At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(60)

"The patterns of childhood are the patterns of adulthood," Mrs. Cavanaugh intoned.

"What should I do?" he asked, at the end of his rope. "Lock her in the basement until she's twenty-one? The kid's been through a lot the past six months. She just needs some time to fit in." He knew exactly how she felt. Since returning to Idle Point to oversee the sale of the Gazette, he had felt like the proverbial fish out of water.

"I'm not trying to be harsh, Noah, but I am concerned both for the other students and for Sophie. The sooner we nip this problem in the bud, as it were, the sooner Sophie will be integrated into the student community."

"So is she suspended or isn't she?" Might as well cut through the bull and get to the heart of the matter.

"Yes," Mrs. Cavanaugh said after a long pause, "but only for two days. Please understand that if she so much as bares her teeth at a schoolmate again , I'll be forced to take even more decisive action."

Like what, he wondered. Lethal injection? Electric chair? Just how did you handle a little girl who had lost her mother, her home, and her country with one bang of a judge's gavel.

"Fine," he said, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet. "I appreciate your time."

Mrs. Cavanaugh creaked to a standing position. "I'm sorry to hear your mother is doing poorly," she said, offering him a gnarled hand to shake. "I thought she was recovering quite well. Please give her my regards."

Noah shook her hand then left the room.

Sophie was sitting in the hallway just outside the door where he had left her. She was small-boned and petite like her mother with a heart-shaped face and a tiny pointed chin but that was where the resemblance ended. Catherine was dark and languid and indolent. She moved with the flowing grace of a cougar stalking its prey. Sophie's hair was golden, the way his had been as a little boy, and she darted rather than walked. Her movements were sharp-edged and decisive, like a predatory bird. You could hear her coming two rooms away. She fought sleep and only gave in when exhaustion overcame sheer stubbornness. He was the same way. Sleep had always seemed to be a waste of time. The only time he had ever loved sleep was when he held Gracie in his arms and—

His brain clicked off. He knew how to stop those dangerous thoughts dead in their tracks. He had had years of practice after all.

"Can we go now, Papa?" His little girl looked up at him with big blue eyes that would one day be a lethal weapon. His Sophie, a biter? Impossible.

"Sure," he said. "We can go now."

She held out her tiny little hand to him and his heart did a somersault inside his chest. It was all so new to him, so long denied, that he still had trouble recognizing it for what it was. Love, he thought. That was how love felt, the way he remembered it.

That was the way it had been with Gracie.

It was impossible to be in Idle Point and not think of her. She was around the bend at Doctor Jim's, looking fresh and competent the way she had that first afternoon. She was sitting at the end of the docks with her beautiful narrow feet dangling in the cool waters. She was standing in the shadows of the lighthouse, near the school, in the kitchen of his mother's house, every damn place he looked.

He had known it would be that way. That was one of the reasons he had stayed away from Idle Point. How could you forget when reminders of what you had shared, the dreams you'd dreamed, waited around every corner.

At least the black anger was gone. That coiled rage had been with him for too long, laying waste to everything that stepped into his path. He couldn't remember exactly when the rage had turned to bitterness, when bitterness turned to a combination of sorrow and acceptance, but he thanked God that it had happened before Sophie came into his life.

He didn't know much about bringing up a child. He was befuddled by the clothes and the tantrums and the great expanse of future unrolling in front of them. The only thing he was sure of was that she needed love in great measure and security. Steadiness. She had had damn little of it in her short life and now it fell to him to prove to her that she had finally come home to stay.

He and Sophie stepped out into an overcast October afternoon. He had always wondered why grey days seemed to bring out the best of the autumn foliage, not that there was much left to speak of. He had always meant to ask somebody about that. He should look it up in the library or surf the Internet. Parents needed to know these things. Next year Sophie would look up at him with those long-lashed blue eyes of hers and ask the same question and he had to know the answer. That was what fathers did. They answered questions and paid the bills and caught spiders.