25. Carrington
CARRINGTON
Carrington cut the toast corner to corner and then across the other way and set the four triangles on the plate with the long edges out.
She had rinsed the green cup, filled it with juice, and placed it by the plate.
She walked to the far end of the kitchen and sorted through the mail.
Behind her, the stool legs dragged on the tile.
The note was still against the blue binder where it had been left, torn off the pad by the house phone, folded in half and stood up like a tent.
That had been eleven nights ago. Since then, Carrington had shut the closet door until it clicked and read Grace two pages and never three, even the night Grace held the book open at the third page and waited.
Carrington opened a letter from the school. "There's a sheet in here about the aquarium," she said. "You're on the bus with Kayla."
Bettina slid a pan into the oven and shut it and kept to her own end of the marble.
The plate scraped on the marble, then Carrington couldn’t hear anything back there but Grace chewing. She put the aquarium sheet face down on the marble and opened the next envelope.
At eight, she washed her hands and got the comb off the shelf.
Grace climbed off the stool and sat down on the floor in front of it with her back turned without having to be asked.
Carrington lifted Grace's hair off her neck and combed it out from the ends.
She divided three sections at the crown and worked her way down.
She reached the collar, and the whole thing slid loose in her fingers.
"I can do that," Bettina said from the oven. "I did my sister's girls’ hair for years."
"No," Carrington said. “I can do it.”
Bettina went back to work. Carrington took it apart and did it again, and it came out the same.
The second attempt, she snapped the elastic hair tie on anyway, and it sat crooked, thick at the top and coming undone at the bottom.
Grace put her hand up and touched it before getting her coat off the hook herself.
Bettina wiped her hands on a towel and took the keys from the peg by the door.
Carrington walked out with them as far as the fountain and stood on the stones. "I'll be here at three when you get back."
Grace pushed her hands under her legs and sat on them.
Carrington walked up to the car and poked her head inside. "Is it something at school?"
Silence.
"Grace. Tell me what it is and I'll deal with it."
Grace reached out and pulled the car door shut. Bettina drove around the fountain and onto the main road. Carrington stayed out there until she couldn’t hear the car anymore. In January, when all this began, the quiet had been perfectly all right then.
The agency had sent a woman out on Thursday.
Denise Farrow, forty-something with nine years on Ashworth's books and two references that Nadia had called herself. Farrow arrived at nine and left her bag by the door. Carrington observed Denise for the first hour. She was good, very good. Denise got down on the rug at Grace’s level, didn’t fill the silence, and didn’t once call Grace sweetheart.
A few hours later, Denise knocked on the door to the study and asked what Grace was particular about. It was a good question. But Carrington found herself reciting Lucy’s note to this stranger. Her voice trailed off partway through.
"This isn't going to work out," Carrington said. "You'll be paid through the month."
Denise Farrow looked at her for a second and said that was fine. Then she asked whether she should say goodbye to Grace or leave quietly. Carrington told her to go quietly, and within the hour, she was off the property.
At three, the phone rang.
"Ms. Cole. This is Renata Ford, Grace's teacher."
"Hi," Carrington said.
"Grace hasn't spoken a word since a week ago.
Not to me and not even to Kayla. Her written work has been fully completed and is correct.
" A chair scraped somewhere behind her. "I put this morning's question in front of her on paper.
She wrote the answer and handed it back, and then she put her head down on her arms."
"What was the question?"
"Whether she wanted to sit with her own group or up front with me. She wrote my group." Renata waited a second. "She'll answer any question I ask, but only in writing.”
Carrington took the phone off the desk and stood at the north window. The sun was all the way across the courtyard and up the wall of the kitchen wing.
"I have to log it," Renata said.
"I understand that."
"I'd like to ask you to hold off until the middle of next week," Carrington said. "I scheduled Grace for a therapy appointment on Wells Street on Tuesday."
"Ms. Cole, has something changed at home?"
"Ms. Harper left on Friday," Carrington said, after a lengthy pause.
"Okay. That's what I needed to know."
"What can I do to help Grace?"
"I don’t know anything that isn't obvious.
" Renata stopped. "She started talking again in March because Ms. Harper turned up every day and never once asked her to talk.
That's all it was. I've been doing this for nineteen years and I've got nothing better than that. She just needs time and patience."
Carrington didn’t say anything. She remembered all the times when Lucy would get down on the floor with Grace, the way she would give Grace space and have it look completely natural for her.
"Ms. Cole?"
"I'm still here."
At half past eight, Carrington pushed the closet door until it clicked and then turned the handle to make sure. Grace had the whale book under her pillow again, one corner of it pushing the fabric up. The braid had mostly come out during the day, and the elastic was hanging off the end of it.
Carrington read two pages out of the fox book in a neutral voice and voiced the gull badly. At the bottom of the second page, she stopped, halfway through something the fox was saying, and shut the book and put it face down on the nightstand.
The gray rabbit had been up on that pillow beside her head every night since February. Carrington looked at the empty space where it went for a second longer than she meant to.
"Goodnight, Grace," she said.
Grace rolled toward the wall and brought her knees up under the sheet.
Carrington left the door open an inch and went along the landing past her own room. She took the Fenwick Street file down to the study at ten and sat down to work until she felt the pull to sleep.
Nobody had cleaned the room in nearly two weeks because she had told Nadia to keep everybody out of it. The folder from the caseworker's visit was still out beside the lamp, where she had put it down that afternoon and had not opened since, and so was the white envelope with the check to Lucy.
At half past one, she hadn’t written anything for the project, and a half hour later, she abandoned work and picked up the envelope, holding it over the outgoing tray for a second, then opened the desk drawer instead.
The two halves of Lucy’s contract were where she had put them, torn low and uneven, the wider piece on top. Under them was the cream envelope Diane Bell had sent up to the house the week after the funeral. Her own name was across the front, in Clara's handwriting. Still sealed.
She took the letter out, dropped the check in after it, laid the two halves back over the top, and pushed the drawer shut. She slipped her thumb under the corner and tore it open along the top. Inside were two sheets of paper. Her eyes were drawn to the middle of the second page first.
You were never cold. Everybody thinks that and they’re all wrong, including you. You were careful. There's a difference and I'm the only one who ever saw it. Now I’m dying, so you'll have to start telling people yourself.
Carrington went back to the top.
I've started this four times already, so I'm going to stop trying to make it sound nice and just say it like it is.
She skipped down.
Do you remember me sitting in that doorway making you name them?
Nine fish and every one of them the same fish.
You never once got them right and you never once minded, and I have thought about that more than you would believe.
It's the only thing I ever saw you want that you didn't have a reason for.
Then Dad made you get rid of the tank when you were fourteen, and you never asked anybody for anything again.
You just earned things. Carrington, nobody ever wanted the receipt.
I meant what I said at her birthday and I'd say it again tomorrow. I shouldn't have said it with eleven other mothers in the room. I'm sorry about that part and not one bit sorry about the rest.
She turned back to the first page and read the paragraph she had skipped.
Everybody is going to tell you I picked you because there was nobody else. There is nobody else. But that isn't why. I've been lying here changing my mind about it since they diagnosed me, and I keep coming back to you, all of you, the two years included.
She won't tell you anything straight. She comes at it sideways and you have to let her. Ask her outright and she'll shut the door and you'll get nothing out of her for a week.
Don't be careful with her. Please. You were careful with me and look where it got the two of us.
Carrington laid both sheets on the desk mat.
The first sound rose out of her with no warning at all.
She clapped her hand over her mouth and stifled it.
She folded down over her knees with her forehead against the edge of the desk.
Her nose ran, and she swiped it on her wrist. It kept dripping.
At some point, she wasn’t sure, her shoulders started shaking and she couldn’t stop them.
It went on for a long time, Carrington doubled over like that as waves of grief racked her body. When it subsided, she stayed down with her arm across the desk and her face on her arm. It was a while before her breathing leveled out.
"Clara," she whispered to nobody.
Then she sat up. Carrington picked up her phone and scrolled down to Deborah Mensah’s name. She stared at the name, then she pressed it.