20. Lucy #3
Lucy woke ten minutes before the alarm, and she turned it off before it could make a sound.
The bottom sash was up and the air coming in over the bed smelled like cut grass.
Carrington had rolled over in the night and was lying on her stomach with one arm thrown across the pillow where Lucy's head had been. She didn’t stir when Lucy got up and the mattress shifted.
Lucy got dressed by the chair with no light on. It took her under a minute.
She carried her shoes along the landing.
Grace's door was shut and the strip underneath it was dark.
The nightlight switched off on an automatic timer at four, long past Grace would fall asleep and notice the missing light.
Lucy waited outside the door, holding her shoes and her breath, and then she walked downstairs.
The hall floor was cold enough through her socks to make her walk faster.
She sat on the second step and put her shoes on.
Then she pushed the courtyard door shut, holding the handle down until it was closed, and stepped out onto the gravel and straight off it again onto the grass.
It was soaked with morning dew, and within three steps, she could feel it through the canvas of her shoes.
She kept her eyes down and watched where she put her feet.
The cottage door stuck again. She pressed against it with her shoulder, and it finally budged.
Her phone was on the counter beside the logbook.
Mira had sent her a message on Thursday that she hadn’t yet answered.
Lucy picked up the phone, her thumb hovering over the text until the screen went dark again.
She laid the phone screen down beside the logbook then walked to her bed.
Carrington came in at ten to seven on Monday with her hair up and her rings on. The chef had the stove on and the back door propped open.
"Ms. Harper. There's a call at half past seven that I'm taking in the study, so I'd like Grace to eat outside. It shouldn't run past eight."
"That's fine."
Carrington took her coffee into the study and shut the door.
Grace came down at half past in her uniform with one sock down. She pulled herself up onto the stool, dragged the bowl over, and then checked the spoon in it. It was the big one. She pushed it half an inch away from her with one finger.
"Ms. Harper, can I have the other spoon please?"
The chef was at the range with her back to them, moving eggs around a pan. She didn’t stop or look around, but Lucy's ears grew hot anyway. She got the small spoon out of the drawer and placed it next to Grace. She took the big one away and said nothing, in case the wrong words came out instead.
But what she really wanted to do was crouch down in front of Grace and tell her that her name was Lucy, that it had always been Lucy, and that Grace shouldn’t call her anything else. Lucy just stood there, still holding the big spoon, instead.
"Thank you," Grace said, and started eating.
They left at ten past eight.
"There's a girl in my class who can do a cartwheel on one hand," Grace said.
"On only one hand?"
"Yep. She does it during recess."
"Did you see it?"
Grace looked out the window. "Kayla saw it."
"So somebody told you about it."
"Yes."
"Then I'd want to see it before I believed it," Lucy said. "No offense to Kayla."
Grace laughed at that, once, with her mouth open.
Nothing went wrong that day. School, pickup, a load of laundry, and half an hour at the kitchen table with a worksheet about the water cycle and an argument about whether clouds counted as weather or as scenery.
Carrington got home at ten to six and ate with Grace at the courtyard table, and Lucy stood at the counter with a dish towel and watched the two of them through the glass.
Carrington said something and Grace answered her.
Carrington said something else and Grace answered that too.
From the kitchen, it looked like a household that was doing fine.
Grace went to bed at half past eight, like usual, after the full routine: two pages read aloud and the closet latched. Lucy was on the path back to the cottage by a quarter to nine.
At nine, she opened the logbook at the table and picked up the pencil.
Slept through. Ate her dinner, all of it. Worksheet finished before six. Talked the whole way to school.
She read what she had written, then wrote:
Grace called me Ms. Harper today and I didn’t correct her.
She read it twice, then closed the logbook.
On Wednesday morning, the social worker was going to sit at the marble counter with a folder open and turn these pages one at a time, reading in between the lines.
Lucy wanted her to read this page. She wanted one person in the world to open that book and find out what was going on in this house, and she wanted it badly enough that she sat with her hand flat on the notebook and didn’t move.
Then she opened up to the page and erased the final sentence until there was nothing left of it but a gray smear and where the pencil had left grooves from pressing into the paper. Then she brushed the crumbs off the page and blew the rest away before closing the book again.