by Kevin Wilson
“Um,” I said, so embarrassed. I hated needing things, and I hated it even more when I needed things from my mom. “The kids are hungry.”
“That makes three of us,” she replied, still looking at the magazine, which was about houses on the beach or some such nonsense.
“I’ve got money,” I said. “Could you order all of us a pizza?”
She looked up at the ceiling, thinking about it. “I’m not really in the mood for pizza,” she said.
“Anything,” I replied. “McDonald’s? Subway?”
She sighed, stood up from the table, and started going through the cabinets, snatching them open and then slamming them closed.
“I’ve got macaroni and cheese,” she said. Then she looked in the fridge. “And hot dogs.”
“That’s great,” I said. I reached for a pot and filled it with water. She threw the hot dogs on the counter next to the stove and went back to the table. While I waited for the water to boil, I stared at her. When I was a kid, there had been so many nights like this, usually my mother and one of her boyfriends watching TV on this little model they kept in the kitchen, while I made butter noodles or a wilted, soggy salad with Thousand Island dressing, cutting up cucumbers and green peppers like we were the healthiest people in the world because of me.
I walked over to the stairs, called out to see if the kids were okay, and they shouted that they were. When I stepped back into the kitchen, my mom said, “I knew you were coming.”
“Is that right?” I said, feeling my skin getting itchy, my heartbeat picking up.
“A man called a while ago. Cal or Carl or . . . something like that. Asked if I’d heard from you.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked her.
“I said I hadn’t seen you all summer, that I hadn’t even talked to you,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, because I knew there was more.
“He said that I should call him if you turned up with two kids,” she continued, now finally looking at me. “Said he’d pay me for my trouble.”
“So did you call him back?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He was so stiff, so formal. I didn’t like his tone. So, no, I didn’t call him back.”
The water was finally boiling, and I poured in the macaroni.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“Madison’s husband,” I said, “he’s—”
“I don’t want to know,” she told me.
“Well, the kids, Bessie and Roland. Something you need to know—”
“No, I don’t need to know,” she said. “I won’t keep you from what you want to do, Lillian. I’ve never kept you from what you want—”
I huffed, my turn to interrupt her.
“You do what you want, but just let me have my peace,” she said after a few seconds.
When I looked over at her, she seemed so old, even though she was only forty-seven, and I knew that sometimes she adopted the mannerisms and posture of someone much older to avoid having to do things that she didn’t want to do. If I’d been a man, if I’d been handsome, she would not have been reading a magazine about coastal living and yawning. I think, maybe, if I’d been anyone other than her daughter, she would have acted differently, but I made her feel old, because I was hers.
I stirred the pasta, started putting hot dogs in a pan.
“I never pictured you with kids,” she said. “You didn’t seem the type for it.”
“That makes two of us,” I replied.
“We’re so hungry!” Roland shouted from the attic.
“Let ’em come on down,” my mom said, indicating the table. She stood up and filled four plastic cups with water.
“Come down!” I shouted up at them, the rickety house letting sound shoot through the walls and floors, and then they were thumping down the stairs.
“Hi!” Roland said, again waving to my mom, who took her magazine and pulled her chair over near the window.
I heated up the hot dogs, nearly burning them because I was also straining the macaroni, and then I mixed everything together in a pot. I got some plates and served them.
“Don’t you want some?” Roland asked my mom.
“I guess so,” she replied, and she pulled her chair over to the table. She took a bite and nodded. “It’s good,” she told me. She always liked it when I cooked for her, whatever it was.
“You’re quiet,” my mom said, pointing her spoon at Bessie.
“I’m a little tired,” Bessie replied.
“She’s cute,” my mom said to me, her spoon still fixed on Bessie, who brightened a little.
“We’re on a trip,” Roland announced, wanting my mother’s attention.
“For how long?” she asked. I wondered how long it had been since she’d talked to a child. To anyone.
“We don’t know,” Roland said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“Just for a little while,” I told the table, not hungry, pushing my food around my plate.
“We don’t stay anywhere for very long,” Bessie admitted.
“Well,” my mom said, “it’s better than just staying in one place for your entire life.”
“I don’t think so,” Bessie said, looking at me now, like she wanted me to say something, but my mind was somewhere else, not in this house. This happened a lot, where my body was right here, in the house where I’d grown up, but my mind was hovering just outside it, waiting to see what it was that I was going to do.
After the kids fell asleep, I was still too keyed up to do anything. Being back in this house, in the attic, felt like sliding down the biggest slide in the world, just an utterly cosmic joke. I tried to imagine my life before this summer, all the times I moved out and then moved right back. I had been so smart, and then when things didn’t work out exactly how I’d hoped, it was like I pushed that curiosity way down inside myself. I’d wasted so much time.
I’d check out books by Ursula Le Guin, Grace Paley, and Carson McCullers. And then I’d hide the books from view when anyone walked by because I was afraid someone would ask me about them, like they might think I was showing off or trying to be someone that I wasn’t. There were times when I felt feral, like I hadn’t gotten the proper training right when it mattered, and now I was lost.
And here I was, and now there were these two children, their arms wrapped so tightly around me that I could barely breathe. And maybe, now that I had them all to myself, now that we didn’t have the safety of that house on the estate, I worried that these kids had missed that opportunity, too, that they were lost. And I wondered if it was cruel to pretend that there was anything I could do for them. I knew there would come a time when I had to give them back. And, god, they would hate me. For their entire lives. More than their mother. More than Jasper, even. They’d hate me because I’d made them think that I could do it.
I pulled their arms off me, and they muttered, their bodies so sweaty in this humid attic. I rearranged the fans so they were closer to the kids, and then I walked downstairs, the steps creaking and squeaking loudly, until I saw my mom on the sofa in the living room. She wasn’t watching TV or reading or doing anything. She didn’t even have a drink. She was just staring into space.
Not long after I’d come back home after being kicked out of Iron Mountain, we were in the driveway, my mom about to take me to school. And when she started the car, smoke began pouring out from under the hood, this terrible grinding sound. More smoke. I ran to the house to get some water, and my mom used some rags to protect her hand while she popped the hood. I ran back outside with a pitcher of water sloshing around, and now the engine was on fire, the flames reaching pretty high. And I stopped a few feet from my mom, who was just staring at the fire, with that same look on her face that I was seeing now. It was like she could see something inside the flame, some prophecy. Or maybe she could see the span of her life up to this point, how she got to this moment, standing over her ruined car.
I’d walked over to her and held up the pitcher, but she ju
st shook her head. “Look,” she said, gesturing toward the engine, “just look at it.” I didn’t know what she wanted me to see, if we could even see the same thing. “It’s kind of pretty,” she finally said. And we stood there, watching the fire, until she finally took the water from me and dumped it on the engine, which didn’t do much of anything. “You don’t have to go to school today,” she told me, sighing so deeply. “I’m not going to work.” I nodded, smiling a little, because I thought maybe we’d spend the day together, go see a movie, but when we went back into the house, she lit up a cigarette and closed the door to her bedroom, locking me out, and I didn’t see her until the next morning. And this was what I finally realized, that even as we sank deeper and deeper into our lives, we were always separate. And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren’t alone.
And now, here we were, back in this house. What I wanted to do, if this was a dream, was to walk into that room. I wanted to sit next to my mom. And I wanted to ask, “Why did you hate me?” And I wanted her to say, “You’re looking at it from the wrong angle. I didn’t hate you. I loved you so much. I protected you. I kept you safe from harm.” And I would say, “You did?” She would nod. I’d ask her who my father was, and she’d say that he was the worst man who had ever been born. She’d say that she had given up everything in her life to get away from him. And she had raised me all alone, as best she could. And I would say, “Thank you.” And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.
I stared at her for a few more seconds, and I could not imagine what was inside her head. I didn’t hate her. But there was no way that I was going to sit on that sofa. There was no way that I was going to say anything to her. I turned around, the steps creaking so loud that she must have heard me; how could she not have heard me? And there were the kids, still curled into the shape of sleep, their bodies both rigid and loose at the same time. I crawled back into bed. And Bessie opened her eyes.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. Because I had no idea, had barely made it this far.
“Will we have to go back?” she asked.
“Eventually,” I admitted. “Yes, we will.”
She thought about this. It was so dark in the attic. I couldn’t really see her and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to.
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It really is.”
She kissed me, the first time either of the children had kissed me. I stroked her hair, her weird hair, this weird child.
“How much longer is summer?” she asked.
“A long time,” I replied. “We still have a long time.” And this was enough. She was asleep again. And then, soon enough, so was I.
When I woke up, Carl was standing over me, his hand lightly resting on his cheek, like I was abstract art, like he saw something that interested him but he wasn’t sure what it meant, like he thought I was something a child could have made. And, honestly, I wasn’t that shocked. He’d let us go, but I always knew that at some point he’d be the one to bring us back.
“Hello, Carl,” I said, and he shook his head, observing my circumstances.
“There wasn’t anywhere else that you could go?” he asked.
“I . . . I don’t have many friends,” I told him. “When did she call you?”
“Late last night,” he replied. I wasn’t even mad at her. I don’t know what I thought would happen. Maybe I wanted it to be over with, had reached the limits of what I could do on my own. That it had taken barely a day seemed pathetic.
“So this is where you grew up?” he asked me, looking around the attic.
“No, Carl. I grew up in a normal room. Downstairs. This room is where I ended up.”
“I see,” he replied.
The kids heard us talking and opened their eyes. When they saw that it was Carl, they simply groaned, flopped onto their sides, and pulled the sheets over their heads.
I should have been more afraid, after all that had happened, but Carl, as much as he irritated me, didn’t scare me. If it had been the police, then I’d have been scared. I realized that Madison and Jasper hadn’t told anyone else about me, about the kids.
“Please tell me the mansion didn’t burn down,” I told him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Some smoke damage, a month of renovations. It’s fine. It could have been much worse.”
“How did you explain it to the fire department?” I asked him, genuinely curious. My guess, if I had only one guess, was that money was involved.
“The fire chief is a close friend of Secretary Roberts,” Carl said. Well, okay, I realized, favors. Rich-people favors were better than money. And then I noticed the title Carl had used, Secretary.
“He’s not resigning?” I asked.
“I’m not here to talk about that,” Carl replied. He held out a cellular phone.
“Who do you want me to talk to?” I asked him.
“Mrs. Roberts,” he replied. “She’s the one who set all of this up. She wants to talk to you.”
“Carl, I don’t know if I can talk to her,” I said. “Legally, I’m not sure what—”
“Just talk to her, okay?” he told me. He put the phone in my hand. “Just press the green button,” he said, and then he shook the bed, pulling the covers off the kids. “Do you kids want to get ice cream?” he asked.
“Not really,” Bessie admitted.
“Well, do you want to get out of this awful attic and get some fresh air?” he tried next.
“With you?” Roland asked, sneering.
“It’s okay,” I told them. “Carl has been good to us. I just need to talk to Madison for a little while.”
“You’re not leaving us?” Bessie asked, cautious.
“Carl’s just going to take you downstairs so you can hang out with my mom,” I told her. “It’s okay.”
They got out of bed, adjusting their clothes. Carl held out his hands, and each kid took one, disappearing down the stairs.
I looked at the phone. If I threw it in the trash, if I could sneak down the stairs and out a window, I could be back on the road, entirely on my own. I resisted this urge, which was pretty common with me, the slightest friction causing me to jump out of whatever it was that was in motion. I’d get a little banged up, would ruin my reputation, but it always seemed worth it for the escape. And then I imagined those kids sitting with Carl and my mother, such a sad fate. I put the phone to my ear and waited to hear that voice, one that I’d replayed in my mind for so many years.
“Lillian?” Madison asked.
“It’s me,” I replied.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank goodness. Just tell me straight up, have you done anything stupid?”
“No,” I said, a little aggrieved. “Well, I mean, I went back home to my mom’s.”
“Well, yes, that is stupid, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You haven’t talked to any reporters? You haven’t drawn attention to the kids?”
“No,” I said. “We drove to my mom’s. We ate mac and cheese. We slept on the most uncomfortable mattress in the world. It’s fine.”
“Well . . . good,” she said.
“How much did you pay my mom to tell you where I was?” I asked.
“A thousand dollars,” she told me. I didn’t say anything. “Why?” she asked. “Is that more or less than what you had hoped?”
“I honestly have no idea,” I said. I didn’t really know how money worked anymore.
“We never really got a chance to talk, Lil. It’s been so crazy. It’s been insane. I mean, yes, the confirmation, all that. But, you know, Timothy . . . catching on fire . . . being a fire child. All that.”
“You protected him,” I told her.
“Well, I fucking dropped him,” she said. “Oh my god,
he burned the hell out of me.”
“But you protected him when it mattered,” I said.
“When Jasper threatened to send him to some weird test site? Yeah, that was never going to happen. I would have destroyed him. It was such a sign of his own weakness that he was even going to consider it.”
“But you were going to send the kids to that ranch, that whatever-the-fuck,” I told her.
“It was up for discussion, Lil. That’s all. I know you don’t believe it, but I have a conscience. I feel bad about stuff. It may take longer than it does a normal person, but I do feel bad.”
“But now that you have your own fire child,” I said.
“Exactly,” she replied. “Exactly. It happened, and it was terrifying, but then Timothy was still Timothy afterward. He was sweet. He was mine. And I felt like, okay, I can do that. However many times it happens, I can do it.”
“That was pretty impressive how you covered it up,” I said.
“It honestly wasn’t even that hard,” she said. “I had it all worked out before we even jumped into the car. There are a lot of nice things about being rich, but one of the best is that you can say almost anything, and if you do it with confidence, without blinking, people put a lot of effort into believing you.”
“So Timothy is staying with you?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I made Jasper understand that, and he’s accepted it. We had a long talk last night—we had to stay in the guesthouse, by the way, which was pretty great, even though Jasper couldn’t stop crying about his family home—and I had to make him understand a lot of things. I had to make him understand how much I could ruin him. How much all of us could ruin him. So he can be the secretary of state. Let him have it. It’s as close as he’ll get to the presidency.”