I knew Jack had meant well, but I hadn’t taken the drops in over a week. I was certain that if Olivia could come back, then Eva could too. I just wanted to see her one more time. It had to be possible. I worried that the drops might make me sleep so deeply that I might miss her in the night.
I didn’t know who to pray to in order to see my child again. Not God. God didn’t govern Bliss House. After years of being immune to whatever link Bliss House had to the dead, Bliss House had shown me Olivia. There had to be more. It had to show me more.
Press left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.
“Michael, go to Mother.” Nonie’s voice.
I opened my eyes to a different light.
My one-year-old son gave a shrill crow of pleasure as he ran across the carpet to my bed.
Had I fallen back asleep? Yes. I’d fallen asleep with a prayer on my lips.
“Eva.”
In a dream, she’d been in the kitchen, standing on a stool beside Olivia, her yellow curls tied back out of her face with a Wedgwood blue velvet ribbon I’d never seen before. Olivia, who had long ago taught Marlene all the recipes she’d learned herself as a girl, seldom went into the kitchen except to give instructions or to catalogue the pantry’s contents. (“Even the best staff makes mistakes,” she’d once confided to me. “They become careless, and get cheated or become too generous with the family’s things. It’s rarely malicious, but they need to remember whose things they are minding.”) This dream-Olivia was stirring something into the kitchen’s enormous crockery mixing bowl, and I could hear her murmur to Eva, who was watching, rapt. I had almost heard what she was saying, but Nonie’s voice had broken the dream. It was gone.
“What is it?”
My tone must have irritated Nonie, because she responded with a forceful “I’ve brought Michael. It’s time you got up.”
Michael, oblivious to the tension, gave another small shriek and clambered up the bed stairs to my four-poster. His blond head was damp and his cheeks were bright pink. They’d obviously been outside for a walk.
“Mmmm. Mamamamama.” He fell over onto my stomach and collapsed with a grunt.
I felt the heat of his little body through the sheet. I sighed.
“What time is it?”
Nonie stood, watchful, beside the bed. As always, she was neat and impeccably dressed, despite the fact that she spent her days with small children. She wore rich browns and tans and, given that her hair was a warm caramel color, she gave the impression of always being ready for fall. Today, the abstract elephant-and-leaf pattern of her short-sleeved cotton shirtdress was whimsical—for her, anyway—but the dress was carefully tailored, with a matching belt that cinched her still-tidy waist. Other than long walks, I never knew Nonie to take much exercise. She kept herself covered when she was outside, so her fifty-something face beneath her delicately striped brown eyeglasses was virtually unlined. She’d been in her mid-twenties when she came to help raise me, and while her beakish nose and assertive jaw kept her from being conventionally pretty, the harsh angles of her face had softened over the years so that she seemed much less intimidating on first glance than she had when I was little. Of course, I’d grown to love her too.
“I’m about to put him down for his afternoon nap.”
I winced as Michael tried to stand up on my thigh, unsteady in his hard-soled white walkers. I took one of his hands, and he wrapped his fingers around one of mine and squeezed as he righted himself. He was so determined, always persevering even when something challenged him.
Everything had seemed to come more easily to Eva, as though she knew that nothing was too difficult for her to do or try.
“You’re hurting Mother, Michael. Get down.” Nonie’s voice was still sharper than I’d heard it in a long while, and Michael looked back at her so that he almost lost his balance. But I pulled him toward me so he would fall onto me instead of onto the bed, or perhaps the floor.
“Why are you frightening him?”
In fact, Michael looked more surprised than frightened, and quickly resumed trying to balance on me. I didn’t care that it hurt. I was finally happy to have him with me. Something had changed, just a little. It wasn’t the desperate kind of feeling I’d had every time I’d seen him over the past weeks.
“I understand your husband will be staying in town to have dinner with Rachel and Jack. Maybe you should dress and join him, Lottie.”
I didn’t respond at first. I knew I should go and spend time with Rachel. She was surely still very upset about Helen and Zion. That I didn’t care much for them shouldn’t have influenced my decision to stay home, but it did.