As Bright As Heaven

Maggie fixes the hair and makeup of a woman laid out in the embalming room. Alex, who is now seven, asks if they can go to the park. Alex helped the Brights survive after the war and flu: “[H]e showed us good things still existed,” Maggie thinks (241). They’ve told him that his mother gave him to the Brights when she was dying, and Willa gave him the rocking-horse rattle that was Henry’s, claiming that it had been his mother’s last gift. Maggie still misses her mother.

She greets her suitor, Palmer Towlerton. He is the first man whom Maggie has liked since Jamie Sutcliff, who’s been gone for six years.

Evelyn, who is training to be a doctor, is a second-year resident at the Fairview Asylum and is present when Dr. Bellfield tells Conrad Reese that his wife, Sybil, has dementia. Sybil is only three years older than Evelyn. Evelyn thinks, “This has been the most sobering fact I’ve learned in my residency. The mind, like any other part of the body, has crippling limitations” (248). The asylum tries to be a pleasant place, focused on a cure for the patients. Evelyn has been interested in psychiatry ever since Uncle Fred shared his anatomy books.