I felt an argumentative urge to disagree. I don’t know why. You’d think I’d know everything about myself by now, but every now and then I’m brought up short by the opposite realization. At any rate I felt almost angry at her. “My grandniece gave me a book for my birthday,” I said. “Pictures of old ladies. Stuff about how beautiful they were. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t think old age is beautiful. I think they look awful.”
She didn’t answer. I could see from a sidelong glance that she looked pensive. I like about her that she doesn’t speak when she’s not sure what to say. I like about her that she didn’t say, Oh, no, you’re beautiful, or some other painful and condescending thing. I’m too old for insincerity.
“Do you see your grandniece often?” she asked. It felt sudden, and I was a little startled.
“No,” I said. “Not often. I have two, but I only like the one.”
“I have the feeling you don’t like many people.”
“Oh, people. I used to like them. It may be hard to imagine now, but I used to like to throw a dinner party.”
“Not me. I hate parties of all kinds.” She said this with a weird anger in her voice.
“Well, don’t worry, I won’t make you go to one.”
She didn’t answer. She pressed a thumb and finger against her forehead, like people do when they have a headache.
“I used to be awash in friends,” I said to her silence. “I used to date. I made delicious desserts, especially strawberry-rhubarb pie. And coffee cake. I made a good coffee cake.”
She nodded, though I don’t think she was listening.
“I was a good cook. I could have made a good little housewife, if anybody’d cared to employ me.” It’s odd, I know, but I felt defensive after I said this, like she’d been the one to suggest no one had ever wanted to marry me. So I said, “I almost got married. I wanted to.”
“I know,” she said, in a neutral tone. I went on talking.
“His name was Lloyd,” I said. “He died. He died in the war.”
“You told me about him.”
“I did?”
“It’s on the tape.” Then, as if realizing she’d been rude, she said, “I’m sorry to be abrupt. I’m not feeling very well.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said sharply. I was annoyed that I’d repeated myself, trying for the umpteenth time to draw some reaction from her. I went there for a glimpse behind the curtain, and there I was again, pulling it back on myself. “I don’t think about it now.” She was silent again, and I said, “Some things happen and some things don’t. It hardly matters at my age which is which.” Silence. Oh, she is good at silence. I wanted to get her to talk, so I told her what all mothers like to hear: “Your son is a cute little boy.”
She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. “He’s my reward,” she said.
“Your reward?”
“Maybe that’s a bad way to put it.”
“Put it however you like. I have no stake in it.”
“In what?”
I waved one hand. “In children. In how people talk about having children. Why would I judge? What do I know about it? I never had any. Never even approached having any.” I wondered if she would ask if I’d wanted to have children, as people sometimes do, with a pity in their voice that I find presumptuous, because they assume the answer will be yes, and they’re preemptively sad for me.
“I can’t imagine that,” she said instead. Not with compassion—you poor old dear—but with wonder. Wonder I don’t mind. Who doesn’t feel some wonder at the sight of a life so utterly unlike her own? Proof that something else was possible.
“You haven’t explained what you meant by reward.”
She pressed her fingers to her head again. “For surviving,” she said.
I felt a flicker of excitement. Here was something real. She’d said it with the weariness of truth. I kept my voice level. “Surviving what?”
“Everything that went wrong.”
It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough, but it was more than I’d ever gotten. I waited. A good detective knows when to let the silence do its work. Who knows what she might’ve told me if Milo hadn’t reappeared, bringing with him an enormous amount of noise. It’s rather like being shelled—the approach of a small rambunctious child. You hear the noise growing closer, and then there it is, louder than anything, rocking the world. He emitted some sort of strange roaring, growling sound—I’m not sure what it was supposed to be. His idea of intimidation. He had a big dark blanket flung over him like a hooded cape. He stopped roaring and looked at us, hands on hips. His little face within the shadow of his cape was lowered into a glower. “I am Dark Flame,” he said.
“Dark Flame?” Jennifer repeated. Her whole demeanor changed when the child came in the room. She leaned toward him. She smiled. “Are you good or evil?”
“I’m morally ambiguous.”
Jennifer concealed her smile behind her hand. “We’ve been discussing that concept,” she said to me. “Because of a character in a book.”
Children are frightening, aren’t they? He really did look like a treacherous creature, a little caped goblin, a devil child. He looked like something that might ruin your life. His mother asked, “Are you magic?”
He growled again, swirling his cape. “I have the power to break hearts.”
Jennifer laughed, genuine and involuntary.