The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(70)

Her face says she doesn’t believe me. I reach for the checkerboard on the side of the table. “Let’s play while we wait for dinner. We can talk more about this, okay?”

“Fine.”

We set up the board and she takes red, as always. “Last night, I read that once London was bombed for nine months in a row, every single night.”

“Ah.”

“Is that true?”

I pause. It’s not exactly correct, but the facts will not help. “The Blitz,” I say. “It was a long time ago, during World War II.” I move my piece.

She frowns at the move, takes a minute to evaluate her choices. “What’s World War II?”

How to sum up such a conflagration in a sentence or two without being too reductive or simplistic? “It was a terrible war. A very bad leader came to power in Germany in the 1930s, and he tried to take over Europe, but he was defeated.”

“And he bombed London?”

“Yes. And many other places. Your move.”

She jumps my piece and takes it, and I take hers, leaving her to study the board a second. “But how was there anything left after all those bombs? That’s like a whole school year!”

“It was. But the English refused to give up. Maybe you can explore some of it when you’re there.”

“I don’t want to go to a place that gets bombed!”

“That was over eighty years ago,” I say.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to go there in case it happens again.” She leaps two of my pieces and gets crowned. “America doesn’t get bombed.”

“Well, it has been sometimes, actually, but I don’t think that’s what you’re going for here.”

“I just want to be safe. How can you be safe if there’s tsunamis and bombs and pandemics and school shootings? And wars?”

For a moment, I say nothing, trying to gather my thoughts. When I was ten, I wanted to create a campaign to pick up all the litter in the world. I was worried about birds getting slimed by oil spills and about nuclear bombs destroying the world. I decide to go with the truth. “Unfortunately, my sweet, terrible things can happen. Here or England or anywhere. But mostly they don’t. Mostly we’re okay.”

She looks unconvinced. The buzzer goes off on the stove. I stand and kiss her springy hair. “You’ll be safe in England. Please set the table.”

She jumps off the chair and opens a drawer with place mats and cloth napkins, taking a moment to mull over the color she wants for today. I love that she chooses a cheery sunflower pattern, one of my designs, and lays out the flatware.

I bring the tray of fish sticks and Tater Tots over, serving us both before taking the pan back to the counter. She’s poured herself a glass of milk and me a glass of bubbly water over ice. We have our rituals, especially after she stayed with me for over a year during the pandemic.

We sit down. She squirts ketchup on her plate and dips a fish stick in. Without speaking, she eats three fish sticks and a half dozen Tater Tots and then washes it down with milk. “How can we be safe, Nana? That’s what I want to know.”

“Well,” I say, and call up my own grandmother. What would Amma have said under these circumstances? It wasn’t as dangerous for kids when I was a child, honestly. Or maybe it was. Either way, I know what she would say. “The truth is, baby, that you can’t stop bad things from happening. All these things you’ve been worrying about—tsunamis and pandemics—those are not predictable.”

“My friend Bennie’s grandma died from COVID and so did Uncle Dmitri. I couldn’t stand it if that happened to you.”

“It didn’t,” I say, and pick up a fish stick. “And most people didn’t die. Almost no people will ever see a tsunami in their lifetimes. Epidemics happen, but only once in a while, and we have all kinds of tools now. Getting bombed, here or in England, is probably something you don’t have to worry about. You can take that off your worry list.”

“What about school shootings? We have drills all the time. You can’t say that won’t happen because it does.”

One of my most painful fears, a thing I’m not sure I could survive. Looking at her serious gray eyes, I see both her resignation and disbelief, and I can’t say it won’t, and it kills me. I hate it that I can’t stand guard over her twenty-four hours a day with a sword drawn. “I can’t. But guess where they don’t have them? London.”

“What? Why not?”

“That is a very complicated question, my dear, but I can tell you that I’ve never heard of one.”

She leans her head on her hand, musing. “That’s good, I guess.”

I wonder if I’ve taken the wrong tack. Will she be more worried than ever? I take a breath and reach for her hand. “You know, Jasmine, good things happen all the time, too. You just have to focus as much as you can on the good things.”

“But I worry!”

I grin. “That’s because you have an amazing imagination. Maybe try to direct it toward good things more.”

“Maybe,” she says with a shrug.

“You could also stay off the internet and stop looking for disasters.”

“But Suze said today you were all into Pompeii. I’m going to look that up.”