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 hissing 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.