“Maggie said Daddy sent her.”
June whispered it, but Warren was close enough to hear.
“No, June,” he said. “I didn’t send her.”
June looked through the fence at Margaret. “Then why did you say he did?”
Margaret’s grip tightened around the paper bag. “I thought you’d feel safer if you heard that.”
“I did,” June said.
Of everything Margaret could have heard that afternoon, I think those two words were the ones she’d least prepared herself for.
I took June’s hand. “When she came to school, did you go anywhere with her?”
“No. Mrs. Bell said to leave my coat on the hook until she checked.”
“Did Maggie ever ask you to go somewhere else with her?”
June shook her head, then stopped. “Does tomorrow count?”
Warren got to his feet.
“What’s tomorrow?” I asked.
“We were going to see the ducks. She said you were going to say yes when she asked you.” June looked up at me. “I already packed my bag.”
I’d seen the little purple backpack by her bedroom door that morning. I’d stepped over it on my way to bring the laundry down.
On the other side of the fence, the bottom of Margaret’s bag gave way. A plastic container fell onto the path, and its lid came loose. Blueberries rolled under the fence and into the wood chips.
“I brought enough for everybody,” Margaret said.
Nobody bent down to pick them up.
What June put in the bag
My sister, Ellen, lived three streets from the park. I called her while we walked to the car and asked whether she could meet us at my house. By the time we got there, she was sitting on the porch, tying her hair up the way she did before she washed dishes or got down on the floor to play.
June went straight past her and upstairs. A minute later, she came down holding the purple backpack against her chest.
“Can I show you what’s in it?” she asked me.
We sat on the rug in the living room. She unzipped the bag and set everything between us. There were mittens, a juice box, a pair of binoculars made from two toilet paper rolls, and a folded slip of paper.
“I wrote your number down in case I wanted to come home,” she said.
One of the digits was backward. The number itself was right. She’d practiced it with me over breakfast for a week after her teacher asked everybody to memorize a grown-up’s phone number.
“Were you worried you’d want to come home?” I asked.
“A little. I don’t know how long it takes to see ducks.”
I rubbed a spot on her knee where the wood chips had left a red mark.
“Mom, am I in trouble for packing?”
“No, honey. I’m glad you showed me.”
“Can I still use the binoculars?”
“Of course.”
She picked them up by the string. Her chin was trembling.
“I really thought you knew,” she said.
I pulled her onto my lap. She stayed there until Ellen came in to ask whether anyone wanted grilled cheese. Even then, June made her bring the plates to the floor.
While she ate, she told us how she’d met Maggie.
It had started in the children’s room at the library. I’d been at the returns desk arguing about a book I was sure we’d brought back. Margaret had picked up a book June dropped and asked whether she wanted to hear the end. The next Saturday, she was there again. Sometimes she read. Sometimes she helped June find the dog hidden on every page of a picture book. When I called that it was time to leave, she went back to whatever shelf she’d been standing near.
I shopped for groceries with June. I watched her swim lessons through a pane of glass. I sat outside her bedroom when she had a fever because the hallway was cooler and I could still hear her breathe. And on Saturdays, in a room full of parents and small children, I’d let myself look away long enough to choose a book.
“Did she ever tell you to keep the visits a secret?” Ellen asked.
June shook her head. “She said Mom already knew her.”
I could imagine Margaret saying it. I could even imagine the smile she’d put on when she said it. She’d known me since I was seventeen. Once, when I got caught in the rain on the way to her house, she took my wet sneakers off and put them by the radiator. I remembered sitting in her kitchen in a pair of Warren’s socks while she told me to stay for dinner.
My phone rang. Warren’s name came up.
I let it ring twice before I answered.
“I’m still at the park,” he said. “My mother went home. I asked her to leave.”
“Did she tell you why she tried to pick June up?”
“She said she thought you’d put her on the school list.”
I looked at June, who was showing Ellen how the two cardboard tubes had been taped together.
“Ask her whose phone number she left with the school,” I said. “Then call me back.”
The number on the form
The next morning, the school principal brought Mrs. Bell into her office before classes started. She remembered the incident. June had run back for a drawing she wanted to take home, and Mrs. Bell had used those few seconds to ask the front desk to check the pickup list.
“June knew her,” Mrs. Bell said. “That was why I hesitated. She called her Maggie as soon as she saw her.”
“Did Margaret say who she was?”
“She said she was June’s grandmother. I asked her whose mother she was, and she said Warren’s. Then she told me you were stuck waiting for a tow.”
I put both hands flat on the desk. “I was.”
Mrs. Bell looked at the principal.
My sister had been the only person I’d called from the shoulder of the road. I’d asked her to get June if the tow truck took too long. She’d been across town and had told me to call the school first. I’d left a message at the front desk.
“Did somebody give Margaret that information?” I asked.
The principal turned a monitor toward me. There had been two calls about June that afternoon. Mine was logged at 2:41. At 2:46, another caller said she was Grace Bennett and that she’d made arrangements for a grandmother to collect her daughter. The receptionist had asked her to come to the office with identification. By the time Mrs. Bell called down from the classroom, the woman had gone.
The principal slid a piece of paper toward me. The caller had left a number.
I’d seen it on the back of an envelope two nights before. Warren had written it there himself.
I called him from the car.
“Did your mother have your phone the day she went to June’s school?”
“What day was it?”
I told him. I heard him set something down. Then he asked me to repeat the date.
“That was my father’s birthday,” he said. “I was at my mother’s apartment. I remember she asked if she could borrow my phone because hers was in the car. She walked out to the hall with it.”
“Did she tell you who she was calling?”
“She said she needed to check on a delivery.”
A bus pulled in beside me. Through its windows, I could see a boy standing in the aisle trying to get his coat zipped. The driver waited for him.
“Grace,” Warren said. “Can I come over?”
“June has school. I’m going to take her to breakfast first.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
“Does she like pancakes?” he asked.
“She likes them cut into squares. She eats the corners first.”
I heard him breathe in. It was the same sharp breath he’d taken at the bakery. This time he managed to speak after it.
“I did that too.”
“I remember,” I told him.
The six envelopes
I agreed to see Margaret that evening. Ellen took June to her apartment to watch a movie, and Warren came to my house fifteen minutes early. He stood at the sink and washed two cups that were already clean. I recognized the habit from the years when we’d been trying to get pregnant. On the mornings we were waiting for a call from the clinic, he used to empty the dishwasher before I got out of bed.
“Sit down,” I said. “You’re making me tired.”
He put the cups on the rack and sat.
Margaret arrived carrying a cloth grocery bag. She stopped just inside the door and looked at the row of hooks in the hall. June’s raincoat hung from the lowest one.
“Is she here?” Margaret asked.
“She’s with Ellen.”
Margaret nodded and followed me to the kitchen. She took five envelopes out of the bag and arranged them on the table in order. I recognized her handwriting on every one.
“I brought the others,” she said.
I left them where she’d put them.
“How did you find out her name?”
“Your sister brought a cake to the house for her first birthday. She stopped on the front walk to take a picture. I could read the name from my car when she tilted the box.”
“You were outside my house?”
“I wanted to see her.”
“Was that the first time?”
Margaret looked at Warren. He was looking down at the envelopes, his hands folded so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.
“No,” she said. “The first time was the day after she was born.”
For a moment I thought I’d heard her wrong. I remembered my sister asleep in a hospital chair, June’s mouth opening and closing in her sleep, a nurse showing me how to get the little hat over her head without waking her.
“You came to the hospital?”
“I got as far as your room. Your door was open. Ellen was holding the baby by the window.”
It was a clear morning. I’d asked Ellen to take June into the light because I wanted to see what color her eyes were. I could remember exactly where I’d been looking. I’d never looked toward the door.
“You used my name with the school,” I said. “You told my daughter Warren had sent you. What were you going to do if Mrs. Bell let her walk out with you?”
Margaret drew one envelope back toward herself.
“I was going to take her to Warren.”
His chair scraped the floor.
“You were going to bring her to me without telling Grace?”
“It was your father’s birthday. You’d come over for cake. I thought if you saw her, I could tell you what I’d done and at least you’d have her there in front of you.”
“You had all afternoon to tell me. We were sitting in the same room.”
“I’d been in the same room with you for six years, Warren. I kept opening my mouth.”
He looked at her for a long time. “When I asked whether Grace would call again, I meant that night. I wanted to get through one night without picking up the phone. You made sure I could get through the rest of my life that way.”
Margaret’s lips parted. For a second I expected her to defend herself.
“You made it easy,” she said instead.
Warren sat back. I watched him take that in. Then he nodded once.
“I did.”
The card with the drawing inside
Margaret pushed the smallest envelope toward me.
“This is the first one,” she said. “I wrote it before I knew how to spell Elizabeth. You’ll see I fixed it later.”
I opened it. A rabbit sat beneath a crooked balloon printed with the number one. Inside, Margaret had written about the cake she’d seen Ellen carry up the front walk. She’d described the white icing, the pink letters, and an edge of the box that had buckled in the heat. I’d had icing on my thumb when I lifted the cake out. I’d given June a taste, and she’d made a face that sent Ellen looking for the camera.
Someone had slipped a folded piece of paper behind the card. It was too thick to be a photograph. I unfolded it and found a drawing done in blue pencil. A big person and a small person were sitting on the front steps of a house. One figure had glasses. The other had two long braids.
“That goes with the last one,” Margaret said. “I must have put it back in the wrong envelope.”
June had signed her name at the bottom. I knew that carefully backward E.
“What did you tell her to draw?” I asked.
“She drew it on her own.”
Warren moved his chair closer. On the big figure’s shirt June had written DAD. There was a rectangle at his feet with two handles.
“That’s a suitcase,” I said.
June had drawn one just like it on a library worksheet about things you might take on a trip. I’d helped her spell toothbrush beside it.
Margaret lowered her eyes. “She asked me where her father was. I told her he used to live in that house. She wanted to know if he still had a key.”
Warren reached toward the drawing, then waited until I slid it over to him.
“Why would she ask that?” he said.
“Because sometimes she heard a car out front after bedtime,” Margaret said. “She thought it might be you coming home.”
He put his hand down beside the paper. The base of his palm covered one of the steps. He moved it away.
“When did she draw this?” I asked.
“The Saturday before I went to the school.”
That was five months ago. At the time, June hadn’t asked me Warren’s name yet. She’d taken her question to a woman she knew as Maggie, and Maggie had sent her home with the idea that her father might come through the front door.
“Tell me exactly what you said,” I told Margaret.
“I said he’d know her as soon as he saw her. I said she had a mark by her eyebrow just like his.”
Warren got up and walked into the hall. He stopped beside June’s raincoat. I went after him because I could hear him struggling to breathe, and for all the years that had gone by, I still knew the sound of him trying to keep quiet in a house where somebody was sleeping.
“She was waiting for me,” he said.
I said nothing. There was more of the story in the kitchen, and I wanted him there when I heard it.
When we came back, Margaret was holding the cloth bag in her lap.
“I want you to leave the cards,” I told her. “And if you see June at the library or anywhere else, you come to me first. Every time.”
Margaret looked at the five envelopes. “May I tell her I’m sorry someday?”
“I’ll ask her when she’s ready.”
She gathered the empty bag and stood. At the door she touched the sleeve of June’s raincoat with two fingers. Then she let it go and left.
The other girl in the picture
Ellen brought June home just before eight. June came in wearing one of Ellen’s old sweatshirts over her clothes, the sleeves folded up three times. She saw Warren at the kitchen table and stopped.
“Did you come to see me?” she asked.
“I came to see your mom,” he said. “But I’d like to say hello if you’d like that.”
June thought about it. “You can say hello while I take my shoes off.”
He went to the hall with her. I could see them from the kitchen. He stayed standing while she leaned against the wall and pushed one shoe off with the heel of the other.
“I have another question for you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“If we go to see ducks someday, can Mom come?”
“I’d like that,” he said.
She got the other shoe off and straightened up. “Good. She remembers to bring my mittens.”
Then she went upstairs to change into her pajamas. Warren came back into the kitchen. He looked at the chair where she’d poured cereal for her bear that morning.
“Would it be all right if I called on Sunday?” he asked. “I can ask her before I go.”
“Yes,” I said.
While we waited, I picked up the drawing to put it away. The blue lines had pressed into the paper so hard that I could feel them from the back. Under the fold, where I’d thought the page ended, was another set of steps. There was someone sitting on those too. A smaller girl with short hair, holding what looked like a stuffed rabbit by one leg.
June came downstairs in her pajama bottoms and Ellen’s sweatshirt. She saw the picture in my hands.
“You found my drawing,” she said.
“I did. Who’s this over here?”
“That’s Lucy.”
“Is she from school?”
June shook her head. “Maggie showed me her picture. She said Lucy has my same dad.”
Warren set his cup down. It struck the saucer hard enough to chip the rim.
“Lucy was my daughter,” he said.
I looked up at the word was. June was still looking at the drawing.
“She’s coming to see the ducks too,” she said. “Maggie promised.”
Warren pulled out the chair beside him, and for a moment I thought he meant to offer it to June. Then I saw that he needed it himself.
“Grace,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Lucy died when she was three.”
