Chapter 7
Ember's POV
The door was open, and the hall light came down slanted behind Vincent, laying his shadow all the way to the tops of my feet. His raised hand hung in midair with the knuckles less than a fist's width from the panel.
When he saw my face it stayed there a beat before it dropped back into his pocket, the way a hand moves when a man has only been passing by and has nothing to explain.
I dealt with my own face first, the back of my hand across it, pressing hard at the corner of my eye to push the heat back down while I swallowed the tightness in my throat along with it. My knee still ached dull and deep, so I got myself upright against the frame and leveled my shoulders.
"I'm fine," I said, steadier than I'd expected. "I'm going downstairs to find my mother."
He didn't step aside. The light lay in bands on the dark carpet, receding toward the head of the stairs, and somewhere below there were voices, blurred by the floorboards between us.
He looked at me the way you look at a chair somebody has set down in the wrong room, with no temperature in it at all.
"You know what your mother came here for," he said. "You're the same."
My fingers closed tighter on the frame. "A woman who climbed out of a place like that, dragging a daughter behind her, getting through a stranger's door ahead of a storm." He said it slowly, as though he thought I wouldn't keep up. "I'm not going to pretend I can't read that."
I looked up at him. He took his glasses halfway off and pushed them back on, an adjustment as careless as straightening a cuff. "One thing for you," he said, and his voice didn't rise at all. "Follow the rules here. Don't put on a show in front of my father. Overdo it, and I'll send the two of you away together."
He turned and went, his steps light, folding himself in at the far end of the corridor, and he didn't pull the door shut behind him, as if what he'd said wasn't worth the effort of his hand. I closed it myself, leaned back against the panel until my breathing settled, then crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.
What the maid had told me that afternoon came back in pieces. There were welcome gifts on the table, she'd said, one from Mr. Hawthorne and one from the young master, and I shouldn't stand on ceremony about either.
I hadn't thought twice about it then. Now every word landed sharp, and the order of them mattered. The snake had come out of the young master's box. Nobody had forgotten to take it away, and nothing had gone wrong anywhere along the line.
Somebody had chosen the box and weighed it, and then waited for me to lift the lid with my own hand, and he had timed his place outside the door so he would be standing there to watch my face when it happened.
Black Creek had taught me plenty of kinds of mean. Some of it hid inside a raised voice, some in the smell of liquor, some in my grandmother's word for me, the one she used like it was my name. Vincent's kind was new. Clean, presentable, no need to wash his hands afterward.
The nausea climbed up from the bottom of my stomach in a slow wave. I looked down and pressed at the red ring around my knee. I wanted to give it back to him, and once that thought stood up I couldn't sit it back down, because every hit I'd taken my whole life I'd had to earn back somehow, and that was how I'd lasted in that house.
But right now I couldn't even say which room I slept in, and that was the whole thing in one sentence.
Rain hammered the window glass. I listened to it a long time, and in the end I decided not to make a scene tonight. In the morning I would ask my mother whether we could leave.
The next morning I woke to light. The rain had stopped, a seam had opened in the clouds, and it came flat through the tall windows down the length of the hall, bright enough to show the fine nap of the carpet.
I lined up what I was going to say twice in my head, tone and pauses both, and my fingers tapped the rail once and twice to count the beat for myself.
The dining room door stood half open, and the sweetness got out first, butter and sugar, something baked not long ago. My mother stood beside the table in a red dress I'd never seen, the hem just past her knee, thin stiff fabric lifting as she turned.
She had lipstick on, a true red with a little orange in it, a color she would never in her life have worn to a parent-teacher conference.
Arthur stood across from her with one hand on the back of a chair, head tipped down while he listened, his mouth loose. My mother was smiling too, and I watched it happen in order, the eyes going soft first and the voice following, the cup steady, her shoulders easy, her back not braced against anything, even the angle of her wrist different from any angle I'd known it to take.
Back home she had walked like somebody behind her was always about to call her back.
I stopped on the stairs. She saw me first and lifted her voice to reach me. "You're up? "
"Yeah." I came down the rest of the way and stood at the edge of the table.
"Did you sleep all right?" she asked.
Everything I had lined up jammed against the back of my teeth and rolled twice, and what came out was, "Yeah. I'm hungry."
She smiled and turned into the kitchen for a plate, and I watched her back from across the table, the red hem swinging with her steps. Arthur said something behind her, and she answered over her shoulder with a lightness I hadn't heard in years, and I put the whole speech away.
If we left now, she'd go back to that drafty house in Black Creek, back to my grandmother's complaints before it was light and my father's television running at the wall all day for nobody.
When we had finished, my mother wiped her hands and carried a white china plate out of the kitchen, a few things on it still warm, browned at the edges, the glaze along the top seeping. "Take these up to Vincent," she said. "He hasn't come down all morning. He barely ate yesterday either."
I took the plate and didn't answer. Upstairs was darker, every curtain pulled, and I knocked twice at the end of the hall and got nothing. I knocked twice more, harder, and still nothing did.
A house this size, sleeping this late meant he'd been awake most of the night, and the picture of that snake came up uninvited, soft and green, spreading flat across the back of my hand. So I knocked three more times, waited half a second, and knocked again.
The door was yanked open from the inside and slammed into the wall. Vincent stood there with his hair wrecked and shadows under his eyes, a person dragged up hard out of deep sleep.
He had no shirt on.
His shoulders were broad, an old faded scar under his collarbone, the line from his chest to his stomach pulled tight in a shape you only get from repeating the same motion every day without ever missing one.
My eyes stayed on him half a second too long and scrambled back fast. My throat moved, and I swallowed the spit in my mouth, small, but the hall was quiet enough that I heard it perfectly.
The glance down was one I hadn't meant to give and gave anyway, quick, the drawstring of his sleep pants hanging in a loose knot, one end below his hipbone.
He had pants on.
The relief was so spineless that I was already annoyed at myself before it had finished.
