Nothing to See Here (41)

“You’re pretty good, too,” I said.

“I thought I was,” Roland admitted.

We took a Gatorade break because eye-hand-coordination stuff is tricky with kids; it’s so easy to get tired and just keep fucking up constantly. We ate bananas with peanut butter, each of us taking a turn licking the peanut butter off a butter knife.

“So you’re good at this?” Bessie asked.

“I used to be. I used to be amazing,” I said. Sometimes basketball was the only thing I was honest about or felt like I knew inherently.

“But you’re short,” she said. “Aren’t basketball players real tall?”

“Some are,” I said. “They have it easy. But I’m good even though I’m short.”

“Can you, um, slam . . . slam-dunk it?” Roland asked. These kids were like aliens, like they’d been given a really incomplete book about humans and were trying to remember every detail.

“No,” I admitted. “But you don’t have to slam-dunk to be good.” I didn’t tell them that I’d probably pay a million dollars just to dunk a basketball once in a real game. I would never admit this to anyone, but it was true.

“And you think this will keep us from catching on fire?” Bessie asked.

“I hope so,” I said. “It always made me happy, kept me from wanting to kill people.”

“You want to kill people?” Roland asked, confused, and I realized that I was talking to children. I’d already just assumed that they were my best friends or something insane.

“Sometimes,” I admitted, no way to walk it back.

“Us too,” Bessie said. And I knew who she meant. I knew she was thinking about Jasper.

We tried dribbling while walking around, which is harder than it seems. Doing two things at once for the first time, no matter how simple it looks, requires your body to adjust, to find the instinctual rhythm that makes it work. And the kids, Jesus, they were not good.

So we took a break, jumped in the pool. We ate bologna sandwiches, all that mustard, and we ate cheddar-and-sour-cream chips that turned our fingers orange. I realized that someday soon, I’d need to stop feeding these kids so much junk food and we’d have to start eating cottage cheese and figs and, I don’t know, low-fat cookies. Wait, do healthy people like fat or hate fat? I’d always just eaten junk. Which I guess is why my body was always just a little too soft. I wasn’t super heavy, because my anger burned calories like crazy, or so I imagined, but I was soft, always this give to my skin. I thought about Madison’s body, and I wondered what it would be like to have that, if it required more effort than I imagined. But if I knew that a body like Madison’s was possible for me, I guessed it would be worth the inconvenience to keep it.

After lunch, we went back and dribbled up and down the court. And Bessie, honestly, was good at it, or was figuring it out quickly. Roland was fine, good enough for a ten-year-old who had never touched a real basketball in his life, but Bessie started to move like the ball was on a string, finding that rhythm. At one point she started running, leaving Roland behind, which made him shout at her to slow down and wait for him, but she was gone. And she got a little too far ahead of herself, and the ball fell behind her for a second. And then I watched her reach behind her back, flick her wrist with the slightest motion, and send the ball bouncing toward her other hand, still moving, and she just kept going. I shouted out in approval. “You went behind the back,” I said to her, and she looked so proud.

“It’s fun,” she said.

“My hand hurts,” Roland whined when he caught up to us, but Bessie just stood there, thumping the ball against the court, again and again and again.

“Watch this,” I said, and I picked up my ball and spun it on my finger, like a Globetrotter.

“Oh wow,” Roland said, impressed, and I felt silly, but not enough to stop showing off. I tried to remember the last time I’d done something and received an oh wow from another human being. Years, probably. Maybe longer. I hadn’t even gotten an oh wow when I gave in and did weird stuff in bed for guys I didn’t care about.

“Hey,” Bessie said, her face darkening. “Somebody’s coming.”

I figured it was a gardener or, at worst, Carl, but then I realized that it was Madison. She was holding a tray with a pitcher on it. Timothy was behind her, holding some plush weasel with a hunter’s cap.

“Hello,” Madison said. “We saw you playing and thought we’d come visit.”

I wondered why she had decided to come see the kids. I wondered why, if the family dinner that weekend was so important, she undercut it by coming out now. Maybe this was just how she operated, always an envoy to test things before Jasper had to deal with them. Maybe her entire life was stepping out in front of everyone else because she knew that she was immortal, that nothing would hurt her. And I knew, even then, that this was mean, that Madison obviously had her own frailties. Her father was a fucking asshole, I knew that. Her brothers had never respected her. She had not become the president of the United States of America. I tried to feel tenderness for her, and it came easily enough.

“Timothy,” Madison said to her son, “this is your brother, Roland, and your sister, Bessie.”

“Half sister,” Bessie said.

“That’s true,” Madison offered, “but I think it’s easier for Timothy to think of you as his brother and sister.”