In the first two stories of the collection, “The Wind” and “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” the author explores the intersection of the past and the present, conveying how the individual’s former experiences or familial inheritances might dictate her sense of self for years to come and introducing the theme of Discovering Grace in a Violent World. In “The Wind,” this dynamic emerges via the first-person narrator’s relationship with her mother Michelle’s childhood trauma. The narrator was not born when her mother, grandmother, and uncles had to flee her abusive grandfather; however, the story lives inside the narrator because the story has lived inside her mother for so long. She is touched by her mother’s past and carries her pain.

In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Eliza similarly finds herself carrying her husband Willie’s pain years after he has outgrown childhood and left his childhood home. At the story’s end, she realizes that she cannot leave Willie because “Who would take care of him then” (49). Since their youthful love affair, Eliza has understood that Willie needs her. Eliza also relies on Willie, who devoted himself to her care when she was caring for her ailing mother. Each character in this short story carries the other’s pain, holding their past sorrow and guiding them through it for years to come.

“The Wind” nuances these explorations via the distinct narrative vantage point of offering Michelle’s daughter the narrative authority to tell Michelle’s story. While Michelle (and her two brothers) escaped their father’s violence—“each finding a kind of safe harbor, jobs and people and houses” (17) beyond their tumultuous childhood—the narrator has always noticed “a silent wind […] raging throughout [Michelle’s] life, touching every moment she lived” (17). The silent wind is a metaphor for the violence she experienced in her youth, which over the years has mutated into worried and anxious caretaking of her daughter, the narrator. Her mother carries her trauma inside of her heart and body, and also wears the literal scars of her father’s violence on her face.

In telling her mother’s story for her, the first-person narrator is showing her mother grace. The daughter arguably has had no choice but to inherit her mother’s violent history, saying the story “seeped into me through her blood, through every bit of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew” (17), but she carries it with grace because she feels it is her duty as a woman. In retelling it, she is fighting against a history of silencing women, seeking grace and renewal for her mother and women like her by memorializing her story. While the narrative is largely located in the scenes of Michelle’s past, at the end, the narrator assumes a more assertive stance as she widens her examination of her mother’s story to a more universal story about female oppression.

In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” the intersection between Eliza and Willie’s past and present lives, identities, and relationship develops the theme of Care as an Act of Love and an Emotional Burden. In the early sequences of the story, Eliza and Willie seem to have an idyllic marital life. They have “lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river” (19)—a setting which evokes fairy-tale-like settings where peace and happiness abound. The surrounding allusions to “the great gnarled apple tree” where Willie is “stringing up fairy lights” (20) or the image of Eliza taking pies out of the oven also evoke a pleasant, peaceful atmosphere with a mythic resonance that simultaneously forebodes violence or upheaval.

Over the course of the story, Eliza’s intensifying unhappiness points to her and Willie’s darker and more complex history. While they are undeniably bound to one another, Eliza has often felt a “pool of darkness” (27) welling inside of her. This metaphoric darkness echoes the metaphoric wind blowing inside of Michelle in the preceding story—a reverberation between the narratives which underscores the universality of women’s physical and emotional entrapment while creating cohesion from one story to the next. In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Eliza’s internal darkness can only be abated by hard work or close attention to some new project or interest. When she starts gardening and spending time with Bet, she rediscovers a younger, wilder part of herself that her relationship with Willie doesn’t allow. Although indelibly linked to her husband, her care for him rides the line between love and responsibility, and very much echoes the love of a mother.

In the story’s closing scene, Willie “put[s] his head under her chin and his breath was warm on her neck, and like this, she held him until he slept” (49). The image of naked Eliza hugging clothed Willie in this fetal position conjures notions of maternity. She is physically wrapped around him, shielding him, while her body is exposed and vulnerable. She loves him and is sacrificing herself for him.