Free When the Wind Blows by John Saul Page A

whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
    Christie, who had been standing silently through the service, looked into Diana’s eyes, perplexed. It almost seemed as if the woman were talking to someone else.
    “I’m all right, Aunt Diana,” she whispered.
    “But you were crying,” Diana whispered back.
    Christie shuddered, remembering what had happened when Diana had found her crying in the nursery. She had been careful not to cry since that morning. “No, I wasn’t,” she insisted, stiffening in Diana’s arms.
    “But you were,” Diana insisted. “I heard you.”
    And then, with her father’s body being lowered into the ground, Christie did let herself cry. This time Diana only soothed her.
    A few feet away, Bill Henry stood watching Diana comfort the child. Her love for Christie was apparent, and Bill wondered if perhaps her adopting the little girl might not be the best thing that could happen, not only for Diana, but for Christie, too.
    Then his eyes locked on Miss Edna.
    There she stood, both hands on her cane now, her face a study in anger as she watched her daughter hold the crying child. Whatever was to happen, Bill decided, was not going to be easy. Not for Diana, and not for Christie, either.
       “It seems to me,” Edna said as Diana carefully maneuvered their ancient Cadillac out of the cemetery, “that if they want to have a reception, they should have it at the Crowleys’.”
    Diana glanced across Christie to her mother, but Edna was staring straight ahead.
    “We’ll talk about it when we get home, Mother,” she replied.
    “There really isn’t any point in talking about it at all, is there? I mean, it’s done, and everyone in town is going to be there, and no one really cares what I want, do they?” Edna began tapping the end of her cane against the floorboards of the car.
    Instead of saying anything Diana merely gunned the engine, and the Cadillac lumbered forward, its transmission grinding at the strain.
    “You’re going to ruin a perfectly good car if you’re not careful,” Edna snapped. The Cadillac, a 1934 touring car, was one of the few things Edna was willing to spend money to maintain, and it looked brand-new, its green paint shining in the sunlight, its top folded down, its fender-mounted spare tires standing proudly on either side of its long hood. For Diana, though, the car—its upkeep, and her driving of it—was only one more source of criticism, and she wished she could convince her mother to trade it in for something more practical. It was, however, one more thing she knew she would never accomplish.
    Let me get home, and let me get Christie out of the car and let people start arriving before I go crazy, Diana prayed. I won’t respond. No matter what she says, I won’t respond. And then everybody will be there, and for a while I’ll have other people to talk to, and afterward it will be over, and she can start on something else.
    And what she’d start on would be Christie, Diana knew. For three days her mother had been insisting that it was wrong for them to have Christie in the house; that sooner or later Diana was going to have to face reality, and reality was that the child was going to become a ward of the state. Thus far she had not weakened in her opposition to Diana’s wish to adopt the child. Over the years Edna had made it all too clear that she had no use for children, that she haddone her duty in raising Diana, and that all she wanted in life was to be left alone with Diana to grow old in peace. But Diana still clung to the idea that somehow she would be allowed to keep Christie, to raise her as her own. To have Christie belong to her as she, Diana, had belonged to her mother.
    Diana paused to let Edna out of the car, then drove around into the garage. Christie helped her pull the rickety sliding door closed, then followed her through the back door into the kitchen.
    “Why doesn’t Miss Edna want people to come out here?” Christie asked