Chapter 7
Otis Marsh was standing beside the black car at the east drive with his hands in his coat pockets, waiting for her as though he had been there for a long time. He was sixty-three, had driven for the Moretti family since the old man’s time, and during the past four months he had spoken exactly four sentences to Corrie, one sentence at a time.
“The young master told me to give you this,” he said. “You’re to read it before you go upstairs to see him.”
Corrie took it. She opened it right there in the rear courtyard while the sea wind blew against her and made the edge of the paper slap her hand.
The first page was a confirmation printed on hospital letterhead. Patient name: Lily Hayes. Attending physician: Dr. Lindqvist. Appointment date: March fourteenth. Beneath that, a sentence stating that the appointment had been reserved and no further confirmation was required.
Corrie read it three times. Then she read it a fourth time, more slowly, because she was searching for some trap hidden between the lines that she hadn’t yet noticed. She found none. The appointment had been reserved. That was all.
For one very brief moment, she felt so light that she had to grip the side of the car. Then the moment passed, and something else took its place. Something cold and slow, rising from the base of her spine.
Standing in the courtyard, Corrie began to understand something she had never allowed herself to face directly during the past three years. The problem had never been money. She had always managed to find the money somehow. She had worked three jobs at once, sold the car, borrowed from Mrs. Fallon twice and repaid her in full both times. If money had been all she needed, she would have found a way.
What she could never buy, never borrow, and never trade for any number of overtime hours was an empty place in the schedule of the finest doctor in the state.
That waiting list stretching into September wasn’t a barrier made of money. It was a barrier made of order. And people stood in that line by waiting — waiting for their proper turn, just like every other mother.
Domenico Moretti hadn’t given her a single dollar. He hadn’t paid a bill for her, erased a debt, or signed a check. He had merely picked up the telephone once, and the line had moved aside.
Corrie stood in the wind holding the paper and realized that if he could do that with one telephone call, then somewhere in the state, someone had just been pushed farther back without ever knowing why. She didn’t dare follow the thought any further.
But it was already there, and it made the man upstairs far more frightening than he would have been if he were merely generous. Generosity was something she understood. Generosity had limits. This didn’t.
The second document in the envelope was an employment contract. Corrie read the heading, then had to read it again because she thought she had misunderstood.
Position: head steward of Hallowmere Manor. Beneath it, clauses outlining authority, the management of fourteen employees, the monthly operating budget, and the power to hire and dismiss staff. The salary was four times what she was earning now.
And on the second page, the clause she had studied for so long one afternoon in early October had been crossed out in ink and replaced with a handwritten line: Employees may choose either residential employment or daily commuting. Days off to be arranged by individual agreement.
At the bottom, in the space reserved for the employer, there was already a signature. The handwriting was slender, neat, and without flourish. Domenico Moretti.
Corrie looked at that signature for a long time. Otis remained beside the car without urging her to hurry. Finally she asked him one question — the only question she asked that morning — whether the young master had said anything else.
Otis considered it for a moment, as though deciding whether he should answer. Then he said that he had told her to read clause nine carefully.
She folded the two documents, returned them to the envelope, and held it with both hands. The paper bearing the eleven names was still in her apron pocket.
On one side was the thing she needed more than anything else in the world. On the other was the thing she had just unearthed from a leather-bound ledger no one was ever supposed to open. And she understood that when she went upstairs, she would have to decide which one to carry with her — because she couldn’t place both on the same desk and still keep her footing.
She didn’t go up to the second floor that day. She placed the envelope inside her personal locker, locked it, and used one of her two days off for the month.
No one asked where she was going, because there was no longer anyone in that house with enough authority to ask.
On Saturday morning, she took the earliest bus to Providence, changed routes once, and reached Mrs. Agnes Fallon’s building shortly before ten. The sun was out that day — the rare kind of coastal winter sunlight that wasn’t warm enough to soften the cold, but was bright enough to make people want to sit outdoors.
She saw the two of them from the beginning of the walkway. Mrs. Fallon was sitting in a wooden chair on the porch with a ball of yarn in her lap, her two knitting needles moving in a steady rhythm. Lily sat flat on the porch floor with her legs stretched straight out, surrounded by a circle of crayons scattered in no order at all, bent over a large sheet of paper with the kind of concentration only a child could possess.
Corrie stopped at the beginning of the walkway and watched for nearly half a minute before moving closer. Lily heard her footsteps before Mrs. Fallon did. The little girl looked up and cried out with delight — then immediately lowered her head toward the paper again and raised one hand, signaling that her mother had to stay exactly where she was, because she wasn’t allowed to look yet, one part was still missing.
Corrie truly stood still. She remained there with the cloth bag in her hand and waited. Mrs. Fallon smiled and said the child had been working on it since Thursday morning, and that she had needed to buy another box of crayons because yellow had run out first.
About a minute later, Lily announced that she was finished, and lifted the paper with both hands, holding it high above her head so that it covered her face. It was a house. A yellow house with a red roof, a tree on the left, and three windows.
Lily lowered the paper and began explaining without waiting for anyone to ask. The first window belonged to her mother. The second belonged to her. And the third belonged to Mrs. Fallon, because Mrs. Fallon had to have a window of her own.
Mrs. Fallon stopped knitting. Corrie sat down on the porch step until she was level with her daughter and said the picture was beautiful, that the tree had been drawn very well, and that she liked the middle window best of all.
Lily asked why. Corrie said, “Because it’s the largest.”
The little girl nodded as though that were a perfectly reasonable answer, then began telling her how Mrs. Fallon had taught her to knit that week, but she had only managed a small section before the whole thing became tangled, and Mrs. Fallon had said it didn’t matter because it had taken her two winters to finish her first scarf.
Corrie sat and listened. She listened as the child talked about the color yellow, about the neighbor’s cat that often came to lie in the sun on their porch, and about how she had tied her own shoelaces three times in a row without either shoe coming loose.
Sunlight fell at an angle across the porch floor. Mrs. Fallon’s needles began moving again.
Then, in the middle of a story about the cat, Lily stopped. She looked at her mother with her head tilted slightly to one side and said, very calmly, in the same voice she had just used to talk about her shoelaces:
“Today, Mommy smiled before she did.”
Corrie couldn’t answer at once. Lily didn’t say anything more. She had already turned back to the box of crayons and was choosing a blue one to add the sky. To her, what she had just said was merely another observation, no more important than the cat or the shoelaces.
But Corrie sat motionless on the porch step and understood something she had never allowed herself to consider during the past three years.
All that time she had believed she was hiding it. She had believed that if she wiped her face before walking through the door, if she spoke in a normal voice, if she always brought a cheerful story to tell, then this child wouldn’t know anything. She had believed it so completely that the belief had become the only thing still allowing her to feel that she was doing one decent thing.
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And now, on a bright winter morning, her six-year-old daughter had just told her the truth of three years in six words. The child had never needed to be told. She had been watching her mother’s face every single day, the way children watch, and she had known all along.
Corrie sat on the step with the drawing in her hands and realized that the only person she had ever successfully hidden anything from was herself.
