Chapter 4
— Upstairs
The caterer left at noon, and the house fell quiet in the way it always did after a busy morning, the way a room feels quiet after the guests have gone. I stood in the kitchen with my coffee and listened to the sounds of the house settling. Dolores was putting the clean tablecloths away in the linen cupboard, and Veronica was by the front door, seeing the caterer out.
"Daddy, can Veronica help me get ready?" Poppy called down from the top of the stairs.
I looked up. She was standing at the top of the stairs in her play dress, her curls bouncing around her shoulders, her favorite doll tucked under one arm. She looked small and bright and entirely herself, and I smiled at her the way I always did when I saw her at the top of those stairs.
"Get ready for what, sweetheart?" I asked.
"For the dinner," she said. "Veronica says she wants to help me get ready, so I look neat."
Veronica turned from the front door and smiled up at her. "That is right, Poppy. Come upstairs with me, and I will brush your hair and help you choose your dress, and we will make you look beautiful for the evening."
I hesitated, but it was a small thing, and Veronica was going to be Poppy's stepmother in a matter of days. I told myself the unease was only the leftover feeling from the night before.
"All right," I said. "But not too long. She still has her dolls to finish with."
Poppy came down two steps and then ran back up, and Veronica followed her, her heels clicking softly on the wooden stairs. I watched them go, and then I went back to the kitchen to finish my coffee. Dolores was folding napkins at the table, and she glanced toward the stairs and then back at me, and I saw something in her face that I did not stop to read. She had worked in this house since before Meredith died, and she knew Poppy better than anyone alive. If she was worried, I should have asked her why. I did not ask. I wish I had.
The house grew quiet after that. Too quiet, I would think later, but at the time it only felt peaceful. There was no sound of dolls being lined up, no small voice telling stories to a row of toys, no laughter from the room at the top of the stairs. There was only the tick of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator and the faint sound of a drawer opening and closing somewhere above me. I finished my coffee and washed the cup, and I went out to the workshop to check on the chair I had been sanding. The afternoon sun was warm on my shoulders, and the garden was bright, and the tree stood at the far end of the lawn with its branches spread wide.
I worked for perhaps half an hour, sanding the arms of the chair and oiling the joints, and I thought about the wedding and the life waiting on the other side of it. I told myself Meredith would have approved, and that she would have been glad Poppy had someone.
When I came back inside, the house was still quiet. Dolores was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for supper, and she looked up when I came in, and her face was troubled.
"They have been up there a long time," she said.
"She is helping her choose a dress," I said. "It takes time."
Dolores did not answer. She went back to the potatoes, but her hands moved more slowly than usual, and she kept glancing toward the stairs. I went to the foot of the stairs and called up.
"Poppy? Are you all right up there?"
There was a pause, and then Veronica's voice came down, smooth and calm. "We are fine, Beau. We are just finishing. Give us a few more minutes."
I stood at the foot of the stairs for a moment, listening. I heard the sound of a drawer closing, and the soft rustle of fabric, and then nothing. No small voice. No laughter. No dolls. Only the tick of the clock in the hallway, louder than it had been before, and the feeling, small and cold, that something in my house had gone wrong while I was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in my hand.
"Poppy," I called again, a little louder. "Come down now, sweetheart. It is time for supper."
There was another pause, longer this time, and then Veronica's voice came down the stairs again. "She is coming, Beau. She is just putting on her shoes."
I waited. I thought about calling up again, but I did not want to frighten her, and I told myself that a little girl choosing a dress could take as long as she liked, and that patience was the price of being a father. Still, the quiet pressed on me, and I found myself listening harder, waiting for the sound of her small voice.
I waited at the foot of the stairs while the clock ticked and the house held its breath, and I did not know that the little girl who would come down those stairs was not the same little girl who had gone up them an hour before. I did not know that the curls I had brushed that morning, the brave curls her mother had loved, were gone. All I knew was that the house was quiet, and the quiet was wrong, and I was about to learn what it meant.