“But you haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”
Alan shook his head. “Not that I know.”
“Then why—”
“We’re keeping them waiting. You should go get dressed.”
“I know,” Marisa said. “But this whole business is giving me the creeps. Why can’t they just tell us what it’s all about?” She hesitated, then asked, “You don’t think it’s got anything to do with my leaving George, do you?”
Alan gave her a thin smile. “There’s no law against leaving your husband—not unless you killed him first.”
“Ha ha.”
“Just get dressed, Marisa. We’ll find out what’s going on when we get down to the precinct.”
“I don’t see how you can be so calm.”
Alan shrugged. “I’ve nothing to feel guilty about.”
But maybe that won’t make any difference, Marisa thought. As she stood there looking at him, every miscarriage of justice that she’d ever heard about reared up in her mind, tormenting her with the possibilities of what might be waiting for them at the precinct. Just last week she’d read about a man accused of molesting his niece. He’d been proven innocent—the girl had admitted that she’d made the story up to get some attention from her own parents—but according to the article, the stigma of the accusation still clung to the man and the whole sorry affair had opened a breach in the family that showed no signs of being diminished. But now wasn’t the time to bring anything like that up, she realized.
“I guess I’ll go get dressed” was all she said.
“Things will work out,” Alan told her.
She nodded.
“But if anything does happen when we’re at the precinct—I mean, if they decide to hold me or whatever—I don’t want you to think that it changes anything. You’re still welcome to stay here. You’ll have to get someone else to help you pick up your things, that’s all.”
“I don’t even want to think along those lines.”
“But just in case.”
Marisa sighed. “Fine. Just in case. But that’s not going to happen.”
“I sure as hell hope not.”
He might look calm, Marisa realized, but inside he was feeling just as worried as she was. She straightened her back, determined to put on as good a face herself. If he could do it, when he was the one the police wanted to question, then she could do it too.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” she said.
She went into the bathroom to get dressed herself and was out again in record time, having paused only long enough to put on a touch of lipstick.
III
Come midmorning, Rolanda was still sitting beside her bed, watching Cosette sleep. She’d left once to go downstairs to cancel her morning’s appointments and get herself a coffee. That had been over an hour ago. The coffee was long finished and Cosette still slept—if what she was doing was sleeping.
Rolanda couldn’t shake the memory of that awful moment earlier this morning when the girl had run an Xacto blade across her hand, the sharp metal cutting deeply into the palm, but the wound hadn’t bled.
Hadn’t bled at all. What it had done was close up again as easily as you might seal a zip-lock plastic bag.
Hey presto, just like that.
It wasn’t possible, of course. What she’d seen couldn’t have happened. Except there was no denying that she had seen it and now the whole world had become unsafe. Nothing could be trusted to be as it once had been. The hard-wood floor of her apartment seemed spongy underfoot, the walls pulsed, the air was thick with light that appeared to have a physical consistency. Dust motes didn’t so much float in it as were encased. Everything was changed.
You think you’re safe, Rolanda thought, looking down at her sleeping charge. You think you know who you are and you’re content with the comfortable familiarity of your life, and then something like this comes along and the next thing you know, everything becomes foreign. It wasn’t just Cosette, lying there on her bed; it was that everything now had the potential to be other than what she always believed it to be.
This must be what people meant when they spoke of an epiphany, she thought, except she didn’t actually understand what she was seeing. She simply knew that there were no more safe corners to turn.
That underlying what everyone accepted as true was another truth. A different truth, one that allowed for god knew how many interpretations.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
She looked down to see that Cosette’s eyes were open, their luminous gaze regarding her sympathetically, and Rolanda realized that she no longer considered the girl as a potential client, in need of the Foundation’s services. Their roles hadn’t so much reversed as evened out so that they were meeting now as equals, each able to learn from the other.
“I don’t know what I am,” Rolanda admitted. “Everything seems changed. Anything seems possible.”
Cosette sat up and scooted over to where she could lean back against the headboard. “Except for happiness.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to be real.”
Rolanda smiled. “You sound like Pinocchio.”
“Who’s Pinocchio?”
“A little wooden puppet in a story who wanted to become a real boy.”
“And did he?”
“Eventually.”
Cosette leaned forward eagerly. “How did he do it?”
“It was just a story,” Rolanda said.
“But that’s what we all are—just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we’d just fade away.”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
“When you’re real,” Cosette added, “your stories have more weight, I think. There’s less chance of being forgotten.”
“I don’t know about that. There are any number of characters from books and movies who are a lot more real to some people than anyone in their own life.”
“How did the puppet become real?”
Rolanda sighed. “I don’t remember exactly. I think it had something to do with his having to be a good boy. Doing good deeds. There was a fairy involved as well—except now I think I’m mixing up the book and the Disney film. I remember the fairy from the movie but I can’t remember if she was in the book. In the movie, she was the one who finally changed him into a real boy.”
Cosette was hanging on to her every word. “I wonder if Isabelle would paint a fairy like that for me.”
“You don’t need a fairy,” Rolanda said. “You’re already real.”
“I don’t dream. I don’t bleed.”
“Maybe that’s a blessing.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to feel so ... so hollow inside.”
“Perhaps,” Rolanda admitted. “But I think you’re making more of what other people feel than what they actually do. Lots of people go through their whole lives with a sense of being unfulfilled. Of feeling hollow.”
But Cosette wasn’t prepared to listen to that line of argument.
“I’ll do good deeds,” she said. “We’ll all do good deeds. And then when Isabelle paints the fairy for us, we’ll all become real. The red crow will beat its wings in our chests and we’ll dream and bleed just like you.”
“But—”
“I have to find Isabelle and ask her.”
She stood up on the bed and danced about excitedly, bouncing on the mattress, clapping her hands.
“Thank you, Rolanda!” she cried. “Thank you!”
Rolanda stood up. “Don’t get too excited,” she began. “That was only—”
But she spoke to herself. Her guest had disappeared, vanishing with a sudden whuft of displaced air.