Page 61 of Middlegame

The sound of laughter from the hall is like music. She knows Dodger’s voice, high and perpetually excited, spiking on every other word, like she’s afraid a failure to show her delight might bring the conversation crashing to a halt. The male voice beneath it is unfamiliar; tenor, light enough to provide a counterpart to Dodger’s heavier stresses, like a soothing ribbon of reason. A third voice comes in intermittently, female, deeper than Dodger’s, with a flat bottom note that speaks of a calm deadpan, a rational approach to the world. The fourth voice is also female, higher and sweeter than the others. Together, they make a choral blend Heather has been waiting to hear since the day she brought her daughter home from the airport. This is what it sounds like when your little girl is living in the world.

She steps into the kitchen doorway, unashamed of the cranberry sauce on her apron and flour on her hands. She’s not worried about embarrassing Dodger in front of her friends; not on Thanksgiving. They’re grad students. All they’re going to care about is the food. “Hello,” she says, beaming beatifically before she sees them. That’s a good thing: it makes it possible for her smile to freeze.

The first female voice must belong to the short, curvaceous girl in the jeans and green sweatshirt. Her hair is strawberry blonde, and for some reason it makes Heather think of the color she gets when she tries to wash blood out of cotton, a color that isn’t pink and isn’t red, but is its own unique, nameless shade, the aftermath of carnage. Her eyes are blue and cold, irises rimmed in startling black. There’s no denying her prettiness, but she looks at Heather the way a snake looks at a mouse, and for a moment—only a moment—Heather is very aware of the beating of her heart, the feeling of the muscle expanding and contracting, and how easily that process could be disrupted.

Heather assigns the second female voice to the slender Indian girl. Her skin is brown, her hair is black, and she is lovely, dressed in a slightly-too-formal yellow sundress too thin to keep her warm almost anywhere else in the country. California’s eternal springtime must seem like a blessing. She, too, looks like a predator in her own way, but a hawk rather than a tiger, safer and more distant, assessing the world and belonging to it at the same time.

Oddly, though, the predator girls are not the problem. Heather has met Dodger’s classmates before, students from her Gifted and Talented courses, child geniuses all too aware that everything they did was weighed and measured against the presumption of their brilliance. They are a predatory race by nature, these children of the golden mean, terrified of their edges being dulled by the world, measuring the love of their parents against the number of perfect scores they can achieve. Heather always tried to be kind to them, hoping they’d warm to her awkward, sensitive daughter, who approached her own brilliance more as a game than a calling. They might have been good for each other. But always and inevitably, Dodger was a better mathematician, or a worse abstract thinker, and would either be fled from as competition or discarded as deadweight. No; the predatory ones are not Heather’s concern.

It’s the boy.

Dodger is tall for a girl and he’s short for a boy; they present an almost matched set when standing side by side. His hair is brown, but his eyes are the same clear gray as hers, shading toward white around the pupils, until it seems he must be blind; no one with eyes that light can possibly be able to see.

Their builds are similar, with the necessary allowances for gender: his shoulders are broader, his hips narrower; her face is rounder, but the structure of the skull beneath is so alike that it makes Heather’s breath catch in her throat. And their faces . . .

Heather Cheswich has waited twenty years for the doorbell to ring and a red-haired woman with freckles on her nose to appear on her stoop, saying politely that she made a mistake, she wants her daughter back, and she hopes they’ll understand. She prepared herself for legal challenges, for teenage tantrums ending with shouts of “you’re not my real mother.” She got none of those things. She has almost stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now here it is, in the form of a politely smiling young man who looks so much like her daughter that it physically hurts.

Do you even know how much he looks like you? she wonders, and forces herself to speak. “Hello,” she says, dusting her floury hand against her hip before she offers it in greeting. “I’m Heather, Dodger’s mother.”

“Erin,” says the first girl, taking the offered hand and shaking it with perfunctory quickness. “You have a lovely home.”

“Thank you,” says Heather.

“Smita,” says the second girl. “I appreciate the invitation. I didn’t want to sit alone.”

“Nonsense; it’s our pleasure,” says Heather. “The more the merrier.”

It’s the boy’s turn. He takes her hand, shakes, smiles. “I’m Roger,” he says. “I know I was a last-minute addition. I really appreciate your having me.”

He has a New England accent, thick as pancake batter, oozing over every word. Heather freezes again, this time in fear. It’s been years since Dodger was attacked, years since her recovery was complete, but the boy who hurt her was never found . . . and that boy spoke with a New England accent. (The papers reported it as Boston. That was easier. That was the simpler route.)

Roger looks at her with evident sympathy. It’s like he knows what she must be thinking, somehow understands the words she’s too frozen and afraid to say. Dodger’s smile is fading, slipping away by inches.

There are questions here, questions that should be asked, but Heather’s not going to be the one who ruins this day. She refuses. So she smiles again, more sincerely, and turns to her daughter as she says, “Daddy’s out back prepping the turkey, and I’ve got things under control in the kitchen. Why don’t you grab something to drink and take your friends out to the patio?”

“Okay, Mom,” says Dodger, relief flooding her features. She bounces over to kiss her mother’s cheek before turning to her friends and asking, “Coffee, lemonade, or root beer?”

“Root beer,” says Erin.

“Lemonade,” says Smita.

“Coffee,” says Roger, with the sort of reverence most people reserve for the names of celebrities, saints, or vacation destinations. This time, Heather’s smile is sincere. They’re so at ease with one another; there’s no way Roger had anything to do with what happened to her little girl.

There’s just no way.

The Cheswich home isn’t large enough to be considered palatial, but it’s huge, especially for a home presumably maintained on a professor’s salary. Roger looks at the living room with its cathedral ceiling and the hallway with its hardwood floors, and feels like he’s made a mistake. Thanksgiving belongs in an old English colonial house with repairs visible to the baseboards and the ceiling, if you know where to look. There should be signs of wear and tear on the wallpaper, not this pristine showroom shine.

Dodger glances at him, grimaces sympathetically, and says, “My folks were afraid we might have to sell and move when I was a kid. Daddy had tenure, but there were budget cuts, and tenure doesn’t keep you employed if your department goes away. They inherited the house from Mom’s grandparents. I never met them, but Great-Grandpa was some sort of apple baron or something, and they had a lot of money back in the day. So I always knew if I wanted to make a mess, I should either make it in my room or go outside and make it there.”

Roger thinks of blood sinking into the ground, of messes made in ways and in places that can never be cleaned. He doesn’t say anything. It wouldn’t change anything. The past is set in stone, and he’s not a sculptor; he doesn’t get to go back and make something like that not happen.

Something about that thought nags at him, like a mosquito buzzing around his head. It’s such a strange way to frame things. He’s not a sculptor. But that opens the possibility that someone else could be; that such sculptors could exist in this world.

Clearly he needs more coffee. He gulps it as Dodger burbles about renovations, about how some of the prize money from the various mathematical puzzles she’s solved over the years has gone back into the house, always with her consent, sometimes with her insistence, shoring up the foundations that kept her safe. There’s a door at the end of the hallway; she opens it, and they’re looking out on the backyard, and the roses, he sees the roses, the ones she showed him when they were children, the ones that always seemed so bright and beautiful to him, like roses grown in the Up-and-Under.

Their colors are as faded as any other roses. He sighs. Dodger glances at him and he closes his eyes, hiding the gesture behind a yawn as he looks through her eyes, looks out and sees the roses, as bright and as beautiful as ever.

He wonders what she gets when she looks through his eyes that she doesn’t see through her own.