You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time.

Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.