Chapter Ten
Dread
Several Days Later
The alarm hadn’t gone off yet. The bedroom held that gray quiet of pre-dawn, the kind where shapes have definition but color hasn’t arrived, and I lay there with one arm behind my head and watched the ceiling and didn’t move because Katy was asleep beside me and her breathing was the only sound worth measuring.
Her hair had come loose in the night. Chestnut brown, spread across the pillow in a way that made the white cotton look darker where it touched, and one strand had found its way across her mouth and was moving gently with each breath.
I watched it. Didn’t reach to move it. The urge was there -- the instinct to clear an obstruction from a sleeping person’s airway -- but this wasn’t medicine.
This was something else, and my hand stayed where it was.
Ellie had left traces of herself everywhere. One of her rocks sat beside the lamp on my nightstand, placed there two days ago for reasons she hadn’t explained. A pink hair tie rested beside it, and a crayon had somehow found its way beneath the edge of the bed.
I’d noticed all three.
I hadn’t moved any of them.
In the bathroom, a small blue toothbrush occupied the holder beside mine.
Katy’s things had begun collecting around the sink too -- face wash, a brush, a bottle of lotion.
I couldn’t have said exactly when any of it had appeared.
There hadn’t been a conversation about making room for them.
They’d simply needed places to put things, and my house had provided them.
A few weeks ago, every object in this room had belonged to me. That was no longer true. I was beginning to prefer it that way.
Ellie’s sneakers sat just inside the bedroom doorway.
Pink. Worn at the toes. The laces double-knotted just as Katy had taught her, and one of them had come partially undone, the loose end trailing across the threshold like it was thinking about leaving but hadn’t committed.
She’d taken them off there last night, kicked them toward the wall with the carelessness of a child who has decided that certain rules no longer apply in this house, and I had stepped over them twice without moving them because moving them felt like correcting something that wasn’t wrong.
I got up without waking Katy. Jeans from the floor.
A worn gray T-shirt from the dresser drawer that smelled like laundry soap and nothing else.
My boots by the back door -- I’d leave them there until I needed them.
The house was cool underfoot, the wood floors carrying the night’s chill, and I moved through the hallway with the quiet of a man who has learned that some sounds are worth avoiding.
The kitchen smelled like coffee before I made it.
I measured the grounds same as I always did -- two scoops, level, not heaped -- and set the pot on the burner and stood at the counter while the machine did its work.
The windowsill above the sink held three rocks.
Gate. Rose. Maple. Arranged by size this morning, which meant Ellie had been awake already, or had rearranged them in her sleep, which wouldn’t have surprised me.
The quartz caught the first thin light and held it, pink vein glowing.
The juice boxes were on the second shelf of the refrigerator.
Four of them, lined up beside the milk, the yellow straws pointing upward.
I hadn’t bought them yesterday. Hadn’t bought them the day before.
They’d been there for weeks, replenished on a schedule I hadn’t articulated but had apparently established, because running out of juice boxes wasn’t an option this house was prepared to consider.
Ellie’s stepstool stood beside the counter.
Green plastic, the kind with the non-slip feet, positioned precisely where a seven-year-old could reach the sink without asking for help.
I’d found it at the hardware store in town, brought it home in the truck bed, and set it by the counter without announcing it.
Ellie had discovered it an hour later, climbed onto it immediately, and washed her hands with the focused intensity of someone testing new equipment, and the stool had lived there ever since, acquiring the patina of something that gets used daily -- water spots on the top step, a small crack near the left edge where she’d dropped it once, hastily repaired with medical tape because it happened when the hardware store was closed.
The coloring books were fanned out on the floor near the sofa where Ellie had been working before bed, pages open to half-finished dinosaurs and geometric patterns that had defeated her. A few crayons lay scattered nearby.
I left them where they were.
Ellie’s things had a way of turning up wherever she’d been. I was getting used to that.
Coffee ready. I poured a mug and carried it to the table where Ellie’s school project lay spread across the oak.
The poster board was standard issue. White.
Twenty-four by thirty-six. Divided into six sections with a ruler and crayon, each section labeled in Ellie’s handwriting -- slightly crooked, the letters larger at the beginning of each word and shrinking toward the end, the particular signature of a child who starts strong and runs out of real estate.
FOOD GROUPS, she’d written across the top in red, the O’s perfectly round, the G leaning slightly to the left as if it was thinking about falling over.
Three sections were filled. Fruits: a cluster of red apples and yellow bananas, colored enthusiastically if not precisely.
Vegetables: carrots and a green blob that might have been broccoli or might have been an explosion.
Hard to tell. Grains: a loaf of bread that looked more like a brick with squiggles on top, labeled brEAD in blue letters that had pressed hard enough to leave an impression on the board beneath.
The remaining sections -- Dairy, Protein, Fats/Oils -- waited empty.
I set my coffee down and reached for the fruit on the counter.
Apples. A banana. A container of strawberries I’d washed yesterday sat beside the cutting board.
I quartered an apple, sliced a banana, halved the strawberries, and arranged everything on a plate beside the poster before returning to my coffee.
A few minutes later, bare feet padded down the hallway. Ellie appeared in the doorway wearing dinosaur pajamas, her hair a tangle of waves that hadn’t survived the night. She blinked at me, then at the fruit and the poster.
Without a word, she climbed onto her stool and reached for a strawberry.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Did you cut the strawberries the right way? Harlow’s mom cuts them sideways and it’s wrong. You have to cut them from the green part.”
I looked at the strawberries. Halved stem to tip. “These are stem to tip.”
She nodded, satisfied, and reached for the poster.
Her small fingers found the crayons -- scattered across the table in the particular disorder she preferred to my neat rows -- and selected a purple.
The Dairy section. She drew a milk carton with remarkable accuracy for a seven-year-old, the rectangular shape, the peaked top, even the little spout on the side that real milk cartons have and that most adults forget to include.
“Milk comes from cows,” she said, not looking up from her drawing.
“But not the kind in cartoons with the spots. Real cows are brown mostly. Tyler says Dylan’s uncle has a farm and the cows are brown and they smell but it’s not a bad smell, it’s just a cow smell, and they make milk that goes into cartons but not right away, there’s a process. ”
I listened. The crayon scratched against the poster board. The coffee steamed between my palms. The knife sat on the cutting board where I’d left it, its edge catching the early light through the window above the sink.
“Protein is next,” Ellie said, pointing at the empty section with her purple crayon.
“That’s meat. And eggs. And beans, but beans are also a vegetable sometimes, which is confusing.
Ms. Keller said if you’re not sure, put it in protein because protein builds muscles.
” She flexed her bicep, which was approximately the diameter of a nickel, and frowned at it. “I don’t think it’s working yet.”
“Takes time,” I said.
“I know. I’m being patient.” She selected a brown crayon and began drawing what appeared to be a steak. The lines were vigorous. Committed. The steak acquired grill marks, a bone handle, and what might have been a smile, though it was hard to tell with steak.
I sipped my coffee. Set the mug down. Looked at the fruit plate, then at the Fats/Oils section, which was still blank.
“Is a Popsicle its own food group?” I asked.
Ellie’s hand stopped. The brown crayon hovered above the steak, and her face went through a series of expressions very quickly -- confusion, consideration, the brightening that happens when a child realizes an adult has said something ridiculous on purpose -- and then she was laughing.
Not a giggle. A full laugh, the kind that comes from the diaphragm and involves the whole body, her shoulders shaking, the stool rocking slightly beneath her, and the sound of it filled the kitchen in a way that made the coffee taste better and the morning feel lighter than it had any right to.
“Popsicles are dessert,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Dessert isn’t a food group, Doc. It’s extra.”
“Good to know. I’ve been misclassifying my inventory.”
She went back to her steak, still smiling, the crayon moving with renewed purpose, and I reached for the apple slices and ate them one by one while she worked, because someone needed to make a dent in the pile.
The footsteps in the hallway were different this time. Heavier. Slower. The cadence of someone who was awake but taking her time about it, and when I looked up, Katy was standing in the doorway.