I mean, I knew what I was doing on a step-by-step basis. I knew that for Changes, I wanted to throw out an extinction-worthy threat from the bad guys, and a proportionate response from Dresden. For Harry, the ultimate motivation would be saving his own child—especially because of his own childhood experience as an orphan, where no one ever came to save him. And it was kind of baked into the cake of my unconscious assumptions that Harry would save his child, of course. Clumsy though the young wizard might be, and sloppy, and desperate, and uncoordinated, and I really feel like the word collateral needs to be worked into it somewhere, Dresden does tend to get the job done in the end.
But I never really paused to work through the implications of the fact that Harry would be pathologically devoted to being there for his kid, and that he was going to save her life. I could see both 2s, but I had never added them up to 4: Maggie was going to be there, a presence in the story moving forward, and he was definitely going to want to be involved with her. Which meant that my hardboiled, unlucky-in-love PI wizard was also going to be a parent.
Which, of course, changes absolutely everything about one’s life. It restructures priorities in a way nothing else really can.
Which is something that is really, really contraindicated when you’re writing a long-running series. You don’t go majorly changing your main character without facing a loss of audience.
The easy, safe thing to do would have been to leave Maggie with the Carpenters, or shuffle her off into the Church’s supernatural witness protection program—which seems like a quite wizardly thing to do, maybe even for the child’s own good. But as I kept writing, I realized that I couldn’t do that and still have Dresden be Dresden, either. He believes too much in what it means to be a parent, as shown in the Bigfoot short stories, and the payment he demands from River Shoulders.
So, at the end of the day, the character was a-gonna change, one way or another. I went with the way that felt most true to who he is as a human being.
Harry’s a dad now. He might not know too much about it, but at least he has the jokes down.
My name is Harry Dresden. I am possibly one of the more dangerous wizards alive, and I have never once spent a whole day as a dad.
My memories of my father are few and faded. He was a good man, and he was kind, but he died before I got into first grade. Sometimes I wonder whether the memories I have of him are mine or they’re just the stories I’ve been retelling myself my whole life.
The point is, I don’t really have much in the way of a personal role model to base my dad technique on. The man who mostly shaped me was a sadistic monster, and by the time my grandfather came along, Ebenezar wasn’t parenting so much as enacting psychological damage control.
And besides, I’m pretty sure you don’t dad a furious, sullen, magically powered teenage boy the same way you do a ten-year-old girl. Not only that, but I was pretty sure I’d never really spoken to a ten-year-old girl for any length of time. Nor had I ever been one.
I was completely in the woods here, and sure of only one thing:
I really, really wanted to get this right.
Maggie walked next to me, taking maybe three steps to every one of mine. She was a tiny child, in the lowest percentile for height and weight in every class she’d ever been in, with pale skin, dark hair, and absolutely enormous dark eyes. She was wearing purple pants and a beige T-shirt that bore an image echoing the original Star Wars poster, but done in the style of Edo-period samurai art, and her shoes flickered with little red lights when she walked.
Next to her paced a granite grey mountain of muscle and soft fur named Mouse. Mouse was a genuine Temple Guardian, a Foo dog. He weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and the length of his fur was something like a mane around his neck and shoulders. He wore a red nylon vest that declared him a service dog, and walked as carefully as if he were avoiding baby chicks with every step. Maggie kept one of her little hands buried in his mane and her eyes on the ground.
“So, you haven’t been to the zoo before?” I asked.
Maggie shook her head and watched an elderly couple pass us on the sidewalk. She waited until they were several yards away before saying quietly, “Miss Molly tried to take me once, but there were too many people and too much sky, and I cried.”
I nodded. My daughter had seen some bad things. They’d left their marks on her. “That’s okay, you know.”
“Miss Molly said that, too,” Maggie said. “I was little then.”
The spring afternoon sun peeked out from some clouds for a moment, and my shadow engulfed her and enough space for five or ten more of her. “That was probably it,” I said. “But if you need to, we can leave whenever you like.”
She looked up at me for a minute, her face thoughtful. She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, but everyone thinks that about their kid.
Maybe everyone is right.
“I want to see the gorillas,” she said finally. “So does Mouse.”
Mouse wagged his tail in agreement, and looked up at me with a doggy grin.
“Okay, then,” I said, as we approached the entrance to the zoo. “Let’s do that.”
Maggie looked at me for a moment more and frowned before saying, “Are you nervous?”
“Why would I be nervous?” I asked.
She looked down and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m nervous. I haven’t ever gone to the zoo with my dad before. What if I do it wrong?”
I felt a little jab in my chest and cleared my throat. Smart kid. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you get right or wrong.”
“What if … I don’t know. What if I set something on fire?”
“Maybe we’ll roast some marshmallows,” I said.
She didn’t laugh, and she kept her face down, but her cheeks rounded up with a smile. “You’re weird.”
“A little,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I think.” She stepped a little closer to Mouse. She could have ridden on his back and he wouldn’t much notice her weight. “Did you really save the gorillas from a monster?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said. It had been three hags, and I’d saved one gorilla from taking the fall for a murder one of them had perpetrated. A couple of people died. But that was a lot of dark and complicated conversation for my first dad-daughter outing.
Maggie nodded seriously. “So, you like animals. Like me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Even dinosaurs?”
“Especially dinosaurs. And dino-dogs.”
“Whuff,” said Mouse, pleased.
I leaned across Maggie to ruffle his furry ears.
A group of noisy children in private-school uniforms came trooping by, and Maggie flinched and withdrew into herself until they’d passed. After that, she stared grimly at the busy entrance to the zoo, looking for all the world like someone a great deal older who badly needed a cup of coffee. Then she sighed, squared her shoulders, and said, “Okay. Let’s see some animals.”
So we did.
THERE WAS A spectacularly good showing from the animals in their various enclosures. The otters played with bombastic fervor. The tigers prowled back and forth at the very front of their pen. One of the polar bears stood up on his hind legs, and a sun bear enthusiastically tore apart a log just as we came walking up. I mean, if I hadn’t known better, I would think they were putting on a show.
Maggie was enchanted, her little face stretching into one quiet smile after another, though she rarely stepped far enough away from the dog beside her to cease being in physical contact with him.
The lion actually roared, a sound that shook the air and sent a dozen people scurrying a few steps back. But not Maggie. Though she flinched whenever anyone walked too close to her, she regarded the lion with an intent gaze, as the beast finished his pronouncement and shook his mane with lazy majesty.
“Awesome,” she said after, and her smile was a sunbeam.
“Yeah,” I said, quietly. “Awesome.”
The actual lion’s roar had been a little too much. There was no way all the animals would be showing off like this without some kind of intervention, and I knew I hadn’t done it. I eyed Mouse with some suspicion.
The dog noticed and dropped his jaws open into a guileless canine grin, panting happily and wagging his tail. I arched an eyebrow at him and shook my head. The beastie was full of incompletely understood yet helpful magic, but he couldn’t play poker to save his life.
Get it? The dog. Playing poker. That’s an art joke.
I may not know humor, but I know what I like.