After breakfast in my room, I started down the gallery to the nursery, stopping in front of Press’s door to listen. Nothing. Was he even inside? I put my hand on the doorknob, but then didn’t turn it.
In the nursery, I found Michael again sleeping later than usual. The shades were still drawn, and the weak daylight barely showed around their edges. Standing over my son’s crib, I let my hand hover a bare inch above his damp forehead, not touching so he wouldn’t wake. His mouth was open, and his breath made a little hum as he exhaled. I longed to trace the sweet curve of his tiny lips. Before Eva was gone, I had prayed that he would be kind and smart. But now I only prayed that he would live.
Eva’s trundle bed across the room was made up with its ruffle-edge coverlet and sham over its single pillow. On it, I could see the outlines of the rubber-faced Lassie dog my father had given her and Buttercup, one of her favorite dolls. The rest of her toys lived on shelves, safe from Michael’s curious, careless hands. She had let him play frequently with the Lassie, not minding that he would pull it to the floor, laughing, then drop onto it with a loud oomph, and laugh some more. There was no reason now not to let him play with everything. But it didn’t seem right. I felt protective of her things, as though they’d become mine. Or as though she might come back and want them.
Leaving Marlene in Olivia’s bedroom to sort through clothes, I went into the morning room and shut the door between us. Marlene had been solemn, but I could tell she was pleased when I’d told her she could take whatever clothes she wanted for herself before sending the rest into town for the thrift store. She and Olivia were about the same size, and as she held up one dress after another in front of the mirror, she looked like a different woman. I rarely saw her out of her shapeless, uniform-style dresses. But when I suggested that it would be fine with me if she wore other, more comfortable clothes—Olivia’s or her own—when we weren’t entertaining, she had looked offended.
“Is there something wrong with my dresses, Miss Charlotte?”
“Of course not. I just thought you might be—I don’t know, Marlene—bored.” Realizing I’d made some kind of mistake, I immediately tried to take it back and apologized. (Something Press would’ve frowned on, I knew.) “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Mrs. Bliss never objected. Did Mr. Preston say something?” Frown lines creased her soft, pleasant brow.
I shook my head. “Please forget I said anything at all. It’s not really my business what you wear.” My departure from the room was probably quicker than was strictly decorous. I couldn’t help but be embarrassed. Along with everything else that had happened, it was going to be a long time before I got used to dealing with Marlene and Terrance by myself. But Terrance worried me more than Marlene. I was awkward with her, yes, but I found him puzzling. He had started taking his instructions, I assumed, from Press. Or perhaps he had been here so long that he didn’t need any instruction at all.
The morning room, on the west side of the house, was even less bright than my own bedroom this early in the day. As I opened the windows, I could see beyond the garden and into the changing trees whose colors moped against the pearly gray of the sky. By the end of the month, we would be able to see all the way out to the swimming pool that sat in a small clearing in the trees. It was a strange place for a swimming pool. Olivia hadn’t wanted it in view of the house and gardens, and I suspected it had something to do with her sense of personal modesty. The shade that covered it meant that the well water that filled it rarely got above the frigid temperature it had been when in the ground. In the fall, the pool filled with leaves that had to be dredged out by the part-time gardener. When my eyes lighted on Eva’s little playhouse on the path, I turned back to the room.
All around me, the children in the portraits stared or looked away, depending on where the portraits were hung. Why so many children? Most of them girls. Yet Press, Olivia’s only child, had been a boy. I wondered if she had been disappointed to not have a girl instead. Had Eva filled that need for her? I certainly hadn’t been any kind of daughter to her.