Ethan sat at the kitchen table and listened to Gerald and answered his questions and felt the specific low anxiety of a person waiting for a verdict on something that mattered more than they had adequate words for. After Gerald left, Victoria was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Are you scared?” “Yeah,” he said, which had become his honest answer to that question.
“She’s going to be fine,” Victoria said. “The placement is solid. Dr. Hail’s report is excellent. Karen Reeves has been positive in every communication for months. Judge Alderman is going to look at Sophie and see a child who is thriving. “I know all of that,” he said. “I’m still scared.” Victoria was quiet for a moment. “Me, too,” she said, which was not something she said often.
The admission of fear without the immediate scaffolding of rational argument around it. Just the admission sitting there plain. He looked at her. She was looking at the table at her hands around her coffee mug. “You care about this,” he said. “A lot about her.” “Of course I do,” she said with a slight edge that said the observation was obvious and possibly unnecessary.
“I mean,” he paused, trying to find the accurate version. “When we started this, you told me Sophie comes first. I took that as a commitment you were making, a condition you were setting. I didn’t think you’d didn’t think I’d what? She looked at him. Didn’t think I’d actually feel it. I didn’t know you, he said.
I didn’t know what you were capable of. She was quiet for a moment. Something moved in her face that he didn’t try to categorize. She got to me fast, Victoria said finally. The first week, the way she talked, the way she thought about things, she was so she took everything seriously. Nothing was casual.
She’d been alone for a long time, and she’d gotten very interior, very self-contained, and then suddenly here was this kid who was paying complete attention to everything. A pause. She drew me. Did you know that? Somewhere around week three. She didn’t tell me. I found the page in her drawing pad when she left it open on the table.
She’d drawn me from behind, sitting at my laptop. She got my posture exactly right, the way I sit when I’m working. She watches everything, Ethan said. She watches everyone, Victoria said. The way people watch things when they don’t expect them to last. The kitchen was quiet. Outside, the April evening was doing what April evenings in the valley did.
Raining softly, steadily, the kind of rain that was almost atmospheric, more mist than drop. Victoria, he said. She looked at him. He started to say something and then stopped because what he was going to say was large and he wasn’t certain of the ground under it and he had learned slowly the hard way. That certainty mattered before you said the big things.
We should get some sleep, he said instead. Courts at 9. She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who has been offered a version of a conversation instead of the real one. She accepted it because she was Victoria and accepting things without making them difficult was one of the things she was good at.
Yeah, she said. Good night. The morning of the hearing, Sophie came downstairs wearing the green dress she’d worn once to a school concert in February, which was the dressiest thing she owned. She had done her hair carefully, pulled back in the braid that Victoria had first shown her back in November.
And she was carrying Humphrey in one arm, and had the look of someone who had prepared for a thing, and was ready for it. Ethan was in the kitchen in his button-down shirt, the same one he’d worn to the first hearing. He didn’t have a better one. And he looked at her and said, “You look great.” “I know,” she said, which was not vanity, but a kind of confirmation, a checking of the box.
Victoria came downstairs in dark pants and a gray blazer, her hair down for once. And Sophie looked at her critically and said, “You should wear that more. You look like a person instead of a meeting.” Victoria blinked. I’m not going to dignify that. I’m paying you a compliment. An unusual one. Sophie considered this. “Do you want me to say it differently?” “I want you to eat your breakfast,” Victoria said and poured herself coffee and sat down.
But the corner of her mouth had done the thing it did when she was trying not to smile. They drove to the courthouse in the truck, the three of them across the bench seat, Sophie in the middle with her hands in her lap, and Humphrey tucked into her jacket pocket, so just his head was out. The morning was clear after the rain.
The valley washed clean, the hills green, the sky a high thin blue. Ethan drove and didn’t say much, and Sophie watched the road and the fields and the early spring light on everything. “I’ve been thinking about something,” Sophie said about 10 minutes from the courthouse. “Yeah,” Ethan said. “If they give permanent guardianship today,” which they will.
She stated this with the calm certainty of someone who has made peace with the desired outcome by refusing to entertain the alternative. “Then what happens to the year?” He glanced at her. the year. You and Victoria got married for a year, the agreement. She looked at the windshield. Does that change now? If the court thing is settled, the truck was very quiet for a moment.
Victoria was looking straight ahead. I don’t know, Ethan said carefully. That’s a conversation for later. I’m just asking because I want to know, Sophie said with the directness she always used for the things that mattered most to her. Because I don’t want things to change. I know that’s probably I know you both have your own. She stopped, started again.
