A silence. Mama used to say I had a gift for drawing. Emily said she said it like a thing remembered from a great distance, like something that had been packed away, and she wasn't sure it was still there. Did she? Clare said she used to make me practice.
Said I had a good eye. Emily looked at the window. I haven't drawn anything in 2 years. There's paper in the desk in the parlor, Clare said. I saw it when I was reorganizing.
Emily looked at her. Go draw something after school, Clare said. The bread will be here. Lily was the easiest. Lily was 9 years old, and she had a child's instinctive understanding that things were broken and a child's instinctive willingness to let them be fixed.
She came to Clare with the natural confidence of someone who has decided without making much fuss about it that here is a person to be trusted. On Clare's fourth day, Lily brought a broken music box to the kitchen table and set it down in front of her while she was mending. Mama's Lily said. P tried to fix it, but he's better with fence posts than music boxes. Can I look at it?
Clare said. Lily pushed it toward her. It was a small thing, ivorycoled with a dancing figure on the lid whose movement mechanism had jammed. Clare turned it in her hands, opened the base, looked at the mechanism. A small piece of the windup gear had come off the track.
She worked it carefully back with the tip of a hair pin. She wound it. The dancer moved faintly. A tinkling melody filled the kitchen. Thin and distant and sweet.
Lily's face did something complicated. Not just happiness, something deeper, something that had grief in it alongside the happiness. The way a thing recovered always carries the weight of its loss. Mama used to play it at night, Lily said when we were going to sleep. It's a pretty song, Clare said.
Lily reached out and closed the lid and the music stopped. She held it for a moment. Then she looked it up at Clare. Are you going to stay? She said.
Clare felt the question like something physical. "I'm here right now," she said carefully. "That's not what I asked," Lily said with the particular precision of a 9-year-old who does not accept evasive answers. Clare looked at her. "I don't know yet," Clare said.
"And that at least was entirely true. But while I'm here, I'm going to be here completely. Does that make sense?" Lily considered this for what felt like a very thorough amount of time. Yes, she said at last.