Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Jack
Iwas up before five. No alarm, just the dark and the unfamiliar sounds of the house and the weight of a mind that had given up on sleep hours ago.
Cassie's house. Clear Creek. Right.
I got up.
The hallway was quiet. Lily's door still closed, a thin strip of grey light under it from the window inside. I stood there a second, listening, then went downstairs.
The kitchen was cold. I found the thermostat in the hall and turned it up.
I waited for the click of the relay, the low thrum of the furnace kicking in somewhere beneath the floorboards.
It was a sound I knew, at least—one thing in this house that worked on logic.
I stood in front of it for a moment like that would help, then went back to figure out breakfast.
The fridge was mostly what I'd left it—eggs, half a block of cheese, a carton of orange juice I'd picked up at the gas station last night because it seemed like the kind of thing a kid should have.
I didn't know if she liked orange juice.
I didn't know what she liked. I stood there with the fridge open longer than necessary, then closed it and checked the cupboards.
Cereal. Three boxes, which told me something about Cassie—she'd always bought in threes, some habit from growing up with not enough. I lined them up on the counter and looked at them. One had a cartoon bear on the front. That seemed like a reasonable guess.
I heard her on the stairs before I saw her. Small, careful footsteps, one at a time. She appeared in the kitchen doorway in pajamas, hair flattened on one side, the rabbit hanging from her hand by one ear. She looked at me. I looked at her.
"Morning," I said.
"Morning." She looked at the cereal boxes on the counter and didn't say anything.
I picked the one with the bear and found a bowl and a spoon. I poured a healthy heap and set it in front of her. She looked at it for a moment, then picked up the spoon and moved the dry cereal around without eating it.
"Milk?"
She nodded.
I poured it, watching the level rise just to the rim of the bowl. She took one small mouthful, then another, then put the spoon down and sat there with her hands in her lap.
I made coffee and stood at the counter, trying to think about what came next.
The list was upstairs, two pages of it now—everything I’d written down at midnight and the things I’d thought of after.
School was on there; I’d need to call, let them know she wouldn’t be in, and find out what I needed to provide.
A death certificate, probably. Or at least the police report.
I wasn't sure. The attorney had called yesterday about the guardianship timeline, something I’d need to follow up on before the week was out.
Lily pushed the bowl away. It was still half full, the bears turning to mush in the milk.
"Not hungry?"
She shook her head.
I looked at the bowl. I didn't know if that was normal. I didn't know what normal looked like for her on a regular Tuesday, let alone this one. I left it.
"Do you want to get dressed?" I said. "We could go somewhere. Later. If you want."
She considered this with the seriousness she seemed to apply to most things. "The park?"
"Sure," I said. "The park."
She nodded and slid off the chair and went back upstairs, the rabbit trailing behind her.
I stood in the kitchen and drank my coffee and looked at the coloring book on the table. Still open to the same page. The half-finished garden, the scattered crayons. I hadn't touched it. I wasn't going to.
From upstairs came the sound of drawers opening and closing, small footsteps back and forth—the clatter and scuff of a child getting herself ready. It went on for a while. I topped up my coffee and waited.
When she came back down she was wearing a red sweater and leggings that didn't quite match, with one shoe on and one in her hand. She sat down on the bottom stair and worked at the laces with a frown of concentration that was so completely Cassie that I had to look away for a second.
"You need a hand?"
"I've got it," she said.
She did, eventually.
* * *
The park was a ten minute walk. Lily knew the way and I followed her lead, hands in my pockets, matching her pace. She didn't talk much. Neither did I.
It wasn't a big park. A swing set, a slide, a play structure shaped like a boat that had seen better days. A couple of other kids were on the swings, a woman on a bench with a stroller, nobody paying attention to anyone else. Lily stopped at the edge of the rubber mulch and looked at the equipment.
"You want to go on the swings?"
She shook her head.
We found a bench. She sat next to me with the rabbit in her lap and watched the other kids the way you watched television—present but not engaged, taking it in from a distance.
One of them, a boy maybe a year older, was working the jungle gym with a kind of manic energy, up and over and down and back again.
Lily watched him for a while without expression.
After a bit she said, "I'm cold."
I looked at her. She had her jacket on, the purple one with the fox on the pocket. Her cheeks were pink. I'd assumed it was the wind.
"You want to head back?"
She nodded.
We'd been there maybe twenty minutes.
The walk home was slower than the walk there. She didn't complain, just moved at a pace that kept falling behind, and I kept adjusting without thinking about it. By the time we got back, she went straight to the couch and curled up with the rabbit and didn't ask for anything.
I made soup for dinner. Canned, the kind with the small pasta shapes, which seemed right. She sat at the table and looked at it and ate maybe six spoonfuls before she put the spoon down.
"Not hungry?"
She shook her head.
I ate mine standing at the counter and watched her stare at her bowl, not knowing what to do about it.
Grief, I told myself. She's grieving. You don't eat when you're grieving.
That was probably true. It was also probably true that she was five and I had no baseline and no way of knowing the difference.
She asked to go to bed at six-thirty. I didn't know if that was normal either. I took her up, stood in the doorway while she got herself under the covers, turned the hall light on, and left the door open the way she seemed to want it.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Night," she said. Already far away.
I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table with the list. The things I couldn't do anything about tonight, I left alone.
Job was on there—mechanic, ask around—and that I could do something about.
I found three shops within twenty miles on my phone, then looked up two more in the phone book Cassie kept in the kitchen drawer.
I spent an hour on it. I called the ones still open, left messages for the rest, and wrote down names and numbers in the margin of the list in the order I'd try them tomorrow.
It wasn't much, but it was the shape of something.
A man with a job was a different proposition than the one Karen Phelps had sat across from two days ago.
The house was very quiet when I stopped. Outside, a car went past, the sound of its tires on the pavement fading into nothing.
Around ten, I went up to check on her.
She was on her side, facing the wall, the rabbit tucked under her chin. I stood in the doorway. Something about the way she was lying—too still, too flat—made me go in.
I put my hand on her forehead and took it away again fast, the way you pulled back from something hot without deciding to. Then I put it back, slower, making sure I was reading it right.
Her skin was dry and radiating heat in a way that had nothing to do with the blankets.
I moved my hand to her cheek. Same. I could feel it against my palm from an inch away before I even touched her.
Her breathing was shallow and fast, her lips slightly parted, a faint color in her face that I'd put down to the cold at the park and shouldn't have.
She didn't stir. Last night she'd surfaced when I'd gone past her door to use the bathroom, called out something half-asleep that I hadn't caught. She didn't move now.
I stood there in the dark of her room with my hand on my five-year-old niece's forehead and tried to think straight.
Lily had coverage—she had to. Cassie wasn't the kind of person who'd let that lapse.
There'd be a card somewhere, a policy number, a pediatrician already on file.
Somewhere in this house was all of it, in a drawer or a folder, and I hadn't found any of it yet because I hadn't been able to make myself go through Cassie's things.
Which meant if I took her in tonight, I'd be walking into an ER at ten o'clock with a sick kid and no documentation.
I had no idea who her doctor was, what she'd been seen for, or whether she was allergic to anything.
I didn't know what a fever in a child this age meant—how high was too high, or what you did first. I knew what Google would tell me, and I knew I couldn't trust it. Not with this. Not tonight.
I went downstairs. I paced the kitchen once, twice—the length of it and back—trying to settle the jump in my chest. Then I started going through the drawer by the fridge, the one where people kept everything they didn't know what to do with.
A takeout menu, batteries, a screwdriver, rubber bands. Nothing.
I tried the drawer in the hallway. A notepad, some pens, a birthday card still in its envelope. I stood in the middle of the hallway, my heart thudding against my ribs, and tried to think like Cassie. Where would she put the important things?
I went to the small desk in the corner of the living room. I went through the drawers as fast as I could without making noise, my hands shaking just enough to make the papers rattle.
Insurance folder. I found it in the second drawer, a clear plastic folder stuffed with papers. I opened it on the desk and went through it with my phone’s flashlight. Car insurance. Homeowners policy. Something from her employer dated eighteen months ago. I kept going.
There—a health insurance card with Lily's name on it. I turned it over. A customer service number on the back, a policy number, and a pediatrician listed that I didn't recognize.
I stared at it.
It was ten-fifteen. I didn't know if the number was a twenty-four-hour line or an office that wouldn't open until nine.
I didn't know if this was even how it worked—if you called the insurance company or the doctor or just went straight to the ER and figured the rest out later.
I typed the pediatrician's name into my phone.
Closed the browser. Opened it again. Typed in fever in child what to do and read three lines before I stopped.
This was stupid. This was exactly the kind of thing you didn’t Google at ten o'clock at night with a sick kid upstairs.
She needed someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who could tell me in thirty seconds whether this was an ER at midnight or Tylenol and a cool cloth and a check-up in the morning. Someone who wouldn’t need me to explain who I was or what I was doing here.
I knew one person in this town.
I closed the browser and went back to the desk. The address book had been in the second drawer, under the insurance folder. Small, green—the kind nobody kept anymore. I found the M’s and ran my finger down the page, and there it was. Cassie’s neat handwriting.
Maddie Clarke.
I sat there for a second, looking at the ink. Then I picked up my phone.