28. Lucy
LUCY
When somebody knocked, Lucy took her time walking down the stairs, because at that hour it was always the landlady's sister. This time, though, it was Bettina, standing on the step in a buttoned coat with the car keys still in her hands. One of the cars from Carrington’s house was waiting at the curb with the engine idling.
"I'm not staying long," Bettina said when Lucy opened the door.
"Is Grace sick?"
"She's stopped talking."
"How long has it been?"
"Since four days after you left. She does her schoolwork and answers her teacher, but she only answers through writing her replies on paper. She won’t reply verbally.
" Bettina said it flatly and didn't dress it up.
"Nobody called to tell you about it, and I've thought about that plenty.
It bothered me. I wanted to come here and tell you myself. "
Lucy had a hand on the door frame but didn't remember putting it there. She did the math in her head and figured out it’d been sixteen days since she had left.
She'd spent them in a rented room winding an elastic around two fingers, worrying about Grace’s closet door.
Meanwhile, that whole time Grace had been going to school and coming home in complete silence.
Bettina took an envelope out of her coat and held it flat in her palm without offering it yet. "She wrote this Tuesday. It's been in her school bag ever since. This morning she gave it to me in the car on the way to school. It’s for you."
The envelope said LUCY on the front in pencil, gone over twice.
"Does Ms. Cole know you're here?" Lucy asked.
"No."
"Then take the envelope back."
Bettina didn't move her hand. "I got your address from the agency. I told them I was calling from the house and they gave me your address so I could come here. So there's that as well."
"Bettina."
"I've worked for that woman for many years, and I've never gone around her back once."
"Then don't start with me." Lucy held the door against her hip. "You take that letter back to the house tonight and you put it on Ms. Cole’s desk and you tell her Grace wrote it. Then it's hers to answer and decide what to do with it. It isn't yours."
"I did think of that."
"And?"
"Ms. Cole would write back." Bettina pressed the envelope against Lucy's chest and held it there until Lucy took it. "She'd sit down and write it well, too. This is yours. It's addressed to you."
"Is Grace eating?"
"You want to know how she is? Go see her," Bettina said. "Read the letter or don't. I'll be in the car waiting."
Lucy looked down at her socked feet. "I can't show up at that house."
"You're holding a letter from a seven-year-old who misses you and you’re telling me about the house." Bettina pulled her coat until it was straight. "I'll wait twenty minutes and then I'll go, and either way, I'm not bringing anything back to her."
She walked back down the path to the car.
Lucy sat down on the second stair with the door open behind her and slipped her thumb under the flap. Grace had folded the page twice. It came out in quarters and wouldn't lie flat, and Lucy had to press it open against her knee.
Dear Lucy.
The lady with the bag came to my school and she asked me who puts me to bed. I said you and Aunt Carrington. Then two days after that you went away. I keep thinking it was because of that. If it was, you can just write it down. You don't have to say no if it is really yes. You don't have to come.
From, Grace.
She read it again. Under the last line, the pencil had gone through the paper, where Grace had started writing something else and erased it without getting all of it. Lucy wanted to know what that line had been.
Lucy got up and found her coat then buttoned the gray rabbit inside it, pulled the front door shut behind her, and got in the car. Bettina drove the coast road with the radio off, and she didn't ask a single question the whole way to the house.
The gates opened. Bettina drove up and stopped short of the fountain.
"Ms. Cole is in the study," Bettina said. "The door's shut."
"How long has she been in there?"
"Probably since five, like usual. She always comes out at half past eight for Grace’s bedtime routine." Bettina lifted the parking brake. "Go through the courtyard. I'll be here."
Lucy crossed the stones and went in through the courtyard door, keeping the handle down until it shut fully so it stayed silent.
As she walked through the kitchen, Lucy noticed that the blue binder was gone, no longer on the counter, and the weekly meal plan now hung on the refrigerator with a magnet.
Somebody had left the mail stacked on the end of the marble.
Lucy picked it up and had the stack halfway to the drawer before she stopped and set it back exactly where she'd found it.
The study door was firmly closed with the light under it.
Lucy knocked on it and took a step back off the threshold to give Carrington some space.
It was a few seconds before Carrington opened the door.
She was still holding a pen, and she just looked at Lucy with a blank expression on her face. She didn't say anything at all.
"Grace wrote a letter to me," Lucy said. "Bettina brought it into town this afternoon and drove me back out here. She did that on her own and said that you didn't know. I'm telling you that first so nobody has to find it out later or get in trouble."
Carrington's hand stayed on the door.
"I'd like a half hour upstairs with Grace. If you want to say no, say it now and I'll go back down and Bettina will drop me back off at home."
"Go up."
"Do you want to come with me?"
"No." Carrington moved out of the doorway, and then she said, "She doesn't speak anymore. I didn't want you to walk into that without knowing."
"Bettina told me already."
Lucy went upstairs. The door to Grace's room was open the width of a hand. She knocked twice on the frame and pushed it wide enough to see in.
Grace sat with her back against the bed and a reading folder open across her knees. She looked up, and then she was on her feet so fast the folder fell off her knees and landed face down the carpet.
"Can I come in?" Lucy asked.
Grace nodded twice. Lucy sat down on the rug with her shoulders against the wall, which put her lower than Grace. After a second, Grace slid onto the floor, too, closer than she needed to be.
"Bettina brought me your letter," Lucy said.
Grace watched her.
"So I'm going to answer it." Lucy turned her hands palm up on her knees. "You didn't do it. Not what you said to the lady, and not anything else. You could have told her anything at all that day, and I'd still have gone that Friday."
Grace reached up onto the bed for a pad with a pen clipped onto it. She handled it like something she'd been using all her life. Lucy let her do it and said nothing about her silence.
Grace wrote, crossed something out, wrote again, and turned the pad around.
Then what was it?
Lucy had put the words together on the drive out. None of them were any use down here with Grace sitting right next to her.
"It was between me and your aunt," she said. "The lady asked the two of us the same question. Your aunt gave one answer and I gave a different one, and your aunt let me go that same afternoon over it. That’s all it was, and none of it was because of you."
Grace didn't write anything down.
"It’s not my place to tell you what the lady asked us. If you want to know, you can ask your aunt. She may or may not tell you, though. I can’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to do.”
"Okay," Grace said.
Lucy's hands closed on her own knees. One word out of Grace’s mouth after sixteen days, and all Lucy wanted to put her face down on the rug and howl.
She wanted Grace to say it again, right now, and she made herself sit still and not ask for it.
She looked at Grace again and studied her face.
Her cheeks were still round and soft with baby fat, but there was a knowing look in her eyes.
"You knew," Lucy said.
"I knew a long time before the lady came.
" Grace's voice came out low and scratchy, and she stopped and cleared it.
"You go upstairs at night. The third stair makes a noise.
You always miss that one and then you get the top one instead.
And she says your name in the kitchen differently than she says it when there's people around. "
"Grace."
"I didn't tell anyone. Not Kayla and not Ms. Ford. And not the lady with the bag." Grace pulled her pajama sleeves down over her hands. "I didn't tell because if you say a thing like that out loud, then a grown-up comes and stops it. That's what always happens."
"You did the right thing."
"But then the lady asked me who puts me to bed and I said both of you." Grace tucked her chin. "So I did say it out loud. Didn't I say it?"
"No, you didn’t."
"You have to tell me even if the answer's the bad one."
"It isn't the bad one. It's no, and no is the truth.
" Lucy leaned in and drew Grace's hand out of the end of her sleeve.
"The lady already had her answer from me before she ever went to your school and talked to you.
I told it to her in the kitchen that morning and I meant to be honest about it.
You couldn't have made any of it happen and you couldn't have stopped it either. "
Grace looked at their hands. Then she pulled hers back, but only to get both arms around Lucy's neck.
She put her whole weight into it. Lucy wrapped both arms around her and was still holding on long after when Grace let go.
Finally, Lucy let her grip slacken. Grace settled back on her heels and wiped her face on one sleeve, then on the other one.
"Are you talking now?" Lucy said. "To your aunt as well?"
Grace picked the pad up off the floor instead of answering, and what she wrote had nothing to do with the question.
A lady came for one day and then she left.
Nobody had told Lucy about that one either.
"Who was she?"