29. Carrington
CARRINGTON
The car should have left by now.
Carrington stood in front of the sink with both hands on the edge of it and listened to the car running but not leaving.
Bettina took the driveway slowly, the same as she did with Grace in the back, so the sound ought to have thinned out toward the gate and stopped.
But it didn’t. It stayed exactly where it was for two minutes.
She tipped the wine out and put the empty glass down on the marble.
Four minutes ago, she had turned the water on so she wouldn't have to hear Lucy walking away. That had been the plan, as far as she had one. Let the woman go. Go up at eleven, put the light out, and be decent about it in the morning.
She could have gone into the study and watched from the north window instead. That was what she had done from the landing the night before the caseworker came, watching the cottage light behind the curtain until she gave up and went to bed. She shut the water off and went down the hall instead.
The courtyard was cold. The low lights were on along the border of the path, and the outside light came on over the door with them. The whole way from the door to the car was lit. She went anyway.
Lucy was at the open passenger door with her hand hooked over the top of the frame and the dome light on above her head. She turned around while Carrington was still on the stones. Her face didn't change and she didn't take her hand off the door.
Carrington had come out with nothing in her hands and nothing worked out to say.
She had practiced the apology to Deborah the whole way down the coast, out loud, in the car, and Deborah had heard the rehearsal in her voice by the fourth word and said so.
The cold seeped into her hands before she was off the stones.
Now she had thirty feet of gravel in front of her and she hadn't put one sentence together.
She wanted to be back inside with the water running, but she kept walking.
"Bettina," Carrington said.
Bettina rolled down the window.
"You're not being let go. Not for anything that happened tonight, and not later on when it's quieter and easier to do."
"All right," Bettina said.
"I'd like you to hear the rest of it. Don't drive off."
Bettina reached down and turned the engine off, silence surrounding them.
"It's a long way back into town for her," Lucy said, "and she's out here again at seven."
"She'll hear this first."
"I said goodbye to you five minutes ago."
"You did."
Lucy's hand stayed where it was on the door. She had one foot turned toward the car and the other one flat, and she was waiting Carrington out the same as she did with Grace. She wasn't going to help.
She could say it to Lucy on her own. Lucy would hear it and believe her. It would be true, and private, and hers to take back if she got scared.
Bettina was a step away with the window down.
"Bettina." Carrington put her eyes on Bettina and kept them off Lucy.
"Ms. Harper didn't leave this house because she stopped being good at the job, and she wasn't let go for anything she did wrong.
A caseworker sat at my island and asked her whether what was between the two of us was personal, and she said yes.
I'd been asked the same question just before, and I said no.
I dismissed her that afternoon because she wouldn't take it back.
That's all of it. If any other version of it has been said in this house, I'd like it corrected. "
Bettina kept both hands on the wheel. "Nobody's said anything," she said.
"Then nobody has to be corrected."
"You could have told me that indoors, Ms. Cole."
"No," Carrington said.
Lucy took her hand off the door and didn't move otherwise.
"You have a file open with family services, Ms. Cole," Lucy said.
"I know what I have. I wrote to Melinda Alvarez on Sunday night."
Lucy's head came up. "You did what?"
"I put it in writing that the answer I gave her on the twentieth was a lie, and that I knew that at the time. I put in that the hiding was mine. That I made you do it, and you did it because I asked and for no other reason."
"Tell me you didn't sign it."
"I signed it and I dated it."
"Where is it now?"
"I mailed it Monday morning."
Lucy turned all the way around and looked up at the house. Then she came back.
"Does Diane know?"
"Diane told me not to send it. She said it plainly and she was right. But I sent it anyway."
"Do you have any idea what you've done?" Lucy came off the car by a step, and her voice came up for the first time all evening. "That woman has an open casefile concerning Grace. You've handed her a signed page saying you lied to her face during a review."
"Yes."
"They can take her away from you."
"Yes, I know," Carrington said.
"Say something else."
"I don't have anything else to say. I haven't heard back. I don't know what it's going to do, but I'm going to find that out the same way you are."
Lucy put her hand up over her mouth and took it away again.
"Why?" she said. "You were in the clear. I was gone. Nobody had anything left in that house to come and look at."
"Because it was true."
"That's never once been a reason for you."
"No."
"So what changed?”
"I didn't like that I had lied on the record. I needed to fix it." Her voice went quiet on her and she didn't fight it. “I've lived with a great many things I've done. I couldn't live with that, though."
Diane had said the words state agency and guardianship to her on that call, in that order, and Carrington had put the envelope in the box the next morning anyway. Every day since, she had been at the desk before six with the phone face up on the mat, waiting for a call, and it hadn't rung.
"I've got more, and I'd rather you heard it tonight."
"I don't want any more tonight."
"I know you don't."
Lucy didn't tell her to stop.
"I went out to Deborah Mensah's house on Sunday afternoon. I apologized to her for the funeral, and for the envelopes, and for two years of not calling my sister."
"You apologized?" Lucy said.
"I practiced it out loud in the car the whole way down the coast, and she caught on and asked me to my face if it was scripted.”
Lucy laughed at that, one sound, and put her hand flat against her own cheek and left it there.
"She's writing to Family Services to take her statement back. I didn't ask her to and I'd have gone whether she did or not."
"You told me to keep that gate shut on her. So don't stand out here and tell me you went and sat in her chair."
"You told me she hadn't done anything wrong." Carrington made herself keep her eyes where they were. "I told you I knew that, but I gave you the instruction to shut her out anyway.”
Lucy didn't say anything to that at all. Bettina hadn't moved in the car.
"One night in that study," Carrington said, "I told you that you could take those pages out of this house and mail them to the Tribune, and not one clause in them would protect me."
"I remember what I said back."
"You said you'd never do it. That was never what frightened me." She pushed her hands down into her pockets. "Ashgrove closes this month. Until it does, my name is in that paper every other week."
"So?"
"So if it would help you, I'll call them myself and give them the whole story."
"Help me how?" Lucy said.
"I'll still do it if you ask me to."
"I'm not going to ask you to."
"No," Carrington said. "I didn't think you would."
She stopped there and then went on anyway.
"The first thing that girl ever knew about me came from a newspaper. She stood at her mother's funeral with both hands behind her back so she wouldn't have to shake mine, and she told me I was the aunt from the news. That's all of me she had. I'd like one page of it to be true."
"Don't do that to yourself for me."
"Ten minutes ago, I offered you Grace every other Saturday." Carrington waited until Lucy looked up. “I told you that you wouldn't have to see me.”
"You stopped halfway through."
"I stopped talking too late. That's the second arrangement I've built for you. The first one was about the lease." She took a breath and let it out. "I don't want to arrange anything."
The engine ticked as it cooled.
Lucy leaned in through the open door and pressed the dome light off with her thumb. Then she shut the door, and the sound came back off the front of the house.
"Bettina," Lucy said. "Go home."
"Ms. Cole?"
"Go home," Carrington said.
Bettina started the car. She came around the fountain slowly, stopped next to Lucy, and put the window down again.
"Seven in the morning," she said, and then, "Somebody should go up and put Grace to sleep."
Grace had the folder open on the rug and hadn't done a line of it. She had the pad next to her knee with the pen clipped on.
Carrington started to sit down on the bed and stopped. It put her head and shoulders above Grace. She got onto the rug instead and leaned against the frame. The floor was harder than she had expected and she wasn't going to complain about it.
"The lady with the bag asked us something," she said. "Lucy wouldn't tell you what it was. She said it was mine to tell you."
Grace put the pen down. Carrington hadn't worked out how to say it, and she said it badly.
"She asked whether Lucy was more to me than somebody who works here. I said no. That wasn't true and I knew it wasn't when I said it. Then she asked Lucy the same thing. Lucy said yes, and I sent her away for it that same day."
Grace pulled the pad onto her knees and wrote and turned it around.
Because she said yes?
Carrington nodded. “Yes.”
Grace took it back. She wrote underneath, low on the page, pressing hard enough that Carrington heard the pen going on the pad.
That's not fair.
"No, it isn’t fair to punish someone for telling the truth."
Grace looked at her for a while. Then she wrote again.
Is she downstairs now?
"She's in the study."
She turned it around once more without lifting her hand off it.
Will she be here in the morning too?
"I don't know yet," Carrington said. "I'll tell you in the morning. Even if it's the bad one."