10. Lucy
LUCY
Lucy put her hand into the pool up to the wrist and held it there until her knuckles ached. Under her fingers, the anemone shut itself, slow and complete, and stopped being a green flower and became a lump of jelly stuck to the rock.
"That's nineteen," Grace said.
"Nineteen what?" Lucy asked.
"Of the green ones. There's an orange one, too, but I don't know if it counts."
"Count it separately."
Grace was flat on her stomach on the shelf with her chin on her fists and her boots hooked over the lip behind her, close enough to the water that Lucy had put a hand on the back of her jacket twice already and taken it off again.
The tide was as far out as it was going to go.
Down past the last of the rocks, the water made the gapped, unhurried noise it had made all week, the gull that never caught anything flew over low and went away toward the point, its beak empty again.
Carrington was crouched at the other end of the same pool with her weight on the balls of her feet and one hand flat on the rock. She had come down the steps in flat leather shoes, and the salt had already dried into a white line across the toe of each one. She hadn't said anything about it.
"There's a fish," Grace said.
"Where?" Lucy asked.
Grace pointed at nothing Lucy could see.
Carrington came around the rim of the pool to the near side and, putting a hand on the rock to stabilize herself, bent down on one knee to see what Grace was seeing.
Lucy looked down. Carrington’s hand was mere inches away from her own, so close she could feel the heat radiating from it, and Carrington didn’t move it.
"There is," Carrington said. "Under the ledge on your side. It's been there the whole time."
"What kind is it?" Grace asked.
Carrington leaned over to get a better look at the fish. "I don't know."
Grace turned her head. "You don't know?"
"No."
"Okay," Grace said, and went back to the water.
They stayed like that, both of them on either side of Grace, until Grace said the fish had moved and nobody could find it again.
The wind came off the cove, and Lucy pushed her hair out of her face with her wet hand and got salt in her mouth.
Fifty feet up, the lodge sat on the shoulder of the headland with all its glass reflecting the same gray as the sky.
Carrington had her sleeves shoved up and her forearms braced on her knees.
Her lips moved a little while soundlessly while counting, and she got to the end of the pool and started again at the far side, checking herself.
Lucy watched her do it until Carrington had started over and then had to look somewhere else.
Breakfast was at eight, at the long table in front of the window.
Grace talked straight through it, with her mouth full.
She animatedly shared about the anemone that might be orange and how it had been sort of orange and sort of brown, and whether that was two different kinds or one kind that had gotten dirty.
That crabs walk sideways and hers had walked forward, which meant hers was either broken or a different animal.
Whether the fish under the ledge was a baby of a big fish or a whole grown fish that had stayed small.
She talked about her friend Kayla at school who had a book about the ocean, but it was mostly whales.
She wanted to know if whales came here. She ate two triangles of toast and left the crusts in a stack, then started on a third.
Lucy sat on Grace's left side with her hands around a cup of coffee she'd already finished, and every so often she said mm or probably and Grace kept going.
"When can we do the other ones?" Grace said.
Carrington put her pen down. "Which other ones?"
"You said there are ones under the shelf. On the left." Grace pointed out the window, in more or less the wrong direction. "We didn't go there."
"You'd need a lower tide than we had this morning," Carrington said. "I can’t control that."
"Oh," Grace said.
"There'll be one," Carrington said. "I don't know when I'll be able to bring you back for it."
Grace picked her toast back up and bit the corner off it.
Lucy pressed her thumb hard into the handle of the empty cup. Across the table, Carrington slid the top page out from under her pen and turned it over.
"Nineteen," she said, writing. "And one that may or may not be orange. One crab. One fish, unidentified."
She tore the strip off the bottom of the page, along the edge of what she'd written, and held it out across the table.
Grace looked at it. Then she took it and folded it in half and folded it again and put it in her coat pocket.
Carrington picked up the rest of the page and went back to whatever the rest of the page was.
Lucy got up and carried her empty cup six feet to the sideboard and stood with her back to the table, hands flat on the wood, until she could stop smiling.
The car came at eleven and they were in the air a little after noon.
Within ten minutes, Grace was asleep. She cradled the rabbit under her chin, and her mouth was open and she had one boot off.
Lucy put a blanket over her and then sat with her hand on the armrest doing nothing at all.
Once, somewhere in the middle of the flight, Grace awoke halfway out of her slumber and said the fish had probably gone back under the ledge by now.
Lucy said that was where she'd have gone, and Grace was out again before she finished the end of the sentence.
Carrington had the same stack of papers she'd torn Grace's list out of at breakfast, and she didn't turn a page the whole first hour.
Then Devika came up the aisle with two folders.
She was the acquisitions counsel, and she was younger than Lucy had expected the first time somebody said counsel.
Devika was already talking before she got to them, about the eastern parcel and the announcement and whether the signing could still happen Thursday.
"Ms. Harper, would you mind?" Devika said. "It's just easier if I'm across from Ms. Cole."
Lucy took her bag and moved back a row, next to Grace, and Devika sat down where she'd been.
"Thursday, then," Devika said. "There's a dinner after the signing, if you want me to hold a room."
"Ms. Harper." Carrington didn't turn around. "What's Thursday?"
Lucy leaned out into the aisle so she could be heard over the engines. "Reading night. And Grace has a line to learn for the assembly."
"A line," Carrington said.
"One line," Lucy said. "Her teacher put the whole class on the program."
"No dinner," Carrington said.
Devika wrote it down, cheerful about it, and said, "of course, Ms. Cole," and went straight on to the next thing.
They worked for the rest of the flight. Devika was very good and very fast, and she was openly pleased about both. The seat backs were high, and all Lucy had from where she sat was the top of Carrington's head, one shoulder, and a hand reaching out to take a page.
Lucy sat with a sleeping child against her arm and listened to a woman she had kissed the night before hold a conversation about remediation schedules, and said nothing at all, for ninety minutes.
The rain caught up with them an hour after takeoff, and they sat on the ground at the far end of the airfield for two more hours, waiting out the weather. It was going dark by the time the cars came.
Devika took the second car into town. The driver put the bags in, and Grace half woke and got into the third row and went out again with her forehead against the window, Lucy climbed into the middle row, and Carrington got in on the other side.
The rain on the roof was loud enough to talk under. Lucy watched the wipers for two miles.
"I tried to get a nightlight sent up to the lodge on Saturday," Carrington said. "Nothing gets out to that point in under two days. I checked three times."
"You checked three times?" Lucy asked.
"Yes," Carrington said.
"So instead, she slept holding your sleeve for an hour," Lucy said.
Carrington was still looking out the window. "There'll be two more of them at the house Monday. One goes in her bag and stays there for future trips."
Lucy sat with that for about a mile with her hands flat on her thighs, making herself leave them there. "Can I say something? You don't have to answer it."
"You may," Carrington said.
The driver was no more than eighteen inches in front of her with his eyes on the road. Lucy looked at the rearview mirror, found nobody looking back, and said it anyway.
"Two things," Lucy said. "I'm not doing this while you're paying me. And I'm not doing it where nobody's allowed to know about it."
The wipers swished faster.
"You've thought about this for a while," Carrington said.
"Yes."
Carrington didn't argue with any of it. She sat with her ankles crossed and looked out at the water traveling up the glass in a line and took her time.
"The first one is easy," Carrington said. "You'd stop being my employee."
"And the second one?" Lucy asked.
"The second one is harder," Carrington said. "Ashgrove closes in June. Until it does, I'm in every photograph attached to it." She turned her head. "And there are eleven people on that property who are paid to notice things."
"June," Lucy said.
"That's not a no," Carrington reassured.
Carrington looked at her. "Tell me what you want in the meantime and you'll have it."
The wipers kept swishing. Lucy looked at the side of Carrington’s face, at the dark patch on the shoulder of her coat where the rain had gotten it between the plane and the car, and she could not think of one thing to ask for.
"I don't know," Lucy said.
"Think about it," Carrington said. "Then tell me."
"All right," Lucy said.
The flutter started up under her ribs anyway.
She'd had it on the bus with two transfers and a folder on her knees, and on the sidewalk outside those gates in February, and both times she had walked until it went away.
There was nowhere to walk here. She wanted her hands on this woman, in a moving car, eighteen inches behind a man paid to keep his eyes on the road, with a month sitting in the air where a yes should have been.
Four years ago, somebody had left a check folded on a kitchen counter, and Lucy had picked it up and put it in her bag. Nobody had made her do it. Money was what people handed you instead of saying what you were to them.
She looked at the rain.
"Is Grace at school on Monday?" Lucy asked. "Or does she take the day off?"
Carrington was quiet for a second. "What do you recommend?"
"School," Lucy said. "She'll want to tell Kayla about the crab and fish."
"School, then," Carrington said.
Nobody said anything else for eleven miles. Grace woke up somewhere in the drive and wanted to know if it was still today.
The gates were slow, the way they always were, and the road went up through the hedge and came around into the courtyard.
And then, there it all was, the same as it was left.
Three lights were on downstairs in the main house and the rest of it was dark.
The kitchen wing across the courtyard from it.
And at the far corner, the path down to the cottage, sixty feet of gravel with the low lights buried along the edge.
Lucy did her job. She got Grace inside and out of her wet boots, then up the stairs and into dry clothes. Grace was asleep before she finished talking about the fish. Lucy pulled the door almost closed, leaving it open barely an inch, and went back downstairs for the bags.
Carrington was still out on the gravel with her coat over her arm and the rain coming straight down on her.
"You'll be soaked," Lucy said.
"Yes," Carrington said, looking up at the sky. She bent down and picked up the second bag, which she had never once done in all the time Lucy had worked for her, and stood there holding it.
"I'd rather not wait until June," Carrington said.
They were four feet apart on the path. Lucy put her bag down.
She closed the distance, grabbed a handful of the front of Carrington's shirt, and kissed her.
Carrington made a sound against her mouth and didn't move for a second, and then her hand came up and closed at the back of Lucy's neck, cold from the rain, and she kissed her back, hard, immediately.
Lucy got her other hand flat on Carrington's ribs and felt her breathing change.
The rain came down the back of her collar, and she took a fistful of wet shirt and pulled Carrington closer and stopped.
Then she turned her face away and broke off the kiss. She stayed where she was, her lips almost close enough to brush Carrington’s, her hand still closed on the shirt.
"Carrington," Lucy said.
"Yes?"
"June," Lucy said. "Or now, with everyone in that house knowing. Those are the only two options."
Carrington's hand stayed at the back of her neck a second longer, and then she pulled it away.
"I know," Carrington said.
Lucy let go of the shirt, picked up the bag, and pushed the wet hair off her forehead.
"Goodnight, Ms. Cole," Lucy said.
She walked down the path toward the cottage. Carrington didn’t follow her, and she didn't turn around to check. Lucy shut the door and stood in the middle of the room, still wearing her wet coat. She had left the light on over the stove on Friday morning, and it was still burning.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the door, dripping onto the boards, and counted the things in the room that were hers.
Two suitcases, one still half packed since February.
The clothes in the closet, which would go into the suitcases.
Her books, eleven of them, twelve if she counted the fox one on Grace's nightstand in the main house.
A comb from the pharmacy in town. A mug she'd bought herself at a gas station outside Cliffside.
The mugs in the cupboard had come with the house.
It would take her under an hour to pack up and disappear.