A woman who had taught herself to write as an adult or close to it. The handwriting was round and deliberate, and in some places the ink had smudged where a hand had rested on the wet letters. Clara brought the box to Lily on the fourth afternoon. Lily took it into her lap, opened it, touched the cards inside with two fingers very lightly. The way you touch something, you're not sure you're allowed to touch.
"Will you show me which one she made most often?" Clara asked. Lily pulled out a card, handed it over without looking up. It was a recipe for apple cake with brown sugar. The card was soft with handling worn at the edges.
Someone had made this many times. "All right," Clara said. "Would you like to help me make it?" Lily said nothing, but she got up from the chair and followed Clara to the kitchen. They made the apple cake without speaking, except when Clara asked which jar held the cinnamon, and Lily pointed to the third shelf.
They stood side by side at the worktable, and Lily's hands moved when she knew what came next, reaching for the butter passing the wooden spoon, and Clara let her lead without drawing attention to it, because this child knew this kitchen in her bones, and it would do nobody any good to pretend otherwise. When the cake came out of the oven, and Clara set it on the table to cool, Lily stood looking at it. Then she said very quietly, "She made this every Sunday. It smells like she got it exactly right, Clara said. Lily didn't answer, but she sat down at the table and waited for it to cool.
And when Clara cut two pieces and sat across from her, Lily ate the whole piece without being coaxed. She was still quiet, but she was present in a way she hadn't been before. Ethan noticed. Clara knew he noticed because she caught him standing in the hall doorway one evening when Lily was sitting near Clara at the kitchen table, not talking. Just close the way a child sits near warmth.
He stood there long enough that Clara was aware of him and then he was gone before she could turn and she heard his boots on the stairs and the quiet of the upstairs hall. He noticed. He just didn't know what to do with what he noticed. That was all right. Clara hadn't come expecting anything from him.
She'd come for the work and the work was what was in front of her. But 2 weeks in, something happened that changed the shape of everything. It started on a Thursday afternoon. Clara was in the sideyard hanging wash when she heard a sound that stopped her cold. Not a cry, not a scream, but a sound with no good explanation.
The kind of thud and then silence that the body understands before the mind does. She was running before she knew she was running. Around the corner of the barn, past the fence, the ladder from the hoft was on the ground, and Lily was on the ground beside it, not moving. Lily. Clara dropped beside her.
Her hands went to the child's face, her neck, her wrists. Lily, talk to me. Nothing, Lily. She pressed her ear to the child's chest, heard the heart beating. Thank God.
Thank God. And put her hand flat on the small rib cage and felt it rise. Clara, it was Clem coming from the far corral. I heard a He stopped when he saw. Get Mr.
Callahan. Clara said her voice was flat and controlled and she was already looking at the child checking head and neck the way the limbs were lying searching for wrongness. Right now, Clem ran. Lily's eyes fluttered open. They were glassy, confused.