“Maybe you’re using the hour I would have spent in music therapy to play Freud.”
I grin. “You know all my tricks.”
“You’re about as hard to read as Elmo.”
“You know, Lucy,” I say. “School’s out in less than two months.”
“Tell me about it—I’m counting the days.”
“Well—if you have any plans to continue music therapy over the summer, it’s something we’ll need to arrange in advance.”
Lucy’s gaze flies up to meet mine. I can tell she hasn’t considered this—when school breaks in June, so do all school activities, including school-based counseling sessions.
“I’m sure Zoe would agree to meet with you over the summer,” I say smoothly. “And I’m happy to use my key to let you guys into the school for your sessions.”
She jerks her chin up. “We’ll see. It’s not like I really care one way or the other.”
But she does, desperately. She just won’t say so out loud. “You have to admit, Lucy,” I tell her, “you’ve already come a long way. You couldn’t wait to get out of the room during that first session with Zoe, and, well, look at you now. You’re angry because she had to reschedule.”
Lucy’s eyes flash, and I think she’s going to tell me to go do something anatomically impossible, but then she shrugs. “She kind of crept up on me. But . . . not like in a bad way. Like when you’re standing on the beach right down by the ocean, and you think you’ve got a handle on it, and then when you look down again you’ve sunk so far that the water’s up to your hips. And before you can get freaked out, you realize you actually don’t mind going swimming.”
Beneath the barrier of my desk, my hand steals to my belly again. Our baby will be the size of a plum, a nectarine, a tangelo. A harvest of the sweetest things. Suddenly I want to hear Zoe’s voice asking me for the thousandth time whether or not yogurt containers can be recycled, or whether I wore her blue silk blouse last week and took it to the cleaners. I want ten thousand ordinary days with her; and I want this baby as proof that we loved each other so fiercely that magic happened. “Yes,” I agree. “That’s exactly what she’s like.”
Angela Moretti had said she’d call us when she had more news, but we didn’t expect it to be just days after our first meeting. This time, she said, she was willing to drive to us, so Zoe and I made a vegetable lasagna and started drinking the wine before Angela even arrived, out of sheer nervousness. “What if she doesn’t like lasagna?” Zoe asks, as she’s tossing the salad.
“With a name like Moretti?”
“That doesn’t mean anything . . .”
“Well, who doesn’t like lasagna?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Lots of people.”
“Zo. Whether or not she likes pasta is not going to make or break this case.”
She turns, her arms crossed. “I don’t like this. If it was something simple, she would have just told us over the phone.”
“Or maybe she’s heard you make a hell of a lasagna.”
Zoe drops the salad tongs. “I’m a wreck,” she says. “I can’t handle this.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
She moves into my arms, and, for a moment, we just hold each other in the kitchen. “Today at the nursing home during group session we were playing the handbells and Mrs. Greaves got up and went to the bathroom and forgot to come back,” Zoe says. “She was my F. Do you have any idea how hard it is to play ‘Amazing Grace’ without an F?”
“Where did she go?”
“The staff found her in the garage, sitting in the van that takes the residents to the grocery store on Thursdays. They found the bell in the oven about an hour later.”
“Was it on?”
“The van?” Zoe asks.
“The oven.”
“No. Thank goodness.”
“And the moral of this story is that you and I might have a massive lawsuit to fight, but we haven’t lost our handbells.”
