ALL THAT NEXT MORNING she watched Patrizia conferring with Miranda and delivering womanly advice. By lunchtime Miranda had been convinced to get over Jonathan’s involvement with the former nanny and to go through with the wedding. Neva pieced this together from snatches of conversation and gestures and looks, the two women ranging over the subject as if they were surveying and studying the floors of a luxury store. At lunchtime they were talking about rehearsal dinner details, and Neva was giving the boys their lunch. The food had arrived, along with a chef and kitchen staff. Neva served the boys from large platters arranged on a console near an outdoor table. Roman was trying to eat while playing a game. His device fell into his lunch several times and Neva helped him clean off the herbs and oil.
During the meal Neva tried to get acquainted with Felix, who was not easy to unearth. An inward boy with a delicate, occasionally quizzical expression. They ate side by side in silence, the barely audible clicks of Roman’s thumbs on his machine blending in with clinking silverware, spilling food, the twittering country sounds.
Felix was usually found reading a book but at the moment he was concentrating entirely on the present, eating with deliberate poise, chewing his fried fish thoughtfully, dipping pieces into the red swirl of ketchup on the white china with a light, graceful movement. He ate his salad using the fork with his left hand.
He had asked Neva no questions since she’d started working for the family a few days earlier. He seemed to have absorbed everything he needed to know about her from watching her, observing both the way others treated her and the subtleties of mood on her generally inexpressive face. He was like a highly intelligent animal, a dolphin mixed with an exquisite monkey.
I’ve never had fish-and-chips before, Neva said.
Felix nodded underneath a filigree of shadows from a large tree.
I thought it would be greasier, she continued.
They were both quiet for a while.
This is fancy fish-and-chips, Felix said. It’s not the real thing. It’s usually pretty disgusting and more delicious.
I thought so.
I have a question.
Go ahead, said Neva.
Why is it harder not to imagine something if someone says to you, Don’t think of a black dog, than if someone says: Don’t think about the sentence “Are you hungry”?
Because the mind works in images. So if you hear the phrase “a black dog,” you cannot not picture it. If someone says a string of words, that’s easier to forget.
Okay. Thanks.
You’re welcome.
How do they study memory? Do they go into people’s brains? I guess they can. I guess they’ll figure it all out. It’s like the way there used to be diseases that people don’t get sick from anymore. We can cure them now. That will probably happen with death. I mean I can’t really imagine that I’m ever going to die.
I haven’t heard about a cure for that yet, she said.
I know, but it will come in the future.
If you say so, Felix. You seem to know a lot.
Where in Russia are you from?
The mountains. I’m named after a river near where I was born.
Felix looked at her for an extra beat, as if he could see the vibrant blue River Neva flowing in the sky behind her head.
Poppy is coming today, he said.
Who is Poppy?
My sister. Actually she’s my cousin who was adopted by my dad when her mother died. She was six. She’s seventeen now. Her mom was my dad’s sister. It’ll be better when she gets here. She’s interesting.
Like you?
For the first time since she’d met him he blushed a little and didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or to hide.
No, he said. Not like me. She’s cool.
I can’t imagine anyone cooler than you.
She has totally white hair. Well, the last time I saw her she did. And her eyes are kind of far apart.
I look forward to meeting her.
Are there any more potatoes?
For a long time Neva has had no friends. Not since she was very small. But Felix, this child, seems like a friend. She is twenty-six and yet this nine-year-old boy makes sense to her. He does not seem to need anything, just like her. Except this girl Poppy, he seems to need this girl Poppy. Neva feels a curiosity about the girl and a pull toward the boy. This is new and different. She is not usually taken in by these families. She doesn’t despise them, but she usually feels a great distance, a divide having to do with more than money, more than education, more than privilege. She usually sees them as people with no similarity to her whatsoever, as if they were an entirely different species, even when she likes them, even when they seem to be decent, thoughtful people. But now she feels an unfamiliar kinship, a powerful loneliness that she can comprehend in this family. She could misunderstand it, could think that she and they are very much alike, and that she is one of them. But she is realistic and practical and she understands at least this much: what connects her to this particular family is their loneliness and in the case of Felix his awareness that he is lonely. He accepts it, accepts himself. Jonathan is like many of the other families she has worked for. Jonathan does not even know that he is in pain, inflicting pain, always in the vicinity of pain. Steve is something else. Steve is another matter. Steve is an ocean.
For dessert they ate ice-cream sandwiches made in innovative combinations such as gingersnap with lavender gelato or mint-chocolate-chip cookie with Earl Grey custard. Neva took the boys back to their room and got them changed into their tennis clothes and then accompanied them to the tennis courts where an instructor was waiting. Roman catapulted the ball at the Australian pro, and Felix hobbled around the court like he had someplace else to be.
Neva sat on the sidelines watching them, Roman lunging and Felix flitting, two awkward, unnaturally cultivated birds.