“I have to find out what happened to the kid, Hailey, I—”
“I told you, we’ll see something in the news if it is serious. I’ve been checking. Did you speak to anyone?”
“The Plain Dealersaid they took him to Metro, so I thought maybe if I—”
“Did you speak to anyone there?” Hailey owed Mack, and she knew he needed her, but he sure wasn’t making this easy.
“No. I chickened out. I—” He didn’t seem to have enough breath left in him to get through his sentence. Hailey stood waiting until the silence was pierced by a scream from the basement, and then yelling:
“What did you do? Gigi, you stupid, stupid thing! I hate you!”
“Hey!” Mack jolted to life as if he’d been struck by lightning. “What’s going on down there?” He turned toward the stairs, but Mabel was already in the doorway, eyes shiny with tears.
“Gigi drop-ded the Polly in the crack! She did it on purpose! It’s Mommy’s and it’s lost and she always—”
“Okay, Mabs, don’t worry, I’m sure we can get Polly back.”
Mabel eyed Hailey warily; the marker had not washed out of her Christmas dress, and significant trust had been lost. Mabel put her thumb in her mouth and cried as Gigi appeared in the doorway, incandescent with rage.
“It was not my fault! She, she—”
Mack looked as if he might just keel over; Hailey had to get them out of his face. “Tweezers,” she said. “I’ll bet we can save Polly with tweezers.”
But plastic Polly turned out to be too slippery for Hailey’s eyebrow tweezers to get hold of, and the crack was too deep and narrow to allow for maximum leverage. Polly’s hair, which might have been easier to snare, was angled away from them, wedged down into the deepest part of the split in the floor. “Mabs, we’ll figure something else out, okay? But I really need to talk to Daddy for a minute first—”
Mabel stood, bottom lip quivering, as Hailey crouched, plucking at the basement floor. Gigi had slunk off at the first sign that Polly’s rescue would not be straightforward.
Mabel was inhaling the beginning of a fresh sob when Mack appeared with the vacuum cleaner in his hand.
“No, Daddy!”
But Hailey saw what he was doing: a quick suck with the hose of the Dyson, and Polly was safely inside its clear cylinder, and then she was back in Mabel’s palm, dusty but otherwise fine. Mabel threw herself at Mack’s waist in gratitude, and for a second he looked like something more than a dead man walking. Then he looked worse than he had before.
“Let’s put the Pollys away, okay, Mabs? You and I can play with them again soon, I promise. Where did Gigi run off to? She can help you clean up.”
As Mabel dutifully began to close up the plastic houses and shops, Gigi reappeared at the top of the stairs.
“We saved Polly,” Hailey told her, “in case you’re wondering.” But Gigi was engrossed in a tablet.
Hailey had had just about enough three-year-old for one day. “Where did you get that? You know you have to ask for screen time.”
Gigi ignored her.
“Gigi!”
Mack moved to take the tablet from her, but Gigi turned her back to him, still gorging on the screen.
“Genevieve Pamela Evans,now!”
“Something’s wrong with it, Mommy. Mabel changed it. Everything’s different. Everything’s wrong!”
Mack wrenched the tablet from her hands. “Enough!” His tone snapped Gigi out of her stupor, but now Mabel too had grown concerned about their most prized (and fought over) possession. She took the tablet from Mack, and they watched her tear-stained face twist into a scowl. “What is this? What did you do, Gigi? Why is the picture—all the pictureses are different! You changed the games!”
Mack took the tablet back. “Enough of this!Please, girls. The tablet is fine—”
He glanced at it as he spoke, and then he frowned. Then he started scrolling.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Mabel tried to take the tablet back from him, but he held it above her reach, still scrolling.
