“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.