I thought about Madison, one step closer to what she wanted. I thought about Jasper, but there wasn’t much feeling there.
“And so what does it mean?” I asked. “Like, for the kids?”
“Let’s just see how this plays out,” he said.
“But are the kids being considered?” I asked. “How all this affects them?”
“Honestly, Lillian?” Carl replied. “Not really. Not much. So just keep taking care of them. Do what you need to do to maintain order.”
“You don’t want them to fuck this up?” I asked.
“I do not want them to fuck this up,” he repeated.
“Okay, fine,” I said.
“Good night,” he said to me. “Good night, kids,” he said to the twins, who didn’t respond.
He left, and I went back to the kids.
“Is Dad dying?” Bessie asked.
“What?” I replied. “No. No way.”
“All right,” Bessie said, suspicious. Hopeful? I couldn’t tell.
“He was supposed to give us a hug after dinner,” Roland said.
“I don’t want him to hug me,” Bessie said.
“You guys look really cool,” I said, changing the subject. “I’m going to take a picture of you.”
I found the camera, the one Madison had asked me to use to document their lives, like maybe she needed pictures in order to quickly make a happy photo album for visitors to see. The kids were slumped on the sofa, tired.
“You don’t have to smile,” I said. “Just stay the way that you are.”
Roland’s head was resting on Bessie’s shoulder. Their arms weren’t quite as shimmery as they had been earlier in the night. I took the picture, then took one more.
“We want you to be in the picture,” Roland said.
“I can’t,” I told them. “It’s just you two.”
“Can we go to bed?” Bessie asked. “Can you read us a story?”
“Hell yeah,” I told them. “Hell yeah.”
Nine
The next three weeks felt like the world was spinning slightly faster than usual, all this weird activity swirling around us, no one telling us anything, but my life with Bessie and Roland didn’t really change. Of course, we saw in the newspaper, front page, how Jasper had been nominated, and everyone said this was a savvy decision on the part of the president. Everyone seemed to love Jasper, and perhaps it’s because I didn’t like him, but it seemed like what they loved about him was that he was inoffensive and gentlemanly, that he looked like he knew what he was doing. Good for him, I guess. If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. I thought about Jane, abandoned, dead, and I wondered how any kind of vetting didn’t think that mattered. I thought of Bessie and Roland on the front lawn, on fire. How did that not matter? But maybe it really didn’t matter. Jasper was a good senator; he made rich people and poor people equally happy, which must have been some kind of magic trick.
Madison and Timothy had flown to D.C. with Jasper, to simply be visible. Carl was on the property, but of course he was preoccupied with other stuff, barely seemed to care what I did with the kids. We played basketball, swam in the pool, read books, did our yoga. It was peaceful, honestly, like the end of the world had happened and we’d missed it. So much intensity had been directed toward these kids, and now that everyone was getting what they wanted, it was like we became invisible. They hadn’t caught on fire in a long time; at least it seemed like a long time to me. And when you are weird, when your surroundings become quiet, you think maybe you aren’t quite so fucked up. You think, Why was it so hard before?
One morning, we’d been testing the starch level in potatoes, and Bessie said, “Is anybody in the mansion?”
“No,” I said. “Well, I mean, the staff is there.”
“Can we go over there?” she asked, and I was like, why not? Who the fuck cares? Or, no, who the fuck was going to stop us?
Just to be safe, they put on their Nomex long underwear, which had finally arrived, this scratchy white material that made them look like they were living in a science fiction movie. They kind of loved it, except for how sweaty it made them. I wasn’t sure if memories of the mansion, long forgotten, might surface and cause them to catch.
So we walked over and of course the doors were locked. And we just banged on the rear entrance until Mary, so pissed to be disturbed, opened the door.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“We want to explore,” Roland said.
“Fine,” she replied, and waved us in like she was letting the plague spread through the house, like she didn’t care if she lived or died.
“Thank you, Miss Mary,” the kids said, and she replied, “Come by later. I have bread pudding. With whiskey sauce.”
“Yay!” the kids shouted.
But once they were inside, free, they grew quieter, more respectful, like they were in some old European cathedral, like the place was lousy with important dead people.
“Do you remember it?” I asked, but they both shook their heads.
“I bet your rooms were upstairs,” I said, and we walked up the staircase. I told them how horses had been hidden in the attic during the Civil War, but they didn’t care any more than I had cared.
We walked down the hallway, peeking our heads into each room. We saw Timothy’s room, all those stuffed animals, and the kids’ eyes got real wide. They walked in carefully, fully expecting it to be booby-trapped, and then they stared at the piles of plush. Bessie punched her fist into one of the piles and retrieved a zebra with Technicolor stripes. “I’m taking this,” she said, a kind of tax, and I was like, A-okay with me, so Roland grabbed an owl with a monocle and bow tie.
We walked around some more, and then they stopped in the doorway of one of the rooms. “This was it,” Bessie said. “This was our room.” I had no idea how she could tell. Now it was an exercise room with a NordicTrack and some weight machines, and all the walls were covered in mirrors. “It was right across from that bathroom,” Bessie said, remembering. “And we had bunk beds, and I slept on top.”
“And there was this toy box right under the window,” Roland continued.
“It was white and had flowers painted on it,” Bessie said. “And we each had our own desk.”
“Where is all that stuff?” Roland asked me, and I just shrugged.
“Maybe it moved with you and your mom when y’all left the mansion,” I offered.
“We didn’t take anything with us,” Bessie replied. “Mom wouldn’t let us.”
“So where is it?” Roland asked.
“I guess we can ask Madison,” I said. “Do you want that stuff?”
“No,” Bessie admitted. “I just want to know if he kept it.”
They seemed tired now, and so we went downstairs to the kitchen and Mary let us have bread pudding, which really had a kick of whiskey to it, but I let the kids have it anyway. We sat there, the three of us eating this sweet thing, Mary watching us, tolerating us. When I finished my bowl, without thinking, I dipped my finger in the glaze that had accumulated and Roland licked it right off my finger, ravenous. “Quite a sight,” Mary finally said, and I felt like maybe she was sincere, that we were something to behold.