by Kevin Wilson
“Bessie and Roland, right?” I asked, like maybe they just hadn’t heard me.
“Who are you?” Bessie asked.
“Can you take those masks off?” I asked them. “I want to see what you look like.”
“We’re ugly,” Bessie said.
“I doubt that,” I said, but it was probably true.
“Our eyes get red in this chlorine,” Bessie said. “Pop-Pop just dumps in these chemicals. He doesn’t measure them or anything.”
“Do you wanna come out?” I asked. I figured I had a few more minutes before Carl came back with their stuff and fucked everything up. As a kid, I’d had a lot of experience getting alley cats to trust me. I didn’t do much with their trust, just gave them some scraps of food and light petting; it was all about getting them to come to me. I thought kids weren’t much different from cats.
“We’re not leaving this pool,” Bessie said. She had on a black T-shirt and some swim trunks. Her haircut was severe, kind of like a bowl cut if you didn’t have the bowl to make it uniform. She was sunburned, but not painfully. Her brother was crouched a little behind her, hiding from me. I figured if I could get Bessie on my side, Roland would come along.
“We have a pool at our place,” I told them. “Bigger than this one.”
“Does it have a slide?” Bessie asked, suddenly curious.
“Two slides,” I lied.
“Do you have flippers?” she asked, Roland nudging her. “Pop-Pop says no flippers.”
“I’ll buy you flippers,” I said.
“You want us to come with you?” Bessie asked.
“Yeah. Come see our place. It’s a nice place. I think you’ll like it. I like it,” I said. Now I was kneeling at the edge of the pool. I put my fingers in the water and felt how warm it was.
“You’re going to take care of us?” Bessie asked me. With each question she moved a little closer, leaving Roland out there by himself.
“If that’s okay with you,” I said.
“It sounds okay,” Bessie said, trying not to sound too excited. “Two slides?”
“Two of them,” I said, smiling. Bessie took off her goggles, and Roland did the same. They had crazy green eyes, emerald and shiny; even in the sun I could see them. Without the goggles, I could figure out their faces. I was a little surprised by how round they were. I had expected fire children to be thin and lanky, the fire burning all the weight off of them, but these kids still had baby fat. They looked like kids who hadn’t been taken care of, a little wobbly and weird. But here came Bessie, right to the edge of the pool, wading over to me.
“Where are you going to take us?” she asked.
“Somewhere great,” I said.
“Is our dad going to be there?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I said, wondering if that was the wrong thing to say.
“Help me out,” she said, holding out her arms like a baby. I leaned forward to reach for her, and she slightly altered her posture. I watched her whole body turn electric and wild, and she grabbed my right arm by the wrist and pulled my entire hand into her mouth. She bit down so hard on my hand that I screamed with such force that the sound just disappeared, the kind of pain where time stops. I looked at Bessie, my hand still wriggling around in her mouth, and she looked like she was smiling.
I fell into the pool and Bessie held my head under the water, yanking my hair, scratching like crazy at my face. The alley cats from my youth had nothing on this wild, psychotic kid. I popped my head up and heard Bessie scream, “Run, Roland!” and I saw his form hop out of the water like he’d been shot from a cannon. He was running for the fence, but I was back under the water, Bessie’s claws digging into the skin in the corner of my right eye, ripping at my cheek. I tried to grab her, to get some purchase on her squirmy body, slick from weeks in the pool, and she bit me again, and I felt like her tooth had cracked on my knuckle. I made it back to the surface, and I could see blood spinning in the water, riding the chlorine.
“Shit, Roland! Get out of here,” she cried out, and I heard Carl screaming, “What the fuck is going on?” I had swallowed so much water, but I finally managed to get my arms around Bessie’s waist, her legs kicking out in front of her while I held on from behind. She was scratching at my interlocked fingers, but I wasn’t going to let go.
“Bessie, for fuck’s sake. I’m going to be your best friend,” I said, and I sounded so puny and whiny and like a fucking jerk. I hated myself.
And then, suddenly, I realized how hot Bessie was, even in the water, the heat rising up and reddening her skin, turning it almost purple. There was so much steam coming off of her. I panicked, I guess, and so I pulled her under the surface of the water. I counted to fifteen, then thirty, felt the heat recede from her skin, hoping I hadn’t killed her. I lifted her up, carrying her to the steps. She went a little limp in my arms, had given up. “Where’s Roland?” she asked. “Did he get away?”
I sat on the stairs, still holding her, and we looked over at Roland, who had tried to hop the fence and gotten snagged by his swim trunks, his pale white butt showing while he hung upside down, Carl muttering bullshit as he tried to free the fabric from the fencing.
“I’m not coming with you!” Bessie shouted, and she found some hidden strength inside her, pulled free of my arms, and started to run for the house. I grabbed her ankle and she fell, hard, skinning her knee. Her shirt started smoking, the fabric singeing along the neckline, but it was soaking wet and couldn’t really catch fire. I realized there were delicate waves of yellow flame moving up and down Bessie’s little arms. And then, like a crack of lightning, she burst fully into flames, her body a kind of firework, the fire white and blue and red all at once. It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.
I heard Carl shout, and I turned to see Roland now on fire, though not as bright as his sister. Carl simply kicked him into the pool, where he fell like a rock, extinguished.
I saw Mr. Cunningham holding a giant fork out for safety. Mrs. Cunningham was still asleep.
“You want to stay here?” I shouted back at Bessie. My hand was hurting so bad, the kind of pain where I didn’t even want to look at it because I knew how fucking angry it would make me, how many times I would time-travel to think about all the ways I could have kept my finger from being bitten off by some feral child. “You want to stay with those old people who are boring and probably don’t even know what things you like?”
“No,” she said. Her skin was turning back to a normal shade, the fire already flickering out. It seemed like their bodies could only sustain the fire for a brief moment. Her shirt was in tatters, almost ash.
“Or do you want to be with me because I’m cool, and I’ll keep being cool, and you’ll like hanging out with me?” I just kept on going, didn’t even wait for her to respond. “You want to stay here with your shitty grandparents and never get fed and scratch bug bites underneath sheets that haven’t ever been washed? You want that?”
“No, I don’t want that,” Bessie said, not crying but wheezing from anger.
“Or do you want to come with me, and I’ll take care of you and buy you all new clothes, and I’ll feed you whatever you want and play games with you and watch movies with you and swim in the pool with you and rock you to bed and kiss you good night and sing you lullabies and then wake you up and let you watch cartoons?”
“That,” she said, her teeth chattering. “We want that.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Then you have to trust me that I’m going to take care of you. It’s going to be weird, okay? It’s going to make you angry sometimes. But I’ll take care of you. It’s what I’m going to do.”
By this point, Carl had fished Roland out of the pool and was carrying him over to us; the boy was listening intently.
“Are you our stepmother?” Roland asked.
“No—Jesus Christ—no, I’m not your stepmother. I’m just—”
“She’s like a babysitter that never leaves,” Carl suddenly said.
“Never?” Bessie and Roland said at the same time, and I realized how this could go bad so quickly.
“Never,” I said, smiling. Bessie still had a little trail of my blood running down her chin.
“We catch on fire,” Bessie told me.
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“We just go with you?” she asked, and I nodded, exhausted.
Bessie looked at Roland, who simply nodded his assent. “We’ll go with you,” they both said at the same time.
“I’ve packed up your belongings,” Carl told them.
Roland shrugged. “We don’t have that much stuff to bring,” the boy informed us. He had stripes buzzed into the sides of his hair, and I was shocked to realize that their hair was unsinged. I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.
Four
“I’ve got Kool-Aid,” Carl said, trying to sound cheery.
The kids smiled, but I shook my head. “No Kool-Aid,” I told him. I didn’t want these kids drugged, didn’t want things to start off any worse than they already had.
Bessie frowned. “You said you’d give us whatever we wanted,” she said. Her face reddened a little, and I was already dealing with some trauma, I think.
“We’ll get you some sodas at a gas station,” I said, and Carl simply nodded; maybe he was as tired as I was.
“That’s good,” Roland said. “Sun Drop, okay?”
“Okay,” I told him.
“Your hand is really messed up,” Roland said.
I finally looked down at it, had forgotten about the pain. It was just a dull throbbing sensation traveling all the way up my arm. There were tooth marks all over my hand, purple and deep, blood bubbling out of the wounds. The worst were on my index and middle fingers. I could barely bend them now.
“I scratched up your face some, too,” Bessie offered sheepishly.
“Sorry about your knee,” I told her, and she just waved me off.
“I’ve got a first aid kit in the van,” Carl said. “You get the kids dressed and I’ll come back with it.”
I led the children past their grandparents. Mr. Cunningham’s steak was now burning and charred on the grill. The kids acted like the grandparents weren’t even there.
In the bathroom, I dried them off with some already damp towels. I was a person without much experience around kids, had always avoided them in the past. Bessie and Roland tore off the burned scraps of clothing, got naked so fast I barely had time to be weirded out. I was like, These are naked kids, and I tried to be mature about it. Eventually, they got into their clothes: cheap souvenir T-shirts of the Smoky Mountains and baggy shorts, slippery flip-flops on their feet.
I looked at my face in the mirror. The worst was around my right eye, which was puffed up and had pretty jagged scratches running diagonally across the side of my face, the top layer of skin stripped away. I looked like a gladiator in some old, bad movie. I found a nearly empty tube of Neosporin in the medicine cabinet and rubbed it all over my face like a beauty treatment.
“You have any other clothes?” Bessie asked me, and I remembered that I was soaking wet, my shoes squeaky with pool water.
“I do not,” I told them, and just then Carl appeared with the first aid kit. He was also holding a muumuu, swirling greens and yellows and maybe purple in there.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“I got it out of Mrs. Cunningham’s closet,” he replied. “I thought you might need to change.”
“I’ll just wear my wet clothes,” I said.
“Don’t be dumb, okay?” he said. “Put it on.”
“It’s a muumuu,” I said.
“Gran-Gran calls them tea dresses,” Bessie offered. I liked Bessie okay right then, even though she’d tried to bite my fingers off.
They all left the bathroom and I changed into the muumuu, which was comfortable and not as billowy as I’d expected, not that it mattered how pretty I looked when my face was mangled and my hand was busted. I gathered up my wet clothes and wrapped them up in a towel. Then I unlocked the door and Carl came in with the first aid kit.
“I bandaged up the girl’s knee. Now, just to let you know, this is a pretty rudimentary kit,” he said, so he grabbed some hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet and used the kit’s cotton balls to clean the wounds, which hurt like hell, turning foamy and tinged with pink. Once he was sure they were clean enough, he took some gauze and patted it gently onto my skin.
“You should have waited for me,” he told me, and I was pissed off because it was hard to argue with him considering how badly I’d fucked things up.
“I wanted them to like me,” I said. “I wanted to be alone with them.”
“It’s going to take time,” he said. “If it works at all. They have been through some awful stuff. They are damaged goods—”
“Jesus, keep your voice down, Carl,” I said. “They’re right outside.”
“Well, I’m just saying. Be careful with them. Our goal is to keep them out of danger for the next few months, to prevent any disaster. It’s all damage control, Lillian, okay?”
“I’ll be careful,” I said. Carl wrapped white tape around the gauze and my hand looked like a flipper.
“That’s the best that I can do right now. We’ll need to make sure it doesn’t get infected, but you don’t need stitches or anything. Nothing is broken.”
“Rabies?” I asked; if it was a stupid question, I hoped he’d think I was joking.
“No,” he said. Then he considered it for a second, looked toward the door, where the kids were waiting. “I don’t think so.”
When we opened the door, the kids were just standing there like zombies. They were ten years old, but they looked younger, stunted in some meaningful way. I hadn’t actually given much thought to how I was going to take care of them. Originally, I had thought I’d just stand next to them for the whole summer and gently direct them toward good decisions. I thought I’d just sit in a beanbag chair and they’d read magazines next to me.
Now it was clear how much this job would require. I was going to have to bend and twist these children into something that could live in that crazy-rich estate back in Franklin. It was going to be like teaching a wild raccoon to wear a little suit and play the piano. I was going to be bleeding and bruised every day, and that would still be preferable to catching on fire, the fillings in my teeth melting while I held on to these little kids.
And as they stared at me, I knew how much of myself I was going to unfairly place in them. They were me, unloved and fucked over, and I was going to make sure that they got what they needed. They would scratch and kick me, and I was going to scratch and kick anyone who tried to touch them. I didn’t love them; I was a selfish person and I didn’t understand people all that well, not enough to really feel an emotion as complicated as love. But I felt tenderness for them, which felt, to my little heart, like a kind of progress.
“Are you ready?” I asked the kids, and they nodded.
“Two slides?” Bessie asked me, and it took me a second to remember what she was talking about.
“I lied about the slides,” I admitted, and she nodded like she had expected lies. They looked at each other for a second, and then Bessie shrugged, and they walked just a few steps ahead of me and Carl to the van, which would bring them home.
When we turned onto the long driveway that led to the estate, I crawled over the seats and into the back of the van, where Roland and Bessie slept on the air mattress, their bodies quivering, riding that thin line between dreams and real life. I wondered what the hell their dreams must have been, what kind of mess was inside their heads. I was afraid of getting bitten again, or set on fire, or even just having the children look up at me and frown, pissed that I was not their mom. So I kind of made a soft hissin
g sound, like I was trying to help someone who was having trouble peeing. That didn’t work, so I gently nudged Roland, who seemed maybe a little less prone to violence, and he stirred. And the minute his body temperature shifted by even a degree, his posture slightly altered, Bessie snapped awake, and they both took a few seconds to figure out where they were, what their lives were. And then they looked at me. They didn’t smile, but they seemed okay with me being there, hovering over them.
“We’re home,” I said, and I hoped it sounded believable, inviting.
“What home?” Bessie asked.
“Your home,” I replied.
“What is this place?” Bessie asked as the two children looked out the window at the estate.
“Do you not remember? This was your home—” I looked back at Carl for confirmation. “Didn’t they live here?” I asked. Carl caught my gaze in the rearview mirror and simply nodded.
“I’ve never seen this place before in my whole entire life,” Bessie said, like a robot.
They had been four or five, I think, when they moved out with their mother. When did children’s memories begin? I tried to remember my own life. I could remember things from when I was two. Not good things, but I remembered them. I thought Bessie might be messing with me.
“You lived here,” I said, “in this—”
“Hey, Lillian,” Carl said, “maybe just let this go.”
“You don’t remember?” I asked the children.
Bessie and Roland shook their heads. “It’s huge,” Roland finally said. “That’s where we’re gonna live?”
“Well,” I said, “kind of. Behind that house is our house.”
“Probably a crappy house,” Bessie said.
“No, it’s pretty sweet,” I said, and I meant it.
“We’re here,” Carl said, the engine idling, like if the kids made one wrong move he’d throw it back into drive and speed them to the nearest hospital or military testing facility.
It was just Madison on the porch. She had two teddy bears, but she was holding them like weapons. That’s not fair. She was holding them like shields, as if they might temporarily protect her from danger.