Matt raised his eyebrows at Renée. Renée shrugged and set down the scissors. "We're not looking," she said.
"Close your eyes."
They closed their eyes. Renée could hear the careful descent, the hush of fabric on the stairs, and something else, a hard little clack, clack, as though Ivy were knocking something against the banister.
"Okay," Ivy said. "Now."
Renée opened her eyes.
Their daughter stood on the bottom step that led down into the den, one hand on the rail, chin lifted high. She was six years old, small for her age, with warm light-brown skin and her father's long eyelashes and eyes that were neither Matt's hazel nor Renée's brown but a green-brown all their own, the color of creek water in shade. Her springy curls had been gathered that morning into two puffs on either side of her head, and they had loosened during the day into soft dark clouds. She wore her flannel pajama pants with the penguins on them.
And over them, falling past her knees nearly to her ankles, she wore a cardigan.
It was a woman's cardigan, an adult's, long and loose-knit and silver, woven through with some kind of metallic thread so that it caught every light in the room and threw it back. The sleeves had been rolled up three or four times and still hung past Ivy's fingertips. The shoulders drooped halfway to her elbows. Around her left wrist, wound over and over until it formed a thick glittering cuff, was a bracelet of rhinestones, so loose that she had to hold her arm bent to keep it from sliding off over her hand. And in her right hand, held up by its slender ankle strap like a prize fish, was a single high-heeled shoe. Silver. Pointed toe. A heel like a pencil.
Ivy stepped down onto the rug, the cardigan pooling around her ankles, and spread her arms so the light ran up and down the sleeves like water.
"Daddy, am I a Christmas movie star?"
For a moment no one said anything. Renée would remember that later, the length of that moment, how it seemed to stretch and stretch, filled only with the tick of the heat and the soft hum of the tree lights. She would remember that she had been smiling, at first. That the first thing she had felt was delight, because her daughter was beautiful and ridiculous and lit up like an ornament, and because this was the kind of moment you wanted to keep.