Print Edition Vol. 13 - Yellow and Pink

YELLOW AND PINK

by Leah Ning

"How many times?" the dying man whispered.

Nathan Reed's attention did not waver from the arm he was working on. Decades ago, Edward Weaver's dying words had bothered him. Today they were like a fly lighting briefly on his neck, and he had to ask: "Pardon?"

"How many times . . . have you killed me?"

"Eight, counting this one," Nathan said. "Nothing personal, it's just that this way you can't tell anyone."

He pulled a small, square piece of plastic from Weaver's arm as its owner's breaths grew shallower. He dipped it into the bottle of alcohol, which he sealed and stored in Weaver's left pocket. The rest of the instruments, still bloody, went into the right.

"What . . . are you trying . . . to change?"

Nathan had never heard that question before. Did he owe the man whose life he was stealing an answer? He stayed silent and inserted the plastic into the incision on his own forearm. Then he pressed the pistol into the Weaver's hand and stood. Soon, to anyone observing this scene, it would appear that Nathan had been attacked but died before his device could be taken.

"Shoot," Nathan said.

"Gladly," said the dying man. Nathan had chosen someone vengeful for a reason.

The flat report of the gunshot echoed around the alley. Nathan fell with a grunt of pain, fingers pressing at the new slick of blood on his belly. Gut shot again. He had thought that he might be used to it by now, but he always began to whimper when the burning started.

###

The first time he'd killed Edward Weaver, Nathan spent the first years he could remember of his childhood having regular panic attacks. He learned to hide them when his parents began discussing how to afford a psychiatrist. The last thing he needed was anyone prying into the cause of his anxiety.

When his family started calling him an "old soul," he silently berated himself. The rich were used to their children being wise beyond their years. The middle class and poor were not, and those who did manage to reset pretended to be children and teenagers until their bodies caught back up with their minds. All Nathan could do was try to act more childish and hope that they didn't look too closely.

As bad as the panic attacks had been, the worst was the first day of high school. A flash of red hair made him catch his breath and look around. He had caught her laughing, her eyes squeezed shut, revealing the lines that he imagined would form around her eyes in thirty years, her mouth open and displaying that crooked canine he loved. A half-wilted yellow daisy drooped behind one ear. A choked cry burst from his mouth before he could stop it and he had to run for the bathroom. He wept as quietly as he could manage, hunched on the hard plastic of a toilet seat.

For all his planning, he had never believed, deep down, that she would really be alive.

###

Nathan had little fear of being caught now. The disgust he felt at how easily he avoided capture was just a low background hum today, buried by the relief that was just around the next bend in the tiled halls of the high school. He passed a scene he would never get used to: the splash of red hair on a dark T-shirt, the crooked canine in a laughing mouth. His throat tightened. So close. Close enough to touch again for the first time in sixteen years. He had to swallow hard to get the lump out of his throat, but he didn't cry. After all, she would always be alive, just waiting in the next timeline.

Two hours later, switching classes for the second time, Nathan kept his head turned strictly forward. His back and shoulders tingled with anticipation. As he passed a familiar bit of permanent marker graffiti on a locker (the name of some band he had watched come and go seven times), he heard the running footsteps and did not brace himself for the impact.

When she slammed into his back at full speed, he fell, the textbooks he held driving all the air from him in a strained "uh!" The peals of laughter from the girl sprawled on the floor next to him thawed him like sunlight on snow.

"I'm so-so-s-s," Holly tried to stammer before dissolving into giggles again.

"Well, that'll teach me to start using my bag," Nathan grinned, gathering his books into his arms.

"If it doesn't, then you're hopeless anyway. I'm Holly."

He couldn't help letting his hand brush hers when she dropped his chemistry book onto the stack.

###

"You know what they say about right person, wrong time?"

These words marked the beginning of a lifetime spent alone. Nathan never dared to try to accelerate the events leading to their marriage again. The part of him that always called him "murderer" or "time thief" tried to convince him that this was a sign, that he didn't deserve to be back with her after what he'd done. He seized those thoughts with both mental hands and shoved them down to a cold, dark, and as-yet-unexplored part of his mind. It was always only Holly's first time, he told himself. He had been married to her for seven years, been with her for ten, but she didn't know that. For her, too soon would always be too soon instead of never soon enough.

Of course, friendship was better than rejection and the inevitable growing apart that followed. And wasn't that what marriage was supposed to be, in the end? Really, it was about being friends, best friends, two people who knew each other better than anyone else on Earth.

No matter how many times he told himself this, his chest always ached until he started to see her looking at him that way again. Then he would hold her regard like a butterfly on the tip of his finger, carefully feeding it sweet things until it knew he was safe.

###

Although the bonfire danced far enough behind them that the crackling was almost inaudible, it still painted Holly's face with a soft orange glow. The salt wind teased at her hair. Nathan's heart was pounding. Sure, it wasn't exactly the first time he had done this, but he always felt afraid of getting it wrong. He knew too well how long another twenty-five years without her would feel.

"Nate," she smiled. "Why do you look so nervous?"

"You always make me nervous," he said truthfully.

Her low laugh was almost lost in the sound of the ocean. "Maybe we can fix that."

"Maybe we can," Nathan said, and then she was leaning in, he could see the white grains of sand stuck to her eyelashes, and her mouth was on his. Ten years seemed like forever standing at the beginning of what they would be, but at the end, he always felt cheated.

###

Didn't they always say things like "if only we had left ten seconds later"? Nathan had thought this at first too, but after three resets he found himself lashing out at those who said it in their awful pitying voices in the days following the accident.

On his second reset, he had shattered a glass of water, which resulted in a delay of ten minutes. The car that swerved in front of them was white instead of red, which was of no comfort.

Holly had rubbed his back for half an hour as he vomited on his third reset. Each touch sent jagged bolts of terror (in an hour I will comfort you as you die in my arms) down his spine.

Then the miracle happened: she stayed home. Thanksgiving dinner was rescheduled for the following weekend with words of concern from her parents. Holly saw his tears of relief and smoothed the hair from his forehead, remarking that "You must be hurting pretty bad."

Nathan woke the next morning while she was in the shower. That was it. He had finally done it. Twelve hours after her death in the previous three timelines, she was alive in this one, now stepping out of the shower and drying her hair. He kissed her in near disbelief as she left for work.

When the police rang his doorbell an hour later, he realized that he had never thought to check when the town had cleaned up the oil slick that killed her.

Oil slicks, he discovered, didn't have timing, and nor did the people who swerved around them. Oil slicks just were. Oil slicks shimmered their deadly existence into your eyes like spikes even while the blood from your wife's head pooled in their centers.

###

How did she manage to make four years pass so quickly? Nathan stood with his hands clasped behind his back to hide their shaking. A flat expanse of neatly cut grass rolled in from his left and sloped down to his right. A few rows of close family and friends showed him only the backs of their heads while pale yellow ribbons fluttered from their chairs.

And there she was. Holly's hair glowed fiercely red in the sunset and she was grinning, exposing that crooked canine. Her hands clutched an explosion of yellow daisies, pink peonies, meadowsweet, and yellow roses. Nathan had grinned back at their first wedding, but he hadn't cried. Today, two hundred years later, he did both. When she reached him, she smiled and wiped the tears from his face with one thumb.

Nathan had changed only one thing about the wedding. Instead of "'til death do us part," he said, "until the end of my days."

For the rest of that night, he drank her in. Her hair left burning trails in the darkening sky. When he spun her, the gauzy white dress floated around her legs. They danced barefoot in the grass as the end of the night came. She laid her head on his chest as they swayed. Her pale face seemed to blur into his shirt in the gloom.

"I love you, Nathan Reed," she murmured.

"I love you, Holly Reed," he said, and kissed the top of her head as she smiled.

Seven years still stretched ahead. It wasn't long enough. It would never be long enough.

###

To punish himself for his fourth reset, Nathan spent his fifth without Holly. He had gotten too arrogant. How had he ever thought he could handle what he had always entrusted to professionals?

Her blood, rather than spreading darkly across the shimmer of the oil slick, had swirled in bathwater. Her fingers had kept a tenuous hold on a sodden, wrinkled sonogram instead of clutching at his shirt.

After that, he hadn't been sure he deserved to ever even glimpse her again. But he had still come back, hadn't he? He had still murdered Edward Weaver on the same day, at the same time, and in the same place. Because he hadn't been sure. God, that had been a whole new level of moral depravity.

I killed someone to have more time to punish myself, he thought with deepening disgust. But that wasn't quite right, was it? He had been horrified, sure, and he had had all the requisite "I don't deserve her" thoughts, but he hadn't come to the next timeline to punish himself. He had ultimately decided to kill Weaver again because he hadn't been sure he should stop trying.

The idea of Holly at thirty years old, at forty, even at fifty, was so attractive that it almost had a gravitational pull. He couldn't resist the possibility that a version of his wife whose laugh lines were permanently pressed into her face might be waiting just in the next timeline.

The idea that she might not want him anymore if she knew began to well up in that deep, unexplored place in his mind as he prepared to commit his sixth murder.

###

"I think it might be time to try some therapy," Nathan said. The vase on the windowsill was empty. He had cleaned it out the day before she'd come home from the hospital and left it that way, having learned that the sight of pink flowers--pink for a girl--made her eyes well up every time she glanced at them.

Holly looked up from her bowl of cornflakes. It was slowly turning into a mass of soggy, inedible lumps. Her right hand moved to cup her belly, which should have no longer been flat.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" she asked.

"No," he said. "I just think you could use some help from someone less clueless than I am."

"I'm grieving, Nathan."

"Grieving is fine. But you've stopped eating and you barely sleep anymore. And every time you do fall asleep, you wake up screaming."

Holly was suddenly on her feet, her chair teetering just on the edge of falling. "I am grieving!" she shouted.

Nathan forced himself to stay in his own chair. "Holly, you can grieve all you want," he said quietly. "But not alone. I don't want you to grieve alone anymore, and I don't want to grieve alone anymore."

That was the crux of the thing, wasn't it? He always grieved for her alone. And how long had it been since he'd really felt for the loss of this baby? His wife was across the table, her skin beginning to look thin and hollow with sorrow, and he had just finished his second bowl of cornflakes. He couldn't even pretend his lack of feeling for the baby was a result of experiencing it over and over. Although nothing else felt like anything anymore, the memories of Holly bleeding on shimmering pavement still had the power to crush every last bit of breath from his lungs.

Nathan's throat began to ache, and revulsion rose like acid in his chest.

"I'm sorry," Holly whispered. Her slippered feet shushed against the floor as she moved around the table toward him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, and he slid his own around her shoulders. "I know I need help," she mumbled into his shirt. "I know. I'm sorry. I'll call tomorrow."

"Don't be sorry," Nathan said, his voice breaking a little. "I just want you to be okay."

That was too true. He breathed in the sweetness of the shampoo he'd scrubbed into her hair that morning and wondered how far his selfishness had really spread while his focus had been pinpointed on sparing himself the pain of losing Holly.

You have to tell her, whispered the voice he always tried to keep locked away. Nathan squeezed his eyes shut and buried his nose farther into her hair.

###

After they were together again, he would tell Holly everything. That was what Nathan told himself on his sixth try. That wasn't something you just told a friend, after all. Friendship was just friendship. She couldn't possibly understand before they fell in love, why he would even consider doing what he had been doing for the past century or so.

But maybe dating was too soon after all, he thought after they had their first kiss. She hadn't yet decided to spend the rest of her life with him, so how could she understand? Nathan decided he would tell her after they were married. That made much more sense than asking while everything was still fragile and undecided.

And then they did marry again. The wedding day came far too soon, though, and so did the honeymoon. In fact, he thought, wouldn't it be better to wait for the ease and familiarity of marriage to set in? It would be so much easier for her to understand then. When would it set in for her? He had felt it for so long now that he had difficulty remembering when it had first happened for him.

Three years later, she miscarried, and that would be the worst possible time to talk about it. He waited for her to recover fully. They were twenty-seven years old when Nathan finally admitted to himself that she was fine, had been for a year, and now it was time to tell her everything.

He walked into the living room. She was sitting on their lumpy green couch, her legs pulled up, and she smiled when she heard him.

"Come sit," she said, patting the couch next to her. So he did, and she relaxed against his shoulder with a content sigh. "I love you," she murmured.

His resolve broke just like that. He only had a year left of this. What if she grew to hate him? That thought brought a new rush of terror swirling into his chest. He shied away from the images of her anger and bewilderment his mind tried to conjure. Instead of "Can I ask you something" or "I need to talk to you," his response was "I love you too."

This will be the last try I need, he reasoned, smoothing his thumb down her arm and reveling in its warmth. He had decided to lock her in the bedroom on the day of her impending death to stop her from getting in the car.

When he did it, she thought it was some kind of game. He almost screamed when she slipped into the hall, wagging a bobby pin mischievously between two fingers. "You thought you could keep me in there with just a little lock?" she said, grabbing the keys. "I'm leaving, with or without you. Let's go."

Twenty minutes later, he yelled, "Stop, stop, there's an oil slick!"

Her last word was "Where?"

###

Despite all his attempts to the contrary, Nathan would hold Holly as she died for the eighth time a year from today. A normal person wouldn't be certain of this. It bothered him that he was so certain of that despite all his attempts to the contrary. He kept trying and failing to convince himself that a year wasn't so short. A year only seems like a long time when you're faced with things less monumental than the death of your wife and the subsequent sixteen years of scrambling to get back to her. After today, the number of years left slipped into the number of days left.

"Hi, you."

Nathan started as Holly's arm crept around his waist. She didn't laugh. Five years of marriage was enough to know when not to laugh. If she knew when not to laugh after five years, how could he not know the answer to the question burning in his mouth after more than two centuries? Maybe, in all the time he had spent drinking her in like a man in the desert, he had been paying attention to all the wrong things. All these years had been about his wants, his needs. He had pretended for the last two resets that he had wanted to know her opinion: was he doing the right thing? Did he still deserve her? Was this what she wanted?

Perhaps he should have understood his wife well enough to know the answers to his questions. Perhaps he knew the answers already and only wanted to hear them from her mouth. In any case, he knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't let him back out after he started.

"Holly, I need to ask your advice."

###

"How many times?" his dying wife whispered.

Watching her die on his seventh reset, Nathan didn't register the meaning of her words. He shushed her gently and smoothed his hand across her forehead.

"How many times have you done this, Nate?"

"What?" he asked.

"You're on a reset," she said. Even though she still whispered, he knew it wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Seven. This is my seventh."

Her forehead was shaped wrong from the impact against the pavement. She wrinkled it. A bead of blood ran down one of the channels.

"Oh, Nate," she breathed. Her hand reached toward his face, slow and trembling, and her mouth opened. Then her face slackened and her reaching hand fell to the ground with a soft smack. Nathan picked it back up and put it to his cheek as his vision blurred. He would have given a great deal to hear the end of that sentence.

###

It was this memory Nathan tried to keep in mind as they sat at the rough, wooden kitchen table with mugs of steaming coffee warming their hands. The vase by the window was full again with yellow daisies clipped from the garden. He wondered whether this would be the last cup of coffee his wife would ever make him. He refused to consider comforting himself with thoughts of fixing it with another reset, another timeline. It was her decision now. If she left, he wouldn't force himself on a version of her who had never had this conversation.

When he finally looked up from his coffee, Holly was watching him steadily. She hadn't asked questions or tried to prod him into speaking, and this made him love her even more.

"I need you to hear me out," Nathan said. "You're probably going to be mad, and you might have a lot of questions, but please let me explain everything first."

"I can do that," she said. She blew on her coffee and took a sip, her eyes never leaving his face.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Then he paused and opened them again. He had been too much of a coward to tell her everything until now, but he would look into her eyes as he did it.

"I'm on a reset."

Holly blinked. A moment later, her face grew confused, but she stayed silent.

"You died in a car accident," he continued. "I couldn't take it. Everyone at your funeral, they . . . kept telling me how if only we'd left a moment sooner, or a moment later, then maybe it would have been okay, and how bad our luck was, and I missed you so much and I couldn't take it. So, I got hold of a reset and I went back. You wouldn't move anywhere else and you wouldn't go on a different day or at a different time or by a different route. Leaving earlier didn't help. Leaving later didn't help. I couldn't save you once. Not even once, Holly, and I don't know what to do anymore, and I miss you so bad."

Nathan had started to cry in the middle of his explanation and now he hid his face in his hands and sobbed. He was surprised to hear the scrape of Holly's chair on the floor and her footsteps coming toward him. She bent and put a warm hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her, his eyes burning and aching, feeling more hope than he had dared imagine.

"How many times?" she whispered.

He froze. His face suddenly felt distinctly sticky and swollen, childlike, shameful. He had heard that question every time he had murdered Edward Weaver, but only ever once before from Holly.

"Eight."

"Eight," she repeated. She closed her eyes. Inhaled slowly. Exhaled. "How?"

Nathan's throat locked up. He had known that she would grasp this immediately, but he still couldn't force his lips to form the words.

Her hand tightened on his shoulder. "How, Nathan? How did you get it? Because unless you suddenly became a very rich man after I died, there's only one way you could have gotten it."

"I killed someone." He couldn't look at her anymore. His eyes fixed on the digital reading on the oven. She had removed her hand and backed away from him.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how else to get back to you, I'm sorry--"

"You killed someone. Eight times!" Holly said, cutting off his babble.

"I didn't know if you'd understand--"

"What part wouldn't I understand? The murders?" Her eyes blazed for a moment before she dropped back into her chair and put her forehead in her palms. "Have we ever had this conversation before?"

"No," Nathan whispered. Something hot lanced his guts each time she said "murder," exactly the way the voice in his head always did. She let out a little laugh.

"You killed eight people before you thought you might ask me if I was okay with it?" she asked. When she looked up at him again, he pushed the heels of his palms against his eyelids, unable to meet her gaze. He heard her breathe deep again. Then again. "Oh, Nate," she groaned. "What a mess."

Déjà vu pinged sourly in Nathan's brain. There was the end to the sentence she'd started in his last reset. The hope that memory had given him drained through his fingers like sand.

Holly's chair scraped back again. He listened to her shuffle around the house with no desire to look up and watch. When he heard the rasping of a zipper, he supposed it could only mean one thing after a fight like this.

More shuffling, and then her voice in his ear. "I need some time to think," she said. "A few days. I don't know what to do, so . . . I'll call you no matter what. Okay? I won't just go dark forever."

Nathan's fingers tangled in the roots of his hair, pulling, pressing his palms tight against his eyelids. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just wanted to grow old with you."

She lingered for a few more seconds before her hand fell from his shoulder. Shuffling. The jingle of keys. By the time the front door had closed, the last heat from her hand had left his skin.

Maybe she'll go dark anyway once she has time to think. Maybe that's what you deserve, said the voice in his head. He wondered if that voice had always sounded so much like Holly's.

###

When Nathan arrived at Holly's first funeral, he couldn't remember the funeral director's name or the coffin in which the woman who looked like his wife lay. Looking at the flowers--white, frilly, with a smell that combined to create something thick and almost buttery--he guessed the choices had been made by her parents. They had somehow never discovered that their daughter hated white flowers. All of his bouquets had been yellow and pink. He smiled mechanically at this thought, and then haze overtook him.

His next clear memory was the haze breaking as he snarled accusations at his mother-in-law in a voice unlike his own. Perhaps he should have felt guilt at the sight of Jade Gray's crumpled, tear-stained face, but he could make none come. After all, hadn't it been she who insisted they visit for Thanksgiving? The haze washed back in as his father-in-law put an arm around her. The expression on Don Gray's face was almost like fear.

When the haze receded again, he was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, his head leaning on a cushion that he had wished into one long, lean thigh. His throat was sore, and his mouth tasted stale and fuzzy. In the haze, Holly had been with him, and that had been good. Out here, he had to see that she was not, and that was bad. He was on the point of sinking again when the commercial caught his attention.

An old man on what was clearly his deathbed, smiling. His family surrounding him, smiling. "I'll see you again soon," the old man croaked, and closed his eyes.

Nathan's eyes welled up again as the scene dissolved into an upbeat jingle.

"Never say goodbye," said a warm female voice from the speakers. "Only see you soon."

People like him didn't get to reset. Money could buy you tens or hundreds of lifetimes, every politician in power right now could attest to that, but people like Nathan made do with wishes and fantasies.

He closed his eyes, but this time the haze didn't come for him. His subconscious had already begun to consider possibilities other than money.

###

Nathan trusted his wife more than he trusted himself, and that was the only reason he didn't fabricate some excuse for going to find her. He had a much harder time stopping himself from destroying his phone to make sure he saw her one more time. He wanted her to make the decision, should have allowed her to do so from the start, so he would have to do it right. No more manipulation, no more thinking of how to do it better next time.

The idea that he could fix his mistakes in the next timeline had become almost an addiction. It was the only way he could reassure himself that things would be okay. For him, like the rich who owned reset devices legally, mistakes were no longer final. The only thing that kept him from trying new things without thought to the consequences was the sharp memory of Holly dying in his arms. A mistake could be fixed, but a mistake could also mean reliving her death again.

Shame rushed warmth into Nathan's face. His sharpest memory of his wife was of her death, but hadn't he been with her for eighty years? He had started this because he had felt cheated out of his time with her. As he had gotten more time, it had become wanting to grow old with her, not just have more time. When had he started believing that his life with her no longer started until after the day she died? Shouldn't he have known, after eighty years with her, whether she would come back? When had he decided that he knew everything he needed to know about her?

When the front door opened two days later, Holly had brought her suitcase back with her instead of bringing boxes. It was more than he would ever deserve.

###

"Ready to go?"

"Ready to go."

The lie came easily, as Nathan had promised it would. He didn't try to grab for the car keys, also as promised. Holly smiled at him as she scooped them herself and jingled them on her way to the door.

"Hold on," he called after her, and as she turned, he caught her with a kiss. He hadn't done this the first time she had died, and some eternally whirring part of his mind hoped that this would change the timing enough that maybe he wouldn't have to go through with his promise, but he shut it away.

She didn't want to know when. That had been her second stipulation for staying. She just wanted to live what life she had left with him, and that was good enough for her. Her first stipulation had been that it should be good enough for him too. He couldn't undo what he had done in previous timelines, but he could end the cycle in this one.

When he pulled away from the kiss, he arranged his face into a careful smile.

That will be the last time we kiss in this house.

He shoved that thought away before it could shout from every inch of his body.

Too soon, they were in the car. He had considered whether to hold her hand to keep her from noticing him shaking and had decided, in the end, that he could keep himself together for the last twenty minutes of her life. So he held one of her hands while she drove with the other, the sun soft on her face and blazing in her hair. He watched her instead of the road in front of them so that it would be just as much a surprise to him as it would be to her.

Except that it couldn't be a surprise to him, because he knew that her brow would wrinkle briefly in confusion, and suddenly she was saying "What is he--"

And then the shrieking of tires began, and the car slewed sideways, tilted, began to roll. Holly screamed over the sound of shattering glass and groaning metal. There was a roar of pain in Nathan's arm as her hand was ripped from his. He lost his sense of direction as the car continued to roll, mashing his head into the door.

Finally the car came to rest on its roof and the world seemed to go silent. Nathan had already begun to extricate himself from his seat. The jagged remnants of Holly's seatbelt swung in the edge of his vision.

He dropped down onto his shoulders and neck and could not scream out his pain because all the breath had been squeezed from his lungs. The few pieces of broken glass left in the window tore at his shirt as he scrambled out. The howling pain in his arm was new. He had never broken his arm before, but he had never decided to hold her hand before.

Even with the broken arm, dragging himself around the front of the car was not difficult. He didn't want to miss Holly's final moments. More than that, he didn't want her to be alone. Still, when he got closer, he feared that she was already gone. Her eyes were closed and an impossible amount of blood had spread under her head.

He brushed hair from her forehead. Her eyes opened.

"So this is it," she whispered.

Nathan nodded and picked up her hand.

"This is the last time. Promise me. The last time."

He nodded again, but she clutched at his hand and said, "Say it!"

"I promise. No more. This is it."

Her grip relaxed and the corners of her mouth twitched. "I love you."

"I love you too."

But her eyes had closed before he had finished. Her hand suddenly weighed more in his.

"Holly?"

Nothing.

"Holly?"

There were hands on him and voices in his ear, but he couldn't hear them. They patted at his face and grabbed at his broken arm, not knowing that the purpose of his last two hundred years was lying in the dark, shimmering rainbow on the pavement.

###

"No."

Holly's parents looked up at him with hurt eyes and he winced.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's . . . she hated white flowers."

"Well, of course they're traditional, but we're more than happy to accommodate," the funeral director said. "What color would you like?"

More important than this, the hurt drained from her parents' faces. He really did love them.

"Yellow," Nathan said. "Yellow and pink. She said they were happier."

"Anything in particular . . . ?"

He closed his eyes, and the right memory came in flashes. Pale yellow ribbons on white chairs, stark against a darkening lawn. Gauzy white floating around bare feet on grass. Red hair backlit by sunset warmth. And in her hands . . .

"Pink peonies," he said. "Yellow roses and daisies. And pink meadowsweet."

THE END