Victor Grimholt's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

The morning after the water's edge, Victor watched Livia hold Lunella and knew the shape of the problem. The baby stopped fussing the moment Livia lifted her. She fit against Livia's shoulder like a hand into a worn glove. Livia hummed and the crying stopped. Victor stood two steps away with the bottle still warm in his hand. He had solved the watcher in the reeds. He had not solved this. If Lunella learned that safety wore Livia's face, she would look for that face every time the dark came, and he would be a stranger in his own house. "Give her to me," Victor rasped. Livia looked up, careful, and passed the child over without a word. Lunella's mouth opened at once. The cry climbed. Victor did not flinch. He held her the way Livia had held her, shoulder high, one broad palm under the small back. He walked a slow line across the floor. The cry kept climbing. Livia stepped forward. Victor shook his head. "Sit," he said. "Please. Watch. Do not take her." Livia sat. Her hands folded in her lap like she had tied them there. He tried what he knew. He tried the rhyme from the borrowed book, low and even in his rasp. He pressed the stitched leather hare into her fist and closed her fingers around its ear. The cry thinned but did not stop. He carried her to the shutter and cracked it so a thread of cool air crossed her cheek. Nothing. He stopped walking. He stopped trying to be gentle in a shape that was not his. He held her against his chest, where the heartbeat was, and let his voice drop to the flat low tone he used with skittish animals in the yard. Not a song. A steady sound. Meat needs patience. Bone needs patience. So does this. He said her name once. He said it again. The cry broke in the middle. Lunella hiccuped against his coat. Her fist tightened on the hare. Her small weight went heavier by degrees, the way a carcass settles when the fight leaves it, and then she was asleep. Victor did not move for a long time. Livia's eyes were wet behind her glasses. She smiled the smile of a woman watching a door open that she had been holding for someone else. "There," she whispered. "There you are." He laid Lunella in the basket without waking her. Livia gathered her shawl. "I'll come every second day now," she said. "Not every day. You don't need me the way you did." Victor nodded once. He walked her to the step and watched her go up the path toward the glass and moss house at the tree line. When he turned back, the room was quiet, and the quiet belonged to him. It was heavier than he had expected.