Three Wishes(56)

She marched up the stairs, pulling him behind her but he barely took two steps when he abruptly stopped.

Hanging above the bottom stair he saw a picture.

The hall itself was painted soft beige with just enough peach to make it warm and inviting. The woodwork looked freshly painted in white but the wood of the banister and stairs had been refinished and was gleaming. The wood floors of the hall were also redone and those, and the stairs, had a muted beige carpet runner.

This would have been cultured and classic however it warred with a set of fairy lights, each light surrounded by a delicate, muted peach daisy, woven artistically through the rails of the banister giving it an offbeat feel. The only other adornment of the room was, every few steps, a picture in black and white in the same exact frame depicting the same subjects.

“My goodness,” Laura breathed, looking at the first one.

In it Lily sat in a wicker chair that had been placed at the front of the house. She looked thin and wan and had a rug thrown around her legs but she was smiling tiredly, almost valiantly, at the camera. She held a bundled, tiny baby carefully, as if she was fragile and as if the baby was the most precious thing on earth to her.

The next photo was the same except the baby was older and Lily was standing instead of sitting, holding the baby on her slim hip. She was looking down at Natasha, her long hair tucked behind her ear and she was again smiling. In the photo Natasha was gazing up at her mother, her chubby baby arm extended, her tiny fingers touching her mother’s cheek.

The next photo was more of the same, this time Natasha, a toddler and standing and Lily was crouched down and pointing to the camera, obviously calling the child’s wayward attention to it. Again Lily and also Natasha were smiling.

Each few steps was another and another, eight in all, the same photo but different. They were all of Lily and Natasha in slightly different poses, none of them rehearsed, none of them formal and in all of them Lily and Natasha were smiling.

Nate noted that Lily had cut her glorious red-gold hair from the length it used to be when he first met her, well passed her shoulders, to the length it was now, just brushing them, sometime when Natasha was five.

“Those are my birthday pictures except the first one wasn’t taken on my actual birthday because Mummy wasn’t home from the hospital yet. Fazire takes them. My Gramma Becky taught him how. She was a photographer,” Natasha informed them authoritatively as they hit the landing and she tugged him along through one of the middle of four doors.

Upon entry to his daughter’s room, Nate was momentarily stunned speechless rather than regularly so.

The room was painted in the pinkest pink he’d ever seen. He didn’t know such a pink existed. He thought that it might be a slightly better world if it that particular pink didn’t exist.

“Well,” Victor said, staring around him and struggling for something to say, “this is… er, pink.”

Natasha giggled. “I know.” She let go of Nate’s hand and started dancing around the room. “Mummy said I couldn’t have the pink I wanted because it was too shocking.”

Nate found himself wondering what was more shocking than the pink Lily had agreed.

Natasha skipped to a set of shelves while Nate glanced around. There was a small desk with spindly legs that was painted white, a matching wardrobe and chest of drawers. The centre of the room was taken up with a double bed with an intensely frilly, intensely girlie coverlet and it was festooned with ruffled toss pillows and stuffed animals. At the end, curled in a circle, was a fluffy ginger cat that completely ignored their arrival and continued existence.

Natasha gestured to the shelves.

“These are my books which Mummy used to read to me and now I read to her,” she bragged happily then lifted her hand to point to a shelf higher up, “and these are my bears which Miss Maxine gives me every year for Christmas. They’re special bears she has made ‘specially for me.”

She danced over to the cat and picked it up with a hand in its middle. The cat, obviously used to this, let its entire enormous, fluffy body go limp so that it was doubled over in her small hand.

“This is Mrs. Gunderson, my cat,” Natasha announced. “Fazire thinks it’s a silly name and not nearly nice enough for an animal of such a dignified breed. Mummy calls her Gunny. Mrs. Gunderson doesn’t sleep with me because I move around too much, she sleeps with Mummy.”

Natasha cradled the cat as she took them on the rest of the tour of her room which should have been short, considering there wasn’t much to it. However she seemed bent on introducing them to every item that had even the most minute meaning to her which was most of it. Then she stopped, dropped the cat, which made a quick getaway, put her hands on her hips, much like her friend Fazire, and looked around.

“Well!” She threw her arm out dramatically. “That’s my room. Now I’ll show you Fazire’s. I love Fazire’s room.”

Without being given an option and entirely unable to stop themselves in the face of her exuberance, they trooped out into the hall again. Laura and Victor glanced speculatively at each other and then at Nate as Natasha guided Nate by pulling at his hand. She walked to the front of the house and threw open Fazire’s door with a flourish, dropped Nate’s hand and skipped in.

Looking around he noted it was unlike any room he had ever encountered, especially a man’s bedroom. It was painted the deepest, darkest aubergine and was all but filled with an enormous bed covered in a satin coverlet which, instead of standard pillows, had a pile of turquoise-coloured round ones with buttons in the middle. Strangely it had a framed, signed poster of a baseball player on one wall and a bookshelf entirely covered, indeed exploding with books on another.