Her Daddy and Her Master

by Katie Douglas

  The ice cream was long finished by the time a zoo assistant came out and announced that it was time for the foxes to have some peace and quiet. Laila reluctantly said goodbye to the Arctic fox she’d been petting, giving him a quick kiss on the top of his head, before Basil decided to take her hand and gently lead her off the snowy area.

  “Watch what happens next, then we’ll go around the corner and see the hopping binkies, whose antlers are as long as their ears!” he encouraged, hoping she’d get over leaving the foxes behind.

  Once all the visitors were off the snow, a huge glass dome slid out of the ground in four sections, like the rain hood on a pushchair, slowly ensconcing the habitat of the Arctic foxes until they were isolated again from the visitors. When the sections were in place, they fitted together so well that it was impossible to see where one section of glass started and another ended. Laila put her face to the glass. From where Basil stood, he saw the foxes getting on with normal fox things, such as sleeping, sniffing the floor, and barking, as the first ten feet or so of glass gradually turned opaque to give the foxes some privacy. They were so friendly, they must like being around people, Basil thought, but sometimes they just needed to be on their own. He understood that. It was the thing about himself that it had taken years to make sense of.

  All through his childhood, Basil had longed for friends to play with and have adventures with, like the children in the books his mother supplied him with. When he became an adult, he’d discovered that he couldn’t stand to be in the company of others all the time, and after a few difficult situations, he’d learned that he needed plenty of time alone, because he was too used to it to give it up now. Maybe the foxes had the right idea, he thought. In packs, no one was left alone when they wanted company, but no one had to have company when they needed to be alone. He briefly considered the idea of trying to form a pack of humanoids, and dismissed it as impossible. Too many wants and needs, and not enough of a team work ethic. Maybe Laila and Flin were all the people he needed regularly in his life.

  “Come on, Daddy! You said the hopping binkies were around the corner! I think I can see one!” Laila pulled on Basil’s arm again and he drew her back to him.

  “Not so fast, little lady, you don’t want to trip and fall again,” Basil said, heading toward the enclosure with the hopping binkies, catching a glimpse of ears and antlers. Did he even want alone time when Laila was around? Yes, he realized, he did. He needed time to reenergize after being around Hurricane Laila. It didn’t make him feel any less guilty for her, though. Shouldn’t a perfect daddy always be there for his little girl? He wished it were so simple.

  Chapter Eight

  After the petting zoo, Laila tidied her room up, then Basil put her down for a nap. She hadn’t known she was tired but a few minutes after her head touched the pillow, she was in dreamland.

  “Come on, princess; time to get up again,” Basil’s voice reached into her dreams and gently led her back to wakefulness. She opened her eyes and smiled at him, as he leaned over her in his navy blue wooly sweater and gray slacks.

  “What time is it, please?”

  “Late afternoon. You’ve been asleep for about four hours.”

  Laila sat up with a start. Four hours! She’d only expected to lie down for a little minute. Shame and embarrassment washed through her and she hoped Basil wouldn’t be too disappointed in her.

  “Sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Why’re you apologizing, honey?”

  “Because I slept through the day. I should have woken up,” she explained. After years of being yelled at for not getting out of bed at exactly the right time, it had become one of many points of stress. Laila felt ashamed for sleeping through. Adults were supposed to be able to get out of bed on their own, without any outside help. She didn’t know how it was possible, but everyone else in the universe seemed able to do it except for her. Now she’d ruined a perfectly good day with Basil because she’d slept too long.

  “But I put you down for a nap. I wanted you to rest, so you’d be fresh for the things I’d planned for this evening. I’d never let you sleep longer than you needed to,” he said. Laila started crying. “Hey, it’s all right. You’re not in trouble, sweetheart.”

  “But I’m so useless. I can’t even get out of bed on my own.”

  “Why’re you so worried about this? You were so happy a moment ago.” Basil sat down on the bed beside her and put his arm around her.

  “Because it’s pathetic. That I can’t wake up, I mean. I’m twenty-two! Sometimes…” She paused, unsure whether to tell Basil or not. “Sometimes, I’m so scared of oversleeping that I can’t get to sleep for hours. I lie in bed trying to be quiet, and I’m so tired, but I just can’t get to sleep. Some nights I don’t go to sleep at all.”

  “What d’you think about when that happens?”

  “Everything! I remember things, and they just go around and around, I can’t make them stop,” Laila said. “Sometimes, I get stuck in a memory, and it’s like I’m dreaming, except I’m not, I’m just remembering, and getting tireder, and all around me I can still hear everything in the room; the air conditioning, the covers rustling as I move around, and all that. If I fall asleep while I’m stuck in a memory, I have very bad dreams.”

  “What sort of things do you remember, Laila?”

  She didn’t want to tell him; talking about it made her remember it all again, but the words tumbled out anyway.

  “I relive things that happened before I got away. Things my mother did. Things Gar-Kon did. I get stuck remembering them, over and over again, and I feel like if I just knew what I could have done to stop them happening in the first place, maybe I could make the memories stop, but I don’t know what I could have done. I tried everything. I tried apologizing to them, I tried doing everything exactly the way they wanted it, I tried hiding from them, I tried just letting them shout at me, throw things at me, and hit me, in the hope it would get out of their systems and they’d run out—but they never did. It never stopped. They would always find something I hadn’t done, something they could criticize, even things they’d never told me to do. Gar-Kon used to hit me for not making myself look pretty enough, for not smiling all the time, for being afraid of him. My mother was just as bad. One time, I was cleaning the kitchen and I’d just finished, I’d spent hours cleaning everything, even inside the cooker, and she came in, she didn’t even look at anything I’d done, she just picked up the kindling box from where we kept it, she poured the wood out on the floor, and started shouting at me that I hadn’t cleaned inside the kindling box. I didn’t know it needed cleaning, she’d never asked me to clean it. I had to go without dinner that night and she locked me out of the house. I tried eating a flower but it tasted weird.”

  “How old were you when that happened, sweetheart?”

  “Seven. Does it matter? I couldn’t ever get it right; I couldn’t ever make it stop. And now as punishment I get to relive it all, over and over again, and one day, I’m scared that I won’t wake up at all.”

  Basil surprised her by pulling her into a tight hug and kissing her several times on the top of her head. The sadness in her heart receded a little.

  “Do you know why you couldn’t make it stop?” he asked. She shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault, sweetheart. You had no control over any of it, you were just a child, doing the best you could, in a world that probably didn’t make any sense, because nobody had given you the script.”

  Laila didn’t believe him. Of course it was her fault. Everything was her fault. She had to admit that what Basil said made sense on the surface, but on a deeper level, she was sure that the awful things that had happened during her childhood were all her fault. Three sentences from Basil couldn’t erase a lifetime of being told different by the grownups in her life.

  “Sweetheart, I think it’d be a good idea for you to see a doctor about all this,” Basil said. “They might be able to help you feel bette
r.”

  “Don’t want to see a doctor.” Laila snuggled into his wooly sweater and wished she could just stay there forever.

  “Explain.”

  “They’ll say I’m bad and they’ll lock me away,” she said, as if anyone needed an explanation as to why it was necessary to avoid doctors, particularly those of the psychiatric persuasion. “My mother used to tell me she was going to take me to the asylum all the time. She said bad girls, and girls who ran away, got found and taken to the asylum. Then she would tell me all the horrible things the asylum doctors would do to lost little girls…”

  “Would you believe me if I told you it wasn’t true?” Basil asked. Laila shook her head.

  “I know it’s true. When I was six, I did something truly awful. I was hungry, and I got out of bed at night and took some food that was in the pantry, and when my mother found out in the morning, she took me to the asylum and told them what I’d done. They took it very seriously, and said I was very young to be showing degenerate tendencies already, and that it meant I was likely to grow up to be the most hardened of criminals. They told my mother she was doing the right things, and gave her new ones to try. They showed us around. I saw it with my own eyes, I saw what would happen if I tried to leave.” She started to shake, the fear of what she’d seen still had a hold over her.

  “Oh, honey, but you’re safe now. You’re not on Pombos anymore, you’re safe here. On Minos Kerala, they’d never, ever do that to a little girl, not even a grownup one. If you went to the doctor, they’d talk to you and suggest things that might help, but they’d never send you somewhere or make you take a medicine if you were very opposed to it.”

  He stroked her hair in the way that she loved, making her feel cozy and snuggled and cared about all at once. Would Basil lie to her about this? She didn’t think so. But maybe doctors would lie to people about whether treatment was optional. That sounded like the sort of thing they would do. Perhaps Basil could protect her if she went to see a doctor.

  “Would you come with me to the doctor’s? And promise you’ll be on my side?” she asked, lifting her head from his sweater, finding his sparkling lilac eyes with her own mud-brown ones.

  “Of course I will, and I’ll hold your hand the whole time if you want. Now I think it’s time for you to think about something else, so pop these clothes on. I’ve got something to show you in the Innovation Suite.” He pointed at a folded set of clothes—he must have chosen them before he’d woken her.

  “Ugh, it’s inside my brain again now.” It was like a rancid, bleachy feeling that lingered every time she thought about her life before Basil and Flin. If only she could get it out, she knew she’d feel a lot better.

  “We’ll get an appointment and go to the doctor as soon as they can see you. I’m sure there’s something we can do to turn the volume down on all these bad thoughts that keep popping up. In the meantime, I want you to put all your attention into what you’re doing. So right now, you’re getting dressed.”

  A few minutes later, Laila was dressed and standing in the black emptiness of the Innovation Suite, while Basil was turning a program on. To Laila’s surprise, the room became totally different than how it was when she’d played with Flin. It looked like a giant nursery, with a couple of desks side by side next to two easels, all facing a chalkboard. There was also a reading corner stuffed with large, thin books, a box bursting with toys, a doll’s house, and a corner with a hanging rail of brightly colored clothes.

  “What’s all this for?” she asked; it vaguely stirred up memories of that week she’d gone to school, only the colors here were brighter, the temperature was warmer, and everything just seemed friendlier than her brief memories of kindergarten.

  “You can play with anything you like in here. I designed it so it’d have lots of things for you to do,” Basil explained. “What would you like to do first?”

  “What’s that sideways paper for, Daddy?” She pointed at the easel.

  “It’s for creating art,” Basil said. “Remember the picture of the flower in Flin’s room? People can paint things like that.”

  “So… I could make a flower on it?” She wasn’t sure how to start.

  “Yes. Let’s get you some paint out, and I’ll show you how to mix it.” Basil got Laila some paint set up, and soon she was occupied with mixing different colors. She loved the idea that all these different colors came from just a few main colors.

  “That’s brilliant, Laila. The colors look fantastic! Why don’t you try painting some of them on the paper, next?” Laila looked at her array of mixed paints. She wasn’t sure she wanted to ruin them by using them.

  “If I paint them on the paper, what if I run out?”

  “You can just mix them again. Have a try; just dip your brush into a paint and put it against the easel.”

  Laila dipped and spread the paint onto the paper. She didn’t know what she was painting, she was just moving paint from one surface to another. After she’d painted all around the edges of the paper with the paint, she looked at Basil, hoping he’d tell her how to make a picture.

  “It’s looking like a nice border. What are you planning to put in the middle?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t know? What about the flower you mentioned earlier?”

  “I don’t know how to make a flower,” she said.

  “What did it look like?”

  “A flower.” Wasn’t it obvious? Petals, stem… it’s not like nature came with a tutorial showing how to paint it all.

  “Shall I show you how I might paint a flower? So you can see where to start?”

  She nodded, and watched in awe as Basil took a brush and painted a long green stalk, then he changed colors to make a strange shape at the top in red, which he shaded with some of the maroon color Laila had mixed.

  When he stopped, Laila stared at it in wonder. It was a flower, right there on the paper.

  “Can I have a go?” she asked.

  He nodded with a smile.

  “Sure you can. Everything in this room is just for you. I designed it myself, based on descriptions of playrooms from Earth, where my parents were from. I guess I’m drawn to it all because of my heritage, but I thought you’d enjoy experiencing all this, too.”

  She took her paintbrush and dipped it in the green. On the paper, she pressed it down, flattening the brush head and dragging it behind the handle as she carefully, deliberately pulled the brush upwards. She dipped the brush in the water to get rid of the green, then she chose a happy yellow color—purple and yellow were her favorite colors—and tried to copy the shape Basil had made on his picture. Hers didn’t come out quite the same, but when she stepped back and looked at it, she was pleased that it looked more like a flower than, say, a house, or a beach. There was something flower-like about it.

  “Ta-da!” She stared at the paper, barely able to believe she’d made something from nothing.

  “Beautiful. I’m so proud of you! Why don’t we do something else while we let that dry?” he suggested.

  Laila wanted to explore the toy box more than anything else. She pulled the lid up and found dolls and puppets inside.

  “They’re so pretty.” She held a puppet shaped like an Arctic fox. “This one’s just like the one at the petting zoo! What do you do with them?”

  Basil showed her how to play with the puppets. She felt a bit silly at first, moving them and getting them to talk, but Basil wholeheartedly joined in and encouraged her and gave her ideas, and soon, Laila was lost in a world of talking animals.

  “What do the dolls do?”

  “Anything you want. You could just brush their hair and change their clothes, or you could make them actors in your own story that you can make up. It’s entirely up to you.”

  Laila brushed out the hair and put it into plaits. She decided that playing was the most fun thing ever.

  “Okay, princess, it’s time to finish playing and put our toys away,” Basil said. Laila giggled
because he’d recited lines from one of her favorite bedtime stories.

  “Does that mean it’s sleepy time?” she asked, feeling like she’d only just got up.

  “Not yet, sweetie. You haven’t had dinner yet, and I wanted to take you somewhere to eat.”

  Laila put away the dolls and puppets. She supposed Basil was trying to get her to have good tidying habits, since everything in the room was going to be gone in a minute anyway. She stared wistfully at her painting.

  “I wish I could keep my picture,” she said.

  “I’m one step ahead, honey. I’ve taken a snap of it with my tablet. It’s gonna be my new background.”

  She smiled and squiggled in delight that her daddy wanted to keep her picture, but still felt a little sad when the program vanished and the room was black once again.

  * * *

  They didn’t have far to walk to the restaurant, and Basil made sure to hold Laila’s hand the whole way there.

  “I have a reservation under Rhodes,” Basil said.

  “Certainly, sir, right this way.” The waiter was polite and efficient, and led them through a rustic dining area into the room Basil had specifically requested.

  “Oh… wow… this… it’s amazing!” Laila had stopped dead at the entrance to the room.

  “I thought you’d like it. Come sit down while we get settled, then you can go explore.”

  The room was decorated like a giant pirate ship. The dining tables were all on the main deck. In the center, there was a large mast that ran floor to ceiling, which had to be about twenty-five or thirty feet, and attached to the mast, there was a rope climbing area shaped like a sail, leading to a crow’s nest. There were a couple of other adult littles making their way up it. The floor itself was made of cushioned, squishy material, meaning no injuries for anyone who fell over. At the prow of the ship, there was a cabin that was a ball pit, the size of a small swimming pool. At the stern, there was a place to crawl under, leading to an opening on the side of the ship, which emerged at a rope bridge. The rope bridge traveled to a little plastic island with rope swings. Between the ship and the islands, the floor had been painted blue, and holographic sharks leaped out of the floor occasionally, complete with sound effects.