The Night Parade(105)

I can’t, he thought. I’m afraid to open my mouth. I’ll lose it.

“I love you, babe. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—”

He went down on his knees.





56


“That was a beautiful service,” he said as he tucked Ellie into bed. Ellie pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, and David leaned in and planted a kiss at her temple. “Will you be okay in here by yourself tonight?”

“Yes. Dad?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“Are you okay?”

He smiled at her in the darkness. “I’m fine.”

She seemed like she wanted to say more. Yet in the end, she gave him a brief squeeze around the wrist, then slid her hand away. Even in the dark, he could tell she was studying him, perhaps reading him. Searching his thoughts, his emotions. Mrs. Blanche, Ellie’s elderly babysitter, had called Ellie a deep and contemplative child. “She roots,” Mrs. Blanche had told David once. “The girl, she sinks the deepest parts of herself far down into the soil and soaks up life.” The elderly woman had said this with admiration and tenderness.

“If you were sick,” she said, “I’d want to help you.”

For several seconds he could not find his voice. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said finally, a coward’s way of avoiding an actual response. His throat felt constricted.

“I keep thinking about that girl on the highway. I feel bad for her.”

“You gave her peace in the end,” David said. “That’s some gift, Eleanor.”

“You never call me Eleanor.”

He smiled at her in the darkness.

“I keep thinking about that boy, too,” she said. “Benny. The truck driver’s son.”

“Yeah,” David said.

“I feel bad about him, too.”

“It’s okay to feel bad. I feel bad, too.”

“And Mom,” she said. “Dad, what if I was the one keeping Mom healthy while she was at home? What if she got sick when she went into the hospital because I wasn’t there to keep her from getting upset?”

This jarred him, caught him off guard. He didn’t know what to say. It had never even occurred to him. He smoothed the hair from her forehead and said, “Please don’t be so silly and start blaming yourself for things. You can’t help it.”

“But I can,” Ellie said, her voice perking up a notch. “I can help everybody.”

“No one knows that for sure,” he said. “Not one hundred percent.”

“But we could try.”

David’s smile faded from his face. “Are we back to this again?”

“I don’t want to be one of the bad guys. I want to be a good guy. Like Mom.”

“I know you do.”

“If I was sick and someone else was the cure, wouldn’t you want them to help me?”

David exhaled—a long, shuddery, uncomfortable sound. “You think too much. Where do you get off being so smart for an eight-year-old?”

“I’m pretty much nine.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I keep forgetting.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He tucked the bedsheet around her small body. “Honey, if you were sick or hurt or in any kind of danger whatsoever, I would do anything in the world to protect you. That’s why we’re here.”

“Then you have to do the same thing for other people, too, Dad. All those other people who have sick kids. Or parents.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve got something amazing going on with you right now. What you can do . . . what you did for that girl today . . . that’s a miracle, El. Maybe that’s your gift to humanity. Maybe it’s not that you happen to be immune, but that you can do something great with your ability once you learn what it is. But you’ll be giving all that up if you turned yourself in to some doctors who just want to study your blood. You might be doing more harm than good that way. Do you understand?”

She was quiet for a while. Then, in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “I think so.”

“Good. Now, give your old man a kiss.”

She sat up, kissed the side of his face, hugged him hard. He tucked her back in, then pulled the bedroom door halfway closed as he stepped out into the hallway.

Gany startled him, sliding down the hall in the dark toward her own bedroom. She paused and touched his arm. “Hey,” she said. “You’re a good dad, you know that?”

He smiled at her in the darkness, his face feeling stiff and made of rubber. She returned his smile, though he registered something stiff and insincere about it. He wondered if she was secretly afraid of Ellie and what the girl had done on the highway. He wondered if she was really at peace with all she had claimed she was earlier at the dinner table. Most of all, he wondered if she’d just overheard their conversation.

“Good night,” Gany said, and continued on down the hall.

*

In the kitchen he found Tim seated by himself at the table, finishing the last of the wine. Only the small light above the sink was on, leaving much of Tim’s face masked in gloom. Beyond the window at Tim’s back, the night sky boasted an impossible arrangement of stars.