“All right. Go home. Come back Thursday.”
“Oh, but I can’t,” Daisy protested, and as clearly as looking into a crystal ball, I could see her claiming that she had some party or excursion she simply could not miss. Honestly, the fact that she had spared a full day for this was somewhat exceptional.
“We’ll come back for it,” I said. “Come on, Daisy.”
We went back to the car, Daisy fretting the whole time about whether the woman was trustworthy or if anyone had seen us or if it was some kind of fraud, the way so many curatives were. I stifled the urge to smack her, and instead said her name. She turned to me with big scared eyes, and I sighed.
“Daisy, be quiet.”
For a miracle, she was, all the way back to the house on Willow Street. I could see the single yellow rectangle of the judge’s study; otherwise the house was dark and silent. I started to get out of Daisy’s roadster, feeling somehow far more grown-up and more worldly than I had getting into it that morning.
Daisy surprised me by grabbing me from behind in a hug. She was always an affectionate girl, but there was a distance to her little peckish kisses, her embraces. There was no space at all between us in this hug, and for a second, I leaned my head back against hers.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.
I went upstairs where the ghost of Anabeth Baker stood in the hallway, staring at me balefully as I came up the dim stairs. She no longer terrified me as she had when I was little, watching from darkened doorways, snatching at my ankles from under the bed so that I had to leap to get under the covers every night. She did not like me, but the dislike had turned at least a little more cordial. The air around her was chilly, and I knew not to look too long into her eyes because it could leave me with a queasy feeling that wouldn’t fade for hours.
Instead of walking past her this time, however, I stopped to look at her, taking in her old-fashioned dark dress, the smooth pompadour of her hair, and the ring of dark bruises around her neck.
“What was it like for you?” I asked. “Were you careless too?”
* * *
Thursday came, and Daisy caught me on the way to school. We hadn’t talked since we had gone out to Fulbright’s a few days before, but she showed up as if we had arranged it, just a few moments before I would have been on the Blakefield grounds. She smiled to the confused students behind me as I got in, waving at them with the graciousness of a queen.
“You look better,” I said, and she laughed.
“Oh, darling, I am simply terrible! I haven’t slept a wink since last we spoke, and look here…”
She lifted her right hand from the gearshift and showed me her fingertips, which were all neatly bandaged save for her thumb.
“I was quite out of my head last night, and I wanted a cup of tea. It started out just right, but then before I knew it, I was yelping like anything and all of the hot water steaming on the floor, and Mother’s ceramic box where she keeps the loose leaf shattered. It was just awful, Jordan…”
I stayed quiet, leaning back in my seat and helping myself to one of her cigarettes. I imagined that under her bandages, it would be the pads of her fingertips that were burned. She hadn’t just brushed her hand against the side of the copper kettle, she had done something more deliberate.
She shook her head, telling me how her father had scolded her in the morning and given her money to go buy a new ceramic tea box before her mother came home. I let her paint whatever response on me she liked, and as we drove, I looked out over the drab March morning, where the sun was struggling to come out, where people were making their way to school or to work and completely separate from who and what Daisy and I were. We might have been angels drifting through Louisville on some kind of divine mission, invisible in our white roadster.