She got out of bed, her arms outstretched, and expertly shuffled her way to the doorjamb, which always turned up sooner than she expected. It was much easier to see once she got out on the landing because they always left a light on, turned down low, in case Dakota got up in the night. She pushed Dakota’s bedroom door open and stood there for a moment letting her eyes adjust.
Tiffany couldn’t hear anything over the rain. She wanted to hear the even sound of Dakota breathing. She tiptoed forward, past the crammed bookshelf, and stood next to the bed looking down at Dakota, trying to make out the form of her body. Dakota appeared to be lying flat on her back just like her father, although usually she slept curled up on her side.
At the same moment she registered the twin shimmers of Dakota’s eyes staring up at her, she heard Dakota say in a perfectly clear, wide-awake voice, ‘What’s the matter, Mum?’
Tiffany jumped and yelped. ‘I thought you were asleep,’ she said, pressing her hand to her chest. ‘You gave me the fright of my life.’
‘I’m not asleep,’ said Dakota.
‘Can’t you sleep? Why are you lying there awake like that? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ said Dakota. ‘I’m just awake.’
‘Is something worrying you? Move over.’
Dakota moved over and Tiffany got into bed with her, feeling an immediate comfort she hadn’t known she craved.
‘Are you upset about Harry?’ said Tiffany. Dakota had responded to the news of Harry’s death in the same impassive way she now responded to everything.
‘Not really,’ said Dakota flatly. ‘Not that much.’
‘No. Well. We didn’t know him very well and he wasn’t …’
‘Very nice,’ finished Dakota.
‘No. He wasn’t. But is there something else?’ said Tiffany. ‘Something on your mind?’
‘There’s nothing on my mind,’ said Dakota. ‘Nothing at all.’ She sounded absolutely certain of this and Dakota had never been able to lie.
‘You’re not worried about going to Saint Anastasias tomorrow?’ said Tiffany.
‘No,’ said Dakota.
‘It should be interesting,’ said Tiffany vaguely. She could feel sleep tugging at her consciousness like a drug. Maybe it was nothing. Prepubescent stuff. Hormones. Growing up.
‘Shall I just lie here until you fall asleep?’ said Tiffany.
‘If you want,’ said Dakota frostily.
*
Dakota’s mother lay sound asleep next to her, not snoring exactly but making a long, thin whistling sound each time she breathed out.
Long strands of her mum’s hair floated across Dakota’s face and tickled her nose. She had hooked one leg over Dakota’s leg, locking her close, like she had her in a leg-cuff.
Holding her breath, Dakota inched her leg free. She pulled back the covers and got up on her knees and flattened herself against the bedroom wall like Spiderman. She slid her way down the wall to the end of the bed. It was a covert operation. She was escaping her captor. Yes! She’d done it! She tiptoed across her bedroom, avoiding the landmines in the carpet.
Stupid stuff. Don’t think stupid, little-kid thoughts like that, Dakota, when there are real wars happening right now and real refugees in tiny boats in the middle of the ocean and real people stepping on landmines. Would you like to step on a landmine? She sat on her cushioned window seat and hugged her knees to her chest. She tried to feel gratitude for her window seat but she felt nothing about her window seat. Instead, she actually thought the terribly rude, ungrateful thought: I don’t give a shit about this window seat.
Dakota had not properly understood until recently how her brain was a private space with only her in it. Yesterday she’d looked at her teacher and screamed the F-word in her head. Nothing happened. Nobody knew she’d done that. Nobody would ever know.
Everybody else probably worked this out when they were like, three years old, but it was a revelation to Dakota. Thinking about it made her feel as if she were alone in a circle-shaped room: circle-shaped because her head was circle-shaped, with two little round windows, which were her eyes, and people tried to look in, to understand her, by looking through her eyes, but they couldn’t see in. Not really. She was there, in her circle-shaped room, all on her own.
She could say to her mum, ‘I love my window seat,’ and if she said it just the right way, not so enthusiastically that she made her suspicious, her mum would think she meant it and she’d never know the truth.
So if Dakota could do that, if Dakota could think shocking, kind of angry, hard thoughts like, I don’t give a shit about window seats, then probably grown-ups had shocking, angry, hard thoughts too, which were probably much worse because they could watch R-rated movies.
For example, her mum might say, ‘Good night, Dakota, I love you, Dakota,’ but inside the circle-shaped room of her brain her real self was thinking: I can’t believe you are my daughter, Dakota, I can’t believe I have a daughter who would do what you did.