“Put this one in your pants,” I said, and he put it behind him, tucking it into his waistband and pulling his shirt over it.
“Lillian,” Carl said, “this is not—”
“Come on,” I said. I handed Bessie the monastery book. “Hold this and act normal, okay? Nothing to see here. No one cares. No one cares about us.”
And I pushed them all, one-two-three, out of the aisle and we walked toward the exit.
“Find what you needed?” the librarian asked us, and I nodded. “We took a lot of notes,” I said. “Good research.”
As we passed through the doors, the alarm went off, and I looked surprised. Both children froze, and Carl looked like he was going to vomit. I kind of nudged Carl and Roland farther outside the door, onto the stairs.
“Oh my,” I said, and the librarian stood up slowly, shaking his head.
“No problem,” he said, but before he could get up, I looked down at Bessie and took the book out of her hands. I walked back to the librarian, and he sat back down, relieved to not have to move.
“She’s always grabbing things,” I said, and the man laughed.
“No harm done,” he said, and then he seemed to notice my bruise but was unfazed, to his credit. It made me love him.
“No harm,” I said, “of course not,” and then I walked outside, where the three of them were waiting for me.
“Let’s just keep going, super cool,” I said. “Nothing to see here.”
When we got to the van and packed ourselves inside it, Carl and Roland removed the books from their pants. I took the book from Carl and handed it to Bessie.
“Thank you,” Bessie said. “You stole it for me.”
“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.
Carl started the van, and we pulled out of the parking lot.
“We looked like a normal family in there,” Roland said, and this made Carl breathe sharply through his nose.
“I guess so,” I told Roland.
“Can we still have ice cream?” Bessie asked.
“Carl?” I asked.
“We can have ice cream,” he said. “That’s fine with me.”
The kids read their books, and they leaned against me, and even though I actually did not like to be touched, I just let it happen. I allowed it. It was fine.
After the ice cream—so many sprinkles—still delirious from the simple act of walking into an open space, of not being inside our house, we happily went right back to that house and waited for the next day, when we’d have our family dinner.
That morning, we found ourselves easily taking up the routine. Roland was a master of yoga, and I eventually just kind of let him take it over, because my body simply wouldn’t hold the positions. “This is easy,” he said, doing this weird kind of crow pose, his entire body supported by his two noodle arms. “Why is this supposed to be hard?” We did some basic math, using Oreo cookies as props. We took notes for our biographies of Parton and York. We shot baskets, and I showed Bessie the proper form, the smoothness of it, the way the ball was just an extension of your arm. It took her a lot of effort, but she was hitting about twenty percent of her shots. And her dribbling, holy shit.
Sometimes, when the kids were invested in something, when they didn’t look entirely blasted by how shitty their lives had been, I’d try to truly look at them. Of course, they both had those bright green eyes, like you’d see on the cover of a bad fantasy novel where the hero can turn into some kind of bird of prey. But they were not attractive children, the rest of their faces soft and undefined. They looked ratty. I hadn’t even tried to fix their cult haircuts. I feared that fixing them would only make the kids more plain. They had round little bellies, way past the point when you’d expect a kid to lose it. Their teeth were just crooked enough that you could tell they hadn’t been handled with care. And yet. And yet.
When Bessie managed to get the layup to bank perfectly off the backboard, her eyes got crazy; she started vibrating. When Roland watched you do anything, even open a can of peaches, he looked like he was cheering you on at mile marker nineteen of your marathon. When Roland put his fingers in my mouth in the middle of the night, when Bessie kicked me in the liver and made me startle awake, I did not hate them. No matter what happened after this, when the kids moved in to the mansion with Jasper and Madison and Timothy, no one would ever think that they were really a part of that immaculate family. They would always, kind of, belong to me. I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to Earth, smashing into the ground like meteroites, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I’d hold it. I would.