29. Carrington #2
Grace tore the page off along the top and held it out.
Carrington folded it once and put it in her pocket.
Then she shut the closet door hard and turned the handle to check it, the same as every night.
She didn't reach for the fox book. She turned the lamp off, left an inch of the door standing open, and went down.
Lucy was sitting down. She had taken the chair on the near side of the desk. Her coat was folded on the arm of it with the rabbit's ears sticking out of the pocket. She had refused to sit in this room the last time she stood in it.
"You said something to me in the kitchen," Lucy said. "About the check and the number on it."
"I shouldn't have."
"You were half right and you don't know which half." Lucy turned her hands over on her knees. "Her name was Elena Marchetti."
Carrington stopped short of the desk.
"Four years. Her house, her kid, her bed, and not one person in that town ever found out what I was to her.
" Lucy said it flatly without emotion. "Then her wife came back.
Two weeks after that, Elena sat me down and was gentle with me for about an hour, and then she put a check under the fruit bowl on the counter. "
"Lucy."
"I took it."
"You took it?"
"I cashed it that Friday and moved four years of accumulated life into six boxes." Her hands went flat on her thighs and stopped doing anything at all. "So a bigger number wouldn't have got me. Somebody got me once for a perfectly ordinary one. That's the half you had wrong."
Carrington put her hands on the desk. "I sent you back down that path to live like staff," she said, "and you said yes to it in under a minute."
"Nobody talked me into it. My boxes were down there before dinner."
"I thought that meant it didn't cost you anything."
"I know you did."
Carrington opened the drawer. The contract was in two uneven pieces where she'd left it. Under them sat the envelope with the check in it, the flap still standing open, and under that was her sister's letter, out of its own envelope now.
She lifted the two pieces out, put them on the mat, and shut the drawer on the rest.
"I tore those up in front of you instead of hearing what you said."
"You did."
"You told me that night you'd been paid to go away before." Her hands stayed on the mat. "I've thought about that sentence every day for two weeks and I never thought about it once before."
"I know you didn't."
"I told you to move down that path and I've never said out loud that I told you to. I let you carry it like you'd picked it up yourself."
Lucy didn't help her.
"And then I wrote you a check, because I was frightened."
"Carrington."
"I'm sorry. Not for the letter being late." She made herself finish it. "For every part of it. And for the time you sat in a rented room waiting for somebody in this house to say so."
Lucy put a hand out and turned the wider piece over and read the back of it, which was blank.
"Page nine had a date on it," she said. "I asked you once what the date was now, and you told me it depended on the file."
"It doesn't depend on the file."
"Then what is it?"
"Tonight," Carrington said. "And nothing worked out past it. I've never said a thing like that to anybody without a schedule underneath it, so you'll have to take it the way it is."
Lucy squared the two pieces up against each other on the mat.
"What happens to Grace?"
Carrington waited.
"If I don't go back into town tonight, and in a year you and I have wrecked it, does that girl lose me twice?"
"She keeps you. Whatever happens between you and me," Carrington said and then made herself say the rest of it, which was the part that cost. "Walk out of this house in a year and never speak to me again, and Bettina still drives her in to see you.
No Saturdays, no rate, no arrangement. Whenever the two of you want it.
It isn't mine to take back, and I'm not going to be able to take it back. "
"Put it in writing."
"No."
Lucy looked up.
"You get my word," she said. "You've got no reason to take it, but I hope you do and trust me."
Lucy was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice sounded far away. "That's the first thing you've done all night that you can't undo."
"Yes. I want you to stay," Carrington said.
Lucy got out of the chair. She was standing closer than she'd been all evening and she didn't answer.
"Say it again in the morning," she said. "In front of Grace."
"I will."
"Then I'll be here in the morning."
"One more thing, and I'd rather do it badly than not at all." Carrington stopped trying to keep her voice where she wanted it. "Three weeks ago, I told you I loved how you are with her."
"I remember."
"That wasn't the sentence. That was the closest I could get to it."
Lucy took hold of the chair she'd just got out of.
Carrington had the rest of it in her mouth and it wouldn't come. She had stood out on her own gravel an hour ago and said worse things than this in front of a woman on her payroll. This was three words and she couldn't get her breath underneath them.
"I love you. I said it about Grace that night because saying it about you was the part I couldn't do."
Lucy's hand came off the chair. "Say it again."
"I love you." Carrington reached over and closed her hand around Lucy's wrist.
Lucy didn't move for a second. Then she turned her wrist over inside Carrington's hand and worked her fingers in between Carrington's and held on hard enough to hurt.
The envelope was still in the drawer a foot from her hip, flap standing open the way it had stood open for weeks. She left it where it was and took Lucy up the stairs.
The landing light lay across the carpet outside Grace's door, which stood open an inch, and she went past it without slowing down. The last time, she had left this door off the latch and put her hand over Lucy's mouth and had thought at the time that she was being careful with everybody.
She pushed the door until it latched and turned both lamps on. Nothing in the house needed listening for. Nobody was coming up the path in the dark and nobody had to be gone by a quarter to six, and she had no reason left to be quiet in her own house.
Lucy had carried her coat up with her and was still holding it. Carrington took it out of her hands and draped it over the chair. She didn't do anything else for a moment. She hadn't seen Lucy in sixteen days, and she wasn't going to be hurried out of it.
The bedroom was the same: gray walls, the two lamps on the nightstands throwing warm overlapping circles across the bedspread, nothing on the dresser but a glass of water and a small tray where Carrington set her rings and hairpins every night.
She noticed that she wasn't listening. The habit was still there in her body, the slight tilt of the head, the held breath, but there was nothing to catch.
No footsteps on a path, no car on the driveway, no deadline pressing against her ribs.
She noticed it and then it was gone, replaced by something she didn't have a word for, something that felt like the room itself had taken a breath and let it out.
Lucy was standing by the foot of the bed, hands at her sides now that the coat was gone.
She was wearing a dark green cardigan over a white button-down, the sleeves of the cardigan pushed up past her elbows the way they always were, the cuffs of the shirt underneath bunched and soft.
Her hair was down, like always. A few strands caught the lamplight and went the color of warm honey against the rest of it.
Carrington wanted to bury her face in it.
It’d been twenty-one days since they were together last. Twenty-one days of nothing but the memory of Lucy's weight against her and the specific way Lucy had said her name, quiet, almost inaudible, like she was testing whether it fit in her mouth.
"Lucy."
Lucy's eyes found hers. Brown eyes, steady, unhurried. She didn't move. She had a way of being still that wasn't frozen; it was deliberate, like she was choosing each second, deciding whether to fill it or leave it empty.
Carrington's hands wanted to move. She made them stay still, but Lucy's fingers were already moving, tugging the hem of her own cardigan, just holding it, just feeling the knit between her fingers like she needed something to do with them.
"Come here," Carrington said.
"You come here."
Carrington crossed the three steps between them.
She was taller, several inches even with the heels off.
Carrington still wore her stockings, but Lucy was barefoot.
She was short and warm-toed and close enough now that Carrington could smell the citrus zest of her conditioner, faint, caught in the hair near her temples.
Lucy reached up. Her hand came up and her fingers touched the first hairpin, the one at the back, the one that held the whole updo in place. She didn't pull it.
"Can I?"
"You don't have to ask."
Lucy took the pin out. She held it between her fingers and looked at it, then reached past Carrington and set it on the nightstand.
She came back and found the next one. The second pin loosened the updo enough that a heavy strand of near-black hair dropped against Carrington's neck.
The hair was warm against her neck where it had been pinned. It fell to her shoulder.
Lucy took her time. There were five pins.
She removed each one with the same careful slowness, setting them in a row on the nightstand next to the first, and with each one Carrington's hair came down further until it was loose to her collarbones, heavy and dark against the gray silk of her blouse.
Lucy's fingers combed through it, and Carrington closed her eyes.
"Open your eyes. I want to see you," Lucy said.
She opened them.
"I want to see you properly. In the light. Both lamps."