Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“No,” she said, “right now. You know the fire?”

“Inside you?” I asked.

“Yeah. It just comes, you know? It just happens.”

“I know, kiddo,” I said.

“But sometimes it doesn’t just come,” she said. I could tell this meant something to her. And so I let her say it. “Sometimes I can make it come.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

“Watch,” she said. She slipped out of the bed. She rolled up her sleeves. “It usually happens when I’m angry. Or when I’m scared. Or when I just don’t know what’s happening. Or someone hurts me. And that’s scary, because I can’t stop it. But sometimes, if I think about it really hard and I hold myself together just right, if I want it, it will come.”

“Come back to bed, Bessie,” I told her.

“Watch,” she said. She closed her eyes like she was making a wish for the entire world. It was so dark, I couldn’t see her skin, but I could feel the heat, the slight change in temperature, the way it moved in waves. And then, after about fifteen seconds of complete stillness, utter silence, there were these little blue flames on her arms. I wanted to put her out, to reach for her, but I couldn’t move. And the flames rolled back and forth across her arms but they never went beyond those parameters, never flared up more than that. And the light from the fire made her face glow. And she was smiling. She was smiling at me.

Then, slowly, the fire rolled down to her hands, and there was this jittery flame and she was holding it. She was holding it in her hands, cupped together. It looked like what love must look like, just barely there, so easy to extinguish.

“You can see it, right?” she asked me, and I said that I could.

And then it was gone. She was breathing so steadily, a perfect machine.

“I don’t ever want it to go away,” she told me. “I don’t know what I’d do if it never came back.”

“I understand,” I said, and I did understand.

“How else would we protect ourselves?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them? I wanted to know. I wanted to know so bad.

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world. They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. I had it on mute, so I didn’t actually know what was going on, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. It wasn’t hard to know what would come next. This was just a rerun of the confirmation hearing anyway, the channel filling time until the official Senate vote came in today.

The kids were on the sofa, reading books. They reeked of chlorine from the pool, a smell that I loved. I was pacing through the house, brushing my hair, rubbing moisturizer on my face, clipping my toenails, all these little things to make myself presentable, and, each time, I’d look at myself again in the mirror and feel like not a single thing had changed.

On the coffee table there were these index cards that listed all the former secretaries of state, like, sixty little cards all over the place. I was getting the kids to memorize them, or some of them, because Madison had said that it might be nice if they knew something about the position, as if the kids needed conversational openers to talk to their own father. So we studied the names. I’d never heard of most of them. It was interesting to look at the six secretaries of state who had gone on to be president. I knew this was something Madison and Jasper thought about a lot. But it was more fun for me to look at the three who had unsuccessfully run for president. I made Bessie and Roland memorize these names first, before anyone else.

Madison thought it was better if Roland and Bessie stayed behind, that the craziness of the proceedings, being shuttled from place to place, would be overwhelming for them. And she wasn’t wrong. I mean, yeah, they probably shouldn’t have gone to one of the biggest cities in America in support of their father, a guy they kind of hated. But I thought of the Smithsonian, a place I had always wanted to see and knew I never would. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. I thought about, holy shit, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that eternal flame. I wanted them to see these things. I even showed Madison the wardrobe for the kids: a layer of flame gel, the Nomex long underwear, clothes like you’d wear at Catholic school, so much coverage.

“It’s just a risk/reward kind of thing, you know?” she told me. We didn’t talk about that night between us, not a word. We didn’t act like it hadn’t happened. That would have been bullshit. But we acted like if we talked about it, it would only keep happening, the same result, the same pain, and what was the point of that?

“I do want them to watch it all, though,” she said. “And read them the newspapers, okay? I want them to appreciate their father. I think it might help, if they see how important he is.”

“They know he’s important, Madison,” I told her. “They don’t think they’re important.”

“Well,” she said, “you have to make them think otherwise.”

“That’s all I’ve been doing, okay?” I said, getting angry.

“Let’s not fight,” she said, reaching to touch my arm, so calculated, her skin on mine. I let her hand sit there, like a butterfly on my arm, its wings beating just so.

“Sorry,” I said. “Okay. You’re right. Okay.”

“This is how the world works,” she told me, and she meant this was how her world worked, as if I didn’t already know. “Things are bad and crazy and chaotic. But you ride it out and you don’t let it hurt you, and then there’s this stretch of time that is so calm and perfect. And that’s what was always waiting for you.”

“Okay,” I said, ready to be done with all this.

“That’s what you tell them,” she said, removing her hand from my arm. “That’s what you get them to understand.”

After we had lunch, the vote came in, no surprises, and Jasper Roberts, Bessie and Roland’s dad, was the new secretary of state of the United States of America. I finally turned on the volume, but it was just more words, nothing that really mattered.

“Your dad did it,” I told them.

“Well, okay,” Roland said.

Bessie said, “I remember something,” and scattered index cards until she held up a name, Elihu B. Washburne. She flipped it over to the back, where there were one or two interesting facts that we’d written. She held it out to me.

“This guy only did it for eleven days,” she told me. “Maybe Dad will be like that.”

“Maybe,” I told her.

And then, on the steps of the Capitol, there was this podium and all these people milling around. I sat on the sofa with the kids. I was looking for Madison, wanted to see what she was wearing. And then there was applause, and I saw all three of them, Jasper, Madison, and Timothy, walking to the podium. I saw Carl behind them, official and serious. Madison was holding Timothy, resting him on her hip. He had a little sports coat with an American flag pin on the lapel. Madison had on this tight maroon dress, like Jackie O or something. Jasper, who the hell cared, had on a boring-ass gray suit, but he looked handsome enough. They looked like a beautiful family, no denying it. They looked so complete, so compact, so perfect. We were here, and they were there, and this all made perfect sense to me.

Jasper started to talk, and it was like when he prayed at dinner that night, just platitudes, like a computer program had written them based on phrases in the Bible and the Constitution mixed together. He talked about responsibility and protecting the country and yet also ensuring its growth and prosperity. He talked about his own military service, which I actually hadn’t known about. He talked about diplomacy, but I wasn’t watching any of that. I was looking over his shoulder, at Madison, who was beaming. She was stunning, the ease of her posture, how relaxed she was now that she had something she wanted. And resting on her shoulder, there was Timothy, who was making this weird face. He was frowning, like he heard a little sound that no one else could hear. And then, there was this noise, like a firework exploding, and someone gasped. For a second, I thought someone had been shot.