26. Lucy
LUCY
The elastic was blue and had a nick in it where something had caught it. Lucy wound it around two fingers, four turns, until the tips of her fingers darkened, and then she let it come loose and wound it again. She had been doing that a while.
She had rented the front room in this house for eleven months before she became Grace’s nanny, and the back one cost the same.
The window in here faced the yard, so the light was bright in the morning and all through the afternoon.
Her landlady had apologized twice. The room came with a bed, a chest of drawers, and a chair with a broken cane seat she could have fixed in an afternoon.
She had lined the six boxes along the wall under the window and opened two of them.
She had sat the gray rabbit up on the nearest closed one with his back against the wall.
Downstairs, the landlady had her favorite TV show on, two women arguing about a third woman who was not in the room with them. It came up through the boards, and Lucy had never once figured out who any of them were.
She had turned the chair sideways to the window on the first day and left it that way. She had the elastic in her hands. On, and off, and on again.
At half past ten, somebody knocked twice, and then a third time, and then Mira said her name through the door. Lucy put the elastic in her pocket and got up.
She went down past the landing window. She saw Mira’s car at the curb. Both Mira and Anjali were standing outside the door. Milo wasn’t with them. It took a week of arranging to get Anjali anywhere without Milo.
"You didn't say you were coming," Lucy said as she opened the door.
"We wanted to surprise you. Sit down," Mira said, and sat on the bed, which put her knees against the drawers.
Anjali sat on the cane chair, which just left the boxes. Lucy stayed standing by the door with her back against the frame.
"You sent me a text. ‘The job ended, I'm at the room, I'll call you,’" she recited. “But you never called.”
“I was going to.”
“What happened?”
"It just ended, and I left," Lucy said. "Nobody did anything terrible to me."
Anjali took two containers out of the sack and set them on the drawers.
"That's a deflection," Mira said. "And you've had it washed."
Nobody laughed. Mira had been saying that to her since college, and one of them had always laughed. Lucy stood in the doorway and waited to find out which one of them it had been.
"I put my name back in at Ashworth on Monday," she said. "It's the slow part of the year, though. Nothing happens until the schools break for the summer."
"And what else?"
Lucy didn't answer that.
"Lucy."
"I keep thinking about whether anybody's shutting her closet door." She caught her own hands moving and put them behind her. "It has to click. She won't go to sleep if it doesn't click."
"That's not what I asked you about."
"I know it isn't."
"What are you doing about work?"
"Nothing," Lucy said.
"It’s been fifteen days," Mira said.
"She said she'd write me a letter," Lucy said, after a second. "For a reference. It hasn't come yet."
"Have you called and asked her for it?" Anjali said.
"No."
Mira set both hands on her knees. "I'll cover the rent here until you're working. Pay me back whenever you can. No pressure."
"No," Lucy said.
"All right." Mira looked at the wall over the bed.
Neither one of them had offered her money in years. It had never once occurred to Lucy that not offering took anything out of them.
"Well, you’ve heard all of it now," Lucy said. "I'm eating, I'm sleeping, and I'll be working before the summer's over."
"We're not leaving," Mira said.
"We’re not here about the job," Anjali said.
"Then what?"
"Your text." Anjali had her purse on her knees and her hands on top of it. "It's the same one you sent me four years ago. I went back and found it. Nearly word for word."
Lucy had the elastic out of her pocket without deciding to. She got one turn of it around her fingers, and then her hands quit moving and didn't start again. Downstairs, the landlady turned her program off, which she had not once done in the middle of a morning.
"Her name was Elena," Lucy said.
"I remember her name," Mira said.
"I know you do." She looked at the boxes under the window instead of at either of them. "I loved her."
Anjali's hands stayed where they were on the purse. Mira didn't say a word.
"It started the second month I was there, and it didn't stop until four years later," Lucy said. "I slept in that house every night and not one person knew what I was to her. Not her sister. Not Josie. Not one teacher at that school, and I was in there twice a week."
"Lucy," Anjali said.
"Let me finish." Lucy pushed off the doorframe. "Then Sara came back with her suitcase. Sara was her wife, and I knew that the first week I was in the house."
Mira wasn't moving. "Did she ever say it back?"
Lucy looked at the window for a second before she answered. "In the house," she said. "Never anywhere someone could overhear."
"Two weeks after Sara came, Elena sat me down at the kitchen table and was kind to me for about forty minutes. She used the word transitions. And then she wrote me a check and put it on the counter under the fruit bowl." Lucy pressed both palms down on her own thighs. "I took the check."
Downstairs, the landlady's chair scraped back on the boards. Anjali edged forward on the chair.
"Okay," Anjali said.
"That's it?" Lucy asked.
"We wondered," Anjali said. "Both of us, for years. I never wanted to make you say it out loud."
Lucy had never said that story out loud in her life. She'd expected something in the room to change when it came out. Her ears were hot, and that was all that happened.
"You cried about a bowl," Mira said. “You called me off the shoulder of the highway and cried for twenty minutes about a mixing bowl," Mira said. "And I sat in a parking lot and told you it was a good bowl and you could get another one."
"You did."
"It wasn't about a bowl,” Mira said.
"No," Lucy said.
"I've thought about that phone call maybe a hundred times."
"I know."
"You let me be wrong for four years."
"Yes," Lucy said.
Mira nodded and looked past her at the containers on the drawers.
"There's another one," Lucy said. "About her."
"Go on," Mira said.
"I lied to you at that lunch. You asked me at the table with Milo sitting there and I told you it was a job. It stopped being a job the week after the coast."
Anjali's eyes went to the rabbit on the box and came back. She didn't ask about it.
"Her name's Carrington," Lucy said, and had to stop for a second. "Last month she asked me to carry my things down to the cottage again and make it look like I only lived there. Family Services had the girl's file open. A caseworker was coming out."
"And you said no," Mira said.
"I said yes that afternoon. Nobody talked me into it and nobody had to. I moved my things before dinner."
"Christ," Mira said.
"Then the caseworker asked the two of us whether our relationship was personal. Carrington said no. I said yes."
Anjali made a small sound and put her fingers over her mouth.
"And then she offered me money," Lucy said.
"Did you take that check?" Mira said.
"No."
"Take it."
"Mira."
"I'm not being clever with you." Mira leaned in. "You worked four months in that house and you walked a seven-year-old through a Family Services review. That woman who wrote the check won't even notice it's gone. That's not a present. That's wages, and you left them on a desk and walked out."
"No."
"Give me a reason that holds up."
"I don't have one," Lucy said.
"Then take the money."
"No," Lucy said.
"Mira," Anjali said.
Mira sat back and let it go.
"Does she know?" Anjali said. "About Elena."
"She knows there were four years of something. She doesn’t know the specifics."
"Are you going to tell her?"
"I don't know," Lucy said. "You two are the first."
Anjali nodded and didn't push it. "Is she a bad woman?"
The caseworker had asked her easier questions than that one. "No," she said. "She's frightened all the time, and she'd rather hand you a piece of paper than say a sentence out loud."
Mira had her hands folded together in front of her, one thumb working at the other. "I said a thing to you on the phone when you were at the coast," Mira said. "About rich women and their coats."
"I remember it."
Mira opened her mouth and shut it again. "I'm not doing that," she said. "I've sat on this mattress for an hour deciding not to do it, and I'd like it on the record that it's costing me."
"You'd have been right," Lucy said.
"I'd have been right about a coat." Mira unfolded her hands.
"That's not the same thing as being right.
You sat in front of a stranger with a form and told her the truth about yourself.
I've known you since we were nineteen and you've never done it once, and it took a woman with a clipboard to get it out of you. "
"It cost the girl her nanny."
"It cost you the job," Mira said.
Anjali reached over and straightened one of the containers on the drawers so that it lined up with the other one. "What do you want to happen?"
Lucy had an answer ready for that. She'd put it together on the second night and gone over it plenty of times since, and every word of it was about Carrington, and none of it came out of her mouth.
Lucy's hands were still flat on her legs with the elastic caught under one of them. Four of those boxes had been shut since the morning she taped them, and in fifteen days she had not wanted one thing out of them.
"I can go the rest of my life without seeing that woman again," Lucy said. "It's Grace. I want to still see Grace.”