It wasn’t enough to interrupt his swelling tantrum. Already his full cheeks had bloomed with pink and his eyes filled with angry tears.
Needing to find Nonie, I carried a squirming Michael back to the nursery and put him in his crib to cry out his tantrum alone. As I shut and locked the door, I felt a swell of anxiety. Failure. If I couldn’t even handle a toddler, how useful could I be to my injured father? Someone had hit him and left him helpless and broken in broad daylight on a Clareston street. I closed my eyes.
Helpless. Alone. Just like Eva.
I heard Nonie’s soft footsteps on the stairs and went to meet her.
“What is it? Where’s Michael?” Seeing my face, her gray eyes filled with fear.
“Everything’s all right.” I laid my hand on her arm, wanting to believe I was telling the truth.
Sometimes when I spoke in the hall, with the dome high above me, I felt as though I were speaking in a church or some other public building dedicated to worship or some arcane philosophy. It was suddenly a house that was no longer benign and simply grand—it breathed with purpose. But what purpose, if not for shelter and perhaps to be an ostentatious display of wealth? Surely I should know. In that moment, the house’s being felt so tangible to me that I lowered my voice almost to a whisper so that Nonie had to lean close to hear.
“Tell me, girl.” Nonie covered my hand with hers and squeezed so hard that it hurt.
“Daddy’s going to be all right, but he’s in the hospital.”
“Oh, good Lord.” Nonie swayed on her feet. I caught her and led her away from the stairs to an upholstered bench outside the morning room. “Is it his heart? What is it?”
Nonie, usually so composed, her responses measured, looked stricken with physical pain. She had been heartbroken when Eva died, and poured her grief into caring for Michael and for me, keeping our lives as normal as possible. But what I’d just told her had hurt her in a different way.
“It was a traffic accident. Someone hit him with their car but then drove away. He has a broken leg, and Buck told me some of his ribs are broken. But he’s in the hospital and awake enough to tell everyone not to worry about him. You know how he is.”
“I know how he is,” Nonie echoed. Now her voice was almost a whisper. Looking down, she took off her glasses and laid her hands on her knees. Her breath was halting. “He’s going to be all right.”
“We’ll go right away, of course. You and Michael and I. There’s no reason for Press to go. And that J.C. woman will be here any minute.” I chose not to add, “They would probably prefer to be alone, anyway.” But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking it.
Nonie took her handkerchief from her dress pocket and pressed it to her face.
“Nonie?”
She wouldn’t look at me, but she kept her eyes cast down to her lap and was quietly sobbing. Around us, the hall was as bright as it ever got during the day, bathing the walls in pale gold, showing motes of dust in the beams from the windows around the dome. The stars had faded in the morning sun.
“He’s going to be all right,” I said more firmly. “Nonie, what’s wrong?”
When she finally looked up at me, I saw something unexpected in her eyes. She looked sorry. Apologetic.
I had known Nonie most of my life. I knew she had come from a family of teachers, and that her father had died of meningitis, that she had never been married, and that her mother lived with Nonie’s sister, Moriah, who taught history in Richmond. I knew she loved deviled eggs, got tearful on hearing “Silent Night” at Christmas, voted in every election, and that she knew I had—until I went to college and she briefly went to work for another Clareston family—sometimes raided the secret stash of sugar-dusted raspberry hard candies she kept in her sweater drawer. And at that moment I knew that she loved my father.
We sat, silent except for a few delicate, retreating sniffs from Nonie as she composed herself.
In the background, Michael had stopped screaming and was now just calling for Nonie as loudly as he could. Already he was learning to try to play us against each other. A clever boy. But Nonie didn’t yet get up.
“Does he know?” I said, quietly.
A denial rose to her lips, but she thought better of it and nodded.