She laid the cardigan and the shoe and the bracelet on top of the dresser, out of reach, and she helped Ivy into bed, and she sat on the edge of the mattress and smoothed the quilt over her daughter's legs. Ivy's puffs had come almost entirely loose. Renée should have braided her hair for the night, put on the satin bonnet; she knew it and she didn't do it. She would deal with the tangles in the morning.
"Mommy?"
"Yes, baby."
"Daddy's friend said I looked like a movie star." Ivy was looking at the ceiling, at Orion's belt. "When she let me try on her bracelet. She said, 'Look at you, you're a Christmas movie star.' And she let me walk in her shoes, but they were too big and I fell down on the couch and she laughed. She had a nice laugh."
Renée kept stroking the quilt.
"What was her name, sweetheart? Do you remember?"
"Miss Lauren."
There it was. Renée had already known, she realized. Some part of her had known from the moment Matt's face went still, the way you sometimes knew the baby's heart rate was going to drop a full second before the monitor showed it. But hearing the name in her daughter's mouth was different. It made it a fact, the way things became facts when you charted them.
Lauren.
She had never met Lauren Voss. She had seen her, though, in photographs: in the old albums in the basement of Matt's parents' house in Arden Grove, the ones Carol brought out at Thanksgiving with a sort of wistful ceremony. Lauren in a blue prom dress with Matt in a rented tuxedo, both of them seventeen and slightly sunburned. Lauren at Matt's graduation from the University of Illinois, her arm around his waist, a wide white smile under a cloud of straight blond hair. Lauren in a picture Carol still kept on the side table in her den, a picture from some long-ago Fourth of July, holding a sparkler and laughing, and when Renée had first visited that house at twenty-six and seen it there, Carol had said, lightly, "Oh, that's just Lauren, she was practically a daughter to us," and had not moved it, and had never moved it.
Matt and Lauren had been engaged, once. For about eight months, when they were twenty-four. Then it had ended, and Matt had moved to Chicago, and two years later he had walked into the waiting room of a dental office in Lincoln Park where Renée was waiting for a cleaning and had sat down next to her and said, "Is it just me, or is this the worst magazine selection in the city?" and she had looked up from a two-year-old copy of Golf Digest and laughed.