“I mean, I knew that’s what they did, of course,” she continued. I realized this was what she needed me for. Someone to tell her that what she saw was real. “But I wasn’t prepared for how . . . bright, I guess? How bright it was.”
“It’s intense,” I admitted.
“And have they caught on fire since?” she asked.
“Nope,” I lied. I didn’t hesitate. “No fire. Not even a spark.”
“Well . . . that’s good,” she replied. “That’s what we hoped. I knew you could do it.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“I just knew,” she said. “I just knew that if anyone could do it, it would be you.”
In the years since high school, sometimes Madison would invite me to come visit her, to reunite, but in my next letter, I’d talk about everything but the invitation, hoping it would just drop. And it always would. 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.
“Have you told them about me?” she finally asked, her voice so soft.
“The kids?” I said, and I could feel the disappointment in my stomach, to remember the reality of the situation. “Have I told them about you?”
“Yeah, like, have you talked me up? Have you told them that I’m good? That I’m cool? That I’m kind? That they can trust me?”
I was still trying to get the kids to believe all those things about me. I hadn’t had time yet to bring anyone else into the discussion. But Madison looked so hopeful, and it was strange to see her this way, worried about what someone else thought of her.
“Of course,” I said. “I told them that you’re a great person, that you’ll be a great stepmother to them.”
“And they believe you?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. I could tell this didn’t satisfy Madison, so I said, “By the end of the summer, I promise that they’ll love you.”
“Okay,” she finally replied. “Find out what they like, and I’ll buy a bunch of it and give it to them.”
“Bribery?” I said, smiling.
“What’s the point of having money if you can’t use it to make people like you?” she said. She reached into the bucket and produced another beer, popped the top, and handed it to me.
“How much time do we have?” I asked her.
“How much time?” she replied, confused.
“Until I need to go back to the kids.”
She thought about this, looking at me. “How much time do you need?” she asked, but I didn’t even answer. Nothing that I said would be enough.
Seven
“We want to shoot!” Roland said, but I wouldn’t let them. Not yet. We were building something, and we had to start with the most basic things. I was learning, with these children, you had to build some kind of foundation or life would get tricky very quickly.
“Okay, we’re going to dribble,” I told them, 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.
And, okay, I understood that whatever I did was going to be stupid. The kids had confessed to me only two days earlier that their mom had tried to kill them. Of course, yes, Jesus, they needed to be in therapy. But it had been made clear to me that therapy was not an option. What else could I do? I had to believe that these children, who could not be burned, who were immune to hellfire for crying out loud, were simply tougher than most people. If their bodies were invulnerable to fire, what was inside them? Maybe they could keep themselves alive. Maybe I could keep them happy. And all I had, right at this moment, was basketball.
“We want to shoot!” Roland said again, looking at the basket, but I put my hand on his basketball—such a weird broken-wing form he had—and pushed the ball gently back toward him. My hand was still aching from Bessie’s crazy teeth, but I could bend the fingers without much pain, and the swelling was gone.