Chapter 3
Two days before that hallway moment, I told myself the box was safe.
It was a Thursday. Ryan had left for the office early, and the house was quiet except for the hum of the chandelier in the closet hallway. I had the cream envelope tucked inside the black shoe box on the top shelf, behind my winter scarves where Maya couldn't reach and Ryan wouldn't look. I'd checked it that morning, straightened the lid, and decided I would deal with it after the foundation gala on Saturday. One more day of normal wouldn't hurt anything.
I was getting ready for the fitting. The black patent Mary Janes Maya was supposed to wear with her dress had a scuff on the toe from the sidewalk outside her music class. I took them out of their tissue, set the small dark wooden stool in the middle of the marble to sit on, and opened the tin of black polish I'd bought years ago and never thrown away. The smell hit instantly, sharp and chemical.
I dabbed a rag in and started buffing. The patent leather caught the warm light and went glossy again under my hand. I was half-listening to the monitor crackle when my phone rang on the marble island behind me.
It was the gala coordinator, asking about seating cards. I said just a second, and I stood to grab the list from the drawer. I left the tin open on the seat of the stool, the rag balanced on its rim, one shoe polished and the other waiting. I thought I'd be gone twenty seconds.
Maya had followed me in without a sound. She liked that hallway because her socks slid on the marble and the chandelier made little rainbows on the walls. She had her white dress on already because I'd let her play dress-up while I worked.
When I turned back from the call, she wasn't by the doorway anymore.
She was at the stool. She'd pushed it with both hands the six inches toward the built-ins, climbed up on it the way she always did to reach the light switch, wobbling on her tiptoes. Her hands were already black.
She'd seen the open tin and the shiny shoe and done what any two-year-old would do. She'd plunged her fingers straight into the polish.
"Maya, no," I said, not loud, and moved fast.
She looked up at me, surprised, her palms and fingers coated thick and wet, dripping black between her knuckles. In her other hand she held the Mary Jane I'd just polished, now smeared with prints.
But that wasn't what stopped my breath.
Behind her, the high shoe box I'd hidden everything in was on the floor. In climbing, reaching, she'd grabbed the edge of the low shelf for balance, and her weight on the stool must have bumped the built-in just enough. Or she'd tugged at the tissue hanging down. I never saw exactly. The box had tipped, slid, and fallen.
Its lid was off. Tissue was half out. And the cream envelope was gone from where I'd left it.
I knelt and wiped her hands with the rag, which only smeared it more. The polish was oil-based and clung. I tried to be gentle, but she started to cry softly, that restrained whimper she does when she knows she's done something wrong but doesn't understand what.
"It's okay, honey, it's okay," I whispered, holding her wrists so she wouldn't touch her dress. I looked around the marble for the envelope while I talked. My eyes were frantic.
I found it quickly, or I thought I did. It had landed face-down against the base of the wood paneling, maybe a foot behind the stool's leg. I picked it up, relieved to feel the weight of it. The red SIX DAYS AGO stamp was smudged now with a small black fingerprint on the corner, but it was intact. I slipped it back into the shoe box, shoved the tissue in on top, and pushed the box back onto the high shelf, higher this time, wedged tight against the wall.
I wiped the marble where the box had hit. I threw the rag away. I carried Maya to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands with soap and water, but the polish had already stained the creases of her palms, the cuticles, under her nails. It wouldn't come off completely. I told myself it would fade by morning and no one would notice if I kept her socks on and her hands clean.
I never got down on my hands and knees to look behind the built-in.
If I had, I'd have seen that when the box fell, a second thing had happened. The impact had knocked the envelope's thin carbon copy sheet loose — the pale yellow second page that I'd tucked behind the letter itself and forgotten about. It had slid out and slipped sideways into the narrow shadow gap between the back of the cabinet and the marble baseboard, just out of sight from standing height.
May you like
From where I stood holding Maya on my hip, the hallway looked clean again. The stool was back in place. The shoe was wiped. The box was hidden.
I thought I'd contained it all over again.
