The Extra Child

Chapter One: The Laundry Room

The fog came off the water most mornings in Pembury and burned away by ten, and Megan Cahill had learned to measure Saturdays by it. Fog meant pancakes. Sun meant the beach. That morning the fog hung low over the spruce at the end of Wharf Street, so she stood at the stove in her robe with the griddle hissing and Rosie banging a plastic spoon against the tray of her high chair like a small, delighted drummer.

"Bee," Rosie said. "Bee, bee."

"Biscuit's still out hunting," Megan said. "He'll come back when he's hungry. He always does."

The cat had been gone since Thursday night, which was not unusual. Biscuit was an orange tom with one torn ear and the temperament of a retired sailor, and he treated the house as a hotel with unreliable service. Still, two nights was the outside edge of his range.

At the kitchen table, Lily turned a page.

She was seven, and she read the way some children eat candy — fast, secretly, with her shoulders curled around the book. She had Tom's dark hair and none of his freckles. She had a way of sitting very still that teachers always praised. Megan had known, from the first month of her marriage, that she was lucky in that specific way: Lily was never loud, never sullen, never one of the children who threw themselves on supermarket floors.

"Pancakes in five," Megan said. "Do you want blueberries?"

"No, thank you," Lily said, without looking up.

Tom came down in his work fleece, smelling of the yard — resin and diesel and salt, a smell that had survived three washings. He ran a boat repair operation down at the marina, and even on Saturdays he wandered over to check the hulls. He kissed the top of Megan's head, then Rosie's, then set his hand on Lily's shoulder, and Lily leaned into it without lifting her eyes from the page.

"Towels," Megan said. "I forgot to bring up the towels."

"I'll do it."

"Flip these," she said, and handed him the spatula.

The laundry room was off the back hall, past the mudroom, a narrow space with a chipped tile floor and a window that never quite shut. Megan pushed the door open with her hip, reaching for the light switch, and her hand stopped halfway.

Biscuit was in the middle of the floor.

He lay on his side in the exact center of the tile, in the open, where nothing ever lay. His front paws were folded neatly under his chin, one over the other, the way a cat sleeps when it is content. His eyes were open and dull as sea glass. His head was turned too far around on his neck, at an angle that made no sense at all with the peacefulness of the rest of him.

Megan did not scream. She had spent eleven years listening to children describe things adults could not bear to hear, and her body had learned a long time ago to go quiet before it went anywhere else.

She crouched. The floor was cold through her robe. There was no blood, no vomit, no scattering of fur. No sign of struggle at all. The dryer vent hose hung loose from the wall behind the machine, corrugated and dusty, but Biscuit was four feet from it, out in the open, arranged.

That was the word her mind supplied, and she disliked it immediately. Arranged.

"Tom," she called.

He came with the spatula still in his hand and stopped in the doorway and said, "Oh, no. Oh, buddy." He knelt beside her. He was gentle with animals in a way that had made her love him early; he put two fingers against the cat's shoulder as though he might still be able to comfort him. "His neck's broken."

"Yes."

"He must have got tangled up in the vent hose. Panicked. Thrashed." Tom nodded at the loose hose. "He liked to get back there. Remember the mouse?"

"Tom, look where he is."

"He's on the floor."

"He's in the middle of the floor. His paws are folded." She heard her own voice, calm and level, the voice she used with parents who did not want to hear an assessment. "Cats don't die tidy."

Tom looked at her for a second too long. "Meg," he said. "He's a cat. He got stuck and he broke his neck and he ended up where he ended up."

There was a small sound behind them.

Lily stood in the hallway, one hand on the doorframe, her book pressed flat against her chest. She was looking past both of them at Biscuit. Megan would think about her face for a long time afterward, and the honest word for it — the only clinically honest word — was interested. Not shocked, not sickened, not the wide-eyed alarm of a child who has walked into something. Her chin was slightly lifted. Her eyes moved along the cat's body from tail to head, unhurried, the way a person studies a painting they have already seen.

Then Lily saw Megan watching her, and her face changed. It did not crumple the way children's faces crumple, from the middle outward. It reorganized. The mouth first, then the eyes.

"I found him," she said.

Tom turned. "You found him, sweetheart?"

"Last night." A tear left her right eye and traveled cleanly down her cheek. "I came down for water and he was like that and I was so scared. I didn't want to tell anybody because I thought you'd be sad." Her breath hitched, precise as a metronome. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Daddy."

Tom crossed the small room on his knees and gathered her in, and Lily's arms went around his neck, and her face pressed into his shoulder, and over the top of his head her eyes found Megan's and stayed there. There was nothing in them. Not malice, not triumph, not fear. They were as flat and calm as the window glass.

"You should have told us, baby," Tom said into her hair. "You don't have to carry stuff like that by yourself."

"I know," Lily said.

They buried Biscuit that afternoon under the hydrangea at the north side of the yard, where the soil was soft. Tom dug. Megan held Rosie on her hip and Rosie kept saying "Bee" and pointing at the hole with great enthusiasm, understanding nothing. Lily placed a flat gray stone at the head of it and stepped back with her hands folded in front of her, and when Tom said a few words she nodded in the right places.

Afterward, while Tom hosed the shovel, Lily came and stood beside Megan. She was close enough that Megan could smell the strawberry conditioner they bought her.

"Megan?"

"Yes, sweetheart."

"Do dead things feel it?"

Megan looked down at her. The fog had lifted. The light was thin and yellow across the wet grass, and the girl's face, turned up, was perfectly untroubled — a child asking about the weather on some other planet.

"No," Megan said carefully. "Once something dies, it can't feel anything anymore."

Lily considered this.

"But before," she said. "Before, they feel it."

And she walked back into the house, and the screen door snapped shut behind her, and Megan stood on the wet grass holding her baby and told herself, very firmly, that she was a professional and that professionals did not diagnose seven-year-olds in their own backyards.

She went on telling herself that for eleven more days.