Ruling with a New Frame novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not the Cellar Stairs

Her father carries her to the car instead, the ER finds pneumonia and old broken bones, and her grandmother arrives with a lawyer holding a form that sends Linnet away in fourteen days.

My father held me against his chest, and I put my mouth beside his ear.

"Father, listen to me."

He flinched.

"At the end of this hall there are two ways," I said.

"The left door goes to the cellar stairs. The right door goes to the car."

His arms tightened.

"If you turn left, I will be dead by morning. And you will have let it happen twice."

I felt the word land in him.

His wife had died in this house two years ago, in a bed upstairs, while the house physician called it a stomach flu.

The child remembered it in pieces.

A closed door, a long night, and her father sitting on the stairs with his hands over his face.

"Edmund," Marguerite said behind him, in a voice like a ruler on a desk.

"Put that child down."

My father stood still in the doorway.

I could feel his heart hammering.

I said nothing more.

A king cannot be pushed to a decision.

He has to be left alone with the edge of it.

Then my father turned right.

"Edmund!"

"She's blue, Mother," he said, without looking back. "I'm taking her to the hospital."

"If you carry her out that door, you carry her out from under this roof."

He kept walking.

I looked over his shoulder and saw my grandmother standing at the head of the table with her hands flat on the cloth.

I held her eyes until the front door closed between us.

The car smelled of leather and cold.

Joanna slid into the back seat next to me and took me onto her lap, as if she had been planning it for years.

"There, there, sweetheart," she said loudly, for my father's benefit.

Her hand closed around my upper arm.

She dug in with her thumb, hard, against the nerve.

"You say one word about the cellar," she breathed into my hair, "and I'll make sure you never see this house again."

The child in me went rigid with fear.

It was an old fear.

It had been taught.

But I was not the child, and I had sat across a table from men who poisoned their own brothers.

"Take your hand off my arm," I said quietly. "Or I will show the nurse the thumb marks and tell her whose they are."

Her fingers opened.

She stared at me.

My father was driving, with his eyes on the road and his knuckles white on the wheel.

He had heard nothing.

I leaned my head on the window and kept my breath slow and shallow, so I would not cough.

In the emergency room, the lights were bright and the people moved fast.

A nurse took one look at me and ran.

Someone put a mask over my face, and the air was cool and sweet.

Someone slid a clip on my finger and read the number aloud.

It was low, and I knew it.

I watched a young doctor with tired eyes read the screen, and I liked her at once.

She did not ask whether I was being dramatic.

"Pneumonia, left lower lobe, and she's hypoxic," she said. "Get a line in, get chest films, start antibiotics now."

They took me down the hall on a bed.

An hour later she came back with a tablet in her hand.

Her face had changed.

She drew my father aside, but the curtain was thin, and I have always been a good listener.

"The films show pneumonia, which we are treating," she said. "They also show a healed fracture in her left wrist, and two healed ribs."

"She falls," said my father. "She's clumsy."

"These are not falls, Mr. Penhallow. These are different ages."

I slid the mask down.

"A door," I said.

The doctor turned.

"My wrist. Grandmother shut the dining room door on my hand, because I took bread before the feast."

My father said, "Linnet."

It was almost a plea.

I looked at him, and I felt no heat, only the steady cold of a judge.

"The ribs are the stool," I said. "When I did not kneel straight."

The doctor didn't speak for a moment.

Then she knelt down beside the bed so her eyes were level with mine.

"Thank you for telling me," she said. "You are safe in this room."

"I'm going to make a phone call, and then I'm going to stay with you."

She stood.

She wrote her number on a corner of the chart and slid it into my father's coat pocket.

"Mr. Penhallow, I am required to report this."

"Of course," said a voice behind her. "Report whatever you like."

My grandmother stood in the curtain gap in her black wool.

A gray-haired man in a suit flanked her on one side, and a thin man with a briefcase on the other.

"This is the chairman of this hospital's board," said Marguerite. "He has known me forty years."

The gray-haired man nodded to the doctor with great courtesy.

"I'm sure your supervisor will want a word, Doctor."

"The child has a family physician, and the family has always handled such matters privately."

The young doctor's jaw tightened.

I watched her understand exactly how much power stood in that doorway.

The thin man with the briefcase stepped past her and put a folded form into my father's hand.

"A residential placement for children with behavioral difficulties," he said. "Briar Hollow, upstate. The family will consent at the Founders' Dinner, in thirteen days."

My father stared at the paper.

I read it upside down over the rail of the bed.

At the bottom, in blue ink, was Joanna's signature.

It was dated five weeks ago.

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