“I hate my dad,” she said. “I was glad to get away from him. Your mom, holy shit, Lillian.”
I knew that nothing I said would change anything.
“I want you to stay with them through the end of the summer,” she said. “Here at the estate. And then they’ll go abroad. And Jasper will see them, okay? He’ll see them on breaks and holidays. They’ll have their trust funds. They’ll be a part of the family.”
I was crying so hard, but I didn’t know when it had started, what had been the exact thing. I couldn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry, Lillian,” Madison said, but I didn’t know what she was sorry for. She took another shot, made it easily, and the ball bounced right back into her waiting arms.
Back at the house, Bessie and Roland were still asleep, and I crawled into bed. Even though I tried to be as quiet as possible, Bessie woke up. “You’re crying,” she said, her voice so soft and dreamy.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you mad at us?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “God, no, never.”
Roland turned, reaching for us, and then propped himself up, waking to the room around him. “Is it morning?” he asked.
“Lillian is sad,” Bessie told him.
“Why?” he asked. I wanted to shoot into the sky like a comet. I was a grown woman, crying, surrounded by fire children who were not mine. No one looking at this would feel good about it.
“Life is hard,” I said. “That’s it. C’mon, kiddos. Bed. Let’s go to bed.”
I settled into the bed, and the kids repositioned themselves around me. I closed my eyes, but I could tell that Bessie was still staring at me, wanted to know what was inside me. And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.
“Lillian?” she whispered once Roland started snoring again.
“What?” I asked.
“I wish you’d never leave us,” she said.
“I do, too,” I told her.
“But I know you will,” she said, and, holy shit, this cracked me open. It made me want to die.
“Not yet,” I told her, and it sounded so wimpy, and I hated myself.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked.
“Let’s talk in the morning,” I told her.
“No,” she said, “right now. You know the fire?”
“Inside you?” I asked.
“Yeah. It just comes, you know? It just happens.”
“I know, kiddo,” I said.
“But sometimes it doesn’t just come,” she said. I could tell this meant something to her. And so I let her say it. “Sometimes I can make it come.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
“Watch,” she said. She slipped out of the bed. She rolled up her sleeves. “It usually happens when I’m angry. Or when I’m scared. Or when I just don’t know what’s happening. Or someone hurts me. And that’s scary, because I can’t stop it. But sometimes, if I think about it really hard and I hold myself together just right, if I want it, it will come.”
“Come back to bed, Bessie,” I told her.
“Watch,” she said. She closed her eyes like she was making a wish for the entire world. It was so dark, I couldn’t see her skin, but I could feel the heat, the slight change in temperature, the way it moved in waves. And then, after about fifteen seconds of complete stillness, utter silence, there were these little blue flames on her arms. I wanted to put her out, to reach for her, but I couldn’t move. And the flames rolled back and forth across her arms but they never went beyond those parameters, never flared up more than that. And the light from the fire made her face glow. And she was smiling. She was smiling at me.
Then, slowly, the fire rolled down to her hands, and there was this jittery flame and she was holding it. She was holding it in her hands, cupped together. It looked like what love must look like, just barely there, so easy to extinguish.
“You can see it, right?” she asked me, and I said that I could.
And then it was gone. She was breathing so steadily, a perfect machine.
“I don’t ever want it to go away,” she told me. “I don’t know what I’d do if it never came back.”
“I understand,” I said, and I did understand.
“How else would we protect ourselves?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them? I wanted to know. I wanted to know so bad.
Ten
Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world. They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. I had it on mute, so I didn’t actually know what was going on, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. It wasn’t hard to know what would come next. This was just a rerun of the confirmation hearing anyway, the channel filling time until the official Senate vote came in today.
The kids were on the sofa, reading books. They reeked of chlorine from the pool, a smell that I loved. I was pacing through the house, brushing my hair, rubbing moisturizer on my face, clipping my toenails, all these little things to make myself presentable, and, each time, I’d look at myself again in the mirror and feel like not a single thing had changed.
On the coffee table there were these index cards that listed all the former secretaries of state, like, sixty little cards all over the place. I was getting the kids to memorize them, or some of them, because Madison had said that it might be nice if they knew something about the position, as if the kids needed conversational openers to talk to their own father. So we studied the names. I’d never heard of most of them. It was interesting to look at the six secretaries of state who had gone on to be president. I knew this was something Madison and Jasper thought about a lot. But it was more fun for me to look at the three who had unsuccessfully run for president. I made Bessie and Roland memorize these names first, before anyone else.
Madison thought it was better if Roland and Bessie stayed behind, that the craziness of the proceedings, being shuttled from place to place, would be overwhelming for them. And she wasn’t wrong. I mean, yeah, they probably shouldn’t have gone to one of the biggest cities in America in support of their father, a guy they kind of hated. But I thought of the Smithsonian, a place I had always wanted to see and knew I never would. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. I thought about, holy shit, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that eternal flame. I wanted them to see these things. I even showed Madison the wardrobe for the kids: a layer of flame gel, the Nomex long underwear, clothes like you’d wear at Catholic school, so much coverage.
“It’s just a risk/reward kind of thing, you know?” she told me. We didn’t talk about that night between us, not a word. We didn’t act like it hadn’t happened. That would have been bullshit. But we acted like if we talked about it, it would only keep happening, the same result, the same pain, and what was the point of that?