“I’m not,” she rushed to say, but he’d already heard that soothing tone in her voice. Her attempt tohandlehim.
“Yes,” he said, “you are. You’re unhappy with me, and I don’t like it.”
“I’m not happy that she’s dead,” his sister snapped. “You only moved Jason’s body out what, ten, eleven, twelve days ago?”
“I was lonely.”
“Take up dancing lessons then,” she cried out. “Go to a pub, get laid, do something to meet people.”
He snorted at that. “Well, as you know, I can’t dance,” he said, “because I’ve got two left feet, and I’m completely tone-deaf,” he said. “Besides, it was a while back but I was at the park, sitting and talking to all these nice people,” he said, “and that’s when I saw her.”
“The child?”
“Yes,” he said in a dreamy voice. “She was running across the park with a balloon. She was so happy, so innocent. I just really wanted to touch that. She was so full of love and laughter, and her mother obviously cared. I mean, they were hugging each other all the time. I mentioned her to one of my cronies. He grabbed her. I was pissed initially, but then I realized he’d done me a solid, as I managed to buy her off him. It took a bit, but eventually I got her for myself.”
“So why did you break that?” his sister asked curiously.
Just hearing that note in her voice again made him feel better. She was always trying to figure him out. Always trying to make some sense of it. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I wanted to be a part of it somehow. I wanted to see, if she was with me long enough, if she would treat me like she treated her mother. If she would look at me like she looked at her mother.”
“But you never could be her mother.”
“I know that,” he said, “but it doesn’t change anything, not really. I still needed to try.”
“And how did she react when you took her away?”
“She was screaming,” he said sadly. “She kept crying for her mother, and, when I told her that I could be her mother, she told me to go away. She said that I was a mean old man. Just like the other one.”
“Ouch,” his sister said. “And I suppose that made you angry?”
“Well, I didn’t think so,” he said. “I mean, these little kids, they don’t know what they’re saying. She’d just never been in an experience like this before, so I couldn’t really listen to the words she was saying.”
“No, of course not.” But his sister spoke with a heavy tone.
“It really was fast,” he said. “I didn’t have any fun at all. I just wanted to be a part of what they had.”
“I’m not sure,” she said, “that you are completely there.”
“Of course I’m completely here,” he said, adding a note of warning. “Just the two of us are involved in this. You’re the only one who knows, and we’ll keep it that way.”
“I’d never tell,” she said, the weariness in her voice making him worried. “But sometimes I wonder if it’s too much for me to hear.”
“You love the details,” he cried out. “That’s how we bonded way back when. It’s never changed.”
“Maybe I’m just getting old,” she snapped.
“We’re both getting old then,” he said. “We’re twins.”
“Duh,” she said. “But sometimes I hear these details, and they’re not fun for me.”
“That’s because you’re not with me,” he said. “I’ve told you that we can get two. I mean, lots of children are out there. It might take a little more planning, but we could get one each. I’ve never gotten the ones I really wanted.”
“Is that true?” she asked again, that curiosity back in her voice.
He smiled, pleased with the angle he had picked up. She always had questions, and, when she had questions, she was engaged. When she was engaged, he knew she was his. “There might have been a couple I wanted, but then I decided that they weren’t a good bet,” he tried to explain. “You know? Some kids are watched better than other kids. Or sometimes you see them walking, and you realize that something’s wrong with their leg, or the mother comes over with medication, so you know they’re sick or things like that,” he said. “Obviously I want as healthy as I can get.”
“And yet you took Jason.”
“I know,” he said. “He had that ethereal look to him, as if he already had one foot in the grave, one foot in the angel’s realm. Seriously something was so angelic about him.”