We took the kids to several different beaches, a whaling museum, an aquarium, often stopping after lunch at an ice-cream parlor where we made our own sundaes. In the early afternoon I played with the kids in the pool while Kay read her book on a lounge chair in the grass, then I took them up and put them down for their naps. They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep. While I read and sang to them, I imagined going to my room and sleeping, too, but when I got up to my third-floor turret I always had a new surge of energy. I continued the letter I’d started to Gina all about my life in the Pike mansion. I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Bront?, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.
When the children woke up from their naps, I played with them outside on the lawn until hunger made them cranky and we went and visited Margaret in the kitchen for a snack. Dinner wasn’t served until eight, when I’d wrestle Elsie into her highchair （she much preferred a lap, especially at that hour） then retreat to the kitchen where I was given my dinner at the oilcloth table. Sometimes Thomas or Margaret would sit with me for a minute or two, but they were always popping up to plate and serve a new course. Stevie and Elsie rarely made it to dessert. Kay often poked her head in the kitchen, signaling that I should evac them upstairs. Of course they put up a fight. Dessert had been held out to them as a reward for good behavior at dinner, but they had “fussed,” as Mrs. Pike called it, and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.
This is how it went for the first six days. Then Hugh arrived. He pulled up in a scraped-up Malibu sedan. We were at breakfast, which I ate with the rest in the dining room to help manage the kids’ morning energy. Margaret was the one to notice. We all went out to the loggia, as Mrs. Pike called it, a covered portico held up by a series of arches facing the driveway.
“But Thomas is supposed to get you at Logan this afternoon,” Mrs. Pike called to him as she began making her way down all those steps.
Hugh leaned against the car. “Then I’ll go back to the airport this afternoon and wait for him.”
“Don’t be silly.” Mrs. Pike, in stockings and pumps, took each uneven step carefully.
“Look at him. He won’t move an inch toward her,” Kay said to me. Then, down to him, “Where’s Molly Bloom?”
“Molly Bloom’s got a new job.”
“She’s not coming?”
“Nope.” He tugged a canvas duffel out of the back. “You get me all to yourselves.”
When Mrs. Pike reached the gravel, he put out his arms and said, “Motherlode.”
She lifted her heels off the ground to kiss him.
“Who’s Molly Bloom?” I asked Kay as we waited for them to come up. I had Elsie in my arms and she had Stevie in hers. They were both squirming but we ignored them. Kay and I had already gotten to that point of not having to communicate about the kids, not having to point out how perilous those steep steps would be for them.
“Hugh’s wife.”
Hugh looked too young, too disheveled, to have a wife. He looked like a boy coming home from boarding school. He was lean and seemed to be still growing, his torn, unwashed pants an inch short, his arms waiting for more muscle. And he had wild teenage hair, frizzy and unable to lie down. He climbed the steps with his arm around his mother and they looked like a pair in a movie, the rich old lady befriending the hobo.
When he got to the top he wrapped his arms around his sister and Stevie and squeezed till they squealed.
He turned to me. His eyes were a pale, watery green. “An alien in our midst.”
“This is Carol. She’s my mother’s helper.”
“Hello, Cara.” He ruffled Elsie’s hair instead of shaking my hand.
“Carol,” Kay said.
But he didn’t pay attention. He reached down and lifted Stevie high in the air and broke into song about someone begging a doctor for more pills.
Stevie shrieked his laughter.