“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.