Nothing to See Here Page 8

  “Who is that?” Bessie asked, clearly interested, hypnotized by Madison’s beauty.

  “That’s Madison,” I said.

  The utterance of the name made both Bessie and Roland stiffen, their bodies crackling. They knew that name. No doubt they’d heard their mother say it, or yell it, or hiss it.

  Carl got out of the van and came to the back, opening the doors, the light spilling in. The children seemed wary, started to back away from Carl, and then they were next to me. I wasn’t touching them, just letting them know that I was with them, would stick by them. Bessie looked at me; she knew she had no choice. She grabbed Roland’s hand and they kind of crawled out of the van. I sat there for just a second, a little afraid. Carl was already walking to the porch, his fingers wiggling like he was about to rope a calf. Then I hopped out, my muumuu riding up, and there was Madison, walking to the kids.

  “Hello, Bessie,” Madison said. “Hello, Roland.” The kids just stared at her, but Madison wasn’t deterred. “These are for you.” She handed each child a teddy bear, and the kids, slightly stunned, took them. They’d been given stuffed animals in the van, and so it seemed like some strange ritual, this never-ending parade of plush. I watched Roland rub his face against the soft fur, while Bessie gripped the bear’s arm like a mom would a small child’s in a crowded mall.

  “Are you our mom?” Bessie asked.

  Madison looked at me, her eyebrows raised. What was her problem? I wondered. Wasn’t she their mom now? Like, legally? And for a second, I was like, Have I adopted these children? Am I their mom?

  “I could never replace your mother,” Madison finally said. “I’m your stepmother.”

  “I’ve read stories about stepmothers,” Bessie said. “Fairy tales.”

  “But this is real life,” Madison said, still smiling. And I thought, Was it real life? Was it real life to these kids?

  “Where’s our dad?” Roland asked, still rubbing his face against that damn teddy bear, his nose so red now.

  “He’s coming,” Madison said, and I saw her face darken for a half second, nothing the kids would notice. “He’s just so emotional about finally seeing you again that he needs a second to get himself together.”

  I wondered if this had all been orchestrated by Madison, step by step, a way to slowly bring these children into this new life. Or, I wondered, was Jasper Roberts just a bum, hiding in his billiards room, terrified of these things that he’d made and thought he’d discarded?

  Madison finally seemed to register that I was there, and my presence seemed to confuse her. She regarded me carefully and then said, as if she couldn’t help herself, “What are you wearing?”

  I looked at Mrs. Cunningham’s muumuu. It was so comfortable. Wearing it, I felt like a gust of wind in the spring, just enough motion to detonate every dandelion puffball in my way. “It’s kind of like a dress—” I began to say, but Carl broke in.

  “We had a slight mishap at the Cunninghams’,” he admitted, and I could see how much it pained him to admit the tiniest mistake.

  “And what happened to your hand?” she asked. “Goodness, your face.”

  I didn’t have the strength to explain. I just let Carl say, “That was part of the mishap as well.”

  “I see,” Madison said. Then she smiled. “Well, the dress actually looks kind of nice on you,” she said to me, which I already knew.

  “She’s our nanny,” Roland said.

  “Or governess,” Madison said, kind of correcting him. Or perhaps correcting me.

  “What are we going to do here?” Bessie finally asked, as if she’d been thinking about this the entire time.

  “Anything you like,” Madison said. “Rest, relax, get settled. This is your home now. We want you to be happy.”

  “Happy?” Bessie said, like she hadn’t quite heard that word, didn’t know what it meant, or had only read it in a book and never heard it spoken aloud.

  “Of course, sweetie,” Madison said, but before she could say anything else, there was Jasper Roberts, wearing a linen suit, looking like a preacher about to say the Lord’s Prayer before the start of the Daytona 500.

  “Children,” he said, but his voice cracked just a little. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Daddy?” Roland asked, but Bessie grabbed his hand to keep him from moving, from saying another word. Maybe they had been faking in the van. Or maybe this single moment, the appearance of their father, brought it all back, but I could see that they knew it now. They knew this place, their life before their life.

  “My sweet children,” Jasper said. He was crying a little, and I couldn’t quite place why he was crying, what it meant.

  “Sir,” Carl said, but then Bessie and Roland started to catch on fire. I could feel this little twinge in the air, and I committed it to memory. And then their skin rashed and strawberried. And then these blooms of flame started to appear on their arms, on their hands. It wasn’t the explosion of a star, like at the Cunninghams’, but they were definitely on fire.

  “Back up!” Carl said, jumping between the children and Jasper and Madison. Smoke started coming off the children, their cheap clothes now singed.

  “Ohhhh!” Madison said, and everyone was just standing there, not doing anything, while these children increased the intensity of the fire that was inside them. That’s what it seemed like, like the fire was inside them, children made of fire. And I knew it would get worse if something didn’t happen to stop it. Madison and Jasper seemed stunned, and Carl’s only concern was keeping Jasper from getting burned.

  I took off my muumuu, which was so easy to remove, by the way, and then I used it to cover my hands and gently lower the children to a squatting position on the ground. “Hey, Bessie. Bessie? Calm down now, okay?” She was rigid, and so was Roland, but the fire was just rolling across them, yellow and red, like what you’d draw with a limited supply of crayons.

  “Can you turn it off?” I asked, almost whispering, but they weren’t listening. So then I started smothering the flames with the muumuu, which caused it to smolder and spark. I patted the children all over their arms, their backs, on top of their little heads. I went pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and kept whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  I could feel the heat, but I just kept lightly tapping them, and the fire seemed to finally die out. As if they had been holding their breath the entire time, Bessie and Roland each took in a deep gulp of air and then sighed, suddenly sleepy. I leaned against them and they kind of slumped onto me. And Carl finally ran over and scooped them both up, one in each arm, and put them back in the van, gently closing the doors.

  I stood up, confused. I realized that I was in my bra and panties, but either people were being really polite or it didn’t matter because we’d just fucking watched some fire children do their thing. Carl and I had already seen it, knew it was real, so we both snapped out of it quicker than the Robertses.

  “My god,” Madison finally said. She hugged Jasper, as if she only now believed him and was sorry for doubting him. I looked down and realized that the teddy bears were lying on the driveway, their fur burned black.

  “Sir,” Carl said, “you tried, and I respect you for that, but it’s time to think about real solutions to this situation. I have a few options.”

  “What?” I said. “That was an accident. They don’t know what’s going on. Look at the size of this house. Madison? Right? Wouldn’t you be freaked out?”

  “They caught on fire,” Madison said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jasper said. “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen.”

  “Sir?” Carl said, waiting for the word. He was jingling the key to the van.

  I felt like the only sane person, and I was in my underwear, holding a ruined muumuu that I’d stolen from a sleeping old lady. “This isn’t fair to them,” I continued. “You have to give them a chance. I can help them, okay? I can figure this out. It’s not that big of a deal, honestly; like, I can already see how to handle it.”


  “Lillian, please,” Carl said.

  “She’s right, though,” Madison finally said. “Jasper, she’s right. We have to give them time to acclimate to this, to get used to us.”

  “I don’t want any harm to come to you or Timothy,” he said, and then, as if remembering the kids in the van, “or to those children.”

  “You got that house ready for them, right, the slave quarters—oh shit—sorry, the guesthouse. Okay? You’ve made a place in your home for them. I can help them.”

  “Sir, she has no training—”

  “CPR, Carl, okay? CPR and . . . other stuff,” I said.

  “We let them stay,” Jasper said. “They’re staying. They’re my children. My son and my daughter.”

  “This is right,” Madison whispered to him, rubbing his back. Jasper was sweating, the linen not doing a damn thing for him. “Family values, okay? Personal responsibility? A better future for our children?” She was saying these things like she was reading them off of huge billboards along the road. Or like she was coming up with campaign slogans.

  “They’re staying, Carl,” Jasper said with some finality. He became senatorial for that moment, standing up straight. Not quite presidential, but maybe vice-presidential.

  “Yes, sir,” Carl replied, so formal, returning to the back of the van and throwing the doors open. I ran in front of him, kind of nudging him aside. And the kids were sitting there, half-lidded, as if a little drunk.

  “We keep getting your clothes messed up,” Roland said. He was really staring at my body, but things were too weird to worry about that right now.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care at all,” I told them.

  “We heard you,” Bessie said. “We heard . . . all that.”

  “Oh,” I said, not really remembering what had been said.

  “We’re staying?” Bessie said, and it sounded like she really wanted the answer to be yes.

  “Yeah,” I told her.

  “And you’re staying with us, right?” she said.

  “I am. I will,” I said.

  “So . . . we’re home?” Roland said, so fucking confused. Both children looked at me, their huge eyes fixed on me.

  “We’re home,” I said. I knew it wasn’t my home. And it wasn’t their home. But we would steal it. We had a whole summer to take this house and make it ours. And who could stop us? Jesus, we had fire.

  Five

  When I took the children to the guesthouse, Roland said, “This looks like TV,” and I asked, “You mean like a television show? Like a kids’ show?”

  “We don’t have television,” Bessie said. “Mom won’t let us watch television.”

  “But we can watch it now?” Roland asked, like it was just dawning on him.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. I imagined that we’d watch a lot of television, or I had before I’d actually met the kids. Now I felt like Bugs Bunny would hit Daffy Duck with a hammer and Bessie and Roland would burst into flames. “Well, with some regulations,” I continued. “Only a little bit a day.”

  The kids still wouldn’t go in. The door was open, but it was like they were vampires and had to be invited in. Or maybe the house was so pristine, so colorful, that they were afraid of destroying it immediately with what was inside them.

  “Are you worried about something?” I asked.

  “No,” Bessie said, irritated. “We’re just thinking.”

  “About what?” I asked. Their mother, I figured. Their father, maybe.

  “None of your business,” she said. Their mother, I figured.

  I wanted to learn more about her, from people who had actually been raised by her instead of Madison’s vague asides. But I also didn’t want to know a single thing about her, because it would make me compare myself to her every time the children set their bedsheets on fire.

  Finally, Bessie and Roland stepped into the house. “Oh, wow,” Roland said, testing the sponginess of the flooring. “This is cool.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said, letting my feet softly sink into the material.

  “And look at all those cereals, Bessie,” Roland said, pointing to a pyramid of individual boxes of sugary cereals, and I understood his excitement, having lived a childhood where the cereal was off-brand, giant plastic bags that were twenty percent pulverized corn or wheat. But Bessie was walking up to a tall bookcase, filled with every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys book in existence, lots of Judy Blume and Mark Twain and all manner of fairy tales.

  “These are for us?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I can read you any book you want.”

  “We can read,” Bessie said, her face reddening at the idea that I might have thought that she couldn’t. “We read all the time.”

  “That’s all we do is read,” Roland said. “But Pop-Pop and Gran-Gran didn’t have any books for kids. It was so boring.”

  “What did they have?” I asked.

  “Books about World War Two,” Bessie answered. “Two different books about Hitler. Wait, four books about Hitler. And other books about Nazis. And books about Stalin. Patton. People like that.”

  “That sounds awful,” I told her.

  “It sucked,” Bessie said.

  “Well, you can read all these books now,” I told her.

  “I read a lot of these already,” Bessie said, inspecting the spines, “but some look pretty good.”

  “That’s great. And we can get more. We can go to the library and get whatever you want.”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding her approval. She looked at me. “And you can read us a book at night. If you want to, we’ll let you read us a book before we go to bed.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and I could feel our lives normalizing, a kind of routine forming.

  “Do you want to put on some clothes?” she asked me, and I realized that I was still in my underwear.

  “Shit—I mean, shoot—yes, I do want to put on some clothes,” I told her, but I was afraid to leave them alone. As if she read my mind, Bessie said, “You can go change. We’re okay. We’re really okay right now.” I nodded, and then I was running up to the second floor, counting the seconds, afraid that if I was gone longer than a few minutes, I’d come back to find them digging a tunnel to freedom. I pulled on some jeans, slipped into a T-shirt, and then ran back downstairs in less than forty-five seconds, and they were still there, Bessie making a stack of books that she wanted to read and Roland sitting on the counter, wrist-deep in a little box of Apple Jacks. Bessie opened up one of the new books and smelled the pages. Roland smiled at me and his mouth looked unspeakable, all these little bits of cereal like glitter in his teeth.

  This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn’t people figure this out?

  And then I realized they were still in their smoky clothes from the fire in the driveway, and I felt like a slob and an idiot, and I had no idea how I’d keep them alive. This was the wave of childcare, I supposed, real highs and lows. My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.” But I wouldn’t be my mother. How many times had I told myself that, and how unnecessary had it always been? There was no regret for me and these fire kids. Not yet.

  I whistled to get their attention, and both kids slowly turned in my direction. “Let’s get you dressed,” I said, “and then we need to talk about some stuff.”

  “Sad stuff?” Roland said. They were the same age, but Roland seemed younger, having the benefit of growing up with a sister who would bite the shit out of people’s hands in order to protect him.

  “No,” I said, slightly confused. “Not sad stuff. Just normal everyday stuff. We’re going to be together all the time. We just need to talk about stuff.”

  “Okay,” Roland said. I realized that the cereal box he was wearing as a glove was no long
er Apple Jacks and was now Cocoa Krispies.

  “Go easy on the cereal, okay, Roland?” I kind of asked and kind of demanded. I’d need to get better about that, be more sure of myself.

  Roland shoved one last handful of cereal into his mouth, the pieces scattering across the counter and onto the floor. Then he stopped, chewed what he had in his mouth, and hopped off the counter and ran over to me. Bessie stood and we all went into their room, which was, I guess, balloon themed. There were framed posters of hot air balloons, crazy colors like flags to countries that existed in made-up worlds. The knobs on the posters of their beds were designed to look like red balloons.

  “This is a lot of color,” Bessie said. “It’s kind of too much.”

  “It is a bit too much,” I said. “But you’ll get used to it.” Bessie looked at me like, Duh. They were children who caught on fire. Their mother had died. They understood how to adjust to weird stuff.

  There were a lot of choices as far as clothing went, and they both picked these black-and-gold Vanderbilt T-shirts and black cotton shorts. I wrapped up their old clothes and tossed them in the trash. How many clothes would these kids go through? Was it better to just let them run around the house naked?

  “Okay, so let’s talk,” I said, and the kids sat on their beds. I sat on the floor and pulled my knees up to my chin, unsure how to proceed. I’d had so much time to prepare for this moment, but I’d spent it playing basketball and eating bacon sandwiches in bed. There had been a folder from some private doctor who’d examined the children, but it was so boring and nothing was actually resolved, so I’d just kind of skimmed it. I wished Carl were here, because he always had a plan, and then I hated myself for it.

  “So the fire stuff,” I said, and both kids had that look on their faces like, This shit again, ho-hum.

  “You guys catch on fire,” I said. “And so, you know, that’s a problem. I know it’s not your fault, but it’s something we have to deal with. So maybe we can try to figure it out.”

  “There’s no cure for it,” Bessie said, and I asked, “Who told you that?”