Ann Hood - The Knitting Circle - The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year

“ ‘You look funny and beautiful,’ I told him.

“He explained to the girls that he would be back with lunch and then he kissed me hard on the lips. I heard Véronique mutter as she pulled away from him.

“ ‘She’ll have to get used to it,’ he told me. He kissed each girl on top of her head and began the hike back.

“ ‘Papa!’ Bébé called after him. ‘I’ll collect sea glass for you!’

“ ‘Wonderful!’

“The three of us swam for a long time in the cool water. We could see our legs and toes flapping about beneath it, and hundreds of small fish swimming around us. Even Véronique enjoyed our time in the water. Then, feeling lazy, I stretched out on one of the hot rocks and closed my eyes.

“I woke to find Claude kneeling beside me with the backpack of food at my feet.

“ ‘Rouge?’ he said. ‘Where are the girls?’

“I sat up slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, scanning the beach. ‘Isn’t that Véronique down there?’ I pointed.

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, relieved.

“He opened the backpack and spread the cloth, and the food, and took out a bottle of white wine. I watched as Véronique made her way back to us.

“ ‘Funny,’ I said, standing. ‘I don’t see Bébé.’

“Claude got to his feet and yelled to Véronique. ‘Where is your sister?’

“ ‘I can’t understand you,’ she yelled back. ‘Speak French!’

“Claude began to run toward her, and I followed close behind.

“ ‘ Ta soeur! ’ he yelled.

“ ‘She was there, looking for sea glass,’ Véronique said.

“We looked at where she pointed. A small cove now filled with water from the tide.

“ ‘Bébé!’ Claude called, racing down the beach.

“Was it a premonition of tragedy that I had that first time I saw Claude and knew that we would be linked forever? I can’t say. But the little one, Bébé, was gone and I was to blame.

“They found her washed up on another beach the next morning. We don’t know what happened because it happened as I slept.”

“Oh,” Mary said, and it sounded more like a moan than a word. Her heart seized in on itself as she thought of this other lost child, and she said, again, “Oh.”

“We never discussed what happened next,” Scarlet said. “I simply came back to the States, alone. He blames me, of course. Why shouldn’t he? I’m guilty. I didn’t watch his daughter and she died. I can never make that right. The guilt used to keep me up at night. It used to drive me crazy. I would try to rewrite that day, that morning. In this version, I would make myself stay awake. We would build sand castles, Bébé and I, with elaborate turrets and moats filled with seawater. And Claude would come back to the beach with our lunch, and we would eat it together, all four of us. And we would swim in the ocean and grow brown under the hot sun. And we would fill our bucket with shells and sea glass. And we would live happily ever after.

“But, of course, then morning would come and I would be left with the real story and the awful true ending.”

The day had turned to dusk. Outside Scarlet’s wall of windows the sky was slashed with violet and lavender. Mary had dropped a stitch early on, and a run of emptiness climbed up the center, cutting through the happy wool like a scar.

“I know about your daughter,” Scarlet said. “I remember reading it in the paper. Meningitis, right?’

“Yes.”

“We have this in common,” she said softly.

There was a small silence. Then Mary said, “Her name was Stella.”

Neither of them was knitting anymore.

“I’ll show you,” Mary said, her voice shaky.

She opened the bag at her feet and from it took the picture of Stella she carried everywhere with her. It wasn’t the most recent photo, or even the most beautiful. It was just the one that looked the most like Stella, her head cocked, smiling broadly, her eyes bright beneath her tangled hair.

Scarlet’s breath caught.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Lovely.”

They sat side by side, and watched the sky grow dark.

4

For several weeks Mary did not go to the knitting circle. A kind of inertia took hold of her, and even though when Wednesday night neared, she thought of going, she could not get herself there. She admired Scarlet, who, after losing Bébé, after losing everything, had managed to make something of her life again. Rouge—and how that name took on such significance now, Mary realized— was always crowded. Why, Mary had written a rave review of it when it first opened, marveling at the butteriness of the croissants, the intensity of the hot chocolate. She wanted to find inspiration in Scarlet’s story, but her still-new grief kept her paralyzed.

Alone in the late afternoons, Mary tried not to think about how six short months ago she would be picking up Stella at school, watching her run down the front steps with her impossibly oversized backpack, her collection of key chains jingling. She would be swooping her daughter into her waiting arms. Trying not to think of these things, Mary picked up her needles and knit. Scarves unfolded in her lap—fat ones; textured ones; eyelash scarves made of thin strands of yarns knitted together—one glittery and multicolored and one soft and fluttery.

On warm autumn days like these, she and Stella would go to the playground on the corner. Or they would walk to the small library up the street and fall into the plump cushions in the children’s section and read. Mary remembered these things as evening approached. She remembered them, and she knit.

On one of these afternoons the phone rang and Mary answered it. Often she didn’t. She let the machine pick up and listened as friends checked in on her, offering cups of tea, afternoon movies, martinis. But on this afternoon she answered because outside her window she could clearly see her neighbor Louise, and Louise’s three children, placing their just-made jack-o’-lanterns on their front stoop. The excited giggles from those kids made Mary want to run across the street and smash those goofy carved pumpkins. Even worse: Halloween was two days away.

“It’s Scarlet,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I thought you might want me to pick you up tonight.”

“Knitting,” Mary said.

“Six o’clock?”

Beautiful-colored leaves floated down from the tree in Mary’s yard. She watched them lift, hover, fall.

“Sometimes,” Scarlet said, “you need to get out of the house. Out of your brain.”

Mary thought of that day at Scarlet’s, of Scarlet’s story about Claude and Bébé.

“Okay,” Mary said. “See you at six.”

Dragging a comb through her tangled hair, Mary imagined sharing her own story with Scarlet. She would tell her about Dylan, and how they had found each other late in their lives; how Stella had been their one chance to make a family. Perhaps she could tell Scarlet what kind of father Dylan had been, how he liked taking Stella grocery shopping, just the two of them. He would bring a lemon to her nose and have her inhale its scent. He taught her how to tell when a melon was ripe, how to choose an avocado, how to order meat from the butcher. After Stella died, Mary took over the grocery shopping, wandering the aisles alone. The sight of a father there with his little girl safely strapped into the cart, nibbling on blueberries or crackers broke her heart. Somehow Mary believed that maybe Scarlet would understand what she and Dylan had lost.

When she thought of her, of Scarlet, she saw her in the south of France, happy. That happiness had lasted only a moment, Mary knew. It seemed to her she’d had Stella for only a moment.

Staring at the stranger in the mirror, Mary sighed. Her face was rounder, her hair duller, her eyes flat. It was another person who used to like what she saw when she looked in a mirror, who playfully added mascara to her lashes and sparkly blush to her cheeks. Mary dug around in her cosmetics bag until she found the hot pink tube of mascara inside. But it had caked from lack of use, and she couldn’t find her blush at all. Who was she kidding? she thought. She looked bad, she felt bad, and she was not ready to talk about any of this to anyone. She had paid a grief counselor a hundred dollars a week for almost two months and all Mary did was sit and cry, which was what she did at home for free.