the second one, dressed the same, slides in behind. He’s older and potato-shaped, a gun belt hanging low under his belly.
“Should we wait while you cover up?” that one asks. She shakes her head. On sweltering days she always wears her mother’s white cotton petticoat if she wears anything at all.
The men remove their hats, revealing hair damp with perspiration. They exchange looks she cannot decipher. “It’s dark in here,” the tall one says. The house is illuminated only by sunlight splintered through gaps in the midnight-blue drapes drawn full across the windows. The older man finds a switch on the wall, flicks it up and down.
“Power out?”
“We use candles.” She doesn’t offer to squander any so early in the day. She anxiously follows the tall one’s gaze to the room on his right with the mahogany table where they eat and she does her sums, and then to the library, on the opposite side of the entryway, where she and James play the windup phonograph and he reads to her of ‘a time before time.’ She sees nothing a spy could report. Our way of knowing isn’t wrong, James has said, but others fear it and therein lies the danger for us.
The tall one’s ears stick out like handles and she stares at them frankly. Curiosity instructs, James likes to say, and a sense of wonder is a gift. Is it wonder or dread making her draw a jagged breath? The house has shrunk with the men in it. They’ve swallowed all the air.
The tall one dips his head, smiles and says, “Officer Nolan, Miss. Don’t be afraid. We won’t bite.” He shows her a thin black billfold with his photograph and name. “My partner here’s Officer Dunn. That a baby crying?”
“Cian!” The lad’s old enough to climb from his cot but he’s never tried. James says it’s a sign of Cian’s advanced trust in the universe to provide for his needs. She starts toward the staircase and the one named Dunn says he’ll go with her. She turns back and searches his moon pale face, his small cold eyes. “You’ll vex him,” she says.
“Where’re you from?” Dunn asks. “You talk strange.”
How to answer? She speaks like James. The officers are the strange-sounding ones. Dawg. Tawk.
“How ’bout you radio the station, Frank?” Nolan nods toward the door. “Let ’em know what’s up.” Officer Dunn leaves.
She climbs the stairs and hurries down the hallway to Cian, who’s rattling the bars of his cot and bleating. “Mandy!” he cries, his mouth pitifully distorted. He stands in his cot, hiccupping little sobs. A sodden nappy rings his ankles. Ammonia from it and others in a nearby bucket stings her eyes. His fair hair is sweaty, his wee organ an angry red from rash. When James left yesterday, he said he’d return with the ingredients for a healing salve.
“Mandy’s here, poor biscuit.”
If she had the lad’s trusting nature she’d chance opening a window in hopes of a cooling breeze. If she didn’t fear exhausting the drinking water, she’d bathe Cian and launder his nappies. Fear is the mortal’s curse, James says. Look at me, so dreadfully afraid of losing you. She lifts the slight child, shaking the wet nappy from his feet. She carries him down the stairs.
Nolan peers up from a notepad. His eyebrows lift. In surprise? Dismay? For a moment she forgets to wonder why he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t. It’s easy to imagine herself, James and Cian as the only souls alive. She heads for the burgundy horsehair sofa in the library. As she sits, dust motes rise in a slow dance and drift back down. She drapes Cian across her lap and wriggles one arm free of the petticoat. He clamps his mouth on her breast, wraps a spindly arm about her waist. His head is warm and damp in the crook of her arm.
Nolan remains in the entryway. To see him, she’d have to wrench her head around. “So the child is yours?” he says. “You look too young.”
In three years, when she’s eighteen, nobody can wrest her from James. She will stand beside him under a ceiling of stars while he invokes the mighty ones. When she’s eighteen, she’ll venture out on her own for Cian’s earthly needs. James won’t have to bring her lilacs each spring. She’ll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent, lie on soft grass, garbed in gossamer and sunlight. She will climb Merlin’s oak tree and Heidi’s mountain, row a boat down the enchanted river behind the house, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear. She and Nicholas will lope over carpets of dandelions as they do in her dreams. Lope is a word she likes to say out loud for the way her tongue starts it off before disappearing behind her lips.
“You say you have news?”
“Yeah.”
She hears him inhale deeply, hears his belt jangle as he shifts weight from one foot to the other. “Mr. Haggerty died on the three-forty-two from Penn Station yesterday,” he says.
“What’s a three-forty-two?”
“You serious?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “A train.”
“Did he jump?”
“Why would you even think that?” He jangles again.
“Anna Karenina did.”
“Who?”
“A woman in a book.” The longest she’s ever read, one James challenged her to get through, hoping to seduce her from the youthful fantasies she prefers. “But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she says aloud, trying to say it daintily like Anna.
Nolan releases a short, tuneless whistle and says, “Jeez, it’s stifling in here. How can you breathe?” His shoes squeak behind her as he goes to the window and pulls back the drapes. He grunts with the effort of hoisting a sash that’s not been lifted since the lad was born for fear his cries would be heard. Panic rises in her throat, a reflex. She tenses, ready to flee upstairs with Cian until she remembers it’s too late to avoid detection.
“Okay if I take a seat?” He’s at the chair on her left.
She nods and he sits, his face in profile, his gaze averted. She runs an imaginary finger over the small bump on his long nose as he hangs his hat on one knee. World scents cling to him, as they do to James when he’s been out. She likes to guess at them, surprising James with her accuracy. Nolan smells of leather and smoke.
“Several passengers witnessed him collapse and die. The coroner determined it was a heart attack. He won’t order an autopsy unless the family insists.”
She focuses on the far wall near the fireplace on a spot where the floral wallpaper is peeling, envisions an angry heart with arms and legs leaping from James’s chest and stabbing him with a fork. Her own chest begins to ache. Pain is an illusion, James says. Float above it. She stares at the dangling wallpaper strip and floats as far as the anchor of Cian’s rhythmic sucking on her nipple allows.
Nolan glances at her then quickly looks down. “You okay?”
“Aye.”
It will storm tonight. She can tell from the weight of the air pressing in through the open window. Thunder will prowl the sky and Nicholas, the house. Lightning will crackle outside the room she shares with Cian and they’ll both cry out for James.
Later, Bill Nolan will tell his wife the girl’s composure was unnerving. No sign of grief as
