Free A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner

And she died later.”
    “Oh! I remember that now. That must have been horrible.”
    “It was. It is,” I said. “There I stood with all my nursing skills and I could do nothing for any of them. Or for him.”
    We were quiet for a moment. I wiped my eyes, and I saw from the corner of my vision that Dolly wiped hers, too.
    After a moment, Dolly took my hands. “And here all this time I thought it was fear of fire that keeps you stuck on Ellis. It’s not the fire. It’s what it took from you, isn’t it? That’s why you never want to come ashore with us. Because of what you lost, not what you escaped.”
    “I’m not stuck here,” I murmured. “I want to be here.”
    She covered my hands with hers. “You haven’t been off the island in five months, Clara.”
    “That doesn’t mean I’m stuck.”
    “But you’re here just the same and you never leave. Are you afraid you might meet someone else? That you might actually get over him? Is that it?”
    “I’m not afraid of that.” The answer fell off my lips as if I’d rehearsed it.
    “Well, what then?”
    There was no answer at the ready this time.
    “Are you afraid you’ll find out he was married or something? That maybe he was just being kind because you were new?”
    I covered the poetry book with my hand. “That’s absurd. I’m not afraid of that. And he wasn’t married.” I opened my mouth and shut it again. A buzzing seemed to fill my ears. I couldn’t think.
    “It might do you good to find out who Edward was, Clara. You barely knew him. Maybe if you did know him, you’d be able to come to terms with this. Get off this island. Get on with your life.”
    The buzzing intensified. I reached my hand up to my ear and rubbed it. “I don’t see how that would make a difference. What I knew I loved.”
    “What you knew?”
    “It was enough.”
    “If it was enough I’m thinking you wouldn’t be stuck here.”
    “I’m not stuck!”
    “Well, it seems as if you are to me. And if you care at all for Andrew Gwynn, you should give him that letter and let him move on, lest he be stuck, too. I don’t think he deserves to mourn all his days a wife who did not love him. Do you?”
    Both of my ears felt ready to burst. “I don’t know what I think.”
    Dolly leaned over and kissed me on top of my head. “Come with the girls and me to the city tomorrow night. We’re going dancing.”
    “Maybe,” I said slowly, with zero conviction.
    She got into her bed and pulled up the covers. “Sleep on it, Clara. You don’t have to do anything with that letter tonight.” Dolly turned over, away from the light that still burned on my bedside table.
    I sat there for a long while, afraid to get into my bed, give in to sleep, and revisit the fire.
    I should never have opened Lily’s trunk. I should never have taken the book. If only I had left it there. It would be ashes now.

Eight
    THE first time I fell in love I was thirteen. His name was Otto Hertz and he was three years older than me. I had known him since early school days but he hadn’t really caught my attention until he took a nasty fall from a barn roof while pushing snow off with a broom.
    His father, a German who spoke little English, brought him into my father’s surgery. It was a bitter cold and colorless day in February. My mother had been helping my father that morning, but when Otto was ushered in with a shiny point of bone poking out of the red-rimmed flesh of his arm, she promptly left the surgery holding her stomach. I stood at my father’s side and helped him as he coaxed the angry pieces of bone back under muscle and skin and sewed up the tear. When the arm was bandaged and bound, I sat with Otto as the ether and morphine wore off, holding a cold compress to the goose egg on his forehead, also gifted him by his fall. He thanked me for my concern and told me I had pretty hair.
    My immediate attraction to the blue-eyed boy was fierce and exciting. But I was alone in it. Other than his