Her suggestion that we go out suddenly made more sense. She probably wanted a chance to be sick in private without Milo seeing it.
“There’s a card for your expenses.” She reached over to flip to the back of the binder and pulled out an envelope, handing it to me.
A black American Express card slid into my hand.
My mother would have been drooling.
As it was, I might have salivated just a teensy bit. The words no limit repeated on a loop in my mind. “Expenses?” I repeated.
“For buying food or snacks or whatever activities the two of you might want to do,” Sheila said.
Receipts. I was going to get a receipt every single time I used this card and stick it into this envelope. For the Crawfords’ benefit as well as my own. I’d make myself accountable.
Milo came back into the kitchen wearing cowboy boots, shorts, goggles, a scarf, and no shirt. “I’m ready!”
“Maybe we should go pick out some clothes that would be better for the weather,” I said, slipping the AmEx card into my back pocket. I’d never understood the expression “burning a hole in my pocket” before, but I totally got it now.
“And after you get changed maybe you could show Diana where the slopes are, so that the two of you can try it out later.” Sheila sounded hesitant, which surprised me. Until now she’d seemed so confident about everything.
“No skiing!” Milo’s expression was hard to make out with his goggles covering half of his face, but he sounded very unhappy.
“It’s John’s favorite thing in the whole world, but Milo is afraid of it,” she said to me in a low voice and then loudly added on, “even though we will be really careful and safe and take it slow!”
“No skiing,” he repeated.
Part of me was relieved, thinking that my lack of skiing ability was not going to be revealed, but this was what they’d hired me for. Using my supposed psychology skills and knowledge of how child brains worked to convince their son to learn how to ski. This made it all worse. How was I going to get him to do it?
“Why don’t you show me your room and we’ll find something to change into?” I asked Milo, now wanting this conversation with his mother to be over.
He grumbled, but Milo led me to his bedroom and I found a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt for him to put on. I left him to change and went into my room to brush my teeth and put my hair up in a ponytail.
Milo met me in the hallway, but he didn’t seem happy about his required wardrobe change.
Oh well. There were worse things in life. He needed to be in warm clothes because I was not going to have him get sick for real. I couldn’t imagine he was a very good patient, what with the thinking he always had some kind of deadly illness.
I tried to get him thinking about other things as we went down to the lobby. “Is there any place special you’d like to show me?”
“There’s some cool stuff, I guess. Like the pool and the waterslides.”
“Which way is that?”
Milo pointed to the left and I followed the signs to the indoor water park. And no joke, there was a lazy river, an Olympic-size pool, a hot tub, and a variety of waterslides. It smelled of chlorine and the room echoed with the shrieks of small children. “Why do they have all this?” I asked. “Don’t most people come to Aspen just to ski?”
I realized my mistake just a moment too late, and Milo’s face fell again. Maybe it would help to talk about it.
“Why don’t you like skiing?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t like it. It’s scary. Do you want to see the playground?” This perked him up a little and I followed him until we came to a large play area with swings and slides and equipment to climb on. It was pretty empty.
“There’s not many kids here,” I commented.
“It gets busier when school is out.” Milo wandered over to a bench and I sat down next to him. He watched the other kids playing with a wistful expression.
“Why aren’t you in school?” I asked him. I couldn’t remember Sheila mentioning her reason for keeping him out of kindergarten.
“My mom worries. She likes me being at home and having nannies and tutors.”
“Why?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I was sick. I had cancer.”
“Was this the kind of cancer you got from the plague?”
“You can’t get cancer from the plague,” he scoffed, as if I were the one who made up medical conditions. My smile faded as I realized that he was being serious. “When I was little I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I was in the hospital for a long time.”
I did not know what to say to that. I settled on “I’m sorry.”
“I’m fine now. And Mom says that when we move to France, maybe I can enroll in school there. Do you know what the best part of that will be?”
Getting away from his mother’s insane and totally unrealistic schedule? “What?”
“I think when I go to school that I’ll finally have a friend.”
That made my heart plummet down into my stomach. “What do you mean? You’ve never had a friend?”
“I don’t know how to make friends. I was in the hospital for a long time. I didn’t get to play with other kids.” He looked so lost and forlorn that I was ready to take on the world for him. How could he not have friends? I’d known him for less than twenty-four hours but I was already prepared to stab somebody to protect him.
“It’s actually pretty easy at your age to make friends. You just find someone you like the look of and ask them if they want to be your friend.”
Milo didn’t respond, and wore an expression that said he didn’t believe me.
“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll come back here tomorrow, later in the afternoon, and I will help you make a friend.” I held out my hand. “Deal?”
He perked up, excited by my offer, and shook my fingers enthusiastically. “Deal!”
Now I had to hope that the kids here would be nice and not terrible snobs who might reject Milo. Children were usually easy to read. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a kind one.
He jumped off the bench. “Let me show you all the restaurants!”
“Sure,” I agreed and stood up. I turned to go but felt a burning sensation at the base of my neck, almost like I was being watched. Not in a creepy way, but there was this feeling of . . . anticipation. Or recognition. As if there were someone I needed to find. It was so strange and I scanned the area, back and forth, and noticed a little girl about Milo’s age on the jungle gym smiling at me. I waved to her, and she waved back.
But she wasn’t the one who had been looking at me.
So odd.
Milo tugged at my hand and I followed him toward the restaurants. I thought of the little girl and hoped that she’d be at the playground tomorrow so that I could help her and Milo become friends.
That was at least one thing I could do for him. Other than keeping him alive and all his limbs intact.
I imagined sharing this story with Alice, and knew she’d be rooting for that little girl to have a cute single dad so that I could make a new friend, too.
That wasn’t what I was here for, though. I was going to focus completely on Milo and the Crawfords. There just wasn’t room for anything else.