She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
Again, she offers you only a sad, stubborn twist of her head.
“Are you lonely?”
Slowly she meets your eyes. She nods almost imperceptibly. You recall your conversation with her father: You had offered to introduce this poor child to your own wonderful girls. You need to follow through with that idea of yours. You need to find Ashley playmates. This is something tangible you can do.
“I know you’ve seen Hallie and Garnet,” you tell her, and you reach behind you for the roll of paper towels on the floor. You hand one to the girl so she can blow her nose and wipe her eyes. “How do I introduce you to them? Any idea there?”
She presses the paper towel flat against her face for a moment and chokes back a small sob. Then she pulls it away and looks more composed. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Tell me: Have my girls seen you?”
“Sort of. But not really.”
“Not really?”
“I don’t think they can.”
“Why?”
“They’re breathers.”
“Breathers?”
“You know. Like you.”
“But I can see you. I can hear you.”
She shrugs.
“Well, then,” you say in your most gentle, paternal voice. “We have a problem. And problems need solutions. Right?”
She turns from you and gazes out the dining room window. You follow her eyes and see in the clear sky high over the meadow a plume from an airplane. Really, planes are everywhere. Just… everywhere. When you turn back to Ashley, she is gone. Reflexively you pat the carpet where she was sitting, and it is still damp with lake water. All that remains is the paper towel, which you pick up. It, too, is wet, and it has the rank odor of jet fuel. So, you wad it into a ball and push yourself to your feet. You know the solution to the problem and you know you have the tools. Or, to be precise, the tool. But you have no intention of taking the knife that the Dunmores left you and butchering either Hallie or Garnet so Ashley Stearns can have a playmate.
Wouldn’t that be asking too much of you-of anyone? One would think so. Yes. That is indeed what one would think.
E mily wasn’t about to call Reseda because she hadn’t the slightest idea what she would say. She honestly wasn’t sure whether she should be indignant that this woman had kissed her on Sunday night-certainly she would be if a man had done such a thing-or whether she needed to say simply that she wasn’t interested in her in that sort of way. She loved her husband and wanted only to be friends. The last thing she needed to add to her life was some sort of harmless, playful dalliance with Reseda. Because in the end it wouldn’t be harmless. These things never were.
Besides, she didn’t believe that Reseda actually had designs on her. Emily couldn’t decide what the kiss had meant-if, in fact, it had meant anything.
She realized she had been sitting at her desk, daydreaming, for twenty minutes. Somehow it had become ten-fifteen in the morning. She was supposed to be in Franconia for a real estate closing at eleven. Quickly she rose and gathered the file on the property, a relatively new gray Colonial with four bedrooms and a pond, and reached for her coat behind the door. In the hallway on her way out, she ran into John Hardin.
“Emily,” he said, “your girls are a dream. Clary and Sage just adored them. I think they’re going to become the granddaughters Sage still doesn’t have!”
She nodded. She had thought so much about that Sunday night kiss that she had completely forgotten how the seniors had swarmed on her children the night before then. Somehow, that part of the weekend seemed a long, long time ago.
Y ou pinpoint Hewitt Dunmore’s address in St. Johnsbury on Map-Quest and see you can drive there via the interstate in thirty-five minutes-assuming you don’t hit a moose. You don’t really worry about hitting a moose; you haven’t even seen one since you moved here. But those warning signs on the highway make you smile. You consider phoning Hewitt before leaving your house but in the end decide against it; you know he will try to dissuade you from coming. He may even insist that he doesn’t want to see you. But the girls-and that friend of theirs, Molly, who is joining them later today-don’t climb off the school bus until just about three in the afternoon. And it’s only a half hour and change that separates your house from Hewitt’s, so you could spend a good forty-five minutes with him before having to turn around. Assuming, of course, that he’s home. Since you haven’t called ahead, there’s no guarantee, and this may very well be a waste of an hour and a quarter.
Still, you don’t imagine that he travels all that much, and you have a sense he will be there. And when you coast to a stop on a St. Johnsbury street with the unpromising name of Almshouse Road, the modest house at the address where he lives has a tired-looking minivan-covered with end-of-winter muck, like most cars around here this time of the year-parked in the driveway. The house is a Cape in dire need of scraping and painting, and the roof looks a little ragged, but you like the remnants of red that peel from the clapboards. The color reminds you of a barn.
There isn’t a doorbell, and so you remove your glove before you rap on the wood: You expect the sound will be sharper and more likely to carry this way. Sure enough, a moment after you knock, a small man with bloodhound jowls and a gray bristle haircut opens the door, leaning heavily on a cane, and stares out at you through eyeglasses thick as a jelly jar. He is wearing a tattered cardigan the color of coral and a string tie over a blue oxford shirt. He looks like a cantankerous professor from a small, rural college. He is not what you expected, but, since he did not attend the closing on the house, you honestly weren’t sure what to expect. Emily had found him ornery on the telephone, but that’s really all you know.
“Yes?”
You extend the hand on which you are not wearing a glove. “I’m Chip Linton. My wife and I are the ones who-”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he says, taking your hand and cutting you off. “You’re the ones who bought my parents’ house.”
You note in your mind how he altered slightly how you would have finished that sentence. You would have referred to it as his house; he called it his parents’. You wonder if this distinction means anything.
“Come in, come in,” he says, his voice resigned. “No sense in standing outside in the doorway.”
He takes your coat and tosses it on a coatrack behind the front door as you untie your boots, and then he limps into the kitchen, sitting you down in a heavy wooden armchair before a mahogany table that is perfectly round and rather substantial. The chair is one of four. The appliances are old but spotless, the white on the refrigerator showing a little dark wear only around the handle. The floor has linoleum diamonds, and the cabinets look to be made of cherry.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he says, sitting across from you and folding his hands on the tabletop. In another room there is a radio playing classical music.
“Well, your parents’ house is proving to be a bit of a mystery to me,” you respond, smiling as you speak. You hadn’t planned on getting to the matter at hand quite so quickly, but he hasn’t offered you coffee or tea and has come right to the point: Why are you here?
“How so?” he says evenly.
“Well, let’s see. There are the items you left behind.”
“That old sewing machine? I told your wife to keep it. Same with the sap buckets and all them bobbins. Or you can cart ’em off to the dump. Makes no difference to me.”
“There’s a very nice brass door knocker. You could use a door knocker.”
“I heard you rapping just fine, thank you very much.”
You nod. For the first time you have gotten a real taste of his accent. When he said fine, you heard more than a hint of an o and a second syllable: fo-ine. “There were three other items that were real, well, UFOs.”
“Pardon?”
“Unidentified flying objects.”
