by Kevin Wilson
“So you’re gonna stay with him?” I asked, kind of already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s fine. I’m going to get what I want. At this point, Jasper gives me access to the things that matter to me, and I don’t just mean money. I mean the freedom to have my own ideas and my own life. Plus, honestly, I still kind of like him. He’s stupid, but I like him well enough. And, hey, guess what? Somebody talked to me about running for Jasper’s seat in the Senate. I mean, wouldn’t that be wild?”
“And if Timothy catches on fire again?” I asked.
“I don’t know that it matters, honestly,” she said. “I’ll come up with something. Maybe I’ll even tell the truth. Timothy is going to be fine. I’ll make sure that he’s fine. I mean, you did it with two kids; I can handle one.”
“Maybe he’ll be president,” I offered.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Timothy is going to be a Tommy Hilfiger model. He’s going to marry royalty. He’s going to have it easy.”
It was so nice to hear her voice, to hear her voice and listen to her talk about what she wanted. I never quite knew what I wanted, the letters I sent her so wishy-washy and pained. Madison, she fucking wanted stuff. And when she talked or wrote about it, with that intensity, you wanted to give it to her. You wanted her to have it. And it was so easy, I was in love with her again, the routine of our relationship, that she would hurt me, but I would allow it. I would live with it.
“What about the kids?” I asked, finally, waiting for bad news. “What about Bessie and Roland?”
“They are not going to that, whatever, that insane boot camp. It’s fine. Plus, honestly? It was going to cost like five hundred grand a year for both of them. That’s bullshit. No way.”
“But is Jasper going to take care of them?” I asked. “What will happen to them?”
Madison was quiet, and I could hear her breathing. I wondered where she was right now, if she was on the porch, a pitcher of sweet tea beside her. I wondered if she was on a private jet back to D.C. to go apartment hunting. I wanted to picture her clearly in my mind.
“Well, it’s complicated,” she replied. “Jasper wants to do the right thing, Lil, and he really, truly means it. He fucked up. He fucked up so bad that I don’t think Roland and Bessie ever really need to forgive him. They’d be well within their rights. But they’ll be taken care of.”
“How?” I said. “Madison . . .” I was almost crying. “How?”
“Do you want them, Lillian?” she asked.
“What?” There was this little ray of light. I could almost touch it. It was so faint, but I could reach up and it would be right on my fingertips. And I could barely breathe. And I could barely move.
“You heard me. I know that you heard me,” she said.
“Me?” I asked.
“Would you take care of them? Would you keep taking care of them?”
“For how long?” I asked.
“As long as they want you to. As long as you want to. For good. Permanently.”
“How?” I asked. “Why?”
“It’s not that complicated. Well, it is, but Carl walked me through everything. He’s so smart. He’s the best. I had the idea, but he worked it out. So, you wouldn’t adopt them, okay? Because that would, like, make you responsible for them. And Jasper, he’s a good man, but it’s nice if he has to legally be a good man. It’s legal guardianship. You’ve heard of that, right? You’d be their legal guardian. But Jasper would make sure they were cared for. He’d provide for their upbringing. He’d pay their expenses. If you wanted Bessie to go to Iron Mountain—”
“Fuck no,” I said, but I was kind of laughing. I was kind of crying, and I was kind of laughing. I must have sounded insane.
“Well, whatever, not Iron Mountain, but a good school. A good but normal school for both of them.”
“They’d be mine?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Madison said. “Would that make you happy?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted.
“Lil, that is not what I’d hoped to hear. I’ve been working on this ever since you nearly burned our fucking house down.”
“No,” I said. “It would. It would. I’m just . . . I’m just afraid that I won’t do a good job.”
“Who would judge you?” she asked. “Who do you know who’s done a good job? Name one parent that you think made it through without fucking their kid up in some specific way.”
“I can’t think of anyone right now,” I replied.
“There isn’t anyone,” she said, getting irritated, wanting me to be grateful, wanting to make up for whatever she had done to me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take them.”
“Lillian?” she said. There was silence.
“Yes?” I replied.
“I think I fixed everything,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Not really. But you kept it from getting more messed up.”
“That’s fixing something,” she said. “You stop it from getting worse.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you, I guess.”
“I’ll see you, okay?” she said. “We’ll see each other. Timothy will see Roland and Bessie. When the time is right, Jasper will see Roland and Bessie. Just not often, not a ton. But it’ll keep going.”
“Okay, Madison,” I said.
“I love you, Lillian,” she finally told me.
“I love you, too,” I answered, but what else could be said? What else could be done? “I’d better go,” I told her.
“Bye, Lillian.”
“Goodbye,” I said, and I turned off the phone.
And how do I say this? How do I say it and have you understand? Maybe there’s no way to say it. I was happy. I was happy that Bessie and Roland would be mine. But, can you understand me? I was sad. I was sad because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted them. They had appeared, like magic, but I wasn’t magical. I was messed up. I messed things up. And I knew that having two children, two children who caught on fire, would be hard. It would make me sad. It would be so easy to ruin them.
Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn’t my life anymore. It was someone else’s. And I had decided that I’d just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.
I’m just trying to say that I got something that I’d wished for. But I knew it wasn’t a happy ending, no matter what Madison thought, no matter how much she convinced herself that everything would work out fine. It was just an ending. And downstairs, there was a new beginning. And they were waiting for me. But I sat there in that attic, where I had never once been happy in my entire life. I sat there and I held on to this moment, before the new beginning started. I wondered how long I could stay in this moment. I wondered how many times in my life I’d come back to this room, to this exact moment in time. I wondered what I would feel, looking back on it.
I got out of bed. I put on some shorts, a ratty T-shirt with a Dominique Wilkins caricature silk-screened on it, the colors faded. I put on my basketball shoes, which I loved and had thought I might never see again. And under the bed, still there, was a basketball, the grip nearly worn off of it. There was a shitty court a few blocks away, weeds and no lines and not even a net on the hoop. But I wanted them to try, to get used to a life that could be all of ours.
Downstairs, Bessie and Roland were sitting on the sofa. Carl was building a house of cards for them, but it kept falling down. My mom was nowhere to be found, of course. I imagined she was already on her way to Tunica to gamble with the money Carl had given her.
“So you talked to her?” Carl asked, standing at attention.
“Yes,” I replied. I didn’t want to draw this out. I handed the phone to Carl. I gave him a hug, which I could tell he either did not like or did not expect. Either way, I just kind of hung on him for a second. “We were a pretty good team,” Carl said, looking sheepish.
I nodded. “Say bye to Carl,
kiddos,” I said. And he was gone, out the door. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.
“What’s happening?” Bessie asked.
“Do you want to stay with me?” I asked them. “For good?”
“Yes,” they said without hesitation.
“You don’t have to,” I told them.
“Yes,” they said again. They were vibrating.
“It won’t be like at the estate,” I said. “It will not be fun all the time.”
“It wasn’t fun all the time there,” Roland said. “It was awful sometimes.”
“Well, then it’ll be like that now, too.”
They just nodded. They weren’t smiling, exactly. They had a kind of dazed look on their faces.
“Do you want us?” Bessie suddenly asked.
“What?” I replied. My heart stopped.
“Do you want us?” Bessie asked.
I wanted to say yes immediately, but it was unnerving, the way she was looking at me. I felt like she knew what was in my heart, even if I didn’t. And she wasn’t blinking.
“Yes,” I finally said. “I want both of you. I want to take care of you.”
And she didn’t smile. She didn’t say a word. She just stared at me. I could see her skin starting to get red, blotchy. I could feel the heat coming off her. I knew that if she caught on fire, I would pull her close to me. I would let it come.
But she didn’t catch on fire. Her skin paled; she took a breath.
“You do want us,” she finally said. “Yes, you do.”
“Let’s get out of this house,” I told them, holding up the basketball. We stood in the doorway, the whole world opening up before us. God, there was so much of it. We walked out of that house, and I led them toward whatever came next. I handed the ball to Bessie, and she bounced it on the sidewalk, that steady thump like a heartbeat.
Bessie had believed me. She knew that I wanted them, that I would always take care of them. And so I decided to believe her. I decided that this was the truth. It was this little fire. And I would hold on to it. And it would keep me warm. And it would never, ever go out.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following:
Julie Barer and everyone at the Book Group, especially Nicole Cunningham.
Zack Wagman, an amazing editor, and everyone at Ecco.
The University of the South and the English Department, with special gratitude to Wyatt Prunty.
The Corporation of Yaddo and the Hermitage at St. Mary’s for the time and space to write.
My family: Kelly and Debbie Wilson; Kristen, Wes, and Kellan Huffman; Mary Couch; Meredith, Warren, Laura, Morgan, and Philip James; and the Wilson, Fuselier, and Baltz families.
My friends: Aaron Burch, Manuel Chinchilla, Lucy Corin, Lee Conell, Lily Davenport, Marcy Dermansky, Sam Esquith, Isabel Galbraith, Elizabeth and John Grammer, Jason Griffey, Kate Jayroe, Kelly Malone, Katie McGhee, Matt O’Keefe, Cecily Parks, Ann Patchett, Betsy Sandlin, Matt Schrader, Leah Stewart, David and Heidi Syler, Lauryl Tucker, Claire Vaye Watkins, Caki Wilkinson, and Becca Wells Williams.
And, as always, with all my love: Leigh Anne, Griff, and Patch.
About the Author
KEVIN WILSON is the New York Times bestselling author of the short-story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine as well as the novels Perfect Little World and The Family Fang, which was made into a film with Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman. His story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. Wilson teaches fiction at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Kevin Wilson
The Family Fang
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Perfect Little World
Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
nothing to see here. Copyright © 2019 by Kevin Wilson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover art © Christian Northeast
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wilson, Kevin, 1978– author.
Title: Nothing to see here / Kevin Wilson.
Description: New York : Ecco, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019008256 (print) | LCCN 2019009387 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062913487 () | ISBN 9780062913463 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062944870 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Humorous. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I58546 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I58546 N68 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008256
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-291348-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-291346-3
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com