What? Elsie got sick the last week of November. Not seriously, as it turned out, a head cold that made her miserable and clingy and demanded far more performance from the adults around her than her actual condition warranted. But for two days, her fever ran high enough to worry him, and those two days were the clearest window he'd had yet into who Vivien Blackidge was, when the outer composure stopped being necessary. She was good with sick children, not in a trained way, or not only in a trained way, but in a way that looked native, like someone who had done it before for someone she cared about.
She kept track of the fever with a close attention that he recognized as real anxiety, not performed concern. She made broth from things she found in the kitchen and got Elsie to drink it by making it into a game that involved a story about a bear who needed soup to be brave. She sat with Elsie in the dark when the child couldn't sleep and talked to her quietly, the words low enough that Gideon at the door couldn't hear them, only the tone, steady, unhurried, the kind of voice that told a child the world was still in its right order. He sat up with them both, though Vivien didn't ask him to, and seemed faintly surprised when she came out to get water at midnight and found him in the chair by the fireplace, awake. "The fever's down," she said.
"She's sleeping. " All right. He didn't get up. Thank you. She stood in the doorway between the main room and the hall, holding the water glass. She was in the clothes she'd been in all day, not having stopped to sleep herself, and she looked tired in a way that her face didn't usually allow.
She called me mama, she said. She said it carefully like she wasn't sure what to do with it. When she was half asleep. She said she asked for her mama and then she looked at me and she said she stopped. He looked at the fire.
He didn't say anything for a moment because he was working out what to say. She doesn't remember her mother. He said, "Not really. She was two when Clara died. She knows there was a mama.
She just doesn't. It's more an idea than a memory for her. " Vivien was quiet. She wasn't being confused, he said. She wasn't mixing you up with someone else. He heard her exhale slowly.
He didn't look at her face because this seemed like a moment she was entitled to have in private, even in a shared room. You should get some sleep, she said after a while. You should, too. I'll sit with her a little longer. He didn't argue.
He went to bed, and through the wall, he heard her settle into the chair by Elsie's bed. And after a while, he heard nothing, which meant Elsie was sleeping and Viven was watching. And the house was quiet in the way it was sometimes quiet now. Not empty quiet the way it had been for 3 years, but full quiet, the way a place sounds when the people in it are simply at rest. That difference, he was finding, was a harder thing to be indifferent to than he'd expected.