Han tugged at Alexandra’s sleeve. He pointed to a device on his lap. “Baba says it is sixty-two degrees in São Paolo, Brazil, with a fifteen-two chance of rain.”
“Fifty-two,” Alexandra said. “Less chance.”
For a while they swiped through cities, and Jeremy made a drink in the kitchen. He went to the doorway and watched. Han had made paper trains that he taped to the lower edge of the wall in the living room, his bedroom, these candy-colored conga lines of steam engines and cabooses, wrapping around the world of their home. He’d cut and colored and he could name them. It seemed so recent his only word had been a monster. He used to be afraid of the other character, the green one. But Jeremy had brought Han recently to an exhibition at the children’s museum. He’d guided Han’s hand along a wall covered with swatches of synthetic puppet fur. See, it isn’t so scary.
“Everything good in my life, I think of how he’ll never see it,” Alexandra said now, shaking her head. “As though that were the point of his life, to validate mine.”
Jeremy set the drink on a coaster for her. “Or as though you want to share your happiness.”
One day, he must believe, she would quarantine the tragic.
He had done it.
He could not tell her he had done it.
He could not tell her of a time when senses piled in concentric circles of near-boredom and imminent stir, moments sharpening, electric, and all the rude glamour of news arriving like memories, happened and familiar and warped. He could not tell her of when he came to believe you could count on certain things if you stayed in Northern Ireland long enough to cease being a stunned optimist, things like bodies turning up in the familiar style: stripped, beaten, bags over heads with bullet holes. He could not tell her he had cared for one of the dead men in his own way and that nonetheless after some time it was clear that the dead were not real anymore, and so you learned to live.
He could not tell her that, no. It had been too many years of the partial story. Time made silence a betrayal. But he could tell her she’d remember their good life. He could tell her there was hope in what they now had.
Their boy was yawning. Their boy’s eyes were closing.
“Nap time,” Jeremy said.
In his room, Han slipped under the covers and Jeremy began to read. What did it say on the cover of this book? Did it say there’s a fright at the end of the book? I am so afraid! The end! The end! I am so afraid of the fright at the end of the book!
“Mama, a fright,” Han said.
“Will you protect me?” she said.