“Are you my conscience now? Anyway, we’ve already cleaned out a supermarket. I don’t see why keeping clean is worse than keeping fed. Just grab some clean socks. Get those funky ones with sharks: we might be going on a boat later.”
Billy was already looting with some enthusiasm. He plumped down on his bum to pull on a pair of women’s spotty wellington boots that came up to his hips. Charlie finished twisting his trouser legs into hard balls of guilt and succumbed to temptation, jimmying open the knife cabinet with a stick. Even the Lost Boy sat next to me clutching a new pair of deck shoes. He pulled them on, biting his lip while tying the laces. Maggie appeared holding a dress decorated with prancing ponies, but stopped to watch the Lost Boy. I smiled at her open admiration of his skills. Shoe laces remained Maggie’s nemesis; any attempt to show her how to tie them ended in a tantrum—on both our parts. I had long since realized that teaching Maggie basic life skills would have to be done surreptitiously to avoid wounding her hypersensitive pride. Rather like slipping extra money into a poor relative’s wallet, we could never acknowledge my helping hand.
The Lost Boy got the laces into two loops, but when he pulled them tight, the knot tumbled apart. “Almost.” I crouched down next to him. “Can I show you a trick? I’ll have to touch your hands, though.” He moved his arms a little to allow me access. I guided his fingers to make bunny ears and perform the tricky switcheroo. When I took my hands away, he pulled the laces tight the first time. “Nicely done,” I said. A ripple of satisfaction passed his lips as he tied the other shoe. From the shelf behind me, I picked up a bar of artisanal soap and some bamboo-cloth towels. “Come on, all of you. Bring your new clothes in here.”
Inside the disabled washroom, I filled the sink with water and lathered up a cloth. I stripped Billy bare and laid him across my legs. While I wiped him down from head to feet, the others undressed and stood in line. I rinsed gray water out of the flannel, and Billy shivered in his wet skin, so I wrapped him inside a big towel and eased the water from his eyes with my thumbs.
“Better?”
“Make me a sausage, Mummy.”
I swaddled him tight inside the towel, so that his arms and legs were trapped by his sides, and picked him up like a baby, rocking him dry and warm. Then I dressed him in his bright new clothes and correctly sized spotty wellies, of which he was mighty proud. He toddled out to show the others his new going-on-a-boat shoes.
Charlie had already started washing himself, too self-conscious to stand naked for long. The Lost Boy joined in with his back turned to me, wiping his thin limbs with studious care. I held another flannel out to Maggie, assuming she, too, would want to do it herself.
“Mummy wash me.”
“Okay.”
I laid my daughter across my legs and wiped the soapy cloth over her face and neck. She stretched her head back to offer me her throat. Charlie slopped his cloth into the full sink behind me, so that watery bubbles tickled onto my scalp. I bathed Maggie’s soft torso and the creamy skin of her arms. All the way down to her mucky feet, where I slid the cloth between each toe and rolled it into a ball to scrub the blackened soles.
The smoke from Joni’s barbecue curled in through the window. It took me back to another echoing white-tiled bathroom in Africa: my mother smoking a cardamom cigarette while I huddled under tepid bathwater. I had her attention at last, but could only bob under the water with my eyes protruding like a frog, my throat bulging with all the things I wanted to say. When she decided I had stewed for long enough, she threw a scratchy sun-dried towel round my shoulders, rubbing my hair so hard my eyes watered.
“This towel is very soft, isn’t it?” I said to Maggie.
She agreed that it was.
“It’s made of bamboo.”
“Like pandas!”
“Pandas aren’t made of bamboo, silly!”
Maggie giggled. I finished drying her hair and pulled the new tennis dress down over her shoulders.
“Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“I miss you.” Her eyes winced, as though it caused her a little pain to admit it.
“But I’m right here.”
“Sometimes I miss you when you’re right here.” The wince spread until her whole face was bunched up with the effort of finding words. I cupped her jaw in my palms and ran my thumbs over her eyebrows to smooth the furrows away.
“I miss you, too, Maggie, all the time.” She folded into me for a cuddle, and I felt her heart beating against my belly. I pulled her in tighter, so she could hear my heart in reply. Her eyes closed and her shoulders dropped, so that I held her full weight in my arms for a few moments.
“Daddy does this when you go away.”
“What?”
“Holds me tight so I can pretend to hear your heart beat like when I was a baby.”
“He did that?”
“Daddy said I mustn’t be scared that your plane would crash, because we loved you so much it would keep flying. And you loved us so much, you would keep it flying, too.”
Daddy. Julian. One person or two? This didn’t sound like Julian. But maybe Daddy was different. How was I to know, I hardly ever met the guy. But I think I would have liked this Daddy. I would have been able to grieve for him.
“Daddy was right,” I said, as Maggie pressed her face into my stomach. “I always came back, didn’t I?”
When Maggie stood again, she drew a little brown comb out of her pocket and plucked the teeth with a fingernail.
“Do you want me to do your hair?” I asked.
She shook her head once, and her mouth made a strangely adult movement of magnanimity.
“Can I do yours, Mummy?” She rasped the comb again.
“You can. And Maggie?”
“Yes, Mummy?”
“I’ll never leave you again.”
I sat down on the white tiles to watch the sweet-corn smoke drift past the window while my daughter held my head back in her pudgy hands and wrenched the knots from my hair.
“What’s that?” asked Charlie.
“What?”
“That.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That thing.”
“I’m driving, so use your words, Charlie.”
“There’s a thing. Up in the sky.”
That got my attention. I pulled to a stop by the side of the road and wound down my window. Wind bustled past me into the car. A group of white wind turbines stood on the neighboring field, their long ballerina legs stretching through their rounds. I got out of the pickup and accepted a pair of binoculars that Charlie held through the window. The sky flowed overhead, and I followed the gray torrent of cloud to a point beyond the turbines, where a single dark shape hung in the sky. The wind was loud, so I couldn’t hear much, but I focused the binoculars as best I could and concluded that it wasn’t a helicopter: no noise and too small. I got in the truck and passed the binoculars to Charlie, who resumed his watch.
“Just a bird riding the thermals. Good spotting, though.”