Chapter 1

The room held a small refrigerator stocked with apple juice and soft drinks, a two-burner hot plate, a phonograph, a circle of worn, comfortable chairs and a smeared green chalkboard that said, GRIEF GROUP :-:.

Maggie Stearn entered with five minutes to spare, hung up her raincoat and helped herself to a tea bag and hot water. Bobbing the bag in a Styrofoam cup, she ambled across the room.

At the window she looked down. On the ship canal below, the water, pocked by the first of the August monsoons, seemed brooding and oily. The buildings of Seattle registered only in memory while Puget Sound hid behind a rainy curtain of gray. A rust-streaked tanker lumbered along the murky canal, ocean-bound, its rails and navigational aerials obscured by the downpour. On its weatherstained deck merchant marines stood motionless—blurred yellow blobs wrapped head to hip in oilskin slickers.

Rain. So much rain, and the entire winter of it ahead.

She sighed, thinking of facing it alone, and turned from the window just as two other members of the group arrived.

"Hi, Maggie," they said in unison from the door: Diane, thirty-six, whose husband had died when a blood vessel burst in his brain while they were clamming on Whidbey Island with their three kids; and Nelda, sixty-two, whose husband fell from a roof he was shingling and never got up again.

Without Diane and Nelda, Maggie wasn't sure how she'd have survived this last year.

"Hi," she returned, smiling.

Crossing the room, Diane asked, "How did the date go?"

Maggie grimaced. "Don't ask."

"That bad, huh?"

"How do you get over feeling married when you're not anymore?" It was a question all of them were striving to answer.

"I know what you mean," Nelda put in. "I finally went to bingo with George—you remember, I told you about him, the man from my church? All night long I felt like I was cheating on Lou. Playing bingo, mind you!"

While they commiserated, a man joined them, thin and balding, in his late fifties, wearing unfashionable pleated pants and a decrepit sweater that hung on his bony frame.

"Hi, Cliff." They widened their circle to let him in.

Cliff nodded. He was the newest member of the group. His wife had died when she ran a red light during her first time out driving after carotid surgery that had left her with no peripheral vision.

"How was your week?" Maggie asked him.

"Oh  . . ." The word came out with a sigh and a shrug, but he offered no more.

Maggie rubbed his back. "Some weeks are better than others. It takes time." She'd had her own back rubbed more than once in this room and knew the healing power of a human touch.

"What about you?" Nelda turned the focus on Maggie. "Your daughter leaves for college this week, right?"

"Yup," Maggie replied with false brightness. "Two more days."

"I've been through that with three of my own. You call if it gets rough, will you? We'll go out and see some male strippers or something."

Maggie laughed. Nelda would no more go see a stripper than she would become one herself. "I wouldn't even know what to do with a stripped male anymore." All of them laughed. It was easier to laugh about the dearth of sex in their lives than it was to do something about it.

Dr. Feldstein walked in, a clipboard in one hand and a mug of steaming coffee in the other, talking with Claire, who'd lost her sixteen-year-old daughter in a motorcycle accident. Amid an exchange of greetings Dr. Feldstein shut the door and headed for his favorite chair, setting his coffee on a nearby table.

"Looks like everyone's here. Let's get started."

They all took seats, conversation trailing off, a group of healing people who cared about one another. Maggie sat on the brown sofa between Cliff and Nelda, Diane on the floor on a fat blue cushion and Claire in a chair to Dr. Feldstein's right.

It was Maggie who noted the absence. Glancing around she asked, "Shouldn't we wait for Tammi?" Tammi was their youngest, only twenty, unmarried, pregnant, abandoned by the father of the baby and struggling to overcome the recent loss of both of her parents. Tammi was everybody's darling, a surrogate daughter to everyone in the group.

Dr. Feldstein set his clipboard on the floor and replied, "Tammi won't be with us today."

Every eye fixed on him but nobody asked.

With his elbows resting on the wooden arms of his chair, Dr. Feldstein linked his hands over his stomach.

"Tammi took an overdose of sleeping pills two days ago and she's still in intensive care. We're going to be dealing with that today."

The shock hit them full force, stunning them into silence. Maggie felt it explode like a small bomb in her stomach and spread to her extremities. She stared at the doctor with his long, intelligent face, slightly hooked nose and full, cranberry-colored lips within a thick black beard. His eyes touched every member of the group—shrewd black eyes with flat violet planes beneath—watching their reaction.

Maggie finally broke the silence to ask what they were all wondering. "Will she live?"

"We don't know that yet. She's developed Tylenol poisoning so it's touch and go."

From outside came the faint bellow of a foghorn on the ship canal below. Inside, the group sat motionless, their tears beginning to build.

Claire leapt to her feet and stormed to the window, thumping the ledge with both fists. "Goddamn it! Why did she do it!"

"Why didn't she call one of us?" Maggie asked. "We would have helped her."

They'd struggled with it before—the helplessness, the anger in the face of that helplessness. Every person in the circle felt the same, for a setback suffered by one of them was a setback suffered by all. They had invested time and tears in each other, had trusted each other with their innermost hurts and fears. To think they could work this hard and have it backfire was tantamount to being betrayed.

Copyright © 1990 by LaVyrle Spencer