18. Lucy
LUCY
Lucy read the line about surgery three times.
It said the undersigned adult could approve an examination, anesthesia, and surgery, if the parent or legal guardian couldn't be reached.
It had been on the counter when she came into the kitchen at twenty to seven, twenty minutes earlier than she needed to be there.
She held the corner of the page down with her thumb and read the rest of it.
Grace's date of birth. The pediatrician on Wells Street.
Allergies, none. A policy number copied out digit by digit.
All of it in Carrington's handwriting, which meant she had sat down and filled it in by hand.
She hadn't gone up to the main house Tuesday night. She hadn't gone up last night either, and Carrington hadn't come down to the cottage.
Behind her, the chef was in the pantry with the door open, running the tap.
"It needs your signature," Carrington said from the hall. "The school wants a copy too."
She had her coat over one arm and her bag on her shoulder already, and she stayed in the doorway. Lucy turned the page over and put it back down. One line was empty. Relationship to minor.
"You left one space blank," she said.
"Which?"
"That one." Lucy pointed at it and slid the form up the counter.
Carrington crossed to the island and read it upside down. She was close enough that Lucy could smell her hair, something with coconut in it, and Carrington kept both hands firmly on her bag as she leaned over the counter, keep a gulf of distance between them.
"Oh, that isn't a required field. Just skip it," Carrington said.
From the pantry, the chef shut off the tap.
"All right."
"I have the meeting at seven forty, and Agatha's already there." Carrington straightened the strap on her shoulder. "Thank you, Ms. Harper."
She went out through the courtyard door and pulled it shut, and Lucy stood there until she couldn't hear the car anymore. She picked up the pen and stood there with it.
In two days, Lucy and Carrington hadn’t been in a room together alone at all. Yesterday, she had put a hot dish down in front of Carrington, walked away, then came back and taken the plate away forty minutes later to clean it.
I'm sorry about Tuesday. Four words. They didn't have to be said well. Lucy would have taken them muttered from the doorway with the car running.
Guardian's designee was true and would fill the line. Or she could leave it blank and let the office on Wells Street call the house and ask whoever answered.
She wrote nanny, signed under it, dated it, and straightened the two pages together on the counter. Then she took the milk out and set a pot on the stove to make cinnamon oatmeal. A few minutes later, Grace came in with her shoes on and one sock down.
"Is she gone?" Grace asked.
"Just a bit ago. Sit up here and I'll fix your sock."
Lucy was wiping down the island at half past three when the main gate buzzed.
Grace was upstairs getting out of her school clothes, which took her eleven minutes on a good day. Lucy had the handset off the wall by the second buzz.
"Hello."
"My name's Deborah Mensah." She had a low, unhurried voice, a good deal older than Lucy's. "I was a friend of Clara's. I know I should have called first, but I have a box in my car that belongs to Grace."
On the little screen, a woman stood at the call box in a canvas jacket with her keys in her fist, chin up at the camera, not smiling at it.
"Ms. Cole isn't here."
"I didn't think she would be."
Lucy went back over the words, looking for the edge in them and couldn't find one. She pressed the button and the wrought-iron gates slowly opened.
Grace was standing on the stairs when she turned around, four steps up with her arms around her knees.
"That's a friend of your mom's," Lucy said. "She's coming up the driveway."
They went out to the courtyard door together. She stopped short of the fountain and left the engine running and got halfway out, then said something to herself, sat back in and shut it off. She came around the hood with a cardboard box on her hip.
She was somewhere in her fifties, her hair gray at the front and dark everywhere else, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a bandage around one thumb.
"Deborah," she said, and put out the hand without the bandage.
"Lucy Harper. Come inside."
"I know it. Diane Bell told me they'd found somebody good." Deborah shifted the box onto her other hip and looked past Lucy's shoulder. "Hello, Grace."
Grace didn't answer.
"You got tall."
Grace stayed where she was, half behind Lucy's arm, and kept looking at her. Deborah didn't fill the silence. That was the first thing Lucy liked about her.
Then Grace came out from behind her arm. "What's in it?"
"Your things. Your mom's house sold and they're packing the rest of it Monday.
Some of what's in there isn't anybody's but yours.
" Deborah tipped it so Grace could see the top.
"You can go through it now, or you can shove it under your bed for years until you’re ready to look through it. Both are fine."
Deborah set the box on the kitchen island. Grace climbed up on the stool and took the things out one at a time. She laid each item flat in front of her before she reached in again.
Deborah kept her hands in her jacket pockets and looked once around the kitchen and the courtyard past them.
"Claire never came up here," she said. "Not one time."
Lucy filled the kettle and stayed at the sink where she could see them both.
Grace turned over a shoebox with two rubber bands around it and set it down without opening it and laid a swimming badge still stapled to its card beside it. Then she took out a picture book, soft at the corners, a whale on the front of it in a green sea.
Grace laid both hands on the cover.
"This is Marguerite," Grace said. "She's too big for the boat.
She's too big for the boat and she keeps saying so, but nobody hears her the first time.
And then at the end they all get out and walk.
" She turned it around and opened it in the middle.
"My mom did the low voice for her. She did it too loud.
She did it in the store one time, and a lady came around the shelf to look at us. "
"I am the biggest thing here," Deborah said, down in her chest.
Grace laughed with her mouth open. Then she read four lines out loud herself, got two of them wrong, and Deborah didn't stop her. Inside the front cover, somebody had written Grace, four in blue ink, and the year.
Then Grace shut the book on her thumb and told Deborah about Tuesday.
About the restaurant on the harbor where you stand outside until they shout your name, and the girl called Pilar whose grandmother owns a boat that leaks, and the tank by the door with four lobsters in it where one of them sits on the others, and how you can pick one but then somebody eats it, so she didn't.
"Who took you down there?" Deborah said.
"Aunt Carrington. And Lucy."
Lucy could call Nadia and have her put it through to Carrington at the office.
But what would she even say? A woman named Deborah Mensah is in the kitchen with Grace and making her laugh?
That would only invite more questions from Carrington, questions Lucy wasn’t sure she could answer.
She set the kettle on its base and pressed the switch.
"I’m making coffee," she said, "if you have some time."
Deborah looked at her for about a second and a half, and Lucy said it again before she could stop herself.
"I'll take one," Deborah said.
Grace carried the box and the book up to her room to arrange everything where she wanted it, which she said would take a while.
Lucy made the coffee in the press and brought two cups over. Lucy opted to sit in the stool next to Deborah instead of across from her, then wrapped both hands around her cup, feeling the warmth seep into her skin.
"I called in March," Deborah said. "I left my name with a woman who wrote down my message very carefully, but I don’t blame her for it. It's a big house. Things get lost."
"I never saw a message."
"No." Deborah drank some of her coffee. "Does Grace sleep through the night?"
"Most nights. She wakes up if there's bad weather."
"She did that at four." Deborah turned her cup a quarter turn on the marble. "Clara used to bring her in and put her in the bed and then lie awake the rest of it herself. In the morning she'd tell me she'd handled it beautifully."
"That's about right."
"And she eats?"
"She eats like she's been paid by the plate," Lucy said. "She just won't do it in front of anybody."
Deborah put her head back and looked at the ceiling for a second. Then she looked down at her coffee and was fine. "How long have you been living down in the cottage?"
"Since February."
"That's a long time in one room," Deborah said. "Do you get days off?"
"Sundays, mostly."
"Mostly."
"It depends on the week."
Deborah nodded and let it go and turned her cup around by the handle.
Lucy asked, "How long did you know Clara?"
"Since she was twenty-two. She sold me a plant I killed within a month.
" Deborah put both elbows on the counter.
"She couldn't drive. Did you know that? Forty-three years old and she never learned it, so I drove her everywhere.
Including to Phoenix Ridge General when she was in labor with that girl upstairs and she made me stop for a sandwich on the way.
I drove her to the appointment where they told her she had terminal cancer too.
She made me come in and sit down, and I stayed with her for three weeks after that, and I was there her final night. "
She turned the cup back the other way.
"And then in January, I stood at that cemetery in the wind with everybody else, and after, I got in my car and drove home. After that, nobody needed me for anything. I'm not family. Not really." She shrugged. "I'm now just a woman who calls the house."
"I'm sorry."
"You're the first person who's asked me about her since she died," Deborah said. She wiped a ring of water off the marble with the side of her hand. "Anybody at all."
"She doesn't take calls at the house. It isn't about you."
"I've met her." Deborah laughed at that, once, and it changed her whole face. Lucy liked her so much in that half second that she had to look down at the counter.
"Are you happy here?" Deborah said.
"Yes."
"Good. Is she?"
Lucy took longer over that one than she should have. "I think she's better than she was in February," she said.
"I'd take that." Deborah smiled into her cup. Then she said, "Clara used to say her sister could love anybody in the world, as long as they stayed on paper."
Lucy set both hands on the counter, one on each side of her cup, and left them there. Her face was hot.
"She wasn't being unkind. She told it at parties." Deborah checked the clock on the oven. "How do you manage the school run from out here, with the coast road the way it is."
"I leave at ten past eight."
"That's what I'd do."
Lucy stood up and took the milk out of the refrigerator and held it there a second and put it back on the shelf.
Grace came back downstairs with the book held against her chest and climbed up on the stool between them. Lucy picked up her coffee and took a few sips, but it had gone cold.
By ten past five, Deborah stood and already had her keys in her hand.
"But you haven't seen my room yet," Grace said.
Deborah stopped and looked over at Lucy, and Lucy said it was okay. The two of them went upstairs. Overhead, Lucy heard Grace talking without stopping to take a breath. Lucy stayed in the kitchen and washed the two cups and the press, then set them upside down on the rack.
They came down after five minutes. Grace was still talking on the stairs, and Deborah was answering her in the same voice she'd used at the door, no louder, taking every part of it seriously.
"She's put the whale at the end of the windowsill," Deborah said. "Where she can see it from the bed."
"It's the biggest one," Grace said.
Deborah put her glasses on to find the keys she already had in her own hand, and Grace walked her out with the book still crossed over her chest.
Out in the driveway, Deborah opened the car door and stood still for a moment. "Thank you for the coffee. And for letting me inside."
"Any time."
"You'd tell me if she wasn't all right?"
"Yes," Lucy said.
"All right, then." Deborah got in, pulled the door shut and put the window down. "Bye, Grace." She reached out through the window and put two fingers on Grace's shoulder.
"Bye."
Deborah drove around the fountain and went off down the gravel driveway, and Grace walked out onto the stones after her, three or four steps, and stopped.
"When's she coming back?"
"I don't know," Lucy said.
The gates were already open. Deborah drove between them and turned out onto the road and went out of sight behind the hedge.