by Kevin Wilson
Carl said, “Lillian, we’ll just come back. Madison definitely has a library card. She’s on the board for the library.”
“Here,” I said, handing Carl the Dolly Parton book. “Put this in your pants.”
“No way,” he said, but I punched his arm as hard as I could. “Just do it,” I told him.
Carl put the book down the front of his pants, and I hissed, “The back of your pants, man. Come on.” Then I turned to Roland. “Pick one of these two books,” I said, “and put the other one back,” and Roland, god bless him, simply turned and threw one of the books into the aisle, so hard and so beautifully, the book skittering across the floor and then bumping against the wall.
“Put this one in your pants,” I said, and he put it behind him, tucking it into his waistband and pulling his shirt over it.
“Lillian,” Carl said, “this is not—”
“Come on,” I said. I handed Bessie the monastery book. “Hold this and act normal, okay? Nothing to see here. No one cares. No one cares about us.”
And I pushed them all, one-two-three, out of the aisle and we walked toward the exit.
“Find what you needed?” the librarian asked us, and I nodded. “We took a lot of notes,” I said. “Good research.”
As we passed through the doors, the alarm went off, and I looked surprised. Both children froze, and Carl looked like he was going to vomit. I kind of nudged Carl and Roland farther outside the door, onto the stairs.
“Oh my,” I said, and the librarian stood up slowly, shaking his head.
“No problem,” he said, but before he could get up, I looked down at Bessie and took the book out of her hands. I walked back to the librarian, and he sat back down, relieved to not have to move.
“She’s always grabbing things,” I said, and the man laughed.
“No harm done,” he said, and then he seemed to notice my bruise but was unfazed, to his credit. It made me love him.
“No harm,” I said, “of course not,” and then I walked outside, where the three of them were waiting for me.
“Let’s just keep going, super cool,” I said. “Nothing to see here.”
When we got to the van and packed ourselves inside it, Carl and Roland removed the books from their pants. I took the book from Carl and handed it to Bessie.
“Thank you,” Bessie said. “You stole it for me.”
“We’re borrowing it, okay?” I said. “Just in a roundabout way.”
For a second, there was that weird flicker in her eyes, that wickedness that I loved, that I wanted to live inside. A wicked child was the most beautiful thing in the world.
“Nobody cares,” she said.
“Nope,” I replied.
“Nobody cares about us,” she said, almost laughing.
Carl started the van, and we pulled out of the parking lot.
“We looked like a normal family in there,” Roland said, and this made Carl breathe sharply through his nose.
“I guess so,” I told Roland.
“Can we still have ice cream?” Bessie asked.
“Carl?” I asked.
“We can have ice cream,” he said. “That’s fine with me.”
The kids read their books, and they leaned against me, and even though I actually did not like to be touched, I just let it happen. I allowed it. It was fine.
After the ice cream—so many sprinkles—still delirious from the simple act of walking into an open space, of not being inside our house, we happily went right back to that house and waited for the next day, when we’d have our family dinner.
That morning, we found ourselves easily taking up the routine. Roland was a master of yoga, and I eventually just kind of let him take it over, because my body simply wouldn’t hold the positions. “This is easy,” he said, doing this weird kind of crow pose, his entire body supported by his two noodle arms. “Why is this supposed to be hard?” We did some basic math, using Oreo cookies as props. We took notes for our biographies of Parton and York. We shot baskets, and I showed Bessie the proper form, the smoothness of it, the way the ball was just an extension of your arm. It took her a lot of effort, but she was hitting about twenty percent of her shots. And her dribbling, holy shit.
Sometimes, when the kids were invested in something, when they didn’t look entirely blasted by how shitty their lives had been, I’d try to truly look at them. Of course, they both had those bright green eyes, like you’d see on the cover of a bad fantasy novel where the hero can turn into some kind of bird of prey. But they were not attractive children, the rest of their faces soft and undefined. They looked ratty. I hadn’t even tried to fix their cult haircuts. I feared that fixing them would only make the kids more plain. They had round little bellies, way past the point when you’d expect a kid to lose it. Their teeth were just crooked enough that you could tell they hadn’t been handled with care. And yet. And yet.
When Bessie managed to get the layup to bank perfectly off the backboard, her eyes got crazy; she started vibrating. When Roland watched you do anything, even open a can of peaches, he looked like he was cheering you on at mile marker nineteen of your marathon. When Roland put his fingers in my mouth in the middle of the night, when Bessie kicked me in the liver and made me startle awake, I did not hate them. No matter what happened after this, when the kids moved in to the mansion with Jasper and Madison and Timothy, no one would ever think that they were really a part of that immaculate family. They would always, kind of, belong to me. I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to Earth, smashing into the ground like meteroites, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I’d hold it. I would.
“Are we gonna dress up for tonight?” Bessie suddenly asked me, breaking me out of my daydream.
“Do you want to dress up?” I asked.
“I just bet Madison and Timothy are gonna be dressed up. I don’t want them to look better than us,” she replied.
“Can I wear a tie?” Roland asked.
“I guess,” I said, and he cheered and ran off, his only wish granted.
“Can you fix our hair?” Bessie asked. “Make it like Madison’s?”
“I can’t do that,” I admitted. I had to be at least somewhat honest with her. “Madison is lucky,” I told her. “She’s just made that way.”
“Can you make our hair look normal?” she asked.
“It’s in a bad place,” I said, and she nodded, like she knew. “There’s not much you can do but let it grow out and then get it into the right shape.”
“Could you cut it shorter?” she asked.
“I could,” I guessed. I had learned how to cut one of my mother’s boyfriends’ hair. He’d get drunk and then try to talk me through the steps to make it neat. He knew what he liked, and I could eventually get it there. He let me shave him, too, which was terrifying, how badly I wanted to cut him, even though he was one of the nicer ones.
“I hate him,” she said, meaning her father. “But I want him to think we’re good.”
“You are good,” I said. “Your father knows that.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Bessie said.
“He does, Bessie,” I said.
She wouldn’t say anything, and I just watched her grinding her teeth.
“What would you do to him?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she replied, her eyebrow cocked.
“If he were here right now, what would you do?” I asked her, curious.
“I’d bite him,” she said.
“Like you bit me?” I asked, laughing.
“No. I didn’t know who you were then,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. Him, I would really bite him. I’d bite his nose.”
“You have really sharp teeth,” I said. “That would definitely hurt him.”
“I’d bite him so hard that he’d cry, and he’d beg me to stop,”
she said. I could see her body warming up, turning patchy. I didn’t care. We were outside. We had infinite clothes. We were practicing.
“And what would you do if he begged you to stop?”
“I’d stop,” she said, as if it surprised her. Her whole body temperature changed, like the sun had gone down without warning.
“That sounds okay to me,” I told her. “That’s fine.”
“Do you hate your dad?” she suddenly asked, like she didn’t want to think about her own dad anymore.
“I don’t have a dad,” I replied, and she accepted this without question.
“Do you hate your mom?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Would you bite her?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t hurt her,” I said.
“Was she bad to you?”
“Yeah, she was. Not horrible. She just, like, didn’t care about me. She didn’t like to think about me. It made her upset to know I was there.”
“Our mom,” Bessie said, “she gets upset if she isn’t thinking about us. All she does is think about us. And if for even a second she thinks that we’re not thinking about her, she gets so sad.”
“I think maybe parents can be pretty bad at this stuff,” I told her.
“Do you want to be a parent?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t be good at it, either. I’d be so bad at it.”
“I don’t think so,” she told me.
And I could feel it washing over me, wanting to take these kids. I’m not joking when I say that I never liked people, because people scared me. Because anytime I said what was inside me, they had no idea what I was talking about. They made me want to smash a window just to have a reason to walk away from them. Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard not to fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I’d just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it.
And there were these two kids, and they burst into flames. And I had known them for less than a week; I didn’t know them at all. And I wanted to burst into flames, too. I thought, How wonderful would it be to have everyone stand at a respectful distance? The kids were making me feel things, and they were complicated, because these kids were complicated, were so damaged. And I wanted to take them. But I knew that I wouldn’t. And I knew that I couldn’t give them the hope that I would.
“Bessie?” I finally said. “Your dad seems like he fucked up, okay? But I think he wants to be a good person. And Madison is my friend. And I know that she is a good person. And Timothy, whatever, he’s just too little right now, but he’ll end up being fine. This is your family, okay? And I don’t know if you understand this, but your family is so rich. They are richer than anyone I’ve ever known in my entire life. They are richer than all the people I’ve ever known put together. This will be good for you. Whatever you want, they will try to give it to you. And that might not seem like such a big deal now, but you’ll be happy for it someday. When you really want something, you’ll be able to take it. If you stay with them. If you give Madison and your dad a chance.”
“I understand,” she said, but her eyes were so intense. I couldn’t look at her. I was talking to this spot on the ground.
“How much longer is summer?” she then asked.
“A long time,” I told her. “A really long time.”
That night, we walked out of our guesthouse and made our way to the mansion. Roland had some khakis on and a white dress shirt with a blue tie that had taken me seven tries to knot correctly, the mechanics all weird on a little kid. I’d clipped his hair pretty easily. Boys are easy with hair, you just keep it neat and nobody cares beyond that. I don’t know that I’d ever heard a straight man compliment another straight man’s hair in my entire life. Bessie had on a black floral summer dress, kind of grungy actually, quite cool. Roland looked like an intern at a bank, but Bessie looked like a girl at her mom’s third wedding. I’d buzzed the sides of her hair, left it floppy on top, and it didn’t make her pretty, but it accentuated her eyes, the wildness of her face. They both looked like wild kids in disguise, undercover, but that was good enough. All that Jasper probably wanted was an attempt at normalcy. That’s all Madison wanted, I was sure. She’d never want them to lose their actual weirdness. The fire, yes, okay, she wanted that gone, but what was underneath that. She’d appreciate it. I knew she would.
I had brushed on a thin layer of the stunt gel, though it was hard to get the amount right. I was worried about the mess it would make, the kids’ clothing, the chairs in the dining room, but whatever. I knew that the moment they saw Jasper, I’d be relieved that I’d put the goop on them.
Madison, always Madison, like a spokesperson for the rest of the world, all the good things contained in it, welcomed us at the back door. “Oh,” Madison said, looking at the children, “you two look wonderful. So grown-up!”
She then looked at me, my fucked-up face with bruises and scratches. “Oh god,” she said, not able to hide her surprise. She hadn’t seen me since she’d put that elbow in my face. “You know, I have makeup that would . . . I don’t know, Lillian. That’s bad.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Lillian’s tough,” Roland said proudly.
“She’s the toughest person I know,” Madison replied. “But I wish she didn’t have to be so tough all the time.”
I thought, Then maybe you didn’t have to become a psycho in a one-on-one game in front of children, but I let it go. I breathed deeply.
And then, five seconds later, there was Jasper. “Hello, children,” he said, and this time he seemed more put together, more charming. No seersucker, thank god. Seersucker was for fucking dolts. He smiled at them. “I know this is hard for you guys,” he continued, the shyness adding to the charm, the way he looked at them like he was counting on their votes. “But I’ve been really looking forward to this. And I won’t ask for a hug right now, but sometime, when you’re ready, I’ve been thinking about giving you guys a hug and telling you that I’m happy that you’re here.”
The kids just nodded, maybe a little embarrassed. Madison touched Jasper and smiled at him, nodded her approval.
“Who’s hungry?” Madison asked.
“I’m hungry,” I said, answering for all of us, and we walked into the dining room.
Timothy was already there, his hands clasped together on the table like he was ready to pray or like he was your boss and was really sorry but he was going to have to fire you. The more I saw of Timothy, his formality and robotic qualities, the more I liked him.
One time, I’d asked Madison about Timothy’s—how do you phrase it politely?—eccentricities, and she’d nodded, like, yes, yes, she knew.
“He’s not good with other kids, honestly,” she’d said. “He’s weird, I know it. But, fuck, I wasn’t the most normal kid, Lil. I was a beautiful child, truly. I know that’s vain to say, but I was. But I was a kid, so I could be ugly in my thoughts. It made me happy sometimes, to not be pretty on the inside. And my mom, god, she hated it; she was this prim and proper woman, and she was real pretty, and it was like she’d never had a dark thought in her life. I think I scared her, like maybe it was something inside her that had unwittingly made me like this. Every little thing that wasn’t from a lady’s handbook, every sharp edge, she tried to sand it down. She had this running commentary, all the things that I was doing, which I wasn’t aware of doing because I was a kid, and she made me feel like shit. She was used to my brothers, these dopey fucking boys who tortured the dog and broke shit and were a hundred times worse than me, but they were boys, and that was okay. No, she focused only on me. ‘Madison, people are going to get so tired of these little tics of yours,’ she’d tell me.
“And so I doubled down. I tr
ied to break her as she tried to break me. We fought a lot, over the pettiest things. She tried to keep me from playing basketball. And, whatever, I know she loves me. And I love her. At least she cared in some messed-up way, unlike my dad, who didn’t even seem to know that I existed until I got older and could be of use to him. But she hurt me. She hurt me at the moment when I didn’t need to be hurt. So when Timothy became this strange little toddler who was, like, fascinated by pocket squares, I said I would never try to curb it. I knew that the world would do that eventually anyway. So I let him be weird. I like it. It makes me happy.”
And I guess I was beginning to understand. I was used to it. It seemed like maybe he was a performance artist, a compelling mimic, and this was just how he fucked with people. What I’m saying is that all children seemed cool to me at this point.
Mary came out with her arms full of plates. The adults each got a Caesar salad with grilled chicken on top, and Timothy had a plate of homemade chicken fingers and mac and cheese. And Bessie and Roland got what they had explicitly requested: Tyson frozen chicken nuggets.
“Oh, wow,” Roland said. “Thanks.”
“Mary made sure to get what you wanted,” Madison said, and Bessie, embarrassed now that what she wanted was something nobody else would ever dream of wanting, looked down at her plate and said, “Thank you, Miss Mary.”
“It’s nothing,” Mary said. “There is no point in making children eat what they don’t want. A fool’s errand.”
“Could I have some of that salad, too?” Bessie asked, and Mary simply nodded and then returned with a small plate and a huge bottle of Heinz ketchup for the nuggets. “Welcome back to your home, children,” she said, and, man, there was some weird judgment in there, but she pulled it off like a badass. Who was gonna stop her?
“This is nice,” Madison said. “Jasper, do you want to say the blessing?”
Jasper nodded. Bessie and Roland looked dumbfounded. Madison and Timothy and Jasper all closed their eyes and clasped their hands, but me and the kids just stared at one another. Obviously we knew what prayer was—or did the kids know what it was? Did they know who God was? Did they think that their mother had made them out of clay? I had no idea. But I was not going to make them pray if they didn’t want to. We’d listen, politely.