Free The Time Between by Karen White Page B

hallway covered with plush carpet toward an open bedroom door, keeping up a constant chatter. “You don’t have to call me Genevieve,” she said solemnly as she faced me on the threshold. “Madame LaFleur—my ballet teacher—calls me Genevieve, but everybody else calls me Gigi. Well, except for Mommy and Daddy.”
    “And he calls you Peanut,” I said, smiling at the memory of our conversation in the dark car.
    She looked surprised. “He told you? Mommy won’t call me anything but Genevieve because she says nicknames stick to people their whole lives until everybody forgets your real name. I like Gigi better, so it doesn’t matter. But when Mommy’s here, you need to call me Genevieve.”
    I nodded. “Of course. And you can call me Eleanor.”
    She frowned, her eyes serious. “You don’t look like an Eleanor.”
    “And what should an Eleanor look like?”
    She shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Somebody bigger, I think? Maybe with curly hair who knows how to play tennis really well.” She frowned again, thinking. “Somebody who doesn’t dream when they sleep at night.”
    Gigi dropped my hand and slid into the room. I wanted to ask her what she’d meant, but I stopped inside the room, my words temporarily deserting me. A large white four-poster canopied bed dominated one corner of the large room. It and the windows and the stuffed armchairs gathered in another cozy reading corner were covered in a whimsical pink lace fabric, yards and yards of it draped over the four posts and over the drapery finials, which were in the shape of ballet slippers. A ceramic chandelier, a replica of a fairy-tale castle, hung suspended by a rope of the same material in the center of the room. A mural covered the wall opposite the bed, what looked like a scene from
The Nutcracker
. On closer inspection, I realized that the little girl at the center of the stage was Gigi.
    “I like pink a lot,” she said, not apologetic at all.
    I realized that the walls had been painted a soft hue of her favorite color, and even the rug was the palest pink. I turned my back on the little girl, overwhelmed with . . . what? Anger? Jealousy? I couldn’t explain it, other than to admit to myself that this was the room I’d always wanted, the kind of room my own father had promised me I’d one day have once he’d saved enough money to send me to school and had a little extra left over. This was the kind of room a devoted parent created for a beloved daughter. A room that could have been mine if things had been different.
    I pretended to stare at the mural, keeping my back to Gigi while I tried to check my emotions, tried not to miss my father so much that being in this room felt like a blade sliding across my skin.
    “Do you like it?”
    I managed to nod. “Yes. I like pink, too,” I stammered. My gaze drifted to a bulletin board hanging on the wall adjacent to the mural. There were several photos of a tutu-wearing Gigi with her father and a single picture of her with a beautiful slender woman with dark hair who I assumed was her mother. I realized then that this was the first time I’d seen anything personal in the house. From what I could tell from my brief glance from the foyer, the downstairs was immaculate: no discarded shoes or backpacks or books splayed open as if the reader had just left. It was as if the heart of the house had been confined to this one room.
    Tacked along the edges of the bulletin board were neatly folded paisley scarves in every color—although there were several in varying shades of pink.
    “That’s my collection,” she said at my elbow, startling me. I hadn’t heard her approach. “I don’t wear them anymore, but they’re pretty so I keep them.”
    I looked down at her, feeling I was missing something. “They are very pretty. Which is your favorite?”
    A small finger with chipped pale pink polish pointed at a fuchsia scarf. “That one,” she said matter-of-factly as she unpinned it