Nothing to See Here (40)

“Have you told them about me?” she finally asked, her voice so soft.

“The kids?” I said, and I could feel the disappointment in my stomach, to remember the reality of the situation. “Have I told them about you?”

“Yeah, like, have you talked me up? Have you told them that I’m good? That I’m cool? That I’m kind? That they can trust me?”

I was still trying to get the kids to believe all those things about me. I hadn’t had time yet to bring anyone else into the discussion. But Madison looked so hopeful, and it was strange to see her this way, worried about what someone else thought of her.

“Of course,” I said. “I told them that you’re a great person, that you’ll be a great stepmother to them.”

“And they believe you?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. I could tell this didn’t satisfy Madison, so I said, “By the end of the summer, I promise that they’ll love you.”

“Okay,” she finally replied. “Find out what they like, and I’ll buy a bunch of it and give it to them.”

“Bribery?” I said, smiling.

“What’s the point of having money if you can’t use it to make people like you?” she said. She reached into the bucket and produced another beer, popped the top, and handed it to me.

“How much time do we have?” I asked her.

“How much time?” she replied, confused.

“Until I need to go back to the kids.”

She thought about this, looking at me. “How much time do you need?” she asked, but I didn’t even answer. Nothing that I said would be enough.





Seven




“We want to shoot!” Roland said, but I wouldn’t let them. Not yet. We were building something, and we had to start with the most basic things. I was learning, with these children, you had to build some kind of foundation or life would get tricky very quickly.

“Okay, we’re going to dribble,” I told them, holding my basketball. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before. It was the thing that I loved most in the world. Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.

And, okay, I understood that whatever I did was going to be stupid. The kids had confessed to me only two days earlier that their mom had tried to kill them. Of course, yes, Jesus, they needed to be in therapy. But it had been made clear to me that therapy was not an option. What else could I do? I had to believe that these children, who could not be burned, who were immune to hellfire for crying out loud, were simply tougher than most people. If their bodies were invulnerable to fire, what was inside them? Maybe they could keep themselves alive. Maybe I could keep them happy. And all I had, right at this moment, was basketball.

“We want to shoot!” Roland said again, looking at the basket, but I put my hand on his basketball—such a weird broken-wing form he had—and pushed the ball gently back toward him. My hand was still aching from Bessie’s crazy teeth, but I could bend the fingers without much pain, and the swelling was gone.

“Do you know what dribbling is?” I asked them. They looked at each other. They did not like questions, I knew, but how else would I know?

“Like this?” Bessie finally said, slapping at the ball to make it hit the ground and come back to her. She caught it awkwardly, with both hands, like a fish had jumped out of the water and into her arms.

“Like that,” I said. “That’s all it is. You bounce the ball and it comes back to you.”

“And this is fun?” Bessie said. “Dribbling is fun?”

“It’s the most fun thing,” I said. “You’ve got the ball, right? It’s your ball. And you bounce it and it’s not in your hand anymore. But before you can even worry, if you do it right, it bounces right back to you. And so you bounce it again. And it comes right back. And you do that, over and over, for hours every day, and after a while, you don’t worry about it anymore. You know that ball is your ball and that you will never lose that ball. You know that it will always come back to you, that you can always touch it.”

“That does sound nice,” Bessie offered.

I felt like a coach in an inspirational movie, like the music would be really stirring, and you’d see the players’ expressions as they started to get it, and it wouldn’t be long before they were hoisting me up on their shoulders, fucking confetti just raining down on us.

And then Roland bounced the ball right off his goddamn toe, and it rolled all the way across the court.

“That’s a good try,” I said.

“I don’t want to go get it,” he said, but I told him, “You have to go get it,” and he walked this Charlie Brown walk, head down, like a rain cloud was following him, until he picked up the ball and brought it back.

“So let’s dribble,” I said, and I watched them standing there, their bodies robotic and rigid, while they bounced the ball. Bessie actually seemed to get it. She was up to ten, then fifteen bounces before she mistimed the rhythm and had to catch the ball so it wouldn’t bounce away.

“You’re good,” I said to Bessie, and she smiled.

“What about me?” Roland said, running off to chase down the ball he’d bounced off his toe again.