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“Well, that worries me,” I confessed to Gene.
“I don’t see why it should.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “Maybe he wants you to sing at his brother’s memorial.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, but I didn’t think that was it.
“You still up for that drink?”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely. I could use a nightcap now more than ever. Or, at least, more than ten minutes ago.”
“Good. But Crissy?”
I waited.
“I know things. I have an excellent sixth sense. And I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
I hoped he was right. But I didn’t believe his sixth sense was any better than mine, and mine, it was clear from an awful lot of my life choices, was rubbish.
The coding teacher thought I wanted to design games, because the older kids in the class lived for games.
I like games.
But I was more interested in how things worked. How to solve problems. (I’d say puzzles, but then you’d say games. I only like puzzles if I look at them like problems to be solved.)
CHAPTER FOUR
Betsy
She could have grown into Elizabeth. She could have been Beth. But she’d been Betsy in day care and Betsy in her Vermont village’s little cooperative preschool and then the town’s bigger (but still small) elementary school, and so Betsy she had remained. She was Betsy when she was a hellion in high school who some days (and nights) made her mother’s life an innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno, she was Betsy when she was getting her master’s in social work, and she was Betsy when she would lose her mother just when she thought the pandemic could cause her no more pain.
Once, she was a mess. She never lost sight of the utter nakedness of her conscious miscalculations and unthinking missteps. There was never anything baleful about her preteen faux pas and teenage flubs—at least the intentions weren’t baleful. Sometimes the results were. That was a reality.
By the time that she and Crissy were in their early thirties, however, she believed that she was the sister who was reflective and judicious and made the world better. She was as sure of this as she was that the Earth was round and there was nothing in the firmament but sky and stars and moon.
It was why she went west with Frankie Limback. She believed she was making the right decision—not just for her, but for her daughter. Even for Crissy. She had no premonition that might dissuade her, no augury telling her no. But had there ever been omens warning her away from her worst instincts? And would she have heeded them if there were?
Probably not.
No. Definitely not.
* * *
The first night Marisa was in Betsy’s apartment with her, the first night the girl was officially Betsy’s foster child, she had a pair of epiphanies. She understood that she was in over her head, because with Marisa, unlike with every other young person she had counseled over the years, there was going to be no respite: no moment when she could say their time was up and send the client back to a parent or older sibling, no moment when the night manager at the shelter would take over, no moment when a psychiatrist would write the young person a scrip that would settle him or her or them down. She thought of her friend at the Vermont DCF who’d introduced her to Marisa and helped convince her that, post-pandemic, these two lost souls would make each other whole. Maybe. But Marisa wasn’t a pandemic puppy. She was a twelve-year-old human being with enough emotional baggage to fill the hold of a passenger jet. That sleeping child was her responsibility 24/7, and there was no one to help her, and she was terrified.
But she also felt this was the best thing she had ever done, and in addition to her roaring trepidation, there was euphoria. And on some level that Betsy was still trying to parse—her loneliness, a biological clock, the loss of a father, a stepfather, a mother—she needed Marisa.
She had bought her daughter ivory-colored pajamas with purple lilacs on them, a pattern so prim that even her sister the wannabe royal would have approved. Marisa chose not to sleep in the bottoms, wearing the top like a nightshirt over her underwear, because she said her legs got hot. Betsy had also gotten her a stuffed animal, a dog that looked like a black lab, and Marisa had said, accepting the gift, “Thank you. I once lived in a house where the family had, like, five dogs. They barked at everything: squirrels, other dogs, people on bikes. They were chained to these pegs in the yard, which is the worst thing you can do to a dog. Chain it up. Did you know that? They want to run, but they can’t, and they feel super vulnerable because they’re tied down. That’s why chained dogs bark. When they took me—the social service police—they also took away the dogs. Or someone did. The animal shelter, I guess. The people I lived with didn’t pay attention to the dogs, except tell them to shut up. They only kept them to scare people away. But I don’t know what they were scared of. Their house kind of sucked. It was pretty run-down.”
“Did the dogs scare you?” Betsy asked.
She shook her head. “No. They barked. They didn’t bite.”
Marisa didn’t sleep with the stuffed animal. When Betsy peeked in on her, the plush dog was on top of the dresser.
* * *
