What he actually did was stay on his knees. He stayed down at his daughter's level with her cold hand in his and he made himself breathe, in and out, the way they taught you in the safety course for working around ammonia systems, slow, and he said, without turning his head, "You don't hit her. I don't care what she did. You don't ever, ever hit her."
"I know."
"I don't care if she hid the keys in the Conestoga River."
"I know, Emery."
"Do you? Because—" He stopped. Linnea's fingers had tightened on his. He looked back at her. "Bug. Does it hurt? Can I see?"
She didn't answer that either. She was not looking at him now. She was looking past him, over his shoulder, at the refrigerator door, and then she let go of his hand, and very slowly, as though she were afraid that any sudden movement would set something off, she lifted her arm and pointed.
"Daddy," she whispered. "Look."
He turned and looked.
It was their refrigerator. That was all it was, at first. A stainless-steel French-door model they had bought on Black Friday three years ago at the Lowe's in Lancaster, against his professional advice, because Noelle liked the way it looked and he could not make her care about compressor warranties. It had a slight lean to the left that he had been meaning to fix with the leveling feet for three years. And its doors, like the doors of every refrigerator in every house with a child in it, had long since disappeared under a skin of paper.
He looked at the paper and saw nothing. That was the honest truth. He saw what he always saw, which was what you see when you look at a thing you have looked at ten thousand times: a blur of color, the visual equivalent of the hum. Linnea's school picture from first grade, gap-toothed, in a magnet frame shaped like a crayon. The rec center swim schedule with Thursdays highlighted in yellow. A takeout menu from the Chinese place on Broad Street. Four drawings of horses in descending order of anatomical accuracy. A dentist appointment card for himself, which he had missed. The permission slip for the second-grade field trip to the Turkey Hill Experience, signed. A photograph of the three of them on the beach at Rehoboth, sunburned, squinting, Linnea on his shoulders with a bucket on her head.
And, at eye level on the left door, the whiteboard.