The Quintland Sisters(80)

Perhaps I have a fever—it certainly feels that way now—but my first thought was that Dr. Dafoe had come back and surely I should tell him as soon as possible that the girls were ill. This was irrational, I know, because we’d heard that very day that he was hundreds of miles away, in New York City. But I simply didn’t think for a moment that it could be an intruder. There are five full-time constables guarding the nursery around the clock: it would be next to impossible for someone to break in. But why wasn’t I more scared? Why didn’t I stop by Miss Callahan’s room to let her know that something was afoot and that I was having a look, or that she should accompany me? I don’t know why. Or maybe I did, I just didn’t realize it.

Only when I was right outside Dr. Dafoe’s office did it register with me that one of the voices was a woman’s. Miss Callahan’s. She has a lovely voice, a radio voice: a deep, slow, buttery way of speaking, which I think is one reason the girls have come to love her and do her bidding. Indeed, she’s supplanted me as their number one choice of reader at story time.

I froze. She was in Dr. Dafoe’s office with someone, that much was clear. With a man. It was none of my business, of course, how Miss Callahan was spending her evening when—I realized at that moment—she likely thought I was three miles away, in Callander, with my parents. But surely she shouldn’t be in Dr. Dafoe’s office unless she was with Dr. Dafoe himself? But with whom if not Dr. Dafoe? One of our guardsmen? M. Dionne?

I should have left well enough alone, I know that. I’m not usually so nosy. But the door was ajar and the room beyond, dimly lit. Bright enough, however, that if I stood well back I could peer in without anyone realizing I was outside in the corridor. So that’s what I did.

It was Miss Callahan all right, laughing low and smooth, seated sideways on someone’s lap. A man’s lap, as if she were one of the girls asking for a bedtime story. She was seated sideways, laughing, on George’s lap.


December 25, 1938

I HAVEN’T FELT like writing in my scribble book, and I can scarcely go back and read what I last wrote. Worse: what I’ve been writing for months. It’s been a blessing to be home with Mother, Father, and busy little Edith—it’s helped to take my mind off the nursery.

My cold has settled so soundly into my chest I worry it might be pneumonia. Mother made up a bed on the couch in the living room rather than keep Edith up all night with my coughing or risk her catching this. But Christmas was pleasant enough, with a fresh blanket of snow yesterday that made everything look clean and gleaming, just in time.

Mr. Cartwright and Lewis stopped in on Christmas Eve, early in the afternoon just as the snow started coming down. It was Lewis who brought me into Callander last week after that terrible night. Whether it is the pleasure of his work, or big city life, or the camaraderie of so many brainy men—and women—all toiling together at something they love, I don’t know, but Lewis is subtly changed. Somehow, despite all these months of letters, I felt, seeing Lewis again, as if I knew him less, not more. Or rather, that there is a lot of Lewis still to get to know. He was as courteous as ever, no question, hastening to help me carry my bags and packages out to the truck. And his quirky eye for detail remains intact. As we drove the short distance from the nursery to Callander, I could do little more than shiver and snivel, deep in my own shame and self-pity—I’d scarcely slept the night before, after what I’d seen. But Lewis, undaunted, did his best to lighten the mood.

“The perils of Christmas punch,” he said softly, pointing to a slumping company of snowmen in a farmer’s yard, much the worse for wear after the mild weather last week. I managed a smile.

Finally, just as we were pulling up outside my old home, he said: “Is everything okay, miss?”

It wasn’t, of course, but I had to laugh. “‘Miss’?” I asked. “I thought we finally got past ‘miss.’”

I think that made him blush, blush like the old Lewis, but he laughed as well. Then we sat quietly until I said I’d had a fitful sleep and was still feeling poorly. He nodded, and I worried for a moment that this would be that and I wouldn’t find a way to say that I would like to see him another time, when I was feeling better. There was an awkward pause, then we both spoke at once.

“Would you and your father like to come around for tea?” I said. And he, in the same instant, said, “I’ve built a toboggan—do you think little Edith would want to test it out?”

That made us laugh a second time, and suddenly things seemed as companionable as they’ve come to feel in our letters. He agreed he and his father would stop by on the twenty-fourth, which they did. I thought Mother would have a dozen questions for me about asking a young man around for tea—she did fix me with a surprised look when I mentioned the invitation. But when they came by yesterday and Father and Mr. Cartwright commandeered all conversation, Mother seemed chiefly preoccupied with making Christmas as perfect as possible for baby Edith, and she did. It was.


December 27, 1938

LEWIS CAME TO call for Edith and me yesterday, bringing the toy sled he’d fashioned out of wood, rope, and airplane remnants in his Montreal factory. How he managed to bring this contraption home to Callander on the train I’ll never know. Accompanying him on our sledding expedition was his brother’s little girl, Sheryl. She must be a year or two older than Edith, but the two of them got along famously, treating Lewis as their own personal Clydesdale and bidding him mercilessly to go faster, faster. It’s lucky he didn’t furnish them with a driving whip.