Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Five
Our eyes nearly met, and I flinched forward, escaping to the road ahead. Which only meant Kai’s gaze pressed into me unguarded, since I offered no resistance to it. I had the strange sense that the quality of Kai’s attention shifted depending on whether she sat in the back or beside me. Overthinking it, probably.
Sitting next to me, Kai seemed to look me over quite openly. Which was why, honestly, I found the passenger seat harder to manage than the back. She almost seemed to enjoy it, watching me pretend not to notice her watching.
“I didn’t ask for quite that much…”
“I mean it right now, though.”
“…Well, I am technically a guest at that hotel too, so… I should go.”
Strange. It felt as though the roles had somehow reversed.
“You really could just stay over, you know.”
“My husband and daughter are waiting, so I’ll pass.”
Whether Maron was even waiting for me at this point was questionable. A little lonely, that. Speaking of Maron, reminded me of something.
“Come to think of it, you said you liked animals once, was that true?”
“I’ve never told a lie in my entire life.”
“That right there is exactly the mark of a shameless little brat.”
Was it beneath me to get worked up over someone twenty-odd years younger? Perhaps. But irritating was irritating, regardless of who was doing it.
“I do like animals. So, what fun animal story have you brought for me?”
She’d set the bar embarrassingly high for what was meant to be a throwaway topic.
“I was going to mention we actually have a dog at home.”
“A dog. Nice.”
Delivered in the same light, teasing tone as everything else, and yet I judged, somehow, that this one wasn’t a lie. Given her circumstances, perhaps a dog was easier for her to be honest with than any person.
Was I frightening to Kai. Was I, a person, frightening to her at all?
Stopped at a light on the main road, I reached toward her. Kai’s shoulder jumped once, but she didn’t pull away, just watched my hand’s progress closely. I brushed her fringe aside, checked the hairline was clear, and pulled my hand back immediately. I was driving, after all.
“You always check.”
“Relieved it isn’t bruised.”
Something in the way she said it, world-weary, only now, are you, reached me faintly, and something like an overcast sky settled over my chest.
She would never willingly show me, and I would probably never see it directly, but whatever lay beneath her uniform was surely a wreck. That kind of image, once seen, leaves you nowhere to direct the fury it produces, just scattered patches, or thick unbroken ones, festering with nowhere to go.
Even imagining it left me furious at my own inability to make the people responsible pay for it. Mixed in with that fury, if I was honest, was a kind of resentment at anyone else having free rein over Kai, and something close to the shabby delusion of thinking I held the string of her kite, all of it hinting at a self-righteousness in me I couldn’t fully deny. I should reflect on that, restrain myself, but not while I was still this angry, so I put it off.
“From now on…”
Resuming the drive, I nearly said something shallow, presumptuous, dressed up as sympathy, and caught myself. What could I actually promise about Kai’s future? Without any real commitment to caring for her indefinitely, promising her a life without new bruises was irresponsible in the extreme.
“From now on, what?”
I stalled for time, pretending to focus on the road while I worked out how to cover the slip. I remembered my daughter wandering the hallway with a sour expression the night before, and landed on that instead.
“From now on, exams are coming up… this week, I think?”
“That’s right, end-of-term tests soon.”
Even Kai, carrying something so far from ordinary, had the same middle-school rhythms as anyone else. A strange feeling, this. Just hearing her say end-of-term test produced a mismatch that wasn’t quite unpleasant.
“Studying all right?”
“I’m sooo incredibly stupid, so I’m reeally worried.”
“Give it a rest with that… that’s a lie, isn’t it?”
Whatever the case, my daughter had told me Kai never once asked her a question during their study sessions. And when my daughter had, on a whim, asked Kai something instead, apparently Kai had explained it patiently and well. Was that really acceptable, daughter?
“You didn’t want to go straight home, did you?”
Now that I knew what I knew about her circumstances, that much made sense. But Kai said:
“That part’s incidental.”
“…Incidental?”
Kai offered nothing further, just smiled. As if to say, you know why.
I don’t, I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the road ahead.
Whatever other reason had her lying her way into visiting my house, I don’t touch that, don’t think about it.
Touching it inevitably brought the scene in the car flooding back. I tried hard not to think about it most of the time, but it surfaced unbidden regardless, always leaving something bitter behind. Kai never brought it up either, which was, if anything, more unsettling. Part of me wanted to dig it up, ask outright what it had even been for. But some instinct warned that pulling on that particular loose thread would unravel something much larger, all at once.
Kai had kissed me.
Kai had licked my finger.
Both, I understood clearly, were things my family, my husband, must never learn of. Why? It was nothing but a middle school girl’s game. And yet I kept every part of my relationship with Kai hidden, disguised inside the shape of an ordinary day.
I tried not to think too hard about it, but if I did, would the guilt toward my family only deepen further?
Life would surely become harder to live, I thought, and the weight of it settled over me.
I did, at least for now, still value my family. I loved my husband. I loved my daughter.
But holding that much value in a home like mine, perhaps, made it hard to meet Kai anywhere close to her own frame of values.
“Kai…”
I found myself wanting to know whether she was frightened of being touched like this, the way I’d just touched her. And, foolish as it was, some part of me wanted to be told something specific.
You’re the one it’s fine with.
I didn’t want to be filed in the same category as the people who hurt her. Adults, generally.
I couldn’t deny wanting to be someone special inside whatever Kai’s inner world looked like.
“What about me?”
Kai picked up on my aimless mutter again, and I hesitated over how to deflect it. As if my hesitation had transferred itself, the car caught another red light. There was a time when hitting that many lights on my commute would have earned at least one irritated click of the tongue. Now, it didn’t bother me at all. Having someone to talk to, rather than sitting through the drive in silence alone, apparently smoothed over a great deal.
I found myself hoping Kai’s own life held something like that too.