The man looks down at his daughter, her light brown hair in a ponytail, her tunic neat and collar straight.
“We’re all dressed up,” he says, “with nowhere to go.”
“Let’s go see Mommy!”
He has not heard her suggestion.
“Let’s go see Mommy at work!”
Most days Robert drives Adele to work, but when he is not well, she takes the bus that gets her close to the office. The town is not big, but the company she works for is on the very edge of town in the new business park. Suzanne climbs into the back seat. She finds a crayon that was lost and props it up in the car-door ashtray so she won’t forget it.
“Mommy will sure be surprised,” she says, but the man in the front seat hears her. His blue-grey shoulders go up and down, he sighs once, and starts the engine.
From the back seat, with her feet up, Suzanne watches the town go by sideways. Mrs. Reidel’s house cruises into view. Her trees are fighting with the wind. Soon it will snow, and they will rest.
“Will I go back to school?” she asks suddenly, as if it has just occurred to her that she might not.
Her father jerks his head to the right to let her know he is listening.
“Yes . . . of course you’ll go. But, listen, maybe . . . maybe we can make a little deal. Like, a secret between us, you know?”
“Oh, yes!” Suzanne inclines her face toward the secret as her father pulls into the parking lot of her mother’s building. He turns the engine off and swings around to face her.
“How about when you go back, you don’t tell people when you get a special feeling, okay? It will be our secret, just you and me and no one else. What do you think, Little Sue?”
Suzanne flips the thought over in her mind. It is not like she has any particular choice when it happens. Could she keep such a feeling inside? Would it hurt?
They walk into the reception area and take the stairs up to the second floor. Suzanne knows her mother’s desk. It is near the window, and she has a leaf plant there, drinking the sunlight.
But she is not at her desk. Suzanne recognizes the rock she has painted and given to her mother as a paperweight. It is sitting on the desk, and it is working; it is weighing down a bunch of papers that would otherwise fly away. Suzanne’s father is talking to the lady her mother works with, who is telling them that Mrs. Cardinal has gone out to lunch.
“It’s early for lunch,” Robert Cardinal observes, wondering whether or not to go home.
The woman tries not to stare, but she is studying the man they have all heard about, who stays home all day while his wife goes out to work, stays home with his child who, herself, does not go to school. The father of the child who died.
“Will she be back soon?” he asks.
The woman is vague about soon, about people being sick of the little restaurant in the business park.
“Please don’t tell her, then, that we were here. It was a surprise. The child’s surprise.”
They re-button their coats, and her Papa puts her hat on back to front. He holds his head up as they walk to the stairwell, as their steps echo on the way down.
They are getting in the car, they are in the car, in fact, when Suzanne sees a dark blue automobile pull into the space on the other side of the lot. The door slices open, and a man unfolds who might be Mommy’s boss but without the glasses. Then the other door.
“There! There’s Mommy! C’mon, Papa.”
She would have been out the door, but for the hand blocking the lock button.
“No . . . no,” her father whispers. “This will just be a secret, okay? Just a secret.”
He wrenches himself around and adjusts the rearview mirror, and Suzanne can see him holding the secret in. He is in pain, her Papa, but he is clamping it all in. Her Papa can do it. Maybe she can, too. The drive home is quiet, which gives her time to think.
Little Sue can keep secrets. She kept the one about the broken trophy at the back of the classroom, the result of a ball thrown by Alan Conway. In a way, Suzanne and her father are like spies, two secret agents on missions to save the world. Robert Cardinal and Fire Engine Sue.
In the winter, the path beside the river is filled up with snow, but Suzanne can get partway down, as far as the little clearing where she would like to build her penguin house.
Penguins like snow. It’s normal for them, like her beanbag chair is normal for her. She works hard and alone, packing snow, building up ridges. There will be levels, like steps, for them to come and go. She loves the way their wings flap just a little. The ones she saw at the zoo with Auntie Sophie flapped their wings a bit and did not so much fly as waddle over to the next rock. She could do that. Anyone could. She likes penguins, because they are not show-offs.
“A frozen home for you, like living in a popsicle.”
It would be too cold for her. Already her parents have warned her about the terribly cold temperatures this winter. She doesn’t feel it, except in her fingers and toes. They get wet and stay wet the entire afternoon. One more little flat part to make, and the first part of the penguin house will be finished. Wind whips around her ears, and she pulls her toque lower. She lies sideways in the snow, eyeing the level of the platform. It looks good. Even. Penguins could dance.
It is silent like this. Her left ear, pressed to the ground and muffled by the snow, hears nothing. Her right hears only the whisper of the wind. She lies there for a while, watching the snow “V” made by her mitten. It’s so quiet. The voices of her parents fade, the tears and the choked up words at night, like the song she liked that wouldn’t come in on the car radio, her parents’ voices and the car radio, fading in and out and getting buried when they drove through the tunnel.
She is cold, then not so cold. She is thinking of resting before heading back onto the windy pathway. She is supposed to stop at Mrs. Reidel’s to see if she needs anything, but she has worked hard, and she deserves a rest, just a short one. She lies in the snow waiting for the penguins to arrive.
When the feeling comes, she almost doesn’t know it. When it comes, she is comfortable and sleepy, and she feels nothing much, just weary and so cozy. The feeling works harder, pushing at the edges, jabbing at her with needle spikes.
“Ow . . .” she murmurs softly. Tiny shifting left and right.
Jab.
“Ow!”
She wants to sleep, just sleep. And then a girl is sleeping, too, and everybody’s crying. Her mother in a veil, her father’s knuckles white. There are flower smells, lilies and roses and those yellow things Mrs. Reidel grows.
And she must get up. She must push up from the soft world. White lights are burning into her, long corridors of light lead her forward, stumbling, incandescence of short candles, toward a village in the distance. Penguins. And home.
A girl in a blue cloth jacket and a red toque is found in a clearing by the river path. She is carrying no identification and is taken to the local clinic where Nurse Carter recognizes Suzanne and calls her parents.
Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, is going to the hospital in the next town, where the doctors will take her temperature, which everyone is watching like the stock market, and will take the baby finger on her right hand.
There will be consultation and wailing, but when Suzanne returns home, she will have one finger less to count on.
Cards arrive from the school, her mother’s work and a few of the children Suzanne knows. The church sends over fruit and a Bible, and Mrs. Reidel has Florence,