"Nothing to See Here"

[fiefoe]

Kevin Wilson's novel recalls 'About a Boy', the breakaway hit about the reciprocal healing power of caring for neglected children. The more up-to-date ingredient of this nice beach read is the girl-girl emotional tangle.

• I’d never been the most responsible employee. It was the hard thing about having two jobs: you had to disappoint them at different times and sometimes you lost track of who you’d fucked over worse.
• I just wanted to hear my own voice go out into the open air. <> “It’s a Miata. It’s mine. Are you ready to go, ma’am? May I take your luggage?” Carl asked, clearly ready to successfully complete this portion of his task. He had that cop-like tic where he tried to hide his impatience with a tight formality.
• And then, after this happened enough times, rich people in real cities, like New York and Chicago, started hearing about this school and started sending their own daughters. And if you can catch that kind of good luck, it holds for centuries. <> I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out.
• I made people in my town, whether they were poor or middle class, especially upper middle class, feel good, like I was something they could agree on, a sterling representative of this little backwoods county. I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.
• I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.” <> She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her. She flipped her hair in such a way that it could only have been instinctual, evolution.
• And we did become friends, I guess you could say. She had to tamp down her weirdness in public because it scared people when beautiful people didn’t act a certain way, made themselves ugly. And I had to tamp down my weirdness because people already suspected that I was supremely strange because I was a scholarship kid.
• I got better with Madison on my team. She gave me some kind of extrasensory court vision; she was so beautiful that I could find her without even looking. We were Magic and Kareem.
• I won a poetry contest when I wrote about growing up poor; Madison had told me to do it after I showed her my first poem, which was about a fucking tulip. “Use it at the right time,” she told me, by which I think she meant my bad upbringing, “and you’ll get a lot out of it.”
• “Mom,” I said, just as Madison was saying, “Dad,” but they both shut us up. Right then, Madison looked at me. Her eyes were so blue, even in the dim light of this shitty steakhouse. It was such a strange feeling, to hate someone and yet love them at the same time. I wondered if this was normal for adults.
• Then, when they did expect things, I just bought weed myself and smoked joints on the back porch of my house all alone, feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed.
• I couldn’t understand what the fence was there for, because it wouldn’t keep anything in or out. It was purely ornamental, and then, like, duh, I realized that if you had this much money, you could make gestures that were purely ornamental. I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me.
• But I couldn’t meet her. I felt like if I moved one muscle, the whole thing would evaporate and I would wake up back on my futon, the A/C broken again. Carl finally had to haul me up, rag-dolling me as if I were a gift for Madison’s birthday, and then I fell into her arms.
• Jesus, these guys are so stupid, she wrote. It’s like they’ve never followed up on a single stupid-ass thing they’ve ever done so they could just fix it. Because Madison was brilliant and because she had that slightly skewed way of saying things in a straightforward manner that broke you in half, the senator ended up putting her in charge of the campaign.
• I imagined Madison as the first lady of the United States of America. I remembered the time during a basketball game when she elbowed this girl in the throat in order to get a rebound and got kicked out of the game. I smiled.
• “Okay,” I said. My whole life, maybe I was just biding time until Madison needed me again, until I was called into service and I made everything good. It honestly wasn’t a bad life, if that’s all it was.
• This was Madison, campaign manager. She looked at the children setting my fucking hair on fire, these naked fire starters, and she saw only a problem that could be solved with a press release or a photo op.
• 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 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.
• I knew that if I asked, a hairbrush would appear, a toothbrush and four different kinds of toothpaste, but I tried to pretend I was self-sufficient. A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.
• He walked over to the kitchen and opened the door to what I thought was a pantry. Instead, it was filled top to bottom with gleaming red fire extinguishers.
• He’s quiet and principled and he’s intense. He understands people and that makes him slightly impatient with them, like they’re too stupid to protect themselves, so he has to do it for them. He’s not funny, but he has a good sense of humor.”
• From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.
• He looked a little weary, like being important was a Herculean task. If any aspect of his appearance had been off by even a few degrees, he would have seemed evil. But he had the ratio perfect. I wouldn’t have married him, even with his money, but I understood why Madison would.
• It didn’t feel natural, but it also didn’t feel like I was expending all my energy trying to make it work. It made me think that wealth, as of course I already knew without firsthand experience, could normalize just about anything.
• “Safe travels,” she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.
• She bit down so hard on my hand that I screamed with such force that the sound just disappeared, the kind of pain where time stops. I looked at Bessie, my hand still wriggling around in her mouth, and she looked like she was smiling.
• I realized there were delicate waves of yellow flame moving up and down Bessie’s little arms. And then, like a crack of lightning, she burst fully into flames, her body a kind of firework, the fire white and blue and red all at once. It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.
• He had stripes buzzed into the sides of his hair, and I was shocked to realize that their hair was unsinged. I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.
• And as they stared at me, I knew how much of myself I was going to unfairly place in them. They were me, unloved and fucked over, and I was going to make sure that they got what they needed. They would scratch and kick me, and I was going to scratch and kick anyone who tried to touch them. I didn’t love them; I was a selfish person and I didn’t understand people all that well, not enough to really feel an emotion as complicated as love. But I felt tenderness for them, which felt, to my little heart, like a kind of progress.
• She was rigid, and so was Roland, but the fire was just rolling across them, yellow and red, like what you’d draw with a limited supply of crayons.
• This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn’t people figure this out? <> And then I realized they were still in their smoky clothes from the fire in the driveway, and I felt like a slob and an idiot, and I had no idea how I’d keep them alive. This was the wave of childcare, I supposed, real highs and lows. My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.”
• I would pick them up, cover them with sunscreen, just a shockingly ridiculous amount even though I couldn’t imagine that the sun would hurt them, and we would run to the pool and cannonball into the water.
• Maybe write a book about the whole experience. And, Jesus, right now the book that I would write was so goddamn boring. Once upon a time, I babysat fire children and made them stay in a pool for three months. The end. I had to write a better story for them, for me, for everyone.
• I looked around, I am not joking, to see if the kids had sprinkled bread crumbs to make their path visible to me. They had not. Goddamn, these children. Not a single crumb of bread. And now some witch was eating them. Or they were burning down the witch’s house.
• And just like all those years ago, when I’d been kicked out of Iron Mountain, everyone would sit there blaming me, wondering why I thought I was anything other than what I was. Madison? That would be the end of our relationship. She had asked me to do this one thing for her . . . well, this second thing for her. If I couldn’t do it, if I failed her, why would she need me? I would lose her again. I had never let her down before. I felt my heart stutter in my chest. I couldn’t let this happen.
• always assumed that whatever was inside me that made me toxic could not be diluted, but each subsequent breath made me a little more calm. And I lost track of time. I had no idea how many breaths we’d done. But I didn’t care. I just kept breathing, and the temperature of the room stayed the same.
• “Are you a good person?” Bessie asked, which was such a strange question, the kind of question a kid asks because they haven’t lived long enough to know how easy that question is to answer. <> I paused, giving it mock thought. “Not really,” I said. “I’m not a bad person, but I could be a lot better. Sorry. But here I am. And here you guys are.”
• “And then she was really asleep. And I told Roland that we needed to get up. So we got up, and Mom was still asleep. And I knew that she was dead, because I felt her heartbeat. And then we changed our clothes because they were wet. I made us peanut butter and crackers, and we ate them. We took all the pills out of our pockets, and we flushed them down the toilet. And then we went outside. We went into the front yard. And then we both caught on fire. It was really big, the fire. It was more fire than we’ve ever made, our whole bodies... people who lived, like, a mile away, saw the smoke, and they called 911. And that’s how they found us. And that’s how they found Mom.”
• Madison never tried too hard. And I had always wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to her. Because I worried that if I went, just once, and it didn’t work out, if she realized that I wasn’t who she thought I was, I’d never hear from her again. If I stayed where I was and she stayed where she was, we’d still have the year at Iron Mountain, when things had been perfect for a little while. And now here I was, sitting close to her, the world so silent that it was like no one else existed.
• 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.
• “Oh wow,” Roland said, impressed, and I felt silly, but not enough to stop showing off. I tried to remember the last time I’d done something and received an oh wow from another human being. Years, probably. Maybe longer. I hadn’t even gotten an oh wow when I gave in and did weird stuff in bed for guys I didn’t care about.
• Maybe her entire life was stepping out in front of everyone else because she knew that she was immortal, that nothing would hurt her. And I knew, even then, that this was mean, that Madison obviously had her own frailties. Her father was a fucking asshole, I knew that. Her brothers had never respected her. She had not become the president of the United States of America. I tried to feel tenderness for her, and it came easily enough.
• Madison took the ball out of my hands and started dribbling. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Come on.” <> I tried to think of a time when I hadn’t done what Madison had asked me to do. That time did not exist.
• “Yay, Mommy,” Timothy said, and this time Roland and Bessie didn’t look angry. They looked sad. Defeated. Like they had hoped for something different and now felt embarrassed for having thought it might happen. I knew that look. I knew that feeling. And it hurt me to know that I’d made them feel that way.
• “I think I like basketball,” she said, not smiling, a little angry, like she was accepting some kind of ancient curse.
• I thought it over. Dollywood. “Islands in the Stream.” That body. She was the best thing that had ever come out of Tennessee. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even close. Bessie had got it on the first try.
• He pried open the bucket and we all looked inside like it might hold the soul of an ancient king. But it wasn’t exciting. It was just a big bucket of gel. It looked, honestly, like semen. It looked like a big bucket of, I don’t know, drool. The point is, it looked gross. And we were supposed to slather the kids in it.
• we found it: Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. Dolly looked like a good witch, like someone who just absolutely fucked up evil queens with her kindness.
• “We’re borrowing it, okay?” I said. “Just in a roundabout way.”
  For a second, there was that weird flicker in her eyes, that wickedness that I loved, that I wanted to live inside. A wicked child was the most beautiful thing in the world.
  “Nobody cares,” she said.
  “Nope,” I replied.
  “Nobody cares about us,” she said, almost laughing.
• Bessie had on a black floral summer dress, kind of grungy actually, quite cool. Roland looked like an intern at a bank, but Bessie looked like a girl at her mom’s third wedding.
• “Mary is the best.”
  “She’s scary,” Bessie said.
  “Cool people are scary sometimes,” I told her.
  “You’re not scary,” she said, and I didn’t know what to say to that.
• And when you are weird, when your surroundings become quiet, you think maybe you aren’t quite so fucked up. You think, Why was it so hard before?
• “What do you want?” she asked.
  “We want to explore,” Roland said.
  “Fine,” she replied, and waved us in like she was letting the plague spread through the house, like she didn’t care if she lived or died.
  “Thank you, Miss Mary,” the kids said, and she replied, “Come by later. I have bread pudding. With whiskey sauce.”
• “And, honestly, it’s huge for me. It’s the kind of visibility that means I can start to advocate for things I want to do. The party is already talking about how to utilize me moving forward.”
  “Well, cool,” I said, and I felt like the biggest nerd in the world, pretending I knew what kissing felt like, what boys wanted.
• “Not much,” she admitted. “Who knows? Maybe that’s for the best. Jasper is a better parent in theory, like if you look at his actions and his values from a distance.
• All those years that I wondered why she never once thanked me for taking the fall for her, I had just assumed that it was because she was so embarrassed. But now it felt like maybe she just didn’t remember it, like her version of the past was that I’d gotten caught with some coke and gotten kicked out.
• “You really are my best friend,” she finally said, not looking at me. “And, yes, I know that’s pathetic because I haven’t seen you since freshman year of high school. But you were. For that little while, you were the best friend I ever had, and I just never met another person like you. But I was so embarrassed by what my dad did—or what I did, whatever—that I kind of thought of you as my friend, but frozen there, in that dorm room. I wrote to you and it made me happy to share my life with someone who fucking cared about me. And I liked hearing from you, knowing that you still thought about me. I wish I’d been a better friend to you. I wish I’d done the right thing and taken the blame.
• “It was so easy to be in love with you back then. And I liked it, because as long as I was in love with you, I didn’t have to love anyone else,” I said. “And I’ve always kind of been in love with you. And I’m still kind of in love with you.”
• I wanted to shoot into the sky like a comet. I was a grown woman, crying, surrounded by fire children who were not mine. No one looking at this would feel good about it... I could tell that Bessie was still staring at me, wanted to know what was inside me. And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.
• 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.
• “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.
• Real fire. Madison screamed, dropping him on the ground, out of sight of the camera. Her dress was smoking, just these little wisps of smoke rising off of her. Jasper didn’t seem to understand what was going on, kept looking ahead as if turning around would be a major sign of weakness, as if someone else would handle it.
• Bessie and Roland were simply touching objects, the sofa cushions, a painting on the wall, setting it all ablaze, calmly moving through the house. <> Still lying there, I turned to see Mary, holding some expensive pots and pans, walk out the front door without looking back. I wished her all the best in the world, every good thing.
• I never quite knew what I wanted, the letters I sent her so wishy-washy and pained. Madison, she fucking wanted stuff. And when she talked or wrote about it, with that intensity, you wanted to give it to her. You wanted her to have it. And it was so easy, I was in love with her again, the routine of our relationship, that she would hurt me, but I would allow it. I would live with it.
• I was happy. I was happy that Bessie and Roland would be mine. But, can you understand me? I was sad. I was sad because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted them. They had appeared, like magic, but I wasn’t magical. I was messed up. I messed things up. And I knew that having two children, two children who caught on fire, would be hard. It would make me sad. It would be so easy to ruin them.
• Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn’t my life anymore. It was someone else’s. And I had decided that I’d just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.
• I’m just trying to say that I got something that I’d wished for. But I knew it wasn’t a happy ending, no matter what Madison thought,