She wanted to ask her a lot of questions but knew her grandmother did not want to talk about what had happened. Louise looked out the open window. She saw the swirl of thick smoke, smelled the smoldering tamarack. Her grandmother was tanning. Grandma had set about her chores as always. The old woman had known difficult times. She had known long hunger, disease. Grandma had fed and clothed two daughters and had lost them. Louise’s mother to pneumonia, Rosalie to TB. Both had died in their twenties. Her grandmother kept a photograph of them hidden upstairs. The bubbled-glass frame had failed to protect their images. Every year they faded a little more as if they were being encompassed by white light. Grandma had never hung the photograph. It was too special for that, her grandmother said. And Louise understood that her grandmother’s grief was a private thing. She knew there were things her grandmother would never tell her.

She wanted most to ask her grandmother about Baptiste, for she was certain she had heard him while she was sleeping. When she had fluttered her eyes she had spotted glimpses of him, scar-worn and sober, different toward her, attentive and kind. She wanted to ask her grandmother if maybe Baptiste had visited her but she knew it would be like asking if Florence had stood by her side, if her mother had returned from the dead. He had appeared to her alive but perhaps only the way the dead can appear in dreams.

She thought of Baptiste, how he could be shy, how soft his voice had been, how he had once been there for her. She felt sorrowful and weak, uncertain about what life held for her now. She saw the beautiful day as endless, unforgiving, but she was awake and alive. She wanted to sit outside for a while and find some peace in the day. “I’d like to sit out on the porch,” she said, “if you think that’s OK?”

Her grandmother nodded and wiped her hands on her skirt again. She placed her hand beneath Louise’s arm and Louise was taken with her grandmother’s firm strength. They moved together slowly. Louise clutched the blanket to her chest and bit her lip. She had to concentrate hard to make her legs move, but when they reached the porch she gulped the cool sweet air and felt new energy. Her grandmother held onto her arm as Louise strained to sit down. “I’m fine now, Grandma,” she said. “It’s OK.”

“I’m just inside,” her grandmother called. “You holler if you need me.”