She spun around, skirt fanning, droplets of paint flying—and stopped cold. She was a cartoon of shock: mouth agape, eyes wide, arms outstretched. No one moved for a long second.
Then something broke inside me. A bark escaped my body, a wild laugh, and then the laughter kept coming, tumbling out of me. My knees weakened and I nearly lost my balance. The dancing, the grass skirt, those paintbrushes!
I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears filled my eyes. The girl looked stricken, which only made the moment more hilarious. I didn’t know what was happening to me. My stomach began to cramp.
The girl looked up at Edo, then back to me. I kept thinking, She dances. My daughter dances!
I was past hilarity now and deep into some unlabeled emotional state, something roaring and chaotic. How does a wave feel when it crashes into the beach?
The girl (my daughter, my daughter who dances) stared up at me. She smiled tentatively, set the wet brushes on the floor, and touched my elbow. Dr. Gloria stood behind her, hands on her hips, waiting patiently for me to recover. Edo walked to the wall and did something that silenced the music.
I wiped at my eyes. “Whoa,” I said. I smiled to reassure the girl.
Rovil stared at me. “Are you okay?”
I had no idea what I was. Edo, though, seemed unperturbed. “Sasha,” he said, “this is Lyda Rose.”
She held out her hand. So polite. I took a stuttering breath, then took her hand in both of mine. I pumped officiously. “Pleased to meet you, Sasha.”
She nodded, equally mock-formal, in on the joke.
Edo said to Sasha, “Do you know who this is?”
She was staring at my hand. My left hand. Then she pirouetted away from me. The room was huge, much larger than the bedroom I’d grown up in. The queen-size bed was unmade, the bedclothes a riot of pinks and greens. Every wall that wasn’t a window was covered with her paintings and drawings. There were charcoal pieces like the one Eduard Jr. had shown me in Chicago, and pieces done in marker, but most were paintings on pages the size of the one on the easel, singing with color. The paintings looked like random swirls and stripes, but I began to see figures in them: an alligator in a red-checked suit; a fat woman holding a pink parasol; a parrot wearing a top hat, hiding in a tree. The pirate bear was a frequent subject—and there was the toy itself, a stuffed bear half buried in the sheets and blankets.
Sasha crouched and reached under the bed. She brought out a rolled-up page, then looked over her shoulder at me. I went to her and helped her unroll it.
In the center were two figures, holding hands. One woman was tall and thin with an imperious afro; the other shorter but with wild red hair that spiked in all directions like flames. Their outside hands were waving at us. The paint was bright, the paper unwrinkled. I thought it must be a recent piece.
Sasha reached for my left hand. She lifted it up so she could touch the ring there. Then she reached inside the neck of her shirt and drew out a necklace. Dangling from the end of it was a benzene ring—Mikala’s ring.
“I think she knows,” Dr. Gloria said.
* * *
Sasha took us on a tour first of her room, showing us her artwork and toys, then of the entire house, then outside to the pool and the rock garden and the sprawling vegetable garden, where three Hispanic men in long-sleeved shirts were assembling aluminum sprinkler frames. They greeted her in Spanish, and she made Edo introduce me and Rovil. Then it was into the huge garage, where Sasha demonstrated her skill with a device that looked like a cross between a skateboard and a teeter-totter. I could not even stand up on the thing. Sasha kept trying to coach me, putting her hands on my shins and ankles, but I was hopeless. Finally she flicked open a digital fan and shook it at me until I understood that she wanted me to take out my pen.
I produced mine and she tapped it, not with her fan, but with her finger. A message appeared: Stand on the dots!
Ah: the two orange circles on the toy’s deck. I put one foot on one dot, stepped up—and the device shot out from under me. Edo caught me before I hit the ground. Sasha shook her head in mock disappointment.
My pen kept filling with messages from her. I couldn’t see how she was typing—the fan wasn’t even in her hand anymore. It was the closest thing to telepathy I’d ever seen. The fake mind readers in the NAT ward would have been so jealous.
We walked back to the house down a path made of pink gravel. Sasha was at my side, chattering away electronically. Rovil and Edo were up ahead, talking pharmaceutical biz.
“You sent that message to me, right?” I asked Sasha quietly. “The one telling me to come here?”
My pen flickered with a new message: Are you mad?
“No, I’m not mad,” I said.
“Not in the way she meant, anyway,” Dr. Gloria said. She was walking a few feet behind us, her hands clasped behind her back. She’d stayed within a dozen feet of me since we’d come through the gate, ready to swoop in as soon as I fell apart.
“Bug off,” I told her.
You’ve got a friend. Like Grandpop.
I stopped. “You noticed that?” I asked Sasha.
I do too. Lots of them.
The pen slipped from my hand. Sasha crouched and picked it up. She opened the screen wide and held it up to me. The letters were blurry. I blinked until they came into focus.
That’s okay. GP cries all the time too.
I said to Sasha, “I don’t usually…” I cleared my throat. “I mean, twice in one day? I think it’s the heat.”
She nodded as if this made any kind of sense and pulled me toward the house. The rest of the group had gone inside and gathered in the enclosed sun porch. The room was positioned at the back of the house, facing the expanse of desert. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in maximum sunlight while the house’s air-conditioning delivered maximum cold, a textbook example of the kind of have-your-cake-and-burn-it-too attitude that the über-rich specialized in. Fuck you, Mother Nature. I thought about saying something, and then Esperanza came into the room with cookies and lemonade. It’s hard to be a militant liberal when you’re being served kindergarten snacks.
My pen pinged. We grow our own lemons!
“They’re great,” I told Sasha.
Rovil had noticed this latest exchange. He leaned over and said to Sasha, “How long did it take you to train the network?”
The girl shrugged. I pushed my pen to him. It said, It’s still learning.
“What’s this networking thing?” I asked.
Edo nodded toward the ceiling. “The house is watching her. Fingers, gestures. Some of it’s virtual keyboard, but some of it’s body language. She’s got her own dialect.” He sounded proud.
Sasha nodded. The pen said, Macros!!!
Rovil said, “Why don’t you just talk?”
Edo frowned. After a moment I said, “Rovil, Jesus…”
“What?” Rovil asked. Embarrassment has a frequency, like a dog whistle. Only some people can hear it.
The pen said, Why should I?
“Good point,” I told Sasha.
Of course I was dying to know why she didn’t speak. Eduard had said she was smart and artistic. Was the muteness congenital? Had the Numinous done this to her?
I said to her, “I need to talk to your … to Edo now. Adult talk.”
Sasha looked offended. She flicked her eyes to the side, then up to Edo.