Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,85

lean into his neck so they fit together perfectly.

“The floors must be hard for you. I can have that done in no time. I can sweep today and then if you want, one day later this week I can wax. I’ll have to move the furniture but I can do half at a time, I don’t mind—”

“I don’t need you,” Garvey said, his voice hoarse and ragged. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”

Lucy took a small step closer. So he wasn’t going to make this any easier for her. “But I have to. Mrs. Sloat said she talked to you, she said...”

“Oh, God,” Garvey said, and turned back to his table. The pelt he’d been working on all week was now stretched over a wood-and-wire form, only its mouth still rolled back on itself. He stared at the thing’s gruesome, gaping face. “Oh, God.”

There was such revulsion in his voice. Was it so painful to look at her? She knew that her face twisted something inside him, provoked him. It had never been because she was Japanese—she saw that now as he clutched the edge of his worktable with both hands, the skin of his knuckles whitening at the power of his grip.

They were both damaged. Both unwanted. Was it the reflection of his own misery that Garvey saw when he looked at her? Couldn’t they forge some sort of alliance—the kindness of silence, the knowledge of kinship? Couldn’t some small bond be knitted from the strands of the terrible things that had happened to each of them?

But if the answer was no, she would not let Garvey intimidate her. She watched his quaking shoulders, his agonized face, and hated him for finding her wounds uglier than his.

“Please,” she said carefully. “Your sister sent me....”

Garvey’s fist crashed down onto the worktable, causing objects to jump and skitter. Something fell to the floor, and Lucy knelt to retrieve it. A small, pale, round thing, it rolled away from his chair and out of sight, into the small space between the cabinet and the floor.

“Don’t,” Garvey said sharply. But Lucy was already crawling after it on her knees.

As Lucy lowered her face to the floor, she saw the spinning spokes of the chair’s wheels out of the corner of her eye, catching the sunlight. There—all the way against the wall—the little object glowed milky-white.

Lucy’s dress had been clean this morning. She had done her own laundry on Friday, pressing her three dresses with care. The neat pleats and crisp collars mattered to her the way the sparkling mirrors and perfectly made beds and orderly kitchen cupboards mattered, as proof that Lucy was better than any task life put in front of her. But the dress could be laundered and pressed again.

She lay flat on her chest and extended her arm as far as she could under the cabinet. No good. Her fingers grasped at nothing as she strained against the lip of the cabinet, her shoulder blocking her reach.

“Stop it. Stop it,” Garvey said roughly. “Use this, for God’s sake.”

Lucy backed out, aware of how she must have looked, prone on the floor. Her skirt had ridden up, and she tugged it back down, embarrassment flooding her face. Something touched the top of her hand. A long stick with a metal hook at the end. Its point was dull, but it looked like a miniature version of Blackbeard’s arm, an image that came from an illustrated copy of Peter Pan that she had once owned.

“Use it.”

Lucy accepted the tool Garvey was holding out to her. She pushed it under the cabinet and hooked the end around the white object and coaxed it forward. It rolled easily over the floor, and in seconds it was in her palm, smooth and cool against her skin.

It was an eye. Made of glass, only half an inch across, perfectly colored with a blue iris, a coal-black pupil. Like the eyes that belonged to the beautiful doll Lucy had received for her eighth birthday, the doll that had been given away as they prepared for evacuation.

But without the benefit of long-fringed lashes, without the closing plastic lid, the eye looked naked, almost...obscene. Lucy didn’t want to touch the thing. She held it out to Garvey, brushing his fingers with hers. He seized it and jerked away from her as though even that slight touch repulsed him.

“What is it for?” she asked.

He didn’t respond, but began moving things around on the worktable. He found a little ceramic