I DREAM ABOUT Claudia, though neither she nor Dominic is with me in the dream. I’m wandering around an antique shop, and I have to buy her a vase. This is very important, very significant. But I can’t find one that’s right for her. They’re decorated with frills and bows and sprigs of ceramic flowers, and I know they’re not her kind of thing—she’d want something quiet and elegant. In the dream I have such certainty about what Claudia needs. I hunt through all the shelves in the shop, but the vases all just get more vulgarly elaborate, the ornaments sprouting with the vigor of shoots in spring as I watch. I’m in a panic, paralyzed, unable to choose her gift.
I wake and see that it’s morning, and Sylvie has slept right through. My mind feels clean, like a washed sheet. I push back the living-room curtains. There’s a sky of the tenderest blue, and a fresh, clean, new-beginnings kind of sunlight. Things are starting to happen in my garden, buds fattening and opening out, and some snowdrops that I planted in the autumn are glimmering under the mulberry. In the clear spring light, the everyday world feels so solid and complete: the table laid for breakfast, the roar of traffic in the street, the weather forecast on television. All these things just so, just as they should be; and Sylvie, sipping her milk so her mouth is rimmed with white, and caught in a beam of sun that glistens her hair. This is the real world, I tell myself, and all those other things—the things I’d half begun to believe—they’re just some crazy fantasy. Like Karen said, all children say weird things. I shall listen to Karen and put all my strange speculations behind me.
I get Sylvie ready for nursery. She’s just learned to tie the laces on her sneakers. It takes a while, she chews her lip, her forehead creased in a frown, but she’s pink with pleasure when she’s done it. She seems much more at peace today. I think how next week I shall finally have the money for the dollhouse, just in time for her birthday. I love to think of the light in her face when she learns that at last it’s hers. I tell myself that things will all go better now, that this is a new beginning—the undisturbed night, the gift of a shiny new day.
We go out to the car. The sun is low in the sky, and our shadows are as tall as trees, with tiny heads and great big clumpy feet.
“Look at my shadow,” says Sylvie. “I’m a giant, Grace.”
In the cloakroom at the nursery, Beth is pinning up a springtime display, which has lots of animals and blossoming trees. The room is full of light. I hug Sylvie.
“Have a great time, sweetheart,” I tell her.
She gives me a quick, cool kiss, her lips just grazing my skin. I watch her walking away from me into the garden room, confident, un-hesitating. I know she will have a good day.
“So. Ms. Reynolds.”
Mrs. Pace-Barden’s shadow falls across me. I turn. She’s wearing one of her crisply cut suits. She smiles, but not with her eyes. There’s a mouse-scurry of fear at the edges of my mind.
“I’d like a word,” she says.
I follow her into her office. There’s a tic beneath my eye, a little random pulse.
She leans toward me across the desk. Her hands are clasped tight together—you can see the lilac mapping of veins beneath the skin—but her voice is calm, emollient.
“Why I wanted to see you, Ms. Reynolds—we had a staff meeting yesterday evening. We were talking about Sylvie.”
“Yes.”
The tic by my eye is stronger now. I’m very aware of its rapid, jittery pulsing. It obsesses me. I worry that Mrs. Pace-Barden can see that there’s this odd twitch in my face.
“We had a good, long discussion, and I’m afraid we were all agreed.”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re asking you to remove Sylvie from the nursery. We agreed we would keep her just till the end of the month.”
“No. Please don’t. Don’t say that.”
“Now, please don’t go getting upset, Ms. Reynolds.” She’s looking at me warily. Scarlet flares in her face.
“But—why so soon? Why can’t you keep her till Easter?”
“To be frank, Ms. Reynolds, it’s a health-and-safety issue. I have my staff and my other children to think of.”
“But we went to see Dr. Strickland . . .” My voice is edgy with protest. “I’m really trying. I mean, I’m doing everything I can.”
“I know, Ms. Reynolds,” she says in her soothing Vaseline voice. “And believe me, I really hope you get there. That you find out the source of Sylvie’s troubles.”
“But where will she be happy if she isn’t happy here?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Reynolds, but that really isn’t my problem. We just don’t have the resources here for children as needy as Sylvie.”
I can’t quite speak. There’s a weight pressing into my chest.
She takes me out through the cloakroom, where Beth is sticking some paper rabbits onto her springtime display. I glance at Beth, but she doesn’t meet my eye. She has a furtive, embarrassed look.
“Believe me,” says Mrs. Pace-Barden on the doorstep, “we do sincerely wish you both well. I’m only sorry things haven’t worked out for her here.”
I turn, head off toward my car, walking with great concentration, each foot placed in front of the other, as though the pavement is glazed and my feet could start slipping away.