Margaret Cadaver

Margaret was the nurse on duty the night of the bus accident in Lewiston, Idaho, and she held Chanhassen "Sugar" Hiddle's hand as she died. This creates an intimate, painful link to Sugar's final moments — she is perhaps the last person to have been with Sugar at all. When Sal learns this truth near the novel's climax, it fundamentally reframes every hostile interaction she has had with Margaret.

Sal resents Margaret on two interlocking levels: she fears Margaret is replacing Sugar in her father's life and irrationally resents Margaret for surviving a scene where her mother did not. Phoebe's wild theory that Margaret is a murderer deepens Sal's distrust. Beneath both grievances is Sal's unprocessed grief, which needs an external target, and Margaret — the mysterious red-haired woman across the street — becomes that target.

John and Margaret share the particular grief of people bound together by Sugar's final moments — Margaret was present at her death, and John lost his wife there. Their bond is one of grief solidarity: John finds in Margaret someone who does not need the loss explained. Sal reads this friendship as romantic betrayal, but Creech frames it as a natural, even necessary, human connection between two people marked by the same tragedy.

No — Phoebe's murder theory is entirely a product of gothic imagination and fear. Phoebe suspects Margaret buried her husband in the backyard and constructs an elaborate villain narrative around her. The novel uses this distortion deliberately to illustrate how rumor, narrative, and grief-driven hostility can warp perception. Margaret is revealed to be a warm, grieving nurse whose defining act was one of compassionate presence, not violence.

Margaret responds with unwavering patience — she does not retaliate, does not explain herself, and simply stays present. Scene after scene, she offers food, conversation, and space without demanding acknowledgment from Sal. This steady refusal to meet coldness with coldness is Creech's clearest illustration of the novel's central Cherokee proverb about walking in another's moccasins: Margaret practices it fully, extending empathy to a child who gives her none in return.

The surname Cadaver — meaning a dead body — is one of Creech's most pointed pieces of literary staging. It marks Margaret as a figure associated with death before the reader learns anything meaningful about her, priming both Phoebe and the reader to misinterpret her as sinister. The irony is that Margaret's actual relationship to death is one of tender witness and care, not harm — her name misleads as surely as Phoebe's murder theories do.

Margaret is Mr. Birkway's sister, which makes her directly connected to Sal's English teacher and, by extension, to Sal's school community in Euclid. This sibling relationship integrates Margaret into Sal's daily life in a way Sal initially overlooks or ignores. It also means that two people Sal interacts with regularly share knowledge of the same tragedy — Sugar's death — without Sal fully realizing the web of connection around her.

Sal's resentment transforms into something resembling gratitude once she learns that Margaret held Sugar's hand as she died. The revelation, confirmed near the novel's climax, retroactively reframes every tense interaction: Margaret's quiet steadiness was not indifference but sustained grace under undeserved hostility. Sal's journey toward this understanding embodies the novel's core lesson — that judgment gives way to empathy only when we truly step into another person's experience.