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second, and I could just picture her falling to the ground, but then the rope snapped tight again and she came racing back towards me, and each time I breathed a sigh of relief.
    When she came to rest, I guess I waited for her to say something because the words weren’t coming to me. I wasn’t sure what I’d say other than sorry a million times over. What do you say to someone when their child dies? Especially when somebody could’ve done something about it. Alice could’ve stayed awake. I could’ve stayed awake too, shown up like I said I was going to. Best I could do now, though, was put my hand on her shoulder and let her say whatever she wanted to, whenever she wanted to. It took her a long time. She just kept staring out into the field, watching her daughters like she always did, from time to time searching as though Grace might just pop into view. When somebody dies, you keep thinking you’re going to see ‘em, like they’ll just walk right into the room like they always had. But Grace’s head wasn’t poppin’ out of nowhere, and eventually one little tear came falling out of Alice’s eye. She wiped it away and took a deep breath, then she turned to me, and her eyes almost broke my heart right there.
    “Why didn’t he save her?” she said.
    And then more tears joined the one little one, and she began to sob all over again, keeling over in the tire swing, causing it to rock a bit back and forth as though it knew to try and comfort her. She meant the angel of course, the one that had brought her kids to the bathroom and locked the door to get them away from Ryan, to protect them. It was a fair question. The strange man who came before wasn’t there in the driveway that night, didn’t bother to take Grace’s hand and lead her out of the path of the car that hit her. For whatever reason, he let her get run over, and there didn’t seem to be any good explanation for it. But maybe people weren’t supposed to understand things like that. I wanted to say something comforting to her, but anything I could think of was going to make her sadder, or more hurt. “She’ll live on inside you.” “Your little angel’s with all the other angels now.” Those would’ve been bullshit words to say.
    “You’ll see her again,” I said eventually, because with the talk recently about the angel her girls saw, and what Alice saw as a teenager, it seemed like there could’ve been something out there, even though it had just screwed up pretty royally. (I say could’ve been because I still wasn’t sure myself. To me, you never really know about something unless you put your own eyes on it). She motioned out toward the field and shook her head. She looked defeated, empty.
    “I can’t see her now,” she said. “That’s what matters.”
    “Well,” I said, “she’s just a little thing, you know. Just keep looking if you have to.”
    “Would you do me a favour, Gideon?” she said all blankly, like she was talking to me in her head, like I wasn’t really there.
    “Of course I would,” I said.
    “Could you come by tomorrow morning to make the girls some breakfast? They need to have their breakfast. Olive can’t cook. She burns the bacon and she makes the yolks hard. Can you do that?”
    “Yeah, Al, I can do that.”
    She thanked me then turned away, back toward her girls, towards the field that seemed bigger and emptier now, and started to pump her legs again to get up as high as she could go. And me, she left me behind, way back down there on earth, watching her soar just like the eagle on the blanket in her bedroom, the one she made into a curtain. From where I was, I could pretend she was carefree like that, when her face was out of view, anyway. And that made me feel good, too, for the times she was close to heaven. I didn’t think there was anything more I could do right then, didn’t have any deep thoughts about roads or any shit like that. And Alice, she probably didn’t want to talk any more