Maya had a rule, in classrooms that frightened her: begin with a song.
On the morning of the second week she sat cross-legged on the nursery rug, with Mark in her lap and a wooden alphabet block in her hand, and sang the silliest thing she could think of.
"A is for apple, who rolled down the hill... B is for bear, who was sitting there still..."
Mark blinked at her. His lip twitched.
"...C is for cat, who sat down on the bear, and D is for Donut, who isn't there!"
A snort slipped out of the little boy, tiny and astonished, as though it had been sealed in a jar for years. He clamped a hand over his mouth. Maya pretended not to see it. She pulled a donut from nowhere, a circle of colored paper she had cut from the wrapping of a box of chocolates, and walked it down the length of the alphabet blocks in a wobbly tightrope, making squeaky voices for each letter.
By the end of the afternoon Mark was laughing out loud. He had learned all twenty-six letters and three of the verses, and he had taught Maya a new one, in which the donut escaped and was chased through the palace by a cross-eyed bear.
The guard who stood at the nursery door, a man with a face like a granite wall, had begun to listen. She saw it in the way his shoulders tilted, the way his rifle sagged an inch lower on its strap every time Mark shrieked with laughter. On Thursday she caught him mouthing the words of the song. On Friday he coughed into his hand, very hard, when she told the one about the substitute teacher who locked herself in the supply closet for an hour with a glue gun.
"True story," Maya told Mark, with a straight face. "My very first week as a teacher, I glued my own thumb to a tablet of crayons in front of thirty children. The principal came in. I had to tell her that a very small dinosaur had done it."
"What did the principal say?" Mark gasped, clutching his stomach.
"She asked if the dinosaur had a hall pass."
Mark fell backward onto the rug and howled, kicking his heels, and for the first time since she'd known him, he sounded exactly like what he was: a five-year-old boy in a very big house, laughing at a very silly joke.
From the hall, the guard made a low, strangled sound that might have been a cough.
…
It was strange what laughter did to a house like this.
Maya noticed it first in small things. The maid with the blank face, bringing the afternoon tray, slowed in the corridor outside the nursery door. A younger servant, barely twenty, had begun leaving extra sugar on Mark's biscuits. The cold, high ceilings of the east wing seemed to hold the sound of the child's giggle a little longer than they had before, as if the old plaster were curious about it.
The old man noticed, too.
He appeared in the doorway on the tenth evening while Maya was folding paper boats on the floor with Mark, and for a long while he said nothing. He leaned on his silver wolf and looked at the tiny fleet of boats on the rug, at the flushed cheeks of the little boy, at the foolish blue paper hat Maya wore, a sailor's cap she'd made for the sea captain's role.
When she looked up and caught his eye, he did not smile. His mouth did something odd and complicated, as if a muscle he rarely used had been startled awake.
"He laughs," he said. "Someone I once knew laughed exactly like that."
Maya went still. "Who?"
The shutters came down over his face. "The doctor will see you tomorrow morning, Miss Maya."
"I'm sorry?"
"A small precaution." He tapped his cane once against the floor, mildly. "You will be in close contact with my grandson for the foreseeable future. I'll not have him exposed to any fevers, any infections, any... irregularities. Dr. Hale will perform a routine physical. Blood, pressure, the usual."
"I'm perfectly healthy," Maya said.
"Then you have nothing to fear," said the old man, and closed the door behind him.
…
Dr. Hale arrived with the dawn in a gray raincoat, carrying a leather satchel and a smile that never reached his glasses.
He was a thin man with careful hands. He took her blood pressure, her pulse. He peered into her eyes with a little pen light and tapped her knees with a rubber hammer. He drew four vials of blood and labeled each one in tiny script.
Then he asked her to lie on the narrow examination bed and unbutton the top of her blouse.
Maya hesitated.
"Routine, Miss Maya. A stethoscope only."
The metal disc was cold against her skin. He pressed it above her left breast, moved it, pressed again, and the silence of his listening seemed to Maya to last far too long. A small electrical machine was wheeled out from the corner. Adhesive pads were stuck to her chest and her ankles. Thin wires snaked from them, and a ribbon of paper began to crawl out of the machine, covered in a green, trembling line.
"Is something wrong?" she asked.
"No, no." The doctor frowned at the ribbon, tore it off, and studied it for a moment longer than seemed necessary. "On the contrary."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you are in excellent condition." He did not look at her. "Remarkable, really."
He packed the vials into a padded case with a lid that closed with a clean, hollow snap, and left without another word.
The rest of that day was strange. The sky outside the barred windows turned grey and heavy, and the first drops of rain began to patter against the glass. Maya taught Mark to fold a paper crane. He learned in two attempts. She was pleased and proud, and underneath it all a small, unnameable chill sat on her neck.
Remarkable, really.
The words kept circling, like a moth around a lamp.
That evening, when the doctor's report came up from the lower floor, she was not there to read it. But she was in the doorway of the study when the old man received it. She'd been sent to fetch the boy's evening milk, a servant's chore, and the door stood a few inches ajar.
She saw the old man sitting at his mahogany desk with the green lamp lit, a folder open in front of him, and her own name written across its tab.
He read the first page. He turned to the second.
He read a line of figures. A very small silence stretched.
Then, slowly, as though a long-frozen river had finally cracked, the old man began to smile.
It was not a cruel smile. That was what made her blood turn to ice. It was the smile of a man who has been walking in the dark for years and sees, at last, a light under a door. His fingers trembled over the paper. His eyes closed. His lips moved, shaping a word she could not hear, and when he opened his eyes again they were wet, and the smile had not left his face.
He sat like that for a very long time.
Maya stepped back from the door, one careful footstep at a time, as if retreating from a sleeping animal.
What did the numbers say?
Why does he look at me like that?
She could not know. She would not know for a long time. But she carried the question back through the dim corridors with the milk glass shaking in her hand, and that night, when she lay awake in her beautiful locked room, listening to the rain on the iron ivy, she found herself touching her own chest again and again, as if she could feel the beat of a thing someone else had set a price upon.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
…
Midnight came, and the rain became a drumming roar.
Maya lay curled on her side with her eyes open. Down the hall a clock struck the half hour. On the other side of the thin wall, in the next bed, she could hear Mark's steady, shallow breath.
Counting stars.
One.
Two.
A gust of wind rattled the shutters. A floorboard creaked somewhere above, and below, and in the walls.
She began, very slowly, to count to three.
She had just reached it when the first gunshot cracked across the night, and the whole house leaped awake.
