Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“No!” Carl shouted, but then he corrected himself. “You guys just stay up there for a second while I talk to Lillian.”

“Do you want us to come with you?” Bessie asked. I had a hard time looking at her and not seeing waves of flame erupting from her skin. I simply shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said. As I walked out of the room, I peeked my head back in and said, “If you feel it coming, run to the shower and turn it on, okay?” The kids nodded, and I felt like this was a kind of test, to let them out of my sight, to feel them above me, to hear them breathing.

Downstairs, Carl was on his knees, sweeping up cereal crumbs with a dainty little broom and dustpan. He looked up at me. “Seems like they’re settling in,” he said, and I felt a little judged.

“They haven’t caught on fire again,” I told him, a little proud of myself.

“We’ll see how long that lasts,” he replied.

“You heard Jasper, right?” I asked him. “This is happening. You’re not getting rid of them.”

“So?” Carl asked.

“So help me, okay?”

“I will help you, Lillian,” he said. “I’ll help you make the right decisions.”

“For instance,” I said, ignoring the little ways he dug into me, “we have to turn off the sprinkler system.”

“It was two grand to install that system,” Carl replied, like it was his fucking money, like Timothy’s stuffed animal budget wasn’t four times that amount.

“How much did all these electronics cost?” I asked. “How about the books, the clothes, the bedsheets? Those kids caught on fire twice in a single day, right? This house will be like a constant rainstorm if you keep the sprinkler system on.”

“So I turn off the system,” he said, “and then what happens when they catch on fire again?”

“Carl, please. Carl? Please. I will put them out.”

“Twenty-four hours a day? What about when you’re asleep?”

“Twenty-four/seven. I’m a light sleeper. I have a plan, okay?”

“All right,” Carl said. I think maybe he now had a sense of how powerful I was. The children were mine, and that gave me something that he didn’t have. “All right, I’ll shut it off. But that’s our secret. Senator Roberts needs to think that there are true safety measures in place.”

“I’m not going to tell Jasper. Holy shit, do you think I would tell Jasper?”

Carl looked at me with some measure of sincerity. His posture changed, just the slightest slackening. “Lillian, honestly? I don’t know what you will or won’t do. But my livelihood is now connected to yours. So we work together. Agreed?”

“That’s great, Carl,” I said, kind of meaning it and kind of making fun of him. “I’d like that.”

“Now, the reason I came over here was to say that Mrs. Roberts thinks that perhaps having a family dinner might be too overwhelming for the children, not only Roland and Bessie but also Timothy.”

“Okay,” I said. So this was how it would work, a line demarcating us and them. I wondered if Jasper would ever see the kids again. I wondered if Madison and I would still hang out, and I figured that we still would, but in different ways.

“You’ll be okay making them dinner here?” Carl asked.

“Sure. No problem,” but I wasn’t quite sure of the mechanics of it. I was used to microwaving something and eating it over the trash can. And, over the last week or so, I’d gotten used to Mary making the most amazing meals that I couldn’t stop eating. I would miss Mary so much, now that I was fully banished to this guesthouse. I wanted the children to meet her.

“All right, then,” he said. He turned but then suddenly turned back. “Do you see that phone?” he asked, pointing to the wall-mounted handset next to the refrigerator. I nodded. “If you ever need me, no matter what time it is or what it’s about, pick up that phone and push one-one-one-one. Okay?”

“One-one-one-one,” I repeated. “And you’ll come to me?”

“I will,” he said. This seemed to pain him to admit.

“Good night, Carl,” I said.

“Good night, Lillian,” he replied, and then he turned into a shadow and was gone.

When I went to the stairs, I saw Bessie and Roland sitting on the top step, not one bit ashamed of eavesdropping, which I loved.

“How did I do?” I asked them.

“You got him to turn off the sprinklers,” Roland said. “That’s awesome.”

“I did it,” I said. “I told you I would, and then I did.”

“Okay,” Bessie said, as if she’d made a decision that she’d been considering ever since she first saw me.

“Do you want pizza?” I asked, and they both nodded enthusiastically, so we went down to the kitchen and I got the oven on and a frozen pizza shoved in there. I cut up some apples, their skin red and waxy like in a fairy tale, and the kids just destroyed the slices, so I cut up two more. I ate a banana. I looked again in the fridge and realized there was no beer, and I almost picked up the phone and dialed 1111, but decided to be responsible. I’d steal some from the mansion tomorrow, or maybe some of Jasper’s fancy bourbon, which I believed I’d earned with my work here today. My hand was kind of throbbing, which made me feel a little less proud of myself, and so I took some aspirin, and then the pizza was ready.

Before I let them eat, I said, “I’m happy to be with you.”

They just looked at me, dumbfounded. “Can we eat?” Bessie asked.

“I said,” I repeated, “that I am happy to be with you.”

“That’s real nice,” Roland said, and he picked up the pizza slice and ate it in three bites, even though it was still pretty damn hot.

After dinner, I washed the plates while the kids picked out a book for me to read to them.

“Can we skip bath time?” Roland asked.

“And do we need to brush our teeth?” Bessie asked.

“You kids were in that chlorinated water this afternoon,” I told them. “And, you know, you caught on fire, so it’s probably good to get a shower. And you have to brush your teeth.”

“Aw, man,” Roland said, but I stood firm and the kids seemed to respect me for this, or else they were biding their time before they ran me over.

I stood outside the bathroom while they took turns hopping in the shower. They were ten. I didn’t know what the boundaries were at ten, but they seemed too old for me to be dealing with their naked bodies, unless, of course, it was fire related. That was my plan, to let them control themselves until they couldn’t control themselves. It’s how I would have wanted to be treated if I were a demon child.

I sat on the floor in between the kids’ two beds, Bessie and Roland all fresh in their pajamas, their hair, what a horror show, wet and slicked down into something tame.

Bessie handed me the book, Penny Nichols and the Black Imp . “What is this?” I asked. The cover was red and faded, just a hardback book with the silhouette of a girl’s profile. I looked at the title again. What in the hell was a black imp? I checked the copyright, which was from the thirties. Was it racist?

“Maybe a different book, guys? There’s, like, a million down there. Maybe, like, Superfudge or something?”

“This is kind of like Nancy Drew, but weirder,” Bessie informed me.

“Have you read this already?” I asked.

Bessie nodded, but Roland said, “I haven’t.”

“What’s the black imp?” I asked.

“It’s part of the mystery,” she told me.

I scanned the opening page and the first line had a “slightly decrepit roadster” pulling up to a house. One of the characters used the word shan’t .

“It’s just this statue,” she finally said, seeing my hesitation. “It’s this clay statue. It’s not about Satan or anything.”