Chapter 3: Under the Table
Leo took hide-and-seek the way generals take war: seriously, and with maps. The rules, delivered in a whisper behind the gift table while the band warmed up and the first guests were still finding their drinks, were these. The seeker was Rosa, who was not technically playing but who counted as the entire enemy army because Rosa could see through walls and, Leo said, possibly through time. The great hall was the kingdom. The good hiding places were ranked in order: the linen cupboard (too hot), behind the long curtains (too obvious, a baby place), the library sofa (Uncle Benny's territory, forbidden), and the best place, the champion place, the place where no grown-up had ever once looked in the whole history of the house.
"Under the present table," Leo whispered. "The cloth goes all the way to the floor. And it's by the kitchen door, so you can hear if there's cake news."
Poppy, who had been invisible for nearly forty minutes and was beginning to itch with it, regarded this as the finest military intelligence she had ever received. They went on hands and knees in relay — Leo first, casual as a cat, then Poppy, blue dress and all, sliding under the tablecloth into a dim, warm cave of gift boxes and ribbon ends and shadow, with the party's noise flattened to a murmur and the smell of wrapping paper and cedar all around. Leo sat with his book. Poppy sat with her knees up. For a while it was the best thing that had ever happened to either of them.
Then the kitchen door opened, close — so close that the draught of it moved the tablecloth — and two men came out onto the little service step, and Poppy understood from the change in Leo's breathing that they were not supposed to be heard.
They were waiters, or dressed as waiters. She could see their shoes through the gap at the hem of the cloth: one pair polished, one pair dusty at the toes, which Rosa would have executed them for. She could smell cigarette smoke being wanted very badly and not lit, because of the party. Their voices were low and easy and bored, the voices of men discussing weather.
"After the party," the first one said. "Not before. He always stays for the speeches, the old—" a pause that rearranged itself politely "—the Don. Then the son does his round, kisses the ring, all that. Eleven, eleven-fifteen, he's in the car."
"The silver one?" said the second. "By the east door?"
"The silver one. It's already started — Vane's man had the line half done at six, neat as you like, so it looks like wear. Tonight, before the heir takes the mountain road, I go under and finish it. Two nicks. He'll make the first bends fine. It's the long drop by the quarry where it'll go, and by then it's just a rich boy who drove too fast. Tragic. Everybody cries. Nobody counts brake fluid on a mountainside."
Leo's hand found Poppy's in the dark and crushed it. He was shaking all over, fine and fast, like a dog in thunder. Poppy did not shake. Poppy was doing the thing her mother had taught her since she was three years old, the thing June Lane drilled into her daughter the way other mothers drilled times tables — because a bakery runs on messages carried by small legs between the shop and the flat and the flour man, and because June had a horror, bred in the bone, of important things being carried wrong.
Grown-up sentences, June said, are like eggs. You carry them with both hands. You don't juggle them, you don't improve them, you don't swap them for prettier ones. You carry them exactly, and you set them down exactly, and if you are not sure you got one right you say so out loud instead of guessing.
So Poppy sat in the dark under the gift table and carried the sentences, both hands, one by one. The heir's car. The silver one. The brake line. Half done. Two nicks. Tonight. After the party. The mountain road. The long drop by the quarry. Nobody counts brake fluid on a mountainside.
"Whose car is the silver car?" she whispered, when the door had closed and the shoes had gone.
Leo's voice was barely a voice at all. "Uncle Adrian's. He's not — he isn't bad, Poppy, he reads to me, he's the only one who—" He swallowed. "Those men weren't waiters. Real waiters don't talk like that. And you can't tell. Do you understand? You can't tell anybody, ever. If the bad men find out somebody heard—" His hand crushed hers harder. "Forget it. Please. Just forget it on purpose. I forget things on purpose all the time. It's easy. You just push it down and sit on it."
Poppy looked at him in the dim, ribbon-smelling dark, this boy who had been kind to her for one hour and who knew all the hiding places in the house because hiding was most of what he did in it.
"I can't," she said, with real sorrow. "I can't forget on purpose. Mama says words stay. She says if you carry them right they stay right, and if you drop them on purpose that's the same as lying. I already picked them up, Leo. I can't put them down."
They crept out separately, the way Leo had taught her, casual as cats, and Poppy went and stood by the kitchen door where June was re-piping one rose that the heat had worried, and for a while she said nothing at all. She watched the hall instead. She watched the silver-haired birthday man in his chair like a throne. She watched Uncle Adrian cross the room with his grave mouth and his kind eyes, and stop to lift a cousin's baby, and laugh at something Rosa said, and check his watch — once — with the ease of a man whose whole evening was planned, whose car was waiting by the east door, whose road home went over the mountain, past the quarry, in the dark.
"Mama," Poppy said quietly, at last, tugging the apron. "I need to tell you a grown-up sentence. All of it. With both hands."
June, whose hands were full of buttercream and whose mind was full of the clock, said the thing she would hear in her own head at three in the morning for months afterwards. "In a minute, baby. After the candles. Be invisible a little bit longer."
Poppy looked at the hall, at the heir checking his watch, at the cake standing five tiers tall and perfect in the candle-glow, waiting to be carried into the middle of two hundred people and cut in front of the whole underworld.