“We’re on a hike,” I told him.
“In your bathing suits?” he asked, curious.
“Hit the road,” I said, making myself bitchy. It felt good.
“Well . . . bye,” he said, driving off. We watched the car head down the road, disappear.
“Can we go back to the house?” Bessie finally asked me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.” And the two of them took my hands, and we made our way back to the house that was ours but wasn’t quite ours.
“Have you guys heard of yoga?” I asked them, and both kids groaned, because nothing that was called yoga was probably much fun.
“Just read to us?” Bessie asked. They were ten years old, but sometimes they seemed so much younger, undernourished, wild.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s just read. I’ll read you a story.”
We listened to the sounds of the woods, and we noticed how, once we made it back home, those sounds had changed, gotten quieter. Or maybe they had gone inside us. Whatever it was, we were back. And we would not leave again.
The next morning, I awoke to Roland’s fingers in my mouth, Bessie’s feet pressed hard against my stomach. The possible inappropriateness of the situation, of sleeping with these two kids, gave me momentary pause, and then I thought, fuck it, nobody else was going to hold on to them. Their lives, up to this moment, could not have been less weird than sleeping with a grown woman who was nearly a stranger to them. I spit out Roland’s fingers, and he twitched a little. I pushed my belly out, and Bessie felt the resistance and stirred. “Wake up, kiddos,” I said, stretching my arms over my head.
“Do we have to go swimming again?” Bessie asked, and she seemed shocked that she had become bored with a swimming pool, glimmering chlorinated water.
“No. We’ve got a new routine,” I said, trying to think of the routine. “We’re doing some exercises.”
“Right now?” Roland whined.
“Yes, right now,” I told him.
“Can’t we have breakfast first?” Bessie asked.
“I think, hm, I think we do exercises first. You don’t want to exercise on a full stomach. That’s bad for you, I think.” I was making this shit up as I went along. I didn’t have the yoga tapes from Carl yet, so I tried to remember my mom’s ex-boyfriend. I couldn’t recall the poses, though I did remember that his butt was often in the air in ways that made me embarrassed for him. He had a ponytail, which was distracting.
“What kind of exercises?” Bessie asked.
“Breathing exercises,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound much like exercising,” Roland conceded, and I said, “Just sit on the floor.”
They sat on the floor, their legs tucked underneath them. “Sit cross-legged, okay?” I said, demonstrating. I was not flexible, lived a life that required me to be tense at all times in case someone tried to fuck me over, and I found the simple act of making my spine erect, making my pelvis and thighs do regular stuff, was a little more difficult than I’d expected. I hoped that the kids didn’t notice, but they were easily making their bodies into pretzels, like I could have twisted them into any shape and they could have held it.
“Now what?” Bessie said.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
“No way,” Bessie replied, and I again felt tenderness for her because I also understood how ridiculous my request was. When I was ten, I wouldn’t have closed my eyes for all the money in the world.
“We’re all going to close our eyes,” I said.
“So you’ll close your eyes, too?” Bessie asked, as if she hadn’t expected it.
“Yes,” I said, trying to maintain calm, to not be irritated.
“So you won’t know if my eyes are closed or not?” she said.
“I guess not,” I said. “I just have to trust you.”
“You can trust me,” Bessie said, and I knew that this was a test. So I just closed my eyes.
“Now,” I said, feeling their hot little bodies, their sour breath, the tremors running all over them, “take a deep breath.”
Roland sucked in air like he was trying to drink the world’s biggest milkshake. He coughed a little.
“Just an easy, slow breath, and then you hold it,” I said. I tried it myself. The air went inside me, more than you’d think, and I just held it. It sat there, mixed with whatever was in my body that made me who I was. And I don’t know if the kids were doing it right or not, but I wasn’t going to open my eyes. I held it, and it felt like the world was spinning just a little less quickly than it had been before.