Scott’s headache came back on the way home—not as bad as before, nothing he couldn’t handle. He cooled his temple against a rattling windowpane as the bus reeled up the curb and into the school parking lot, where Mom and Polly were waiting in the Hyundai and fogging up the windows with their talk.
“You okay?” Erno asked Scott as they disembarked.
“Getting better.”
“I have a theory about your headaches, Scott,” said Emily, who was shivering under her puffy blue coat. “I think I can cure them, but you have to not mind being electrocuted a little bit. Do you mind being electrocuted a little bit?”
“Um. Can I think about it?”
“Take your time. I have some soldering to finish first, anyway.”
Erno rolled his eyes. “My sister thinks she’s in one of those movies where the smart kid invents things and all her friends call her Gadget.”
“Yeah. All my friends,” Emily said, and waved her arm only at Scott. “Good night.” She stepped off toward a windowless white van, and Erno followed. Scott heard him protest furtively: “I’m your friend. You know, sort of.”
Scott got into the backseat of his family’s Hyundai, and Polly immediately turned and hooked her fingers over the headrest.
“Because your bus was late we get pizza!” she announced.
“Get in the back and buckle up,” said Mom.
“Finally I understand why I have a brother,” Polly said solemnly.
There’s a story behind Polly’s name, too.
Scott’s naming had turned out to be so significant that John warned against taking his next child’s naming too lightly.
“I like Sarah,” Mom had said, and often.
“I like Sarah, too,” said John. “That’s not the point. The … universe … or the gods or someone will tell us what our daughter should be called. We just have to be patient. It could be really important for us, like with Scottish.”
Scott, almost four, lay on the sunny bed with his cheek against his mother’s belly, hoping to feel the baby kick. Instead he heard a sound like a wet burp. He flinched and looked up at his mother.
“What was that?”
“That,” Mom sighed, “was a contraction.”
John knew that the modern husband was supposed to be in the delivery room with his wife, not pacing the waiting room like a dad in a cartoon. But he’d been by Sam’s side for Scott’s birth, and the whole operation hadn’t agreed with him. Now he noticed a nurse eyeing him, and he forced himself into a chair.
He cast about for something—anything—that could conceivably be a sign, a divine message within the confines of the St. Mary’s Hospital waiting room. The time was nigh, the child must be named; but there were no suggestions here for John apart from a magazine about cats and a poster outlining how to give himself a breast exam.
Whiskers Doe? he wondered as he glanced at the open magazine. Leukemia? Then a tangle of green just beyond the magazine caught his eye.
“I’m sorry… Miss? Nurse? Miss?”
The woman turned.
“What sort of plant is that, Miss? Do you know?”
The nurse glared at him. “Are you being funny?”
John straightened in his chair.
“Miss, I have played Puck in the Park. I assure you, if I were ‘being funny,’ you would be the first—”
“That plant’s fake. It’s made of polyester.”
Polly Esther Doe had been born at 8:03 a.m. on August 14.
John would leave them six weeks later.
“How was the play?” asked Mom. “Did you love it?”
“It was okay,” Scott answered. “But I had a headache today.” And I saw a unicorn. And a unicat. And a leprechaun tried to steal my backpack.
“Oh no.”
They ordered a take-out pizza and rented a video—an old movie their mother had loved as a girl. It was, coincidentally, one of those movies wherein the smart kid invents things and all his friends call him Data. Scott could sense that his mom wanted it to be a real event—a fun family night. She would be leaving after Thanksgiving (a day care worker from Goodco would be staying with them) and wouldn’t be back for a month, maybe two. But Scott’s headaches tended to wear him out, and he fell asleep during the big finale with the pirate ship, pretended not to wake when his mother covered him with an afghan, and trudged up the stairs to his bedroom when his official bedtime compelled him to his official bed.
He didn’t notice anything unusual in his room that night. He didn’t notice anything at all until morning, when he woke up next to a leprechaun.