sense. It’s like he’s written the outline of some dystopian nightmare about Over the Woodward Wall, all mixed up with familiar faces.
“Golly, Zib, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he mutters, and chuckles dryly, a sound that turns into a cough as the crud that’s settled in his lungs overnight shifts and cracks. Smoking’s going to be the death of him one day. The thought makes him realize how much he needs a cigarette. He stands, leaving the book behind, and heads off to start the morning.
It will be much, much later before he realizes that this was the moment when he decided which part he was going to play. By then, it will be a thousand miles too late.
VARIATION
Timeline: 13:11 PST, November 22, 2008 (six days later).
The doorbell rings. Dodger tears herself away from an ecstasy of Thanksgiving garlands, shouts, “I’ll get it!” and races for the door, leaving her craft supplies scattered across the table.
In the kitchen, Heather Cheswich laughs and slides the yams into the oven. It feels like she’s been waiting years for Dodger to invite people to Thanksgiving dinner. She loves her daughter more than anything, but a mother worries. A mother worries a lot. Dodger has never made friends easily or seemed to mind spending most of her time alone with her math books and her chessboard. Even chess, which initially seemed like a way to get the girl to socialize—hard to play a two-person game by yourself—yielded none of the social benefits Heather was hoping for. After less than two years of competitive play, Dodger retired, claiming it wasn’t fair.
She’ll never admit it, but Heather was starting to fear that her brilliant, beautiful little girl would be alone for her entire life, never realizing there was any other option. So naturally, when she wanted to bring her classmates home for a real family meal, both Heather and Peter were delighted to agree. Buying a slightly larger turkey was a small price to pay for knowing Dodger is finally making friends.
The sound of laughter from the hall is like music. She knows Dodger’s voice, high and perpetually excited, spiking on every other word, like she’s afraid a failure to show her delight might bring the conversation crashing to a halt. The male voice beneath it is unfamiliar; tenor, light enough to provide a counterpart to Dodger’s heavier stresses, like a soothing ribbon of reason. A third voice comes in intermittently, female, deeper than Dodger’s, with a flat bottom note that speaks of a calm deadpan, a rational approach to the world. The fourth voice is also female, higher and sweeter than the others. Together, they make a choral blend Heather has been waiting to hear since the day she brought her daughter home from the airport. This is what it sounds like when your little girl is living in the world.
She steps into the kitchen doorway, unashamed of the cranberry sauce on her apron and flour on her hands. She’s not worried about embarrassing Dodger in front of her friends; not on Thanksgiving. They’re grad students. All they’re going to care about is the food. “Hello,” she says, beaming beatifically before she sees them. That’s a good thing: it makes it possible for her smile to freeze.
The first female voice must belong to the short, curvaceous girl in the jeans and green sweatshirt. Her hair is strawberry blonde, and for some reason it makes Heather think of the color she gets when she tries to wash blood out of cotton, a color that isn’t pink and isn’t red, but is its own unique, nameless shade, the aftermath of carnage. Her eyes are blue and cold, irises rimmed in startling black. There’s no denying her prettiness, but she looks at Heather the way a snake looks at a mouse, and for a moment—only a moment—Heather is very aware of the beating of her heart, the feeling of the muscle expanding and contracting, and how easily that process could be disrupted.
Heather assigns the second female voice to the slender Indian girl. Her skin is brown, her hair is black, and she is lovely, dressed in a slightly-too-formal yellow sundress too thin to keep her warm almost anywhere else in the country. California’s eternal springtime must seem like a blessing. She, too, looks like a predator in her own way, but a hawk rather than a tiger, safer and more distant, assessing the world and belonging to it at the same time.