Chapter 31
BIRDIE
It’s a little sticky on the patio, but there are a couple outdoor fans going, and once the kids finish eating and get restless, they’re allowed to change into swimsuits and get the water guns.
Caro sits out the battle royale, clearly interested in more cloud cuddling time, and Bell gamely extracts Lilith from where she’s been sleeping inside his shirt and places the passed-out kitten in Caro’s lap.
“How did you make her fall asleep, Uncle Ryan?” Caro asks as she begins administering cautious strokes to Lilith’s exposed side. “She was so spicy earlier. She tried to attack her reflection in the window.”
“Most things will feel safe with you if you’re patient enough,” explains Bell.
“The secret with any cat is going slowly enough that she thinks being near you was her idea all along. And then you have to be very still after and very gentle and prove to her that she’ll be happy and cozy whenever she comes to you. ”
I think of the kitten at Evelyn, the one meant to be that evening’s live subject that ended up spending the class sleeping in Bell’s hoodie.
I think of myself, sleeping more deeply than I ever have in my life and the deepest of all when I’m pressed against his furnace of a body, breathing in the incense-and-pepper scent of his skin.
Me and the kittens—we never stood a chance.
“Birdie,” Ryan adds, “Caro is an artist too. Aren’t you, Caro?”
Caro, like any real eldest daughter, looks abruptly caught between a yearning for recognition and terror at being found lacking. “I just draw on my iPad sometimes,” she says quickly, self-effacingly, looking down at the animal in her lap. “That’s all.”
“I’d love to see some of your drawings, but only if you want to show me,” I tell her. “I don’t like anyone to see my art until it’s finished either. Only people I trust very much get to see it before it’s ready.”
I say it to be encouraging, but as I finish speaking, I realize what I’ve just admitted to Bell…and also to myself.
I do trust him, and I trust him with something far more important to me than my body or my time.
Caro deliberates, still looking down at the kitten, and then she draws up her shoulders in determination.
“Okay, but they’re not very good,” she qualifies in a mumble, reaching for the iPad on the edge of the table.
There’s apparently a no-screens rule at dinner, but with Zenny still at work and it being summerrrrrr, Sean allowed himself to be wheedled into making an exception.
Not that the wheedling seemed too difficult.
For someone as shrewd as he seems to be, he’s an easy mark for anyone under five feet tall and with a Bell dimple in their cheek.
I’m happy to look at Caro’s art, but I’m also grateful to have an excuse to cloister with her, that it won’t be rude for me to retreat from the rest of the table.
Bell’s family is so friendly, but I feel shy around them, around Sean’s kingly demeanor and Elijah’s sophistication and Aiden’s infectious cheer.
Maybe it’s for the best that their brother Tyler lives in New England.
I don’t know that Kansas City would be able to survive all of them together in one place.
At some point after the lightning bugs come out, the men start clearing the table and cleaning up the kitchen, Bell kissing the top of my head before he does.
Caro and I stay put, looking through her art while the other kids dart and shriek in the yard.
Every ten minutes or so, Lali runs dripping into the house to find Sean for a quick hug and then runs back out.
“I can’t do hands very well,” Caro says. “I keep watching videos, but when I try to do it myself, they don’t turn out right.”
“Hands are hard,” I agree. “I wasn’t any good at them until college, and I only became good because one of my projects was to turn in a sketchbook of a hundred hand drawings at the end of the semester.
I didn’t have any choice but to sketch them, even if they were bad, but all the practice helped me learn some things.
Do you mind if I take your Apple Pencil? ”
Caro agrees, and I spend a few minutes showing her how to make a hand from a rectangle, how to take the bisected rectangle and use angled lines and three-dimensional shapes to create the needed architecture, and then give her the chance to try on her own.
I splay my hand on the table for her as a reference.
“I’m glad you’re dating Uncle Ryan,” Caro says while bent over her tablet. “Mom says he’s lonely, even though he has lots of friends.”
It’s only been in the last few days that I’ve begun to appreciate that he does indeed have lots of friends and that apparently these last two and half weeks have been an aberrant absence for him.
He doesn’t have any qualms about keeping his phone where I can see the screen, and he doesn’t have much in the way of privacy settings, so I’m able to see the texts and DMs popping up constantly.
Dinner, drinks, game night, camping. I don’t feel guilty that he’s not spending time with them—I’m not the one setting his schedule after all—but it is disorienting to be reminded how well-liked he is.
Depressing to consider that some people have to work to be alone because they have so many people who want to see their face and share their time.
“I’m glad I’m dating him too, but I think he was doing okay before I came along. I’m sure his friends kept him from being too lonely.”
“Well, Dad told Mom that Uncle Ryan is a sociopath, so maybe his friendships are all kind of fake anyways.”
“Carolyn!”
Caro and I both turn to see her mother behind us, still in scrubs and comfortable shoes, a stern look on her face. The movement makes Lilith jolt awake, and then with a squeak, she leaps from Caro’s lap and dashes into the house.
Caro is too smart not to see an escape when it’s presented. She sets her iPad and stylus on the table and then runs after the kitten, announcing loudly that she’ll take care of it.
Shaking her head, Zenny approaches the table with her hand extended.
“I’m so sorry, Birdie,” she says. I accept the handshake and then Zenny drops heavily into the chair next to me, looking exhausted.
“She’s got a better filter than Amani, but sometimes she can’t help herself. ” Zenny shakes her head. “A sociopath.”
“It’s okay, really,” I assure her.
Partly because I don’t think Caro—or Sean—are wrong about Bell’s potential sociopathy.
Zenny gives me an evaluating look. “Well, you don’t seem too bothered by the idea at least.”
I like Bell’s family and I want them to like me too, so I curate my answer accordingly. “He’s a wonderful boyfriend.”
Her look remains evaluating, but she seems to decide to shelve the topic.
She gives a roll of her neck and starts massaging her shoulder while she watches her children chase lightning bugs at the far end of the yard.
“You were great with Caro, by the way. I was watching you two before she started talking nonsense, and you managed to get around her perfectionism long enough for her to try something new. Are you a teacher?”
I’m glad the only lights are the ones strung over the patio and those coming from the house’s windows because I know my face is turning beet red.
Bell and I had agreed on a mostly true—and heavily redacted—version of events, but we’ve also managed to avoid relaying those events all evening, much to my relief.
Absurd that I’m being kept as Bell’s sexual pet, but I’m worried that his family will think I took advantage of him when he was in college.
But why wouldn’t they? It’s what Kaitlyn believed, and the staff at Evelyn.
Bell had only laughed when I’d brought up my qualms.
Trust me, baby, the last thing my family is going to worry about is someone taking advantage of me. I could tell them that you were my professor and my cardiologist and the judge at my traffic ticket hearing all at the same time, and Sean would still think I’m the villain.
“I was,” I finally answer. “Just for a semester at Evelyn College. I wasn’t any good at it. I have some anxiety around large groups of people.” And everything else.
“Maybe you just need to teach smaller groups,” Zenny says, pushing her shoulder forward and backward. “Or individually. I actually think there are a lot of people who’d love to learn from someone as gentle as you. It would be a lovely gift to share, you know?”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” I say with a weak smile.
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Zenny waves her hand.
“When you’re ready, I know a whole roster of places that would love to have an artist willing to volunteer and teach.
Women’s centers, queer youth centers, after-school programs, eldercare programs—a lot of them have or want to have community art classes, but they’re some of the first things to fall away when budgets get tight. ”
Volunteer and teach. I rub my hand over my heart as I consider this.
I’ve felt helpless in my own life for so long that the idea of helping other people is so much more than ridiculous—it literally hasn’t even occurred to me.
How can I have anything to give when life has taken everything from me already?
Zenny isn’t looking at me—she’s still got her eyes on the children—but there’s a prescience in her words when she says, “I’ve always found that helping other people somehow ends up helping me too. It’s kind of magical that way.”
I keep chafing at my chest as I nod. It does seem like magic.
“So you taught at Evelyn?”
The topic change is expected, but my face grows hot all over again. How I wish Bell were here to have this conversation with Zenny instead of me. “Yes. A semester seven years ago. Like I said, I wasn’t very good at it.”
“So you were there while Ryan was there?”
Deep breath. “Yes. He was my student that semester.”
“I see,” Zenny says. She doesn’t sound ready to kick me off her patio, which is a relief. “And that carving in front of city hall?”
“Yes. That was me.”