Chapter 2: Three Minutes Before
To explain the floor I have to go back three minutes, which is not far.
At 7:38 that evening I carried Ethan down the main staircase on my hip.
Twenty-two stairs. I had counted them in my first week, the way you do in a house that is not yours.
Mr. Blackwood had been expected at seven. He was not home at seven.
That was not unusual. His arrival times were a weather system and not a schedule.
But Ethan had spent forty minutes at the nursery window with both palms flat on the glass.
A fourteen-month-old at a window is a fourteen-month-old who will not sleep.
So I brought him down.
He had his red ring in his right hand. Hard plastic, the largest ring off a stacking toy, nine centimetres across.
He carried it everywhere. He never stacked anything with it. He simply held it, and when he lost it he made a particular flat sound until it came back.
The foyer had stopped being a foyer some weeks before.
The wedding was six weeks out, the twenty-fourth of October, and the room had become an office.
Boxes on the console table and two more on the floor. A long gray box of place cards. A florist’s binder, open at a page of white things.
Serena Montigue was standing at the table with a pen in her hand.
She was thirty-three and always exactly dressed, even at home, even on a Monday with nobody coming.
She said good evening to me. She always said good evening to me.
In front of other people she was courteous to me in a way that several of them remarked on afterwards. They were not lying. She was.
I put Ethan down on the runner because he wanted down. He had been arching for the floor since the fourteenth stair.
He walked from object to object with his arms up, using the furniture as a handrail.
He went to the console table because it had a box on it with one corner overhanging the edge.
He took the corner. The box came down.
Four hundred place cards on marble, white, going out across the floor in a fan.
I was three steps behind him. I said his name and I bent for the cards.
That is the reflex. You pick up the mess first. It is what you are paid for.
It is the only decision I made that night that I would take back.
I should have picked up the child.
Serena took his wrist.
Not his hand. His wrist. She had the small bones of it in her fingers, and she lifted, and his weight came off the floor.
He was nineteen pounds four ounces at his September weigh-in. I have never had to look that up.
I said, “Don’t —”
I do not know what the rest of the word was going to be, and I have never been able to finish it.
I came forward, put both hands where his ribs were, and took him off her.
That is the sentence. I took him off her. I am not going to pretend it was gentler than it was.
He was on the floor again, sitting, and the crying had started, and it was already the wrong crying.
And then she turned round.
Her shoe was a black court shoe with a stiletto heel.
The height came up in the deposition. Somebody measured it. Ten and a half centimetres.
It went into my stomach, below the ribs, on the right side.
It was not a kick the way a kick is in a film. No run at it, no wind-up.
She put her foot into me, quickly and quite hard, while she was in the act of turning.
What I remember is not pain. It is the sound I made, which was no sound, because the air had gone.
I have never described it as more than that. Every version that says more came from somebody else.
The marble was cold through the uniform. The heating in the foyer did not run until October.
And my right pocket was empty.
The recorder had been in that pocket since a quarter past six, and it was running.
It had been running for one hour and twenty-six minutes.
It was running for a reason that had nothing whatever to do with Serena Montigue.
It will take me two more chapters to get to that reason, and I am not going to rush it.
When I went down, it came out of the pocket, and I did not feel it go.
It weighed about ninety grams. You do not feel ninety grams leave you when you cannot breathe.
It crossed the marble, stopped against the skirting board under the console table, and went on recording.
Serena stepped forward once and the hem of my uniform went under her shoe.
She bent slightly at the waist, the way you bend to speak to somebody in a hospital bed.
“Touch him again and you disappear,” she said.
Her voice was low and level and she did not sound angry.
In all the months that followed, she never once sounded angry.
And I kept my eyes on the boy.