her floor.
    What color it would be, what size. What its smell
    would be, the smell of Kylie Venable at nearly sixteen.
    I used to have the fancy that I wore Kylie inside me,
    just under my skin, that I was a suit that fit exactly the
    being who was my child, and that she was the structure
    that filled out the skin that was me. Since that day there
    has been a terrible, frail lightness, a cold hollowness,
    a sort of whistling chill inside me where Kylie used to
    be. It makes me feel terribly vulnerable, as if a high
    wind could simply whirl me away. As if there is not
    enough substance inside me to anchor me to earth.
    Usually the pain of her loss is dulled enough now so
    that it is more a profound heaviness, a leaden darkness,
    a wearable miasma that is as much a part of me as the
    joy of her used to be. But sometimes that first agony
    comes spiking back, as it did now. I sank to the floor,
    the T-shirt still pressed to my face, feeling the killing
    fire flare and spring and rage, feeling the great shriek,
    the scream of outrage and anguish, start in my

    38 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    throat, feeling the scalding tears gather and press at
    my eyes. I opened my mouth to let it out, but nothing
    happened, nothing came. It never did. I screamed si-
    lently into her T-shirt, my face contorted, my throat
    corded and choked with the need for her, but no sound
    would come. I could not cry for my child. I never had,
    not even when they came to tell me, not even when I
    watched her go down into the earth of the Lowcountry,
    riding in a fine carriage of mahogany and bronze.
    I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Clay’s voice.
    “Caro, don’t. You promised you wouldn’t. Come
    on with me now, and take a shower and get dressed,
    and we’ll have some coffee on the veranda before we
    go. I’ll take you by the guest house; we’ll put the
    flowers around together. They’re beautiful, by the way.
    Those old roses, they really have lasted, haven’t they?”
    I did not move to get up, and after a moment I felt
    his hands under my elbows, and he lifted me up.
    “You need to work, baby,” he said. “That’s the thing
    that will help; that’s what’s helped me most. Real
    work. This is your job now, helping with the new
    families, you need to come and do your job.”
    I looked at him then.
    “She was my job,” I said.
    But I did not say it aloud.

    2
    W hen I was sixteen, the son of the local undertaker
    in the little town where we lived asked me out on a
    date, and my stepfather promptly called the chief of
    police, who was in