The girl’s fingers went to the skirt of her cotton sundress, bunching the fabric as if daring Quinn to try to take it off.
“Okay. You can sleep in your dress,” Quinn quickly amended, and then added, “but maybe not your shoes.”
Lucy bent down slowly and began to work the double knots in her pink laces. Her tennis shoes were old and scuffed, so worn at the toe that Quinn was sure she could see a hint of flesh peeking through. For some reason, that more than anything tugged at Quinn’s heart. Dirty child, tangled hair, tattered shoes.
“Can I help?”
Lucy didn’t say anything, but neither did she pull away when Quinn sank to the carpet. They each worked on a different shoe, struggling with laces that had clearly been tied by someone with a sadistic streak. Thanks, Nora, Quinn thought. But as the back of her hand grazed Lucy’s, it struck her that this was the first time they had touched. Lucy didn’t pull away. It gave Quinn a crumb of hope.
She settled Lucy into the spare room off the kitchen. The bed was queen-sized and it seemed to gobble Lucy up, making her look like a tiny baby instead of a five-year-old. Six? Nora hadn’t told her how old Lucy was and Quinn didn’t consider herself competent enough to accurately guess. It had been years since she had been the Key Lake resident babysitter extraordinaire, and all Walker’s siblings were older. There were a dozen questions on her tongue, but she ignored them all and asked, simply, kindly, “Is there anything I can do?”
Lucy turned her cheek into the pillow and squeezed her eyes shut as if she could wish Quinn and the unfamiliar cabin and the entire experience away. Quinn’s heart seized. She wanted to do something, anything, to comfort her. But the girl was stone.
“My bedroom is just down the hall,” Quinn offered quietly. “And the bathroom is right beside it.” Should she have made Lucy pee before bed? Brush her teeth with one of the extra toothbrushes in the convenience drawer that was stocked with single-use toiletries? But there was nothing to do for it now. The girl was curled inside of herself. Inviolable. Not wanting to make the situation worse, Quinn backed slowly out of the room. She left the door open several inches and the light above the stove in the kitchen on. It cast a band of light straight into the spare room and onto the bed where Lucy lay. She hoped it was enough.
She poured herself a glass of wine and intended to wait up for Walker. It was no use texting him, he wouldn’t pick up his phone when he was working, and she didn’t dare to leave Lucy alone in the cabin. But by midnight, Quinn had moved to their bedroom, door thrown wide so she could listen for any hint of movement in the house. Of course, she fell asleep. She knew this about herself, that lying horizontal for any amount of time would result in a deep and dreamless slumber no matter how stressed or preoccupied she was. But Quinn didn’t imagine she could rest with Lucy nearby. A living, breathing child who she was suddenly, unfathomably, responsible for.
When she woke, sunlight was streaming in the window and Walker was sprawled beside her. Most mornings Quinn rolled over and welcomed her husband to bed. He often worked into the wee hours of the morning, and his presence beside her when she opened her eyes was always a bit of a surprise. She liked to wrap her arms around the hard plane of his weary body and press kisses onto his shoulders and back, but he rarely accepted her early morning invitations. He was too tired.
This morning, Quinn had sneaked out of bed. No kisses. Instead, she had hurried to the spare room with her heart in her throat. The reality of Lucy was an astonishing thing, like pain that hit when the morphine wore off. It felt like a bad dream, but Quinn knew it was real. Worst of all, she felt guilty for falling asleep, for not keeping vigil. What if . . . ?
Lucy was there. Sleeping or faking it, Quinn couldn’t tell. But she pulled the door shut quietly and stood in the kitchen with her head in her hands.
“You seem upset,” Walker told her, breaking her reverie by kissing the curve of her ear. Quinn hadn’t realized that her whole body was tensing, remembering, and she tried to relax her shoulders as Walker’s mouth trailed down her neck. But when his hand slid into the waistband of her shorts she pulled away and turned to face him.
“We can’t.”
“Why not?” Walker’s eyes twinkled mischievously. “The timing is perfect, right?”
What could she do but tell him? And yet, there were no words. Instead, Quinn took him by the hand and led him to the spare room. She put a finger to her lips and eased open the door. Walker stared for a moment, his face expressionless, and then he turned to her with a look of pure bewilderment.
“Who is that?”
“Lucy,” Quinn said, because it sounded better than “I don’t know.” She carefully edged the door shut again.
“Who’s Lucy?”
“Nora’s friend.”
“What?” Walker looked so disconcerted that Quinn made him sit down on one of the barstools while she started boiling water for a cup of his favorite pour over coffee. She told him the story in starts and stops, searching for words, for explanations to fill in the many gaps. All the same, she had told him everything she knew long before the kettle on the stove began to whistle.
“She’s one of us,” Quinn said, repeating Nora’s cryptic revelation.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Walker just shook his head. “This is insane.”
“I know, but—”
“What do you know about kids?”
You, because Walker was the oldest of six (ranging in age from twenty-seven to eleven) and Quinn had heard many times how he had practically raised his younger siblings. How he helped them with their homework and made them oatmeal for breakfast and could tell if his sister had had a bad day just by the way she dropped her schoolbag by the door. Walker had assured her that children were far more complicated than she imagined them to be. Quinn bristled. “I’m great with kids.”
“Well, yeah, for an hour or two, but, Quinn, this is different.”
“How?”
He ignored her. “Where is her mother? Her father? She didn’t just appear out of thin air. I think we should check the news for a report of a missing child.”