Page 19 of Saint Céline
My heart jumped. My mother looked caught between gratitude and worry.
“That’s very generous, Mrs. Montgomery, but Selena doesn’t want to be in the way.”
“She won’t be,” Katherine said.
There was something fierce in her voice. Small, but fierce.
Mrs. Montgomery sighed. “After lunch. Only for an hour.”
Katherine looked at me like we had won something big. Maybe we had.
* * *
That afternoon, I walked into the main part of the house for the first time through the family hallway instead of the staff entrance. It felt different right away. The floors shone dark under my sneakers. My reflection moved faint and uncertain inside them. The walls held paintings of people who looked like they had never once worried about rent or groceries or what mood their father would be in when he came home. I walked carefully, afraid of scuffing anything.
Katherine walked too fast, as if she had never once considered the possibility of damaging a floor just by standing on it.
“This way,” she said.
I followed her past a sitting room with heavy blue curtains, past a staircase that curved upward like something out of a movie, past a closed door where I heard a man’s voice on the phone in a serious tone.
“My father,” Katherine whispered.
“Is he nice?”
She made a face. “He’s busy.”
That was not really an answer.
The library sat at the back of the house, facing the ocean. When Katherine opened the door, I stopped breathing for a second. The room reached two stories high with shelves climbing all the way to a carved ceiling. A ladder ran along a rail on one wall. Leather chairs waited near the fireplace, and a wide desk sat under the windows. Outside, the cliffs dropped sharply toward grey water, waves breaking white against the rocks below.
I had never seen that many books in one place. Not in school. Not in the public library back in Portland. Not anywhere.
Katherine watched my face. “You can say it.”
“Say what?”
“That it’s a lot.”
“It’s a lot.”
She looked satisfied.
I stepped inside slowly. The room smelled like old paper, wood smoke, and something faintly sweet I learned later was beeswax polish. I ran my fingers along the edge of a shelf, careful not to touch the spines.
“You can take them down,” Katherine said.
“What if I ruin one?”
“Then we’ll put it back before anyone notices.”
I looked at her, shocked. She gave me another tiny smile.
It was easier to talk to her in the library. Maybe because the room was so big, it swallowed the awkward silences. Maybe because Katherine seemed different there, less stiff than she had been in the kitchen, more sure of where to put her hands and her eyes.
She showed me her favourite shelf first. Science books. Anatomy. Biology. Old illustrated encyclopedias with diagrams of plants, animals and cells. She opened one to a page showing the inside of a leaf, all green veins and tiny chambers.
“This is a stomata,” she said.
