7. Winnie #2
“I’m sure she would appreciate that,” I said, raising my voice slightly so she could hear me. I knew, without a doubt, the other two would have something to say as well.
Sure enough, Bianca’s reply followed. “The narrator says the bright coloring warns predators away. Beauty is incidental.”
“Maybe beauty is the warning,” CJ said.
Conrad made a small sound that might have been laughter. “I’m too sick for philosophy on frogs.”
I smiled down at the soup despite myself.
By early afternoon, everyone had consumed food and tea, and they’d all kept it down. Conrad even tried to help carry dishes back to the kitchen, which earned him a look from me.
“You heard the queen,” CJ told him from the couch.
Conrad set the bowls down instantly. “It seems I’ve been overruled.”
His gaze held mine a moment longer than necessary. Something unspoken rested there, fragile from fever and fatigue and the intimacy of shared exhaustion. Then Billie sneezed so violently that the moment fled for its life.
A little after three, while the younger girls were half-dozing downstairs and Conrad had been ordered into the armchair with tea, a bell rang from upstairs.
CJ.
I had given each child a small silver bell that morning after realizing the house was too large and my hearing, while excellent, did not make shouting through illness any less undignified.
Billie had immediately called hers “the summoning bell” and attempted to use it to request a personal cloud.
Bianca had asked whether there was a maximum number of permitted rings per hour.
CJ had accepted his with unusual seriousness.
I found him propped up in Conrad’s bed, laptop open on his knees, frustration etched on his face. He’d improved enough to look restless, but not enough to do anything with it.
“You rang, sir?” I asked from the doorway.
He closed the laptop halfway, too quickly. “Not sir.”
“No?”
“I’m more of a duke in exile.”
“Forgive me, Your Grace.”
His mouth lifted, but only a little. The frustration remained.
I crossed the room and sat carefully in the chair beside the bed. “What’s troubling you?”
He stared at the laptop. “Nothing.”
“Ah. An old enemy.”
He let out a breath. “I was trying to write something.”
I kept my face relaxed. This was my chance to help him, but I didn’t want to spook him by being overly enthusiastic. Pre-teens scared easily. “One of your stories?”
“Maybe.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“It isn’t.” He pushed the laptop away with more force than necessary. “Nothing comes out right. I had ideas before, but then I opened the document, and it all looked stupid. The screen just looked back at me, judging me.”
“Screens tend to do that.”
He looked up. “They do?”
“Oh yes. Horrid little rectangles.”
That earned me a real smile.
I closed the laptop. “Perhaps this tool is too many things at once.”
His brows drew together. “What do you mean?”
“Your brain associates this machine with schoolwork, games, messages, research. It’s both distraction and expectation. Perhaps your mind doesn’t know whether it’s meant to create or perform.”
He considered that with unusual seriousness. “Maybe.”
“I have something in my car.”
“Something weird?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Cool.”
I left him and went outside through the side entrance. The afternoon light remained gray and weak, though I still took my parasol to be safe. From the rear compartment of the hearse, I retrieved a small pad of lined paper and a yellow pencil from one of the storage drawers.
I kept several of these cheap notepads on hand because one never knew when a child might need paper, and paper had fewer ways to betray a person than electronic devices.
I wanted to help CJ because I knew, more than most people, what it was like to be a prisoner in your own mind. To want to say or do something that felt extremely important to no avail. I hoped my idea would free him from the barriers in his head.
When I returned, CJ looked more alert.
I offered the paper and pencil. “Would you like to try the old-fashioned way?”
He frowned. “This is just paper.”
“Most wonderful things begin in the simplest of ways.”
He turned the pencil between his fingers. “What if it’s bad?”
“Then you’ll have written something bad.”
He scoffed. “That’s your encouragement?”
“It’s the truth. Bad pages are useful. Blank pages are only smug.”
He laughed, then quickly looked down at the pad. He wrote his name in the top corner, erased it, then wrote it again in a smaller print. I sat beside him, letting the silence stretch without pressure.
After a minute, he said, “How do you know if a story is good?”
“Oh, there are many ways.”
“That’s not helpful.”
I shifted slightly in the chair. “A good story usually knows what its character wants, even when the character is wrong about what they need.”
He frowned at the paper. “That sounds complicated.”
“People are complicated in real life, so that should translate into fictional stories.”
“What if the character wants something impossible?”
I shifted closer. “Then the story becomes even more interesting.”
When he looked at me, I saw the cautious boy beneath the charming one. “What if he wants to go somewhere that doesn’t exist?”
“Then perhaps the question is why he needs to go there so badly,” I said.
CJ swallowed and looked back at the page. “Maybe because it’s better.”
“Better how?”
“Nobody ever leaves.”
There were many ways to answer that. Most of them would have been too heavy for a sick eleven-year-old who looked so small in his father’s bed.
So, I chose a gentle approach. “That’s a powerful reason to write.”
His fingers tightened around the pencil. “You think so?”
“I do.”
He pressed the tip of the pencil to the page, then stopped again. “What about twists?”
“Oh. Twists are very important.”
“What makes them good?”
“A twist is only as good as its setup,” I said. “If it comes out of nowhere, readers feel cheated. If they could have seen it coming but didn’t, they feel rewarded.”
He nodded slowly. “So, you have to hide the truth in plain sight.”
“Exactly.”
His eyes lit then, faint but unmistakable. “That’s hard.”
“Yes.”
“I could do hard.”
“I suspect you could.”
He starting writing, his face changing as he worked. He became less guarded, more absorbed as he filled line after line with his messy, slanted script.
I stayed until his shoulders relaxed.
When he finally looked up, he seemed embarrassed. “Can I keep the pencil?”
“It’s all yours.”
“And the pad?”
“The pad, too.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
I stood to leave, but he spoke again before I reached the door. “Winnie?”
“Yes?”
“If I write something really bad, do I have to show you?”
“No. But if you write something you are proud of,” I added, “I would be honored to read it.”
He gave me a tentative smile, then went back to writing.
Downstairs, Billie had awakened with a renewed interest in life. She requested crunchy soup, which turned out to mean toast cut into triangles that she could dip into soup. Bianca followed me into the kitchen, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“What’s in the tea you gave us today?” she asked.
“Peppermint, ginger, a little catnip, and honey.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Catnip is for cats.”
“Humans can consume it as well.”
“Does it make humans behave like cats?”
“No, it has a calming effect.”
Billie called, “I want to behave like a cat.” The girl had superhuman hearing sometimes.
“You already knock things off counters,” Bianca said.
I set a small cup of cooled tea in front of Bianca. “Catnip has been used traditionally for digestive upset and sleep. Peppermint helps with nausea for some people, and ginger is also useful for the stomach.”
Bianca leaned forward. “How old is that knowledge?”
“Old.”
“How old?”
“Very.”
“That is not a measurement,” she pointed out.
“No, but it’s what you’re getting.”
She looked dissatisfied, so, naturally, she continued with the questions. “Was that the kind of medicine people used during plagues?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “During outbreaks, people used whatever they understood at the time. Herbs, vinegar, smoke, prayer, isolation, charms, bloodletting. Some helped. Many did not. Some made things worse.”
Bianca’s face became painfully focused. “Which plagues?”
“Bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, influenza, and many more.” I hesitated only slightly. “The nineteenth century had more than enough lessons in bad sanitation.”
Her eyes sharpened. “You know a lot about the nineteenth century.”
“I went to school and did my homework.”
Conrad made a faint sound of amusement. “That is becoming your most suspicious answer.”
“It remains a useful one.”
I picked up Bianca’s book on plagues and flipped through the pages.
“You hold books correctly,” she said suddenly.
I turned toward her. “Uh, thank you?”
“Most adults crack the spine.”
I pretended to gag. “Monsters. I would never.”
The corners of her mouth twitched into a rare, unguarded glimpse of a smile.
From the other room, I heard a weather report replace the nature documentary.
“Although the storm system along the eastern coast of the United States has begun to weaken,” the reporter said, “officials in the United Kingdom are warning of unprecedented rainfall and severe flooding across several coastal regions. Emergency services remain active tonight as river levels continue rising?—”
“That’s the storm system they were talking about last week,” Conrad said.
“Seems it saved the worst for them,” Bianca said.
The reporter continued speaking, but Billie asked whether rivers could get angry, and the conversation moved on. I turned back to the stove, though a thin unease moved through me before I could name it.
Flooding. Coastal regions.
A memory brushed too close to the surface, cold and dark.
I shut my eyes tightly. No.
I stirred the soup and forced the thought away.
Conrad coughed lightly, and I looked back before I meant to.