Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“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.

“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.

“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.