"Oh." I finished the lemonade and put the glass down on her desk. "Where exactly did all of them come from? This little boy, Alec, for instance, the one with the bear."
"I don't know. Orphans, like everybody else, I guess. When you kill off three-quarters of the human race, all you have left are orphans. Who has relatives any more?" She sniffed and wiped her nose. "Their papers haven't come over the wire yet. God knows when they will. It would help. Supposedly a team of caseworkers have worked these kids; we're supposed to get their reports. Don't hold your breath. In the meantime, we'll just have to start figuring them out from scratch all over again." She looked over at me. "There's something going on with every single one of these kids, Jim, don't ever doubt it, no matter how good they look. They're just as badly damaged as the rest of us, probably more so, still reeling from the plagues and the aftereffects. We're all going to be living with it for the rest of our lives, and so will the next umpteen generations until the world gets back to normal-if ever. The wounds may not always show, and maybe not in ways we can easily recognize, but they're there; that's why we've all got to be super-careful. We might be rubbing salt in them without ever knowing it. That's why I didn't insist on washing hands and faces this morning before lunch; it was more important to get them to trust us by giving them food than to confuse them by giving them another set of rules to learn. They could have seen washing as a condition necessary to having lunch, and we had to show them that lunch-and our love-has no conditions attached. You'd better keep an eye on that Alec kid, by the way. I'm surprised they sent him up here."
"Well, Tommy and Holly have been pretty good at watchdogging him already."
"Mm, yeah, that's probably it. He's obviously one of the walking wounded, but they sent him up because they couldn't risk taking him away from Tommy and Holly, and hurting them. They weren't thinking of Alec, they were thinking of the other two. Damn! I wish we had those papers."
"Say, can we get that bear away from Alec long enough to clean it and stuff it with fresh foam? Maybe sew it up, put a new head on it for him?"
"I wouldn't try it," B-Jay said.
"Why not?"
"What would happen if you put a head on it he didn't recognize? It might not be his bear anymore. Better leave it alone for now-at least until we see how important it is to him. He's pretty badly damaged, Jim; we'd better be prepared to separate him if we have to."
"Separate?"
"Send him back."
"Back?"
"Jim," she said quietly, "there are kids who've gone catatonic, autistic, or worse, gone wild. You've seen them. Those are the ones we can't reach; we don't even have the time to try. I think your Alec might be one of them."
"We can reach him," I insisted. She didn't say anything. "Well, we've got to try."
"And ignore the other sixteen we can reach? Not to mention the other hundred and seventeen we've already accepted responsibility for?"
"Well, no, but . . . "
"We only have so many hours a day, Jim. There's only so much we can do. We can't afford to waste a single minute. These kids need to be fed, bathed, clothed, sheltered, doctored-and most of all, hugged a lot. They need to be reassured. We can't show favorites, we can't . . . "
"I've heard this sermon before, B-Jay," I interrupted her. "You're forgetting something. Alec is already a factor in the social equation. Holly and Tommy have adopted him. He responds to them. He responds to me too. You're going to have to fight Holly, Tommy, and me if you try to send him away."
"Okay," she said. She said it too easily.
"Huh?"
"I said, okay."
"Aren't you going to argue with me?"
"No."
"Aren't you going to list all the reasons why?"
"No. You said he had to stay. I recognize that we've got to live with these orphans' psychoses. That includes the big ugly orphan sitting in my office, drinking up my lemonade. I can work with your psychoses too. You want to take responsibility for him, it's all right with me."
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
"All right. I'll have the adoption papers ready next week. I don't think there'll be any problem getting Birdie to approve."
"Hey, wait a minute-I never said anything about adoption."
"Sure, you did-you said you'd be responsible."
"But that doesn't mean-"
"Yes, it does. We're both speaking English, aren't we?"
"Now, wait a minute, B-Jay! You're trying to railroad me into something I'm not ready for."
"Well, make up your mind, Jim-what do you want to do?"
"Uh . . . ," I stopped in mid-word. "I don't know."
"That's what I thought." She dropped her feet to the floor with a klunk. She refilled both our lemonade glasses, the ice clinking like chimes. She pursed her lips in an acid frown. "God, I wish we had sugar."
"Stir it, the honey's probably settled."
"It's not the same." She drank and frowned again, then came hack to the subject. "Listen, Jim-I'm not forcing you into anything. I just wanted you to understand what taking responsibility for the kid means."
"All right . . . "
"No, let me finish. I'm not sending Alec away. Not yet, anyway. I just don't want you getting too attached to any of these kids. Unless you mean it. And don't let them get too attached to you either. You may just want to play house for a while, but it'll be more than a game to them, and when you get tired of it, you'll be doing worse damage. A kid can survive the loss of one set of parents, I doubt if he can survive the loss of two and still have any reasonable chance of being healthy. So, don't come messing around my kids unless you mean it."
"I'm sorry, I didn't realize."
"Let me tell you something, Jim. Most of the time, you're in the way. You don't really do anything useful around here, and you eat a lot of food. And there are a lot of people around here who resent you. Sometimes I do too. That's when I have to remind myself that you're one of our children too, another lost soul that needs a family. Just another bloody orphan like the rest of us. So we put up with you. We pamper you. We try not to notice all that emotional baggage you're dragging around. We're doing it as a favor to the memory of your mother. We don't owe anything to you, Jim; this is just the only way we can pay back some of what we owe her. Okay, today you decided that you want to be a parent. Well, that's okay too. But not unless you mean it for keeps. I'd be delighted to have one less kid and one more parent, but it's a one-way trip. Once you accept responsibility for any of these kids, you can't abrogate it later on. Which means, Jim, nobody around here will watch out for you any more; we'll be too busy watching out for the real children, and you'll have to cope with life without our help."
"I've been doing okay."
"You think so. Around here it doesn't count unless I think so too." She paused, studied me thoughtfully. Her eyes were sharp. "Anyway, that's the way it is. Do I make up adoption papers or not?"
"I didn't think you allowed adoptions here."
"Why?"
"I don't know just the way the place seems organized. Like one big commune."
"If you had known that we encouraged adoptions, would you have volunteered?"
"Uh, probably not. It isn't really necessary, is it?"
"You tell me," she said.
"Look," I said slowly. "What I thought was that I could sort of watch out for those three kids, Holly and Tommy and Alec, for a while, and take some of the load off the rest of you. I didn't realize you wanted it to be such a deep commitment. I was thinking more in terms of being a big brother than a daddy."