Nothing to See Here

by Kevin Wilson

  “Yeah, I’m hungry, too,” I finally said, and we all walked into the dining room. I marveled at how easily I had been absorbed into the rhythm of this family’s life. It didn’t feel natural, but it also didn’t feel like I was expending all my energy trying to make it work. It made me think that wealth, as of course I already knew without firsthand experience, could normalize just about anything.

  It made me think that these two children who were coming over the horizon like twin suns would not do a thing to this place, that they would be purified. I didn’t think about it then, but later I remembered that these kids had already been in this very house, had called it home, but had been expelled. I didn’t know what the lesson was. I didn’t think about it.

  After dinner, which Mary had prepared—angel hair pasta with olive oil and lemon chicken, bread that cracked open like a geode, icy-cold wine, and some kind of spongy cake spiked with alcohol—we all went outside, the sun still out, a perfect evening. Madison wanted to show me something, and we walked through the grass, which honest-to-god squeaked under my feet, until we reached a basketball court, the surface shiny onyx asphalt and the lines painted in sparkling white, regulation. Madison flicked a switch and lights crackled to life and illuminated the court.

  “Oh my god,” I said, unable to really take it in.

  “It used to be boring tennis courts,” Madison said, “but I had it converted.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. Honestly, it was more impressive than the mansion.

  “Basketball isn’t really a refined pastime,” Madison said, frowning. “No one ever wants to play.”

  “I do,” I said. “I want to play.”

  Jasper, as if this had all been planned in advance, took Timothy by the hand and led him to a modest set of bleachers. Madison went to a waterproof chest and produced a ball that looked like it had never once been bounced. She flicked a pass to me, and I caught it and then dribbled it three times and sent up a lazy jumper that, thank god, fell right through the hoop, with that sexy sound the net made when you’d hit it just right. If I’d missed that shot, I think I would have cried.

  Madison caught the ball before it hit the ground and then posted up against an imaginary defender, spun to her left, and executed an old-school hook shot that banked into the hoop.

  “Do you play a lot?” I asked. If I had this court at my disposal, I’d sleep on top of the rim.

  “Not as much as I’d like. You know, it’s boring to just shoot free throws. I miss five-on-five.”

  “You can’t just get your employees to play?” I asked. Why did you need a gardener, I wondered; why not hire the Washington Generals to live in the guesthouse?

  “They wouldn’t be able to hang with me,” she said. She wasn’t being arrogant. It was probably true. Iron Mountain had won state in her junior and senior years, and she’d been All-State both times. She’d played at Vanderbilt. She hadn’t started, but I knew how good you had to be to ride the bench on an SEC team.

  And I knew that she was happy to have me here. I’d been All-State my senior year, though it was mostly because our team was so crappy that I had to do everything on my own, which drove my stats through the roof. We didn’t even make it out of the region. I could never decide if I was happy or sad that my high school and Iron Mountain were in different classes, that I’d never get a chance to drive on Madison and see what she’d do to stop me.

  But we didn’t play one-on-one that night. We just shot, hypnotized by the sound of the ball smacking against the asphalt. I felt my muscles loosen up, and I found my rhythm. I couldn’t miss. And Madison even stepped back and hit three after three. When I was a kid, I’d been so angry that I was a girl and couldn’t dunk, but this was so much better. You found your spot, lined it up, and knocked it down. The rim had a nice amount of play in it, a playground assist, and we shot for about forty-five minutes. The sun was going down, and Timothy shouted when fireflies started blinking around us. I drove to the bucket and hit a layup, and then Madison put the ball away. Timothy held his hands in front of him, awkwardly trying to catch a firefly, and then Jasper gently snatched one out of the air and let it rest on his open palm. We all gathered around him and watched as the bug seemed to be breathing, the glow emanating from inside it once, twice, and then it flew away.

  “Bath time,” Madison finally said, and I thought she meant me, but then I saw Timothy nod and start walking back to the mansion. Madison took his hand in hers, and then Jasper touched my right elbow and I froze.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing for us,” he said.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. I had no idea what I was doing. Until I knew how hard it was going to be, I didn’t want his gratitude.

  “My children . . .” he said, but then seemed to let the thought drift away. “I’ve always tried to be a good man,” he finally said, finding a new way to say what he wanted to say. “But I haven’t always been successful. Madison has helped me find the way to something true. I’m lucky to have her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I made too many mistakes with my kids, with Roland and Bessie. I let them get away from me. I lost sight of them. And that’s my fault. Whatever happened while they were with Jane, it’s still my fault. But I hope you understand that I’m trying to make it right.”

  He looked like every word slightly pained him, and I wasn’t sure how to make it easier for him. I didn’t actually want it to be easy for him.

  “I know this is asking a lot of you,” Jasper said. “I know you’re only doing this because you care for Madison, but I want you to know how much it means to me to have you here.”

  I understood that he wasn’t hitting on me. I could tell he wasn’t interested in me romantically, and that calmed me. “Madison says that someday you might be president,” I said.

  Jasper got a funny look on his face, like Madison amused him more often than not. “Well,” he said, “it’s a possibility, yes.”

  “President Jasper Roberts,” I offered.

  “Well, not anytime soon. There are more important things to think about right now,” he said.

  He simply started walking to the house, and I let him get twenty yards away from me before I followed him. I watched him, his posture slightly crooked. He looked like he had no idea how anything in his life had fallen out the way that it had. I felt the same way.

  Three

  We were humming down the highway in a white fifteen-passenger van with the last two rows of seats removed and an air mattress slapped down in the back. To make it more inviting, there were Charlie Brown bedsheets and two stuffed animals, identical Smokey hound dogs. At the moment, it was just Carl and me, the unhappiest couple in the history of the world, on our way to pick up the children, Roland and Bessie.

  I don’t know why, but I had just assumed that the kids would one day appear at the estate, maybe stuffed inside a giant wooden crate, packing peanuts pressed against their rickety bodies. I thought I’d just take them in my arms and place them in our new home like dolls in a dollhouse. But no, we had to go on a road trip, six fucking hours round-trip, and Carl made it seem like we’d have to tie them up, pull them screaming from the crawl space of some bombed-out building, a kind of kidnapping. “These children are not used to transitions,” he said. “They’re already dealing with the death of their mother. From what I understand from their grandparents, they’ve been . . . agitated.”

  “Well, then maybe the police should get them,” I offered. I hated the way I always tried to get out of hard work, but, Jesus, hard work sucked. I’d been sleeping on a feather bed and drinking chamomile tea. I wasn’t up for snatching some feral kids.

  “No police,” he said. “That’s not what we need right now. This all needs to be private, a personal matter. We don’t want social services or hospitals or police. It’s just you and me. It’s an easy enough task.”

  “What does Madison say?” I asked him, hoping to gain a reprieve.

  “This is what you’re being p
aid to do,” he said, exasperated. “You’re to care for these children. So you’re coming with me to get them. Once they’re here, you can do whatever you think is necessary to keep them safe and happy.”

  “What should I wear?” I said. I was still in my pajamas, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times while Mary fried some eggs for me. It was already ten thirty in the morning. It made more sense to go early the next day.

  “Just wear normal clothes,” Carl said. I appreciated that he no longer tried to hide his impatience with me. It meant that I didn’t have to hide my irritation with him.

  “Okay, okay. Chill out,” I told him. “After I eat my eggs, we’ll leave.”

  “I have some granola bars and a thermos of coffee. We need to get going. I already let you sleep in,” he said.

  “Mary is already making the eggs,” I said. “I don’t want to waste them.”

  Carl sat down on the bench next to me and leaned forward, whispering, “Do you think Mary cares if you don’t eat those eggs? Do you think you would hurt her feelings?”

  “You’re too close to me,” I told him, and he seemed to suddenly realize how threatening he might seem to me, that my fucking with him had made him overplay his authority. He got all stiff and embarrassed, and he stood back up.

  “I’ll be waiting in the van,” he said. “Meet me in ten minutes.”

  “Should we sync our watches?” I asked, but I don’t think he heard me because he was already in the hallway. I stood up and went over to the kitchen counter. Mary, not saying a single word, set a plate of fried eggs in front of me, and I ate them so quickly it was like they hadn’t ever existed. “Thank you, Mary,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Safe travels,” she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.

  Now we were almost to the vacation home where Jane’s mother and father were keeping the children out of sight. From what Carl told me, the Cunningham family had long been a political force in East Tennessee, but not long after Jane’s marriage to Jasper, her father, Richard Cunningham, had been implicated in some complicated Ponzi scheme and pretty much lost the entire family fortune in litigation. Jasper had kept him out of jail, but the Cunninghams were ruined. Undeterred, Richard sold blue-green algae door-to-door, some kind of superfood that sounded like its own kind of Ponzi scheme. But they still had this vacation home near the Smoky Mountains, which was where they were watching over the children. Carl indicated that all they did was sit around while the kids splashed in the pool for hours at a time, occasionally calling them inside to eat fish sticks. I figured that, for their discretion, Jasper was going to pay them a tidy sum. There was an entire industry that had sprung up around these children.

  As Carl tried to navigate the unmarked back roads, I grew antsy. “Were you in the military, Carl?” I asked him.

  He turned his head, his sunglasses reflecting my image right back at me. He stopped at an empty four-way intersection and actually waited five seconds before continuing. He was probably in his late forties, lean but not handsome, his nose too big and his hair thinning. He was short, too, but there was an intensity about him that made up for it, the way he accepted his ugliness, which was a kind of virtue. “No,” he finally said, “I’m not military.”

  “Did you used to be a cop?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, what did you do before you worked for Jasper Roberts?” I asked, not willing to give up until I understood this man a little better.

  “Different things,” he said. “I worked for a newspaper as a junior reporter, and then I sold insurance, and then I got a license to be a private investigator. I was good at it, discreet, and I started running in political circles. And I did some work for Jasper, looked into the life of someone of interest to him, and I did a good job, I guess. He hired me to work for him full-time.”

  “Do you like working for him?” I asked.

  “It’s better than running down deadbeat dads,” he said. “I grew up in a rough place. Sometimes I feel so far away from there that it seems like I must have done the right thing.”

  “I grew up in a rough place, too,” I said, suddenly feeling tenderness for Carl, shocked that he had actually confided in me. I knew that we were nothing alike. He was too buttoned-up, too afraid to fuck up. I’m sure he thought I was a disaster waiting to happen, a problem that he was going to have to constantly manage. But for a moment, I could see him. He was good at his job, even if that job probably sucked. He handled things. You could depend on him.

  “Oh, I know all about you,” he said, and then he turned back into a starched suit, the way he tensed his jaw. So, okay, we wouldn’t be best friends after all. Fine with me. “Where the fuck is this house?” he said, looking around, and he made a quick U-turn.

  We finally pulled up to a cabin with all kinds of strange windows, the shape of it a triangle, and the front door was wide open. “Oh, Jesus,” Carl said, removing his sunglasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “Do I just stay here in the van?” I asked, like, Please just let me stay in the van. Carl got out, opened the side door, and retrieved a cooler that was stocked with bottles of what looked like Kool-Aid and bars of Hershey’s chocolate. I was kind of upset that all I’d had the whole trip were some dusty granola bars and weak coffee when there was this cache of sugar.

  “This juice is laced with a sedative,” he said. “It’ll make things easier if we can get them to drink at least one of them on the drive home.”

  “We’re gonna drug them?” I asked.

  “Don’t start, please,” Carl said. “We’re sedating them. Mildly. They are in a fragile state.”

  “Then why didn’t Jasper come get them? I mean, he’s their dad. That would calm them down.”

  “I don’t know that it would,” Carl admitted. “And Senator Roberts has work in D.C. right now. This is our job. You and me.”

  “Well, I don’t want to drug them,” I said. “That seems bogus.”

  “Have it your way,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We walked into the cabin, which was dark, not a single light on, but we could see activity in the backyard. The sofa, some flowery abomination with plastic covering it, was burned black on one side, the ceiling above it dusted with soot. Carl slid open the glass door, and we saw Mr. Cunningham in a tiny swimsuit and some flip-flops, cooking a steak on a rickety old charcoal grill. His wife was dead asleep in a lawn chair.

  “Carl!” Mr. Cunningham said. He was in his seventies, but he had curly gray hair like a wig. He looked like he was in the process of melting, his skin sunburned and sagging everywhere, hanging in folds. He had a huge dimple in his chin.

  “What’re you doing there, Mr. Cunningham?” Carl asked, adopting a very friendly tone.

  “Living the life!” Mr. Cunningham said. “Cooking a steak.”

  “Looks good,” Carl replied.

  “Well, a man can’t live entirely on blue-green algae, Carl,” Mr. Cunningham continued. “Steak is a kind of superfood, I suppose.”

  “The kids in the pool?” Carl asked.

  “Been there since this morning,” he told us. “They like the water. Jane, you know, couldn’t swim. But she made sure the kids knew how. That’s the kind of mom that she was, giving her kids what she didn’t have.”

  “She was an amazing woman,” Carl replied.

  “If Jasper hadn’t fucked everything up . . .” But then Mr. Cunningham simply looked at his steak, which was sizzling, popping, just a single steak on the grill.

  “He’s going to take care of these kids,” Carl reassured the man, but Mr. Cunningham wasn’t listening.

  “You have a check for me?” Mr. Cunningham finally asked.

  Carl handed him a cashier’s check and then looked over at Mrs. Cunningham. “Would she like to say goodbye to the kids?” he asked.

  “Let her sleep,” Mr. Cunningham said.

&
nbsp; “Is their stuff packed up?” Carl asked.

  “It was the kids’ responsibility,” Mr. Cunningham said. “I don’t think they ever did it. They’re not entirely reasonable children.”

  Carl looked disgusted, but he simply nodded. “Okay,” he told me, “I’m going to get their stuff together. You wait here with Mr. Cunningham and then we’ll get the kids and head home.”

  “I kind of want to go see them,” I said.

  “Well, just wait a few minutes like an adult and then you can meet them,” Carl said, and then he was off.

  Mr. Cunningham didn’t even seem to notice me. I don’t know who he thought I was. “What does blue-green algae do for you?” I asked him.

  He wouldn’t look at me, but he replied, “Everything, dear.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, his wife snoring, and then I said, “I’m just going to go say hi to the kids.” I needed time apart from Carl, so the kids would understand that I wasn’t some narc, so I could hypnotize them with my own weirdness.

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  As I walked to the edge of the pool, I realized that the sounds of splashing had stopped. The kids, their faces obscured by giant goggles, were standing in the shallow end, the water lapping against them. It looked like they were staring at me, but with the goggles it was hard to tell. It was a little spooky, truthfully. I was working up this Mary Poppins kind of attitude, and the goggles were throwing me off.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, kind of casual cool, the tone where you act like you already know somebody so they’ll be curious. “Bessie and Roland, right?”

  In agonizing slow motion, the two of them began to slip beneath the surface of the water. They didn’t swim away, just sat there, holding their breath, while I stood over them, my arms hanging at my sides. I didn’t feel anything like Mary Poppins, that bitch. I needed a prop, some magic umbrella that played music or something. I wasn’t counting, but it felt like they were under there for a good minute or so before they both stood back up, as if they thought I’d left.