* * *
The park was a ten minute walk. Lily knew the way and I followed her lead, hands in my pockets, matching her pace. She didn't talk much. Neither did I.
It wasn't a big park. A swing set, a slide, a play structure shaped like a boat that had seen better days. A couple of other kids were on the swings, a woman on a bench with a stroller, nobody paying attention to anyone else. Lily stopped at the edge of the rubber mulch and looked at the equipment.
"You want to go on the swings?"
She shook her head.
We found a bench. She sat next to me with the rabbit in her lap and watched the other kids the way you watched television—present but not engaged, taking it in from a distance. One of them, a boy maybe a year older, was working the jungle gym with a kind of manic energy, up and over and down and back again. Lily watched him for a while without expression.
After a bit she said, "I'm cold."
I looked at her. She had her jacket on, the purple one with the fox on the pocket. Her cheeks were pink. I'd assumed it was the wind.
"You want to head back?"
She nodded.
We'd been there maybe twenty minutes.
The walk home was slower than the walk there. She didn't complain, just moved at a pace that kept falling behind, and I kept adjusting without thinking about it. By the time we got back, she went straight to the couch and curled up with the rabbit and didn't ask for anything.
I made soup for dinner. Canned, the kind with the small pasta shapes, which seemed right. She sat at the table and looked at it and ate maybe six spoonfuls before she put the spoon down.
"Not hungry?"
She shook her head.
I ate mine standing at the counter and watched her stare at her bowl, not knowing what to do about it.Grief, I told myself.She's grieving. You don't eat when you're grieving.That was probably true. It was also probably true that she was five and I had no baseline and no way of knowing the difference.
She asked to go to bed at six-thirty. I didn't know if that was normal either. I took her up, stood in the doorway while she got herself under the covers, turned the hall light on, and left the door open the way she seemed to want it.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Night," she said. Already far away.
I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table with the list. The things I couldn't do anything about tonight, I left alone.Jobwas on there—mechanic, ask around—and that I could do something about. I found three shops within twenty miles on my phone, then looked up two more in the phone book Cassie kept in the kitchen drawer. I spent an hour on it. I called the ones still open, left messages for the rest, and wrote down names and numbers in the margin of the list in the order I'd try them tomorrow. It wasn't much, but it was the shape of something. A man with a job was a different proposition than the one Karen Phelps had sat across from two days ago.
The house was very quiet when I stopped. Outside, a car went past, the sound of its tires on the pavement fading into nothing.
Around ten, I went up to check on her.
She was on her side, facing the wall, the rabbit tucked under her chin. I stood in the doorway. Something about the way she was lying—too still, too flat—made me go in.
I put my hand on her forehead and took it away again fast, the way you pulled back from something hot without deciding to. Then I put it back, slower, making sure I was reading it right.
Her skin was dry and radiating heat in a way that had nothing to do with the blankets. I moved my hand to her cheek. Same. I could feel it against my palm from an inch away before I even touched her. Her breathing was shallow and fast, her lipsslightly parted, a faint color in her face that I'd put down to the cold at the park and shouldn't have.
She didn't stir. Last night she'd surfaced when I'd gone past her door to use the bathroom, called out something half-asleep that I hadn't caught. She didn't move now.
I stood there in the dark of her room with my hand on my five-year-old niece's forehead and tried to think straight. Lily had coverage—she had to. Cassie wasn't the kind of person who'd let that lapse. There'd be a card somewhere, a policy number, a pediatrician already on file. Somewhere in this house was all of it, in a drawer or a folder, and I hadn't found any of it yet because I hadn't been able to make myself go through Cassie's things.
Which meant if I took her in tonight, I'd be walking into an ER at ten o'clock with a sick kid and no documentation. I had no idea who her doctor was, what she'd been seen for, or whether she was allergic to anything. I didn't know what a fever in a child this age meant—how high was too high, or what you did first. I knew what Google would tell me, and I knew I couldn't trust it. Not with this. Not tonight.
I went downstairs. I paced the kitchen once, twice—the length of it and back—trying to settle the jump in my chest. Then I started going through the drawer by the fridge, the one where people kept everything they didn't know what to do with. A takeout menu, batteries, a screwdriver, rubber bands. Nothing.
I tried the drawer in the hallway. A notepad, some pens, a birthday card still in its envelope. I stood in the middle of the hallway, my heart thudding against my ribs, and tried to think like Cassie. Where would she put the important things?