The whole of the next morning, over breakfast and everything, Jennifer keeps touching Michael, as if he faded into nothingness once, briefly, and so she wants to check now that he is still substantial.
Me, I feel ghostlike too, only half there. One half of me is still seeing the Child in its palace of glass, reaching out to me across the chasm, wanting me to comfort it.
The thought makes me shiver. I have to save the Child from the Crone, I think. It’s totally crazy but I know that I have to do it.
Then I see Jennifer look at me with concern bruising her eyes and I try to shunt back into the room, like a train changing tracks, to cancel the image of the crying Child from my mind.
I smile at Jennifer, and she smiles back, then does that touching-Michael thing again.
I think I know what’s going on with the two of them. He was the one who was broken; she had her hope, her faith, her god, and he didn’t. Now she thinks she can see him mending, and she is feeling him out, like prodding a cup that you have fixed with superglue, to see if it is holding.
It’s true too, he seems better. There’s more color in his cheeks, he looks less like some kind of addict. He has switched, quite suddenly, into a more positive mode, like a negative number being squared.
And the thing doing the squaring, the factor of multiplication, would appear to be baseball. Ever since it came up, he’s been—well, not happy, but a whole different person. Me too, I have to admit. Because it always seemed odd, you know? That I loved it so much—me, with my overweight mom who never did any exercise in her life. Now I think: I got it from him. It’s something concrete he gave me, even if I look at his face and I can’t for the life of me see any physical resemblance. It’s something in my blood, passed down.
In my DNA.
And that makes me think of the eagle, or Eagle, whatever, and him saying how there was one unbreakable line of DNA between me and …
Between me and my dad.
My real dad.
I think of Mark saying that there are a billion years of ancestors inside me.
James can see it too, the unbroken-line stuff though obviously not the eagle stuff or the Mark stuff and he looks pleased, but also a tiny bit jealous. He doesn’t like baseball, I know, and I wonder if this is making him feel left out. Maybe. He definitely seems closer to his mom than to his dad.
Anyway, I don’t want to get into the politics of it. The fault lines of the family. I’m just glad to have a plan for the day.
So when we’ve finished our bagels, Michael grabs his wallet and his shoes and hugs Jennifer. We’ll be back in an hour, he says. We’ll keep it short.
It’s okay, says Jennifer. I waited fifteen years for her. I can manage without her for an hour. She is looking at him with such love, this man who she must have come close to losing too.
Well, then, says Michael. He opens the door for me, and I go through. James waves from the couch, where he’s reading about French painters.
In the hallway, we bump into Summer from the CPS. She does a small double take. You’re going out? she says.
To the park, says Michael.
I don’t know if that’s advisable. There’s [ ] and [ ]. You don’t want to be recognized.
I turn to Michael. No one knows what she looks like, he says.
For now, says Summer.
Well, precisely.
I would still—
What do you want? I mean, what about when we get home? You want us to keep her inside for the rest of her life?
No, we just—
Michael is fully a positive integer now; all that defeat has left him. It’s as if he inhaled a ghost and it spread out to fill his whole body, puffing him up like a balloon, taut. I’m taking my daughter to the park, he says.
Summer sighs. Fine. In that case, do you mind if I come with you?
Yes, says Michael. Yes, I mind.
Summer does NOT know what to do in this situation and it is all kinds of awesome. It is fifty-four flavors of awesome.
Uh, right, she says. I’ll [ ] then. Jennifer and I can discuss some of the arrangements for—
Do what you want, says Michael. Then he walks past her.
And I follow.