It was a small magnetic whiteboard, maybe eight inches by ten, with a blue plastic frame and a dry-erase marker clipped to the side on a string. Noelle had bought it at the Target in the fall of the year she came home. And every morning since, before coffee, before anything, she had written a number on it. She wrote it in black marker in her round, careful hygienist's hand, and below it she wrote a single word, a different one each day, whatever she had decided to hold onto. Patience. Teeth, once, which had made him laugh. Linnie, most days. And at first Emery had read it every morning too, the way he read the weather, and he had kissed her on the back of the neck while she wrote, and said, Look at that number. And then at some point, he did not know when, maybe a year in, maybe more, he had stopped reading it. It was just there. It went up by one every day the way the odometer in his car went up, and it would have taken a breakdown on the side of the road to make him look at the odometer.
It said, this morning, in his wife's handwriting:
862
Brave
He looked at it. He looked at it for perhaps three full seconds without understanding why his daughter was pointing at it, and then he saw the dots.
They were in the lower right corner of the whiteboard, down where the frame met the white, so small and so close to the edge that you could have mistaken them for a smudge, for a place where the marker had skipped. They were not in black marker. They were in pencil, which doesn't come off a whiteboard easily, which was, he would realize later, almost certainly the point. A little row of dots, pressed hard, each one a tiny gray crater in the white surface. He leaned closer. He counted them without meaning to, the way he counted bolts on a compressor housing.
Nine.
Below the whiteboard, held to the door by a magnet shaped like a pineapple, was a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve, curling at the corners, faded by two years of afternoon sun through the kitchen window into something closer to tan than white. He had not read it in a long time. He knew what it was the way he knew what the smoke detector in the hallway was. It had been made in an office in Lancaster, on a gray Saturday in the spring of the year Noelle came home, with a family counselor named Dr. Nalini Mehrotra and a box of markers and a five-year-old who had insisted on drawing a sun in the corner. The sun was still there, yellow, with spokes. Above it, in Dr. Mehrotra's neat block capitals, it said: LINNEA'S SAFETY PLAN.
IF MOMMY SMELLS LIKE THE GRAPE JUICE, OR ACTS SLEEPY AND SILLY IN THE DAYTIME:
1. DO NOT GET IN THE CAR. NOT EVEN IF SHE SAYS IT IS OKAY. NOT EVEN IF YOU WILL BE LATE.
2. CALL DADDY.