The description of a baby’s cries funneled through the tower is so eerie that I can almost hear it. I look up from Morris Bennett’s journal and realize I do hear it—the sound of a baby crying as if it had been preserved in the tower over the years—
Or Chloe is somewhere in the house crying for me. How long have I been here?
I look at my watch and see it’s after noon. Two hours that I’ve dreamed away over Morris Bennett’s journals, not even once thinking about Chloe. It feels like a disloyalty. After all, how much do I know about Mrs. Williams? What kind of a mother gives her child over to a woman she’s met for all of five minutes? How do I even know that the woman who showed up at my door this morning is Mrs. Williams? Maybe she’s an escaped patient with a fixation on babies.
The crying grows louder. I can’t tell where it’s coming from. Morris Bennett was right—the tower is like a funnel for sound. I get up and turn in a circle, not sure what direction to go in. Down the stairs to my apartment? But as I approach the spiral stairs the sound grows fainter. It must be coming from the main house.
I push open the door and find myself in a long book-lined corridor that stretches into the shadows, like a corridor in bad dreams that goes on forever. That’s another of Laurel’s dreams. In this one she’s put Chloë down in a room in an enormous house and then forgets where the room is. She wanders down the long corridors, hearing her crying, unable to find her. Just as I do now, groping my way down the dim hallway, trailing my hand along the ribbed book spines until I reach a wide staircase. The crying is definitely coming from downstairs. I head down, the wooden steps creaking under my feet. The stairwell is paneled entirely in the same dark honey-colored wood, as if it had been carved out of the surrounding forests. It smells like pine and woodsmoke.
I pause at the foot of the stairs, listening for the sound of crying, but it has become unnaturally quiet, as if the house is holding its breath. I look into a parlor full of faded chintz settees and divans drowsing in mote-filled patches of sunlight like big cats. This must be the parlor I’m “welcome to use” but it doesn’t look like anyone has used it for years. Even the faces looking out of the framed photographs on the tables and the oil portraits on the walls look as if they’re uncomfortable. As if they are patients waiting for a doctor. One face in particular draws me over the threshold. It’s a portrait hanging over the mantel of a young woman painted in bright primary colors. It’s jarringly modern for this old-fashioned room. The face, while beautiful, is painted in broad, primitive strokes of green, yellow, red, and blue, each feature somehow separate from the rest as if they might fly apart into a dozen separate pieces. At the bottom someone has written “For Elizabeth, my girl of many faces.” Elizabeth, I recall, is Sky’s mother’s name. Perhaps this was done by a family friend, which explains its place of pride over the mantel. The woman in it does look familiar—
The cry wrenches my attention away from the painted face and all the faces in the framed photographs look at me reprovingly, as if to say, Why are you dillydallying here while your baby cries?
I follow the cry down another hall and through a swinging door into a bright, modern kitchen. Billie is standing at the counter straining carrots through a sieve and Chloe is ensconced in a bouncy chair. She waves her arms in the air at the sight of me and I go straight to her, feeling a queasy mixture of relief and guilt. “Mommy’s here,” I say, scooping her into my arms and pressing her to my chest. “Don’t cry, Mommy’s here.” But there’s no need to tell her that; she isn’t crying, at least not now. To Billie I add, “You should have come and gotten me if she was crying.” As soon as I say it I hear the echo of Laurel’s voice chiding Simone in the parking lot.
But Billie doesn’t look offended by my sharp tone, she only looks confused. “I would have,” she says, “but she hasn’t cried all morning.”
Daphne’s Journal, July 7, 20—
Laurel was right that all I had to do was be more honest with Peter; everything has been much better since I told him how important Laurel’s friendship is to me. Really, it was all my fault. Peter’s been nothing but loving and supportive since Chloe was born; how could I expect him to know what I wanted when I didn’t know myself? I can’t even blame him for not hiring a babysitter, because I’d told him I hadn’t wanted one. I mean, that was because when he first suggested it I thought he was criticizing me for not being able
