Free A Reckoning by May Sarton

and the air had smelled of snow when she opened the door. She would just lie here for a while, she thought, and do what came most easily these days, drift off down the long, winding rivers of consciousness that always seemed to bring her finally to the house of their childhood summers by the sea. “I must go down once more,” she thought. But alone? The very image of the icy-cold, closed house made her shiver. Why isn’t it spring? This winter had been interminable, with unrelenting cold to sap energy and numb the senses. Would she be given one more spring? It would be good to live to see the leaves once more.
    When the phone rang, she hesitated a second. Not answer? No, it might be Aunt Minna.
    “Hello.”
    “It’s Ann. Are you all right?”
    “Why?”
    “Your voice sounded so far away. Maybe I woke you.”
    “I was awake. Good heavens, it’s after eight!”
    “We want you to come over for supper tonight if you can. It’s Laurie’s birthday, you know.”
    “I really am in a bad way … I’d clean forgotten. Of course I’ll come. What time?”
    “Six? Are you feeling better, Laura? Did the doctor give you an antibiotic? I’ve been meaning to call, but we’ve all had colds. You know what that’s like—everyone home. Chaos!”
    “Grindle is barking to get in—I forgot all about him. See you at six.” At least she hadn’t had to answer about her health, and in the happy confusion of a birthday supper for Laurie no one would notice. But what to give Laurie? Laura got out her jewel case and laid it on the bed. There was the diamond star, Charles’s present on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and the lapis lazuli necklace her mother had given her when she was twenty-one. Laura took it out, feeling the smooth stones slip through her fingers. There was an exquisite necklace of crystal balls, strung on a thin silver chain that Ella had given her as a wedding present. There was her grandmother’s engagement ring, a sapphire circled in brilliants—The thought of giving any of these away, even to Laurie, caused her a brief but acute pang. So she left the jewels there on her bed and went downstairs, for Grindle’s barks had become quite cross. She had left him out in the cold far too long.
    “Come in, doggo, I’m sorry I forgot you. You shall have a cheese biscuit, and I shall have some breakfast.”
    While the coffee perked, she considered what precious little thing she might give Laurie—Laurie just ten years old today. It seemed a great blessing that she had known this wild little granddaughter at least for ten years, and the pang she had felt for a moment had been subtly translated now into a special kind of joy, quite new to Laura, the joy of divesting herself of a treasure. It had to be her mother’s lapis necklace, passed on to her great-granddaughter. Sybille would like that. But would Laurie? She never wore a dress if she could help it and would probably much prefer a pair of cross-country skis! Nevertheless Laura ended by wrapping the necklace and wrote a card to accompany it: “a treasure for my treasure on her 10th birthday.” It was, she suddenly realized, exactly what her mother had written forty years before except that Sybille’s card had read, “for my treasure on her 21st birthday.”
    Was I her treasure, Laura asked herself? And she knew that the answer was yes. Sybille had exalted her children in a special pantheon reserved for them. We were not exactly told, but we somehow got the idea that we were more beautiful, more intelligent, and gooder than any other children. But what barriers that idea had set up between them and their contemporaries!
    Still, it had been intoxicating, Laura had to admit. The family temperature ran so high, they lived on the edge of a perpetual drama, the great and famous coming and going, and those wonderful balls in Genoa when they danced all night with Italian officers and young men on the staff, or leaned over the banisters to see their mother’s newest