game.
The first time Luce tried to take their clothes off to help them bathe was a bad day. They cried bleak, silent tears. They could bawl like calves or wail like beagles when they were frustrated or mad, but this was something else. She stopped undressing them immediately, but they went off into their own heads, dazed, and stayed there for hours.
She found, though, that if allowed to undress themselves, they didn’t mind being buck naked outdoors. Pour a pail of chill spring water over them in the backyard while they soaped themselves, and all was okay. But it was still muggy August. Come a November morn, frost white on the ground, then what? A pair of children could get to smelling pretty high over the course of the cold months, was Luce’s guess. But mainly she began thinking about how bad their bad patch must have been for them to go down so deep where fear and pain couldn’t reach.
AFTER THE BATH INCIDENT , Luce never saw the children cry again. It was not a channel they used to communicate. They expressed their feelings in ways besides whimpering and chin quivering and their eyes watering up. They might fly at you with balled fists and try to fight. They might go running away toward the woods. They had a sound like a growl, and also various hollers and hoots and screeches. Or they might give you a slow look that suggested if they weighed a hundred pounds more, they would kill you where you stood. Most of the reasons regular children cry—pain, fear, embarrassment, frustration, anguish, regret, sorrow, guilt—didn’t seem to apply with these two. They showed little fear and no embarrassment. And especially no sorrow or regret or guilt under any circumstance.
On the happy side of things, they forgot bad emotions of their own almost immediately. Not that they came running to hug you around the knees shortly after some violent moment. Asking forgiveness, even by way of facial expression, was not a possibility. More like, they invested no feeling at all in what had happened and expected you to do the same. Let it go. No apologies. Repent was a lost word in their lexicon. They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind. And Luce wondered if maybe that was what they had to teach her. No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.
A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn’t make her thoughts stop running back into the past, craving to be happy about something long gone, feeling sad or shameful for things she should have done differently. If the children came to harm under her care, she would not be able to let it go and move on. Not ever. Guilt would haunt her to her deathbed. It’s what she would be thinking about instead of teaspoons or moon phases or birds. Living life unfettered by the past would be splendid, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even really like the children, much less love them. But she loved Lily and would raise her children and not be trash. And her own parents came directly to mind at that point in her thinking.
Apart from Lola’s bitter slaps, benign neglect had been about the worst of it during Luce’s childhood. And that had its reimbursements. Mainly, limitless freedom, even at age five. Who wouldn’t wish for that at any age? Out roaming without anyone calling your name way on into moonlit evening, if that’s what you wanted. Maybe a hug or a tone of concern in a parental voice now and again would have been helpful, but on the other hand, Luce had never been laid into by an angry grown man when she was five or six.
Her parents were too busy with each other to pay much attention to her one way or the other. That was a few years before Lola disappeared, when her father had just returned from the war,
The first time Luce tried to take their clothes off to help them bathe was a bad day. They cried bleak, silent tears. They could bawl like calves or wail like beagles when they were frustrated or mad, but this was something else. She stopped undressing them immediately, but they went off into their own heads, dazed, and stayed there for hours.
She found, though, that if allowed to undress themselves, they didn’t mind being buck naked outdoors. Pour a pail of chill spring water over them in the backyard while they soaped themselves, and all was okay. But it was still muggy August. Come a November morn, frost white on the ground, then what? A pair of children could get to smelling pretty high over the course of the cold months, was Luce’s guess. But mainly she began thinking about how bad their bad patch must have been for them to go down so deep where fear and pain couldn’t reach.
AFTER THE BATH INCIDENT , Luce never saw the children cry again. It was not a channel they used to communicate. They expressed their feelings in ways besides whimpering and chin quivering and their eyes watering up. They might fly at you with balled fists and try to fight. They might go running away toward the woods. They had a sound like a growl, and also various hollers and hoots and screeches. Or they might give you a slow look that suggested if they weighed a hundred pounds more, they would kill you where you stood. Most of the reasons regular children cry—pain, fear, embarrassment, frustration, anguish, regret, sorrow, guilt—didn’t seem to apply with these two. They showed little fear and no embarrassment. And especially no sorrow or regret or guilt under any circumstance.
On the happy side of things, they forgot bad emotions of their own almost immediately. Not that they came running to hug you around the knees shortly after some violent moment. Asking forgiveness, even by way of facial expression, was not a possibility. More like, they invested no feeling at all in what had happened and expected you to do the same. Let it go. No apologies. Repent was a lost word in their lexicon. They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind. And Luce wondered if maybe that was what they had to teach her. No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.
A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn’t make her thoughts stop running back into the past, craving to be happy about something long gone, feeling sad or shameful for things she should have done differently. If the children came to harm under her care, she would not be able to let it go and move on. Not ever. Guilt would haunt her to her deathbed. It’s what she would be thinking about instead of teaspoons or moon phases or birds. Living life unfettered by the past would be splendid, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even really like the children, much less love them. But she loved Lily and would raise her children and not be trash. And her own parents came directly to mind at that point in her thinking.
Apart from Lola’s bitter slaps, benign neglect had been about the worst of it during Luce’s childhood. And that had its reimbursements. Mainly, limitless freedom, even at age five. Who wouldn’t wish for that at any age? Out roaming without anyone calling your name way on into moonlit evening, if that’s what you wanted. Maybe a hug or a tone of concern in a parental voice now and again would have been helpful, but on the other hand, Luce had never been laid into by an angry grown man when she was five or six.
Her parents were too busy with each other to pay much attention to her one way or the other. That was a few years before Lola disappeared, when her father had just returned from the war,
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