Timothy touched Bessie’s hand like he thought it might be hot. Bessie let him.
And then someone was knocking on the door, and Madison and Carl appeared in the doorway. Timothy pulled his hand away from Bessie and immediately started walking toward the door. Madison came in. “Look at this!” she said. “Are you having fun?” she asked Timothy, who actually nodded, or what for him was a nod.
“Well,” she said, “we’d better get back to the house.”
“Where’s Dad?” Roland asked.
“Well, he’s been called away on some important business,” she said, as much to me as to the kids. “Very important. But he’ll see you again soon.”
Madison took Timothy’s hand and they stepped outside, but Carl hovered in the doorway, which I took as a sign for me to come talk to him.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is it about the kids?”
“The secretary of state just died,” he whispered to me. “Just dropped dead in his kitchen.”
“Wasn’t he dying?” I asked.
“Well, he was dying, but he was a powerful man. He was going to die very slowly. This was unexpected.”
“So what now?”
“So Senator Roberts has been offered the post.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Really?”
“There’s a process that starts in earnest now,” Carl replied, “but they’ve already been doing a lot of preparation. It looks promising.”
I thought about Madison, one step closer to what she wanted. I thought about Jasper, but there wasn’t much feeling there.
“And so what does it mean?” I asked. “Like, for the kids?”
“Let’s just see how this plays out,” he said.
“But are the kids being considered?” I asked. “How all this affects them?”
“Honestly, Lillian?” Carl replied. “Not really. Not much. So just keep taking care of them. Do what you need to do to maintain order.”
“You don’t want them to fuck this up?” I asked.
“I do not want them to fuck this up,” he repeated.
“Okay, fine,” I said.
“Good night,” he said to me. “Good night, kids,” he said to the twins, who didn’t respond.
He left, and I went back to the kids.
“Is Dad dying?” Bessie asked.
“What?” I replied. “No. No way.”
“All right,” Bessie said, suspicious. Hopeful? I couldn’t tell.
“He was supposed to give us a hug after dinner,” Roland said.
“I don’t want him to hug me,” Bessie said.
“You guys look really cool,” I said, changing the subject. “I’m going to take a picture of you.”
I found the camera, the one Madison had asked me to use to document their lives, like maybe she needed pictures in order to quickly make a happy photo album for visitors to see. The kids were slumped on the sofa, tired.
“You don’t have to smile,” I said. “Just stay the way that you are.”
Roland’s head was resting on Bessie’s shoulder. Their arms weren’t quite as shimmery as they had been earlier in the night. I took the picture, then took one more.
“We want you to be in the picture,” Roland said.
“I can’t,” I told them. “It’s just you two.”
“Can we go to bed?” Bessie asked. “Can you read us a story?”
“Hell yeah,” I told them. “Hell yeah.”
Nine
The next three weeks felt like the world was spinning slightly faster than usual, all this weird activity swirling around us, no one telling us anything, but my life with Bessie and Roland didn’t really change. Of course, we saw in the newspaper, front page, how Jasper had been nominated, and everyone said this was a savvy decision on the part of the president. Everyone seemed to love Jasper, and perhaps it’s because I didn’t like him, but it seemed like what they loved about him was that he was inoffensive and gentlemanly, that he looked like he knew what he was doing. Good for him, I guess. If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. I thought about Jane, abandoned, dead, and I wondered how any kind of vetting didn’t think that mattered. I thought of Bessie and Roland on the front lawn, on fire. How did that not matter? But maybe it really didn’t matter. Jasper was a good senator; he made rich people and poor people equally happy, which must have been some kind of magic trick.