“Frank?” she said.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to say something, and I want you to hear me.”
“Okay.”
“You are nothing like your father.”
She rolled back off him, so they were side by side. Somewhere near them, Jesus leaped from one surface to another with a soft thud. Frank lay with his eyes open, trying to listen for her next move.
“Cley?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What was your mom like? You never talk about her.”
“She was a lot of different people,” she said quietly.
Frank stayed silent. If Cleo was ready to talk, she would. He didn’t want to push her.
“She made the best birthday cakes,” she began. “I think it’s because she was good at architectural models. Like one year, she made a cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower with a little doll that looked like me at the top. We’d been to Paris for the Easter holidays and completely loved it, so the whole party was French-themed. It was me and twenty other eleven-year-olds all wearing berets and playing games like pin the mustache on the Frenchman. My mum even bought us fake cigarettes from a joke shop, which I think was pretty scandalous at the time.”
“That’s funny,” said Frank. “What did she look like?”
“She had blond hair like me, but she was taller. She wore high heels every day and these tailored silk shirts. I used to go into her closet to rub them between my fingers, I just loved the way they felt.”
“She sounds very glamorous,” he said.
“She was,” agreed Cleo. “But then she had to start taking this medication that made her gain a lot of weight and sleep all the time. She was very active, you know, so she hated that. I think that’s why she stopped taking it eventually.”
“When was that?”
“That was when she and my dad got divorced. I had to go stay with him and Miriam in Bristol because she needed to live in the hospital for a while. Then she got better, and I came home. When she was well, she could tell what kind of day you’d had just by the way you said hello. She’d want to know everything about what I was thinking, what I was reading in school. I’d sit on the kitchen counter and chat to her while she made dinner. But she’d have these bad periods where she’d stop sleeping or eating much. She’d get so focused on a project you could say her name ten times and she wouldn’t hear you. I hated that. It was like you didn’t exist. She’d talk to herself and laugh. She had a lot of random men over. I’d walk in on them in the bathroom sometimes. The first time she tried to kill herself was during one of those periods.”
“I’m so sorry, Cley,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Then she got on a new medication,” she said, the words pouring out fast now. “And she was normal again for a while. She went back to work, and I moved out to go to uni, and she started dating this guy seriously, someone actually nice for a change. He was another architect. Then something happened, I guess they broke up, and she went off her medication again. I didn’t know that at the time, the doctors told me afterward. She died when I was in my final year. She had a little bit of money left, not much, and it all went to me. But I was depressed, like I told you, so that’s when I came here to do my MFA. I started taking antidepressants and making more art and things got better. And then I met you, and that was the best thing really, the best thing that had happened in years.”
Frank turned onto his side and wrapped his arms and legs around her. He held her as tight as he could without hurting her. He could hear the soft boom of her heartbeat beneath his ear.
“You’re not going to be anything like your mom,” he said.
Jesus leaped onto the bed near them and bounced off again, her tiny body barely leaving a dent in the covers.
“How do you know?” she said. Her voice in the dark was plaintive.
“Because you have me.”
“But what about if something happens to you? Or you go away?”
“It won’t. I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on Jesus.”
He didn’t deliberately avoid Eleanor at the office, but he was so busy working on the Kapow! pitch that their paths didn’t cross much. Frank loved the brainstorming process, loved the feeling of ideas orbiting around him, and he felt confident in what his team had created. On the night before the pitch, Frank had managed to drink just enough to dull his nerves and knock himself out without, he hoped, impeding his performance the next day. He was just drifting into sleep when Jesus knocked over Cleo’s book from the bedside table.