Gideon, standing at the stove and pretending to be occupied with it, heard something in the exchange that he thought Martya had missed. Not a rebuke exactly, but a quiet closing of a door on a line of conversation that wasn't going anywhere Vivien was willing to go. After they left, Marta said to her husband on the road home, though she didn't know Gideon could still hear her across the cold in the distance, "Refined woman like that coming all the way out here makes no sense. Something she's not saying. " Marta wasn't wrong. Gideon knew she wasn't wrong.
He'd thought the same thing since the moment he'd watched Viven scan that train platform like she was expecting pursuit. He just didn't yet know what to do with the knowledge. It was the doll that got to him. Elsie had a cloth doll she'd had since she was two. One of the few things left over from a time Gideon didn't like to think about.
It was not a fancy thing, handmade by someone with uneven stitching and button eyes that didn't quite match. But Elsie treated it with the specific reverence children extend to objects that have come to stand for something larger than themselves. On the eighth day of Viven's presence in the house, the doll caught on a loose nail in the wall by Elsie's bed. And when Elsie pulled it free, the seam along one arm tore open badly. The stuffing, dried grass and scraps, began leaking out.
Gideon heard Elsie crying from the barn and came in to find her in the main room with the doll in her hands and the kind of grief on her face that only children can show cleanly, the whole of it right there on the surface with nothing held back. He went to her and held her and said the things he knew to say, that it could be fixed, that it would be all right. But the truth was, he had no idea how to fix a cloth doll, and he owned nothing that resembled sewing supplies. Viven came in from outside, stopped when she saw Elsie, and took in the situation in a single glance. "May I look? " she asked Elsie.
Elsie, still crying, held out the doll. Viven took it, turned it over carefully, studied the torn seam. I can fix this," she said. "How? " Elsie asked. The crying had gone down to hitching breaths.
"I have something in my trunk. Come with me. " He watched them go to Vivien's room together. Elsie's small hand in Vivienne's, both of them disappearing through the door. He heard the trunk's heavy lid being opened, the particular sound of it. He heard Elsie say something he couldn't make out.
And then he heard her say, "Oh, in the way, that means a child has been shown something remarkable. " He didn't follow them. He stood in the main room and waited. 40 minutes later, they came back out. Elsie was carrying the doll, repaired, and the seam where the tear had been was now stitched with a thread that caught the firelight, golden, bright against the dull cloth, visible and intentional rather than hidden. She's stronger there now," Elsie told him with complete conviction.
Vivien said that what gets mended with love grows stronger than it was before. Gideon looked at his daughter's face and then looked at Vivien, who was standing in the doorway of her room with her arms at her sides and her expression carefully neutral. She was watching him the way people watch when they're uncertain of their welcome. He didn't know what to say, which was not a familiar condition for him. He said, "That's good, Elsie. " Which was not adequate, but was what he had.