Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“Do you need a nightgown?” she asked.

“I’ll just sleep in this stuff,” I replied.

“Sweet dreams,” she said, kissing me on the forehead. She was so tall; I’d forgotten how she’d kiss me on the forehead in high school, how soft her lips were. And then she was gone; the house had swallowed her up. I couldn’t even hear footsteps.

It was almost too much to get into the bed. I felt like the dirtiest thing this house had ever seen. I felt like an orphan who had broken in to the mansion. I kicked off my shoes and then delicately lined them up next to the bed. I got onto the bed, which took actual effort, it was so high up. I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep. I thought about those two kids, on fire, beckoning me with open arms. I watched them burn. They were smiling. I wasn’t even asleep. I wasn’t dreaming. This was my waking life now. They stood in front of me. And I pulled them into my arms. And I burst into flames.

Inever went back home. I called my mom the next morning to tell her that I was staying in Franklin. I had an elaborate lie cooked up, something about being hired as a paralegal and working on a big class-action lawsuit involving toxic waste, but she didn’t even really care. “What do you want me to do with your stuff?” was all she asked.

I didn’t really have stuff, nothing that I needed. There were some magazines that I’d stolen from the grocery store, this one T-shirt that I really liked, and a pair of basketball shoes that I’d saved up for six months to buy and wore only when I played pickup games at the YMCA. But Madison had said they’d buy me anything I wanted.

“Just keep it there,” I said. “Maybe I’ll come get it later.”

“You’re with Madison?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m staying with her,” I told her.

“She’s always been good to you for some reason,” she said, like she was dumbfounded by unnecessary kindness.

“Well, you know, I did a good thing for her,” I told her, heating up, ready for a fight.

“Ancient history,” she said.

“I’m actually going to be a governess,” I told her suddenly.

“Okay, then,” she said, and she hung up before I could explain what that was.

Madison was downstairs in the breakfast nook, a smooth leather bench that curved all the way around the table. There was a huge bay window and I could see squirrels hopping around the lawn, scavenging nuts. It took me a second to realize that Timothy was there, holding a sterling silver fork that fit perfectly in his little hand. I tried to remember how old he was. Three? Four? No, three. He was beautiful, but it was a different kind of beauty than what Madison possessed. On Timothy it was unnatural, cartoonish. His eyes were so large that they seemed to take up seventy-five percent of his face, like a collectible figurine in some old lady’s house. He was wearing pajamas that were red and patterned with the insignia of the Tennessee state flag.

“Hello,” I said to him, but he kept staring at me. He didn’t seem shy. He just couldn’t figure out whether I was someone he should talk to.

“Say hi to Lillian,” Madison finally said. She was eating cottage cheese topped with blueberries.

“Hello,” Timothy said, but he immediately turned back to his scrambled eggs. He was done with me.

“Do you want coffee?” Madison asked, like I was one of her children, like this wasn’t the first time in years that we’d even seen each other.

I was startled when some lady appeared right behind me, holding a pot of steaming coffee. She was Asian, very small, age indeterminate.

“This is Mary,” Madison said.

“I can make anything you want,” the woman said, her accent possibly British. Or maybe just so elegant that it felt European. It wasn’t Southern, that’s all I knew. She wasn’t smiling, but maybe she wasn’t supposed to smile. I kind of wished she were smiling. It would make it easier to ask her for a giant bacon sandwich.

“Just coffee is fine,” I said, and Mary poured me a cup and then returned to the kitchen. I wondered how many people were employed by Jasper Roberts. Was it ten? Or maybe fifty? Or was it a hundred or more? Any of these seemed believable. Just then, as if conjured by my curiosity, a man wearing suspenders and a big floppy hat walked across the backyard; he was holding a rake like a soldier marching with a rifle.

“How many servants do you have?” I asked Madison, who stiffened. I couldn’t tell if I was doing this on purpose, trying to make her feel bad about being so filthy rich.

“More than we probably need,” she finally said. “But they’re not servants. They’re employees. It’s like running a cruise ship or something like that. It’s just that a place this big has a lot of things that have to get done and a lot of people who have specific abilities. But I know all their names. I can keep track of them.”

“And now you have me,” I said.

“You’re not an employee,” she said cheerfully. “You’re my friend who is helping me out.”

I drank the coffee and it was really good, the taste so complex that it made me realize that I was going to have to get rid of my expectations of how things worked. I was used to break-room coffee so thin that I had to dump a pound of sugar into it just to make it taste like something. The pizza we’d eaten the night before had been so fresh that I could taste the tomatoes in the sauce. The crust had been just slightly charred. I was finally, after twenty-eight years, going to experience things the way they had been intended. No more knockoffs.

“What do you have to do today?” I asked Madison, and then I added, “What do I have to do today?” which was more important to me.

“You can just relax. You can take a walk and get familiar with the grounds. This afternoon we’ll go into Nashville and buy some clothes and necessities. Oh, and Jasper is going to be home this evening; he’s flying back from D.C. I wanted him to meet you.”

“How often is he around here?” I asked.

“Less than you’d think,” she said. “He has a lot of work in Washington; he has an apartment there. But I see him enough; he’s big on family, you know.”

I didn’t know that at all. After all, the whole reason that I was here was to take care of his primitive, as-good-as-orphaned kids. Then I realized that this was just Madison going over talking points. She had a faraway look in her eyes. I knew that, over time, she’d forget herself and I’d learn what was wrong with Senator Roberts. I could wait.

“I’m going to take Timothy to day care and then when I come back, we’ll go explore. Sound good?” she offered.

“That’s cool,” I said. I wanted another cup of coffee but didn’t know if it was impolite to go get it myself. Or was it worse to call for Mary just to refill my cup? I knew that whatever I chose would be the wrong thing. I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.

“Say goodbye to Lillian,” Madison instructed Timothy.

The boy dabbed at his little mouth with a napkin, the most dainty and infuriating thing I’d seen in my life. Only then did he look at me and say, “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Tim,” I said, hoping that the boy would be annoyed by this abbreviating of his name. And already I was fucking up. I needed to get Timothy to like me. Or I needed to learn how to like him. He was practice. Until the twins arrived, he was my one shot to figure out how to talk to, how to behave around, how to tolerate a child.

I tried to think of the times when I had willingly interacted with children. One time, some little kid had gotten lost in the aisles of the Save-A-Lot. I was changing the price on some cereal boxes, and I suddenly noticed her, like a ghost had materialized just for me. She was doing that thing where her eyes were real wide while she put every bit of effort into trying not to cry. I cautiously held out my hand. She took it easily, without question, and we walked in silence through the store until we reached the last aisle and her dumbass fucking mother was standing in the freezer section, looking at Lean Cuisines, no clue her daughter had almost been abducted. Before I could mutter some real passive-aggressive stuff to the mom, the girl simply squeezed my hand so I’d look down at her. Then she kissed the top of my hand, slipped out of my grasp, and ran to her mother, leaving me there. For a few seconds, I wanted to scoop up the girl and keep her. I opened the freezer door to some Popsicles and held my head in the cold until I felt normal again, until the girl and her mom had moved out of sight. I was so out of it that I ended up stealing an entire country ham at the end of my shift just to take my mind off of that girl. For the next few weeks, I kept hoping she’d return, but I never saw her again. Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.