Kris took a step forward, her legs quaking as if they might give out at any moment.
“Sadie!” Kris yelled.
The wind shifted outside, sending thick drops of rain thudding against the great room’s windows.
An image flickered through Kris’s mind: the handprints she had found on the glass when they first arrived, the remnants of a thousand childlike hands pounding desperately to be freed.
Quietly, cautiously, she moved toward the hallway. A floorboard creaked under her weight, and Kris flinched. She was immediately ashamed. She knew there was nothing waiting for her in the darkness.
Then why are you afraid?
Like a steam engine propelled across tracks, Kris crossed the rest of the way to the hall. She reached into the inky black and searched the wall with her hand until she found the switch. She gave it a hard, irritated flick.
Light exploded into the hallway, driving the dark away until it was nothing more than quivering shadows.
No one was there.
“Sadie? Sa-die …”
At the top of the staircase, a board gave a telltale squeak. Kris listened patiently as footsteps crept down the stairs until a pale form, barely visible in the thick gloom, appeared at the end of the hall.
“Mommy?” Sadie called.
“Yes?”
“Do we have tea? Like hot tea? Like we have back home.”
It took a moment for Kris’s confused mind to understand what Sadie was asking. Then she thought back to the things she had bought at the supermarket.
“Yeah,” she said. “We have tea. You want me to make some? We can sit in the kitchen or at the coffee table.”
Sadie shook her head. “I want you to bring it upstairs,” she said. “I want to have a tea party with you.”
There were no teacups and saucers in the lake house, and Sadie’s plastic play set was on a shelf in her bedroom back in Colorado, so Kris had to improvise with two mismatched coffee mugs. But the tea smelled wonderful, a mixture of citrus and wildflowers that curled up into the air on ribbons of steam.
Sadie was waiting in the main room upstairs. Her plush animals were arranged in a semicircle with Sadie at the center. In her lap was Bounce, his head hanging low on his thin neck. His crooked eyes stared in two different directions.
Rain tapped against the windows along the north wall. It sounded like the fingertips of some unknown visitor asking to be let in.
Kris placed a folded paper towel on the floor in front of Sadie and sat one of the mugs—a low, wide cup with sloping sides that looked most like a teacup—on top of it. She raised her own mug to her lips and blew softly across the surface of the tea before taking a sip.
“It’s still a little hot,” she told Sadie.
Nodding, Sadie looked down at her mug but did not attempt to touch it.
They sat and listened to the rain tapping on the window above the dresser like a friend asking to be let inside.
“This is nice,” Kris said, breaking their silence.
Sadie nodded, but she did not look up from her mug. She seemed entranced by the finger of steam twisting into the air.
“It sounds like you’ve been having a lot of fun lately.”
Again, Sadie nodded.
“What have you been doing up here?”
“Playing,” Sadie said.
“Playing what?” There were no board games up here. No toys beyond the stuffed animals. In all their weeks here, Sadie had never asked once for the iPad still stashed away in the Jeep’s glove compartment.
“Tag. Hide-and-seek.”
Kris glanced around the room at every possible place to hide: the furniture still draped in sheets, the small square door to the secret room.
“Is it fun playing those things by yourself? I mean, would you want to go to the park sometime and see if there are other kids to play with?”
Sadie started to respond, then her eyes darted away from the mug as if something had caught her attention. When she looked back at her tea, she appeared slightly withdrawn.
Chastened, Kris thought, even though it made no sense.
“No,” Sadie said softly. “I like it here.”
Kris took another sip of tea, letting the moment linger. Then she said, “Don’t you get lonely?”
Sadie slowly shook her head. Her lips bunched tightly as she fought a little smile.
“What?” Kris asked brightly, as if she were in on the joke. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” Sadie said, but the hint of the smile lingered.
Kris glanced down at Sadie’s mug. The steam was a mere wisp.
“It’s probably cool enough now.”
Carefully, Sadie wrapped both hands around the mug and lifted it up from the paper towel. She took a hesitant sip. As she did, she glanced ever so slightly to her left, her brow furrowing as if she had heard something that concerned her.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Kris asked.
Sadie seemed to be processing a thought she was afraid to say out loud.
“If there’s something on your mind, you can talk to me. You know that. You can talk to me about anything.”
“What happened to your mommy?” she asked suddenly.
The question took Kris completely by surprise. She had expected Sadie to ask about Jonah, about how he died or why he died. In that moment, Kris’s mother had been the furthest thing from her mind.
She cleared her throat and resisted the urge to pull away.
“Well, I told you, she was very sick.”
“What did she have?”
“Cancer.”
“What’s cancer?”
Kris bit the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth.
“Cancer is a disease that some people get from smoking or being in the sun too much or sometimes for no reason at all, like what happened to my mom. It’s like a little part of your body goes bad, like when a piece of fruit gets a dark spot on it, you know?”
“Like rotten?”
The word struck a flat chord inside Kris. She swallowed and forced herself to nod.
“Yeah. And sometimes no matter what the doctors do, it just keeps getting worse and worse until your body can’t take it anymore and …”
Kris stopped herself, not because she was afraid of scaring Sadie but because she did not want to continue down that road.
“Were you sad when your mommy died?” Sadie asked.
“Yes, I was very sad. I loved her very much.”
The back of Kris’s throat clenched. She took a gulp of tea to loosen it. For a moment, she thought she was going to choke. There was a bitterness to the tea that she had not noticed before. It reminded her of the time when, as a very young child, she had picked a dandelion and pinched the end of its stem between her lips. She remembered spitting it out as its shocking bitterness invaded her mouth. Finally Kris’s throat relaxed, and the tea slipped down, the aftertaste making her wince.
“Did she die here?”
Kris looked up. Sadie was staring at her with intense interest.
“What?”
“Your mommy. Did she die in this house?”
“Sadie, I—”
“You said anything. You said I could ask you anything.”
Setting her mug down, Kris took a deep breath.
“Yeah. I said that. But … why do you want to know about that?”
The little girl’s eyes flicked briefly to her left again, as if she were looking to someone for guidance.