Little Girls(13)

Thoroughfare, she thought coldly.

“I’m upstairs,” Laurie called back. She went down the stairs and nearly collided with her daughter in the foyer. “There you are, kiddo.”

Susan’s face was bright and beaming. She had her hands clasped together and held out in front of her. She thrust them toward Laurie now. “Guess what I caught!”

“Caught?” Laurie said. “As in, something is alive in your hands?”

“A baby frog!”

“Oh, my . . .”

“There was a whole bunch of them in this little pond by the woods!”

“Don’t let it loose in the house.”

“I won’t,” Susan said, and spun away back down the hall. Ted was washing his hands in the kitchen. Laurie folded her arms and leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching him for several seconds before he observed her reflection in the windowpane over the sink. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark.

“It’s very pretty out there,” he commented, shutting off the water and drying his hands on a dishtowel. Laurie thought it might have been the same dishtowel Dora Lorton had been carrying around with her in the pocket of her frock. “The lawn’s a little overgrown and the trees and shrubbery need trimming, but the grounds are very nice. That Felix Lorton knew how to maintain the property.”

Laurie smiled weakly at him. She felt suddenly very tired. “Most likely, it was my father. He fancied himself a gardener and an amateur horticulturist.”

“There’s some water out beyond the trees in the back, too.”

“That’s the Severn River,” Laurie said.

“There were some kids flying kites on the other side. We saw them through a break in the trees. Susan yelled to them and I think they heard her. I think they waved, too.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “You’re going to propose something, aren’t you?”

He came and kissed the side of her face. He smelled like his cologne and there was a piece of dead leaf in his hair. She left it there and said nothing about it.

“It makes no sense to throw money away on a hotel,” he said. “Unless, of course, you’re that uncomfortable with the idea of staying here at all. . . .”

“I don’t know, Ted. . . .”

“And the place is great. It’s the first time Susan’s smiled since she learned she was forfeiting summer vacation with her friends.” He shrugged. Laurie noted how young he looked when he was excited about something, as if the boy within him was given permission to peek out on these infrequent occasions. More and more, she found she was astonished by Ted’s persistent youthfulness. He was three years older than she was yet he looked younger than her. In another five years, she would look like his mother.

“You have a leaf in your hair.”

“Also, we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get everything squared away with your father’s estate.” He raked fingers through his hair but did not disturb the leaf. “I could really get some good work done here. There has to be a million rooms to choose from. Trying to work on this adaptation in some cramped hotel room . . .” He made a face that finished the sentence for him.

“A million and one rooms,” she said. She was thinking of the windows nailed shut, the crosses gouged into the walls of her father’s study. “This is what Susan wants, too?”

“It was her idea!” He stood beside the counter with his hips cocked, his arms folded just as Laurie’s had been a moment before. “She thinks the place is great.”

“All right,” Laurie said.

“But only if you’re comfortable with it.”

“I said all right. I’m okay.”

“And only if we take down that creepy empty picture frame.” He grimaced but there was still joviality in his eyes.

“I already have.”

“Wonderful. You’re a saint.” Again, he pecked a kiss on her cheek. Then he bellowed into the next room, “Hey, Snoozin! Guess what!” His voice boomed down the empty halls of the house.

“It got loose!” Susan shouted from somewhere in the house. Then she squealed. “Daddy! The frog got loose!”

Laurie shivered. “Oh, Jesus . . . Ted . . .”

“I’ll get it,” he said, still grinning his boyish grin. He rushed past Laurie and galloped down the hall. “Where are you, Snoozin?”

He’s going to outlive me. The thought lightninged into her brain out of nowhere. He’ll be like Benjamin Button. I’ll get older and he’ll just keep getting younger and younger.

She knew dementia was hereditary, and not for the first time since learning of her father’s illness, she wondered if the horrible affliction waited for her somewhere in the future. The last conversation with her father had taken place about six months ago. By then, she was already well aware of the dementia settling cloaklike around him. Eighteen months earlier she had hired a full-time caretaker to look after him from a well-reputed service in Baltimore, which had turned out to be Dora Lorton, and Laurie had since received a few phone calls from Dora’s boss, Mr. Claiborne, on a number of occasions concerning his recommendation and ultimate inclusion of a night nurse in order to provide her father with twenty-four-hour care. But Laurie had not known the true severity of Myles Brashear’s senility until that final telephone conversation with him. Midway through their phone call, the old man’s speech became garbled. Several times she had asked him to repeat what he’d said. When his speech became clear again, the words were there, but they were arranged now in a patternless jigsaw, a litany of nonsense. Twice he called her Tanya. Biting her lower lip, Laurie had remained on the phone and did not interrupt the man until he was once again back in his own head. His apology was pitiable, and she thought that maybe he was crying on the other end of the line. She told him not to worry about apologizing to her . . . though what she really wanted to tell him was that if he’d been more available to her as a father all these years, he could have moved in with her, Ted, and Susan, to live out his remaining years with family instead of in a cold and lonely house with no one but paid caretakers to look after him. It had been on the tip of her tongue. She had watched the seconds tick by on the kitchen wall clock. She hadn’t said it.