Free The World Below by Sue Miller

than she’d ever been before. She touched her daughter frequently, she stroked her bright braided hair or her soft hands. Her voice, when she spoke to Georgia, often deepened with tenderness. She said, “I’m sorry for you, dearest, you shouldn’t have to do this,” as Georgia helped her up the stairs or into the bath or, later, carried her chamber pot in or out. For as long as it waspossible, she made an effort to connect with the running of the household, to select meals, to discuss with Mrs. Beston the schedule of her duties for the day, to suggest activities or playmates, especially for the younger two—and to arrange, when she could, for Georgia’s freedom.
    In the later stages, she tried to protect her children from her illness. The last four or five months of her life, Dr. Holbrooke came almost daily at her request to give her morphine so her pain wouldn’t scare the children—she didn’t realize how terrifying her drugged, slow thickness was in itself. And the summer she was dying, she insisted the windows to her room be closed, in spite of the heat, so her cries wouldn’t float out into the yard where Mrs. Beston tried to keep the children occupied in those long, empty waiting days.
    Now Georgia felt abandoned and particularly responsible, more responsible than when she’d had far more to do. It is true there might be a vast, peaceful silence when she waked in the night, but, at least at first, she felt this as her sorrow, her burden. She was in charge of it—the peace, the black nothingness. She was alone.
    It was a life not without its pleasures, though, and slowly Georgia learned them. She came, over the long months, to feel a real sense of pride in running her household well. In having stiff fresh-smelling sheets on the beds each week, the new holes neatly patched with darns. In using the dust mop daily, even under the beds, letting Freddie whack it vigorously on the edge of the front porch between rooms. In polishing the few silver pieces they owned at least once a month. And she herself cooked the dishes that the two other children and her father especially loved: Indian pudding, lemon pound cake, corn chowder, baked beans, blueberry pancakes, soda biscuits.
    Gradually her life changed to conform to her new role. Perhaps to avoid the lonely wakening at three or four in the morning, she began to stay up later and later when her father was away. Long after Ada and Freddie were in bed, she roamed the house. She tooka delight she couldn’t have explained simply in sitting in chairs she normally didn’t use. Here I am , she would think, looking at the darkened room from this new perspective. This is me, seeing this. Feeling this. The world seemed, at these moments, to be arranged, fitted, exactly around her.
    She liked to watch the empty town green at a time when everyone else was safely asleep, intensely aware of her separateness. She read, sometimes until well after midnight. There was a mantel clock in the parlor with a glass case etched with flowers, and hearing it strike those few isolate notes in the dead span of the night made her feel a rich, melancholic sense of her own solitude.
    In her senior year of high school, she fell in love with Bill March, who lived on the opposite side of the green. It was their arrangement to signal each other with a candle at ten o’clock precisely, he from the dark attic bedroom of his house, she from what had been her mother’s sewing room. She loved seeing him there in his white nightshirt in the flickering light, his face a pale blur, so much more romantic than the tall, solid Bill she knew by day, with his square jaw, his occasional stammer. He told her he went to bed directly after this, filled with thoughts of her. But Georgia stayed up. She was restless with thoughts of him, yes, but she also worried about her future: how could she think of marrying, ever? Of leaving her father? Who would take care of everyone? She felt middle-aged at these moments,