All Adults Here(49)

“Absolutely. Let’s go outside, guys!” Cecelia said, in her best imitation of a camp counselor voice. She waved to Elliot. “See you later!”



* * *



—

The backyard was wide and flat, with a tall wooden fence on the three sides not facing the house. The twins raced past the swing and to the very back of the yard, where they began to build something out of sticks. Cecelia wandered in their direction but stopped and sat on the tire swing. She lay back and stared at the clouds passing back and forth over her head.

Elliot looked a lot like her dad. Or, he looked the way her dad would look if someone got him on a TV makeover show—tighter clothes, neat, short hair, no beard, real shoes. Their voices even sounded alike: higher than average, with a touch of caramel on the back of the tongue. Her father was a great singer—Smokey Robinson, that sort of thing. Cecelia wondered if Elliot ever sang. She couldn’t imagine it—according to her dad, Elliot had always been uptight, and everyone knew that uptight people couldn’t sing. (She herself was too shy to sing in front of anyone, and understood.) Families were the weirdest thing in the world. Her dad and Elliot and Porter, all living in one house? Eating breakfast and dinner together every day? Sharing a hotel room on family vacations? It was like a video game—stick all these people together and see which one survives. One of the boys cried out, and Cecelia sat up. They seemed perfectly content from a distance, but when she wobbled to her feet and took a few steps closer, she could see that one of the twins—Zachary, if the shoes were on the right person’s feet—was bleeding from his face.

“Shit,” she said, moving faster now, with both boys running in her direction. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”



* * *



—

There were no Band-Aids in the bathroom Elliot had pointed to, nor in the kitchen drawers, which Cecelia opened one at a time, slamming them open and closed while holding the bleeding twin on her hip; he weighed at least thirty pounds, maybe more, and the other twin kept trying to climb onto her other side.

“Let’s look upstairs, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Cecelia said, not remotely sure that it was the truth. She watched as tiny drops of blood fell onto her shirt, onto the carpet in the living room, onto the gleaming hardwood floor. Zachary wailed—the cut was just underneath his eye, a straight line, about an inch long. An inch looked like a mile on a small face. Cecelia humped him higher up onto her hip and held Aidan by the hand, dragging him along.

Elliot’s bedroom was spotless. Cecelia didn’t think that she’d ever seen a real bedroom with no clothing piled up in one place or another. Zachary buried his face in her chest, leaving smears of blood on her shirt. Cecelia set his butt down on the ledge of the sink and opened the medicine cabinet. There were Band-Aids and tubes of Neosporin and tweezers and more bottles of skin cream than she’d ever seen outside of a Sephora. She pulled down a box and quickly unwrapped a Band-Aid. Zachary stopped crying long enough to watch her with suspicion.

“Are you going to take out his eyeball?” Aidan asked, his chin level with her hip bone. He sounded hopeful.

“What?! No, he just needs a Band-Aid,” Cecelia said. Aidan pinched her thigh to express his disappointment. Zachary whimpered while Cecelia held the corner of a towel to his face to stop the bleeding. The towel looked clean, like everything else in the house, and surely they wouldn’t object to a stain from their child’s blood. She let the towel drop to the floor and put the Band-Aid on the cut. He looked like the Shrinky Dinks version of Rocky. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “I promise. Let’s go watch some TV.”

Zachary didn’t need to be told twice. He leapt to the ground and ran down the stairs, not slowed for a second, with his brother two strides ahead of him. Cecelia stooped down to pick up the towel, and after opening and closing a few doors, found the laundry room. She pulled open the door of the washing machine and, just before she let go of the bloody towel, noticed an iPhone sitting in the steel basin. This seemed like the universe evening itself out a little bit: one downside, a child was bleeding, but on the upside, she’d found Elliot’s missing phone. Maybe she wasn’t the world’s worst babysitter after all. She’d been half surprised that he had asked, given her new status as a ne’er-do-well. Maybe losing the phone was a test, and he was checking to see if she was a thief in addition to whatever else.

Downstairs, the sound of Paw Patrol filled the house. Kids knew how to do everything now. Cecelia poked her head into the room next door—an office. Instead of the beiges of the rest of the house, the room was filled with thick dark wood and a heavy desk that was meant to look old but clearly wasn’t.

Cecelia looked for a piece of paper to write a small note on—there was a pad on his desk, clearly made by Wendy, with photos of the smiling twins at the top of every page. Cecelia tore off a sheet and opened Elliot’s desk to look for a pen. In the drawer, just behind some loose pens and pencils and the odd penny, there was a glossy black folder. Cecelia reached for it without thinking—it was shiny, with the Beauty Bar logo. Elliot didn’t seem like the Beauty Bar type, though Wendy did. When it had opened its first branch in Brooklyn, Katherine and Cecelia and their friends had gone and tried every sample, regardless of their need for it: lipstick, wrinkle cream, blush, volumizing spray, cuticle ointment. The stores were as glossy and black as the folder, with floors that looked like pools of wet ink. Cecelia opened the folder and looked at the drawing on the first page. It was a drawing of the roundabout, with Susan’s Bookshop and Spiro’s and Shear Beauty and the hardware store all in their spots, steady as Beefeaters outside Buckingham Palace, but in the upper-left corner, next to the pizza place, was Beauty Bar. It dwarfed everything else—the building was taller, wider, darker, like a hurricane that had decided to stay put.