Chris Adrian - The Great Night

It would have been tantamount to suggesting that they cast Jesus out of the household to say that an end should be put to the endless stream of foster brothers and sisters that had been coming and going in the seat next to her forever. But she wondered if it reduced the sum total of anybody’s suffering to keep them around for a few months in a situation that ultimately did nobody any good, that changed nothing in anybody’s life and only rearranged some things for a little while. But that was like wondering if they should stop playing and singing because their songs did not in fact enter into people’s hearts and make them love themselves and each other and Jesus, who mediated all love of any kind, the love clearinghouse and the love circuit board. Looking at the new boy, she thought that it might be easier for everyone if he just went away right now, and she waited for the voice to add something snarky and cruel to that thought. She waited and waited, but nothing came, and when he glanced her way again and caught her staring she put a piece of broccoli in her mouth and looked at her lap.

“What an unusual name,” Mary said later, when the four girls were in the bathroom getting ready for bed. “Peabo. Pea … bo .”

“It’s a dog name,” said Malinda. “Here, Peabo. Here, boy!”

“Here, kitty kitty!” said Melissa, then thought a moment and added, “It has pee in it. I bet his middle name is Doody.” She struck a pose in front of Mary and stuck out her hand. “Hello, my name is Pee Doody. How do you doo-doo?” Mary slapped her hand away, and Melissa laughed. It was as typical and ordinary and expected as the dinner questions, or starting the new kid off on the tambourine — it had all happened before, and it would all happen again, the touch of cattiness in the beginning, relatively innocent doo-dooisms that lacked any deep venom. These would fade away little by little and the giggling denigrations would be replaced by goggling admirations, a slow fade-up that might not be noticed if it hadn’t been part of the eternal foster cycle. Molly paused while brushing her teeth to sigh expansively.

“What?” Malinda asked.

“Nothing,” Molly said, because Malinda had become convinced in the past few months that Molly thought she was better than all the rest of them, and she had taken it upon herself to teach Molly just how un-Christian and bitchy it was to go around heaving big sighs to let everyone know you were bored by your own superiority. That wasn’t it at all, of course. Molly actually felt pretty lowly, compared with the rest of them — just because she was always unwillingly coming up with insults against them all didn’t mean she thought she was better than anybody else. But she didn’t tell Malinda that.

“What?” Malinda said again.

“His middle name is Bo,” Molly said. “I saw his papers on Dad’s desk: B-O. Paul Bo. P. Bo.”

“You like him,” said Mary, smiling.

“You’re not supposed to be looking at things on that desk,” said Malinda.

“Molly and Doody,” Melissa sang, “sittin’ in a tree.”

“He won’t last a month,” Molly said. She rinsed out her mouth, put her toothbrush back into her color-coded space — blue — in the holder, and went to her bedroom. It was hers that year by lottery; her sisters shared a room. Malinda said that having her own room had gone to Molly’s head.

She turned out the light, neglecting both her regular and her special Bible study, neglecting to kneel at her bed to pray, and only very quickly (though not insincerely) asking a silent blessing on all the people in her family, flipping their faces through her head like a deck of cards instead of turning them over in her mind like little statues. She considered the new boy last, picturing him on a card all his own, in his tambourine pose, in midshake and midbenediction or threat, whatever it had been, and let her mind go quiet for a moment while she held on to that image, as if inviting the voice to say something cruel about him. But again nothing came. For the rest of her family, she prayed for happiness and a long life, and that they be gathered up in Heaven if they should all die that night in an earthquake or a fire (and she briefly imagined them all buried under the earth, and with burning hair). For the boy, she just asked that things work out for him here after all. Then she went to sleep.

When she saw him standing at the foot of her bed, her first thought was that it was strange to be dreaming about him, since he was interesting but not fascinating, and sad but not troubling. She stared at him for a while before she realized that she was actually awake. She sat up. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. In response he did an explosive move, throwing his arms up and out three times, slapping his heel, and spinning in place. She flinched but didn’t cry out; he did it again, and then something more complicated and harder to follow, and yet she did follow it, and preserved every move, the pointing and the spinning, the way he made double guns of his hands and fired them all around her room and then blew the imaginary smoke from the tips of his finger-pistols, the splits in the air and the brief air-guitar solo and every blocky motion of the robot dance. He smiled at her when he was done. She stared back at him, not smiling, with the covers drawn up to her chin, and watched as he danced out of her room, doing a perfect curving moonwalk right out the door, which he left open. She stared at the open door for a while, considering it as evidence that he had actually been there since she made a point of closing it every night before she got into bed, and trying to think of what she should say to herself about what she had just seen. She didn’t know what to say, so she waited, instead, for the snarky, dissatisfied voice in her to say something, fully expecting it to be something more cruel and more vile than anything it had yet dared to say. But the words, when they came, were Nice moves .

She considered those moves as she sat the next day with her mother and the other girls sewing the costumes for the new video. They were in the garage, the only place in the house with enough empty floor space to lay out the fabric, though today they were just sewing spangles on the jumpsuits, each of them sitting cross-legged on cushions nipped from the livingroom sectional. She had wondered until she finally fell asleep if she should tell on him. It was probably her duty, after all, to get him whatever help he needed to keep him from entering relative strangers’ rooms uninvited at night. And maybe she ought to tell on him for her own sake, since any variety of bad behavior might be dormant in him, and the little dance only a fluid, grooving prelude to a lifetime of deviance.

And yet it had only been a little dance. That was all he had done. There were Christian households where that was a crime, but this wasn’t one of them. There had been some kind of infraction; she was certain of that. But what exactly it might be was not clear at all. Whatever it was, ejection from the household on only the second day of his tenure seemed a little too severe a punishment, but that was what would probably happen, since she knew her father would regard the situation with considerably less sophistication than she was currently bringing to bear. She found that she cared whether or not he stuck around, because it had been nice to hear something from the voice that she could actually agree with. Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

“Pay attention, honey,” her mother said, because she was about to sew a spangle fish on backward to the sea-blue one-piece, zip-up-the-back pants suit. The girls had lost an argument with their father about how the fishes should be placed. “The fishes all swim the same way,” he said. “Up, toward Jesus.” It would have been more pleasing, Molly thought, to have them going every which way.