At three, Mrs. G came out of the office and tapped me on the shoulder.
“I have a woman on the phone for you,” she said. “Sasha someone. She says she tried your phone upstairs. She says she is from the Children’s Services. She doesn’t say what she wants. You will come and speak to her?”
My tongue turned to a hot hunk of raw meat in my mouth. I looked at Arun, and with my eyes I said, “Please tell me I can’t go. Tell me I need to mop the floor or fry some more fish or see to the customers.” There was one old woman at a table in the corner, peeling the batter off a piece of cod. Arun flapped his hand and said, “Yes, yes, go, Julie,” and I followed Mrs. G. I felt like a kid sent out of the classroom. In the office, she patted my shoulder, went to the couch, and picked up her knitting. I thought she would go back to the kitchen, but she chose two pink-wrapped sweets from the bowl on the coffee table and sat down.
“Don’t take notice of me, dear,” she said. “You get on with your phone-calling. I will be listening to my radio.”
Mrs. G was very sweet and very nosy. She wouldn’t be listening to the radio. She would be listening to me. I picked up the phone with the tips of my fingers.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi, Julia, hi.” Sasha was one of the only people in the world who knew who I really was. She pretended not to hate me, but it didn’t work—I could hear it in her voice, under the topcoat of brightness. Hatred. “How are you?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good. Good. So. I had a call from the hospital,” she said. I felt it as a fishing hook lowered down my throat, snagging on my tonsils and trying to turn me inside out. “How’s Molly? Getting used to the cast?”
Molly was offensively proud of her cast. She’d only had to wear the sling for the weekend, and I had been glad to slide both her arms into her coat on Monday morning. When she had worn her coat with the sling the empty sleeve had flapped ghoulishly. On Monday I eased it down over the cast, so only the white edge peeped out, and she hoiked it back up, determined that the plaster should be the first thing anyone noticed about her. She walked into school with it held aloft, like a trophy, and came back with felt-tip drawings from elbow to palm. She spent a long time pointing at different pictures and telling me who had drawn them, and when we got back to the apartment she asked me to add my own. I didn’t.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“Good,” said Sasha. “That’s good. Well, I just thought it might be a good idea if you popped in to see me. Just for a quick meeting. I was wondering about tomorrow morning. Would that work?”
“Tomorrow?” I said.
“The morning. Ten? Would ten work for you?”
“But Molly’s fine.”
“Shall we just chat tomorrow?”
I didn’t want to chat tomorrow. I wanted to tell Sasha that her saying “just” so many times didn’t make the things she was talking about any less threatening, and I wanted to ask who had snitched on me. My guess was the slit-eyed doctor who thought I had hurt Molly on purpose. Mrs. G had started humming along to the music on the radio, and the clock on the wall told me I needed to leave to collect Molly from school, and my throat felt narrowed to a thin rubber tube.
“Tomorrow. Fine. Bye,” I said. I put down the phone. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to breathe. I tried to push away the blockage between my collarbones, but it stuck.
If Mrs. G hadn’t been clacking her knitting needles behind me, I would have asked Sasha whether the point of the meeting was to tell me they were taking Molly away, and she would have made high-pitched objection noises and changed the subject. I was glad that that pantomime hadn’t been played out. They had wanted to take Molly for years but hadn’t been able to find a reason, and now it was here, big and clumsy and covered in felt-tip scribbles. I thought of the peeling-can voice I had heard on the phone. Chrissie. Whoever it was had tracked me down somehow. They must have spoken to someone who knew me, someone who hated me. Sasha knew me. She hated me.
The pain was a tight band across my shoulders, spreading through the base of my skull. I arched my back against it. It was the same pain I felt every year, sprouting with spring and waning with summer. Sometimes, when I felt it spread from my shoulders to my head, I imagined it as blood in water. Dark red hands reaching into clear fluid. I rubbed the bumps of spine that rippled the back of my neck.
“You have a stiff neck?” Mrs. G asked.
“It’s fine,” I said, but she was already behind me, a head shorter and twice as wide. She moved my hands away and I felt her thick fingers on me. The skin on the pads was hard from years of guiding knitting needles through wool. I smelled spices and sawdust and found, abruptly, that I wanted to cry. The brush of her skin on mine made me feel young and bare. I clenched my teeth. I never cried.
“You have a very stiff neck, dear,” she said.
