9. Carrington
CARRINGTON
"Don't turn the big light on."
Lucy was six steps down the hall already, one hand on the wall. Carrington reached the door a beat behind her and put her hand a foot short of the handle, which she had done every time since they arrived.
Grace screamed again, and it cut off abruptly.
The door wasn't latched. It swung on Lucy's palm into a gray room, curtains open a hand's width onto the cove, and Grace was sitting straight up in bed with both palms flat on the mattress. Awake. Eyes open too wide, mouth open, not blinking.
"That sound is the water," Lucy said from the doorway.
Grace didn't answer. Carrington stopped at the threshold and waited for Lucy to go past her. Lucy stepped back into the hall.
"Carrington."
Her hand was on the doorframe. She left it there.
"I'll be right here." Lucy put her back against the far wall, hands at her sides.
Carrington went in. The floorboards were cold under her feet. She stopped a yard from the bed, close enough to be seen, and Grace looked up at her.
"Where's Lucy?" Grace said.
"In the hall."
"Oh."
The clock on the nightstand said 10:41. Grace's hair was stuck to one side of her face, and her breathing was still coming high in her chest.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Do you know where you are?"
Grace looked at the window and then at the door, taking inventory of a room she had slept in twice. "Yes."
Carrington turned the lamp on. Grace's whole face winced against it and she put her arm up over her eyes. Carrington turned it off again and stood in the dark she had just made worse.
"Can you tell me what it was about?" Carrington asked.
"No."
"It was a dream. Dreams aren't real."
"I know," Grace said, with the flat, courteous voice from the dinner table.
The closet door stood open about six inches.
Carrington crossed the room and pushed it until it caught and turned the handle so the latch seated properly.
Grace watched her do it, and nothing in her face changed.
Triangles. The green cup. A closet door shut, not ajar.
She stood with her hand on the handle a second longer than the job needed and then took it off.
"There's another room at the end of the hall," she said. "The same bed, the same view. We can move you tonight if this one's wrong."
"It's not wrong."
"The car comes at eleven tomorrow. I can move it up to seven and have you home for lunch."
Grace shook her head against the pillow.
The fox book was on the nightstand with a receipt in it for a page marker, spine gone soft, a corner of the cover missing.
Carrington picked it up and found the receipt and sat on the edge of the mattress.
It was now the routine at home, starting at eight-thirty at home, four nights out of seven.
Carrington had done it badly every one of those nights, and Grace had let her.
"Do you want the next bit?"
Grace shut her eyes.
Carrington read the next four lines aloud, hearing her own voice come out of her flat and correct, and she stopped in the middle of the fifth. She put the receipt back where it had been and closed the book and set it down on the nightstand lined up to the edge.
"Would you like me to get Lucy?"
"You said she's in the hall," Grace said.
Carrington went to the door. The hallway was black except for the gray coming out of the room behind her, and Lucy was an amorphous shape against the far wall with her arms folded.
"Ms. Harper."
"I'm right here," Lucy said. She didn’t move or say anything else.
Grace lay down and turned to face the wall with her knees coming up under the sheet. "You can go back to bed. I'm okay now."
Carrington's mouth had gone dry. Nobody was coming. She sat down on the floor with her back against the side of the bed, facing the window, which put her at a considerable disadvantage and out of Grace's line of sight. But she stayed there.
"The tide's out," she said. "You can tell from the sound. When it's in, it's one long noise, and when it's out, you can hear the gaps."
Nothing from the bed.
"There are tide pools down at the bottom of the steps. Under that rock shelf on the left. You have to go at low tide or you don't see anything, so it would have to be early."
The sheet moved and made a scratching sound.
"When I was your age, I wanted to work on that. Not the pools. The rest of it, further out."
"Doing what?"
"Counting things, mostly, and writing down what I counted." The gull was flying over the water again, the same one that had been working the cove since Tuesday, methodical about it. "I had a fish tank. From when I was six until I was fourteen."
"What was in it?"
"Nine fish. I named them all."
There was a pause with a different quality to it. "What were they called?"
"Barnaby. Edwin. Constance. Mr. Pike, who was not a pike." Carrington had not said any of these words aloud in thirty-five years and her voice did something on the third one. "Alistair. Hugo. I don't remember the last three."
"Those are people names."
"They are."
"Which one was Barnaby?"
"I never knew," Carrington said and smiled.
"They were all the same fish. Small and orange with a black bit on the tail.
I told your mother I could tell them apart, and she used to sit in the doorway and test me on it.
I got it wrong every single time, and she thought that was the funniest thing that had ever happened in our house. "
Grace didn't say anything. Carrington kept her eyes on the glass and found the seam between two floorboards with her thumbnail and went along it and back. "Are they still alive?"
"No. They lived about two years. Fish don't live very long."
"All of them?"
"All of them. Some of them I flushed and some of them I buried by the fence. I cried about Constance but not the others, which never made any sense to me, because I couldn't tell which one Constance was."
Grace didn't say anything for a while, and then: "Did you get more?"
"No. I stopped."
"Why?"
"I got busy with other things," Carrington said, which was the truth with all the loaded heaviness taken out of it.
The breathing behind her had come down out of the top of the chest. Carrington waited until it was slow and even, gave it another minute, and put a hand up on the bed to push herself up.
Grace's fist closed on the cuff of Carrington’s sleeve, gathered up in one fist at the wrist, the way you'd hold a rope. Carrington sat back down, leaving her arm up on the bed.
She had put a hand out to her once before. Grace had looked at it and put both of hers behind her back.
The clock now said 11:04. Her phone was on the arm of a chair on the other side of the wall.
There was a note to Devika she had been assembling since dinner about the remediation schedule and the three-year structure and whether the eastern parcel should be held back from the announcement, and she got as far as the second clause of it and lost the thread, and started again, and lost it in the same place.
After that, she gave up on it and sat in the dark listening to the gaps in the water and doing nothing whatsoever, for the first time she could remember since she was fourteen years old.
The clock said 11:26. Her arm went numb from the shoulder down, hot first and then a complete lack of sensation.
Four fingers and a thumb, closed on the cotton.
She kept looking at them. Every few minutes, Grace's little hand tightened and let go again, checking, and every time it did, something arced through Carrington's chest.
Somewhere around twelve, Grace’s fist unclenched and stayed open.
Carrington waited for the fingers to go slack all the way and then took her arm back an inch at a time.
When she stood up, she realized that her foot had gone dead, too, and she put a hand on the wall to steady herself until the sensation of pins and needles passed.
Grace was face-down in the pillow with her mouth open. The closet door was shut. The amber nightlight was plugged into a wall in Cliffside, four hundred miles away, and Carrington stood in the doorway and worked out what it would take to have one here before Grace woke up.
Lucy was sitting on the floor of the hall with her back to the wall and her legs out in front of her, in the T-shirt and the leggings. She had been there the whole time.
"Fifty-one minutes," she said.
"She's asleep." Carrington pulled the door to and left it an inch slightly off the frame, a thing she had learned from Lucy and never mentioned. "You didn't come in."
"No."
"You could have had her down in ten minutes."
"Probably." Lucy took her time getting up off the floor. She put one hand on the wall and pushed against it to un-pretzel her legs to stand up. "I was going to give it another twenty minutes and then take up drinking."
The sleeve of Carrington's shirt was crushed into a fist-shaped mess of creases from the cuff to halfway up the forearm. Lucy looked at it but didn't say anything about it, and she didn't reach out and smooth it either. Something in Carrington's chest came apart very quietly at that restraint.
"You were bad at it," Lucy said.
"For about ten minutes."
"Longer. You told a scared kid her dream wasn't real, which is the worst thing to say when a kid has a nightmare, and then you offered to buy her a different bedroom.
" Lucy pushed her sleeves back up past her elbows.
"And then you sat on the floor for an hour until your arm went numb until she went to sleep. "
She didn't add anything to that. She put her back against the wall and waited to hear what Carrington was going to say next.
"The car's coming at eleven," Carrington said. "I'll have Devika push the signing set to Thursday, and if the weather holds we could take her down to the pools at seven, which gives us an hour and a half before we have to—"
She stopped.
She took two steps and put her hands on Lucy's face, and she kissed her.
For a second, Lucy didn't move at all. Then her hand came up and closed on Carrington's wrist, not pulling it away, holding it where it was, and she kissed her back. Lucy’s other arm went around Carrington's waist under the ruined sleeve.
Lucy made a small sound into the kiss, and Carrington walked her back into the wall, just to hear her make it again.
She wanted more. That was all she could think about.
When they broke apart for air, she left her hand where it was, her thumb under the bone of Lucy's jaw, and Lucy breathed against her wrist. Lucy took her other arm back and put both hands flat on the wall behind her, palms to the wood, and left them there.
Carrington had a whole speech ready. They could talk about it before the car came. But she kept it behind her teeth and just stood there with her hand still caressing Lucy's face. "Goodnight, Lucy."
She didn’t wait for a response. Carrington let herself into her own room and closed the door, then stood in the dark with her hand still on the handle.