circles that she proceeded to fill in completely with black felt-tip.
“Look, Coco,” I said cheerfully. “Balloons.”
“No, not balloons,” Gaia said flatly. She added a mouth with bared teeth beneath them. “It’s the Sad Lady. See?”
“Who?”
“She lives in our basement. And she doesn’t have eyes, just holes.”
“O . . . K . . .”
I tried to push this comment to the recesses of my mind. The basement. Holes for eyes. Not a weird thing at all for a six-year-old to say. Maybe she’d had a similar warning from Maren. Don’t go near the basement! Such a warning would fire anyone’s imagination. Or maybe Gaia was just predisposed to a Gothic temperament. I had been a weird kid, too, I reasoned. Long before my mother’s dysfunctionality rearranged the wiring of my brain I was the Wednesday Addams of every playgroup, a collector of dead insects, precociously obsessed with winding up any overly smiley adult with whom I came into contact by telling them that Satan was my father, or replying to their benign, who’s-a-pretty-girl questions by deadpanning, “I eat souls.”
Happily, Gaia moved on to relatively chirpier subject matter—rainbows, which she transformed into gravestones—and finally we read the flash cards, or rather I read the flash cards while Coco devised a game of speed-crawling out of the room and up the stairs. When four o’clock came I consulted the schedule: it was time for “splash and scoop,” though I had no idea what that was.
“It’s when we fill the tub with water and splash it,” Gaia said, her expression joyless. I looked around for the tub in question, but just then she brightened and said: “Could we do something else?”
“Certainly,” I said.
Gaia pushed her glasses up her nose, shuffled off her chair, and lifted Louis. “He likes his trousers,” she said, rubbing the hem of them between her finger and thumb. “They’re a bit scratchy, but he likes the pattern.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I can make him another pair, if he likes?”
She smiled, and next thing I knew she was walking behind me and playing with my hair. Coco—who was gnawing on a crayon at this point—gawped up at her sister as she ran her fingers through my hair like a comb.
“I like your hair,” Gaia said. “Why is it so black?”
I was learning fast that six-year-olds were masters of the Abstract Question. It was better to respond with truth, or at least a version of it. “Well,” I said. “My biological father was from Spain. Possibly.” The full truth was that I had been conceived while my mother was on her one and only sojourn out of the cosmopolitan wonderland that is Sunderland on a hen-do in Majorca. A few weeks after that she began to feel sick, and for four or five months thereafter she numbed the sickness with weed. “That’s how I became a weed addict!” she used to muse fondly. “Little did I know I was up the duff! If I’d known, I’d have had an abortion! Lucky you, eh, Lexi?”
My father could have been one of any number of men she encountered on that trip, none of whom she could recall clearly. What was clear was that I inherited nothing of my mother’s clammy English pallor, and the olive-skinned, brown-eyed, and black-haired coloring that I did inherit served only to invite a wide range of soul-crushing xenophobic taunts that would be hurled at me in the playground, in the street, and occasionally in my own home.
Of course, I didn’t tell any of this to Gaia.
“What does ‘biological’ mean?” she asked.
“It means my real daddy. So, your daddy is your real daddy, isn’t he?”
She nodded.
“I never knew who my real daddy was.”
She cocked her head. “Why?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. There was simply no safe way to answer that question.
“Why don’t we play a game?”
“Shall we play hairdressers?” She started running her fingers through my hair again. “I love your hair. When I grow up I’m going to have black hair just like yours.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Gaia.”
“I can do your makeup, too.”
I started to tell her to stop, but just then the sensation of having my hair played with was so soothing that my willpower rolled over like a dog wanting its belly rubbed and before I knew it I was allowing both of them to twist my hair into dreadlocked braids and draw all over my face.
* * *
—
Maren entered the kitchen right as Coco decided she’d had enough of my attempts to feed