“Yes,” Leisha said. “I thought you said you made money in your study all night!”
Daddy smiled. “Not all night. Some of it. But then I sleep, although not very much.” He took Leisha on his lap. “I don’t need much sleep, so I get a lot more done at night than most people. Different people need different amounts of sleep. And a few, a very few, are like you. You don’t need any.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re special. Better than other people. Before you were born, I had some doctors help make you that way.”
“Why?”
“So you could do anything you want to and make manifest your own individuality.”
Leisha twisted in his arms to stare at him; the words meant nothing. Daddy reached over and touched a single flower growing on a tall potted tree. The flower had thick white petals like the cream he put in coffee, and the center was a light pink.
“See, Leisha—this tree made this flower. Because it can. Only this tree can make this kind of wonderful flower. That plant hanging up there can’t, and those can’t either. Only this tree. Therefore the most important thing in the world for this tree to do is grow this flower. The flower is the tree’s individuality—that means just it, and nothing else—made manifest. Nothing else matters.”
“I don’t understand, Daddy.”
“You will. Someday.”
“But I want to understand now,” Leisha said, and Daddy laughed with pure delight and hugged her. The hug felt good, but Leisha still wanted to understand.
“When you make money, is that your indiv…that thing?”
“Yes,” Daddy said happily.
“Then nobody else can make money? Like only that tree can make that flower?”
“Nobody else can make it just the way I do.”
“What do you do with the money?”
“I buy things for you. This house, your dresses, Mamselle to teach you, the car to ride in.”
“What does the tree do with the flower?”
“Glories in it,” Daddy said, which made no sense. “Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort. And that’s all that counts.”
“I’m cold, Daddy.”
“Then I better bring you back to Mamselle.”
Leisha didn’t move. She touched the flower with one finger. “I want to sleep, Daddy.”
“No, you don’t, sweetheart. Sleep is just lost time, wasted life. It’s a little death.”
“Alice sleeps.”
“Alice isn’t like you.”
“Alice isn’t special?”
“No. You are.”
“Why didn’t you make Alice special, too?”
“Alice made herself. I didn’t have a chance to make her special.”
The whole thing was too hard. Leisha stopped stroking the flower and slipped off Daddy’s lap. He smiled at her. “My little questioner. When you grow up, you’ll find your own excellence, and it will be a new order, a specialness the world hasn’t ever seen before. You might even be like Kenzo Yagai. He made the Yagai generator that powers the world.”
“Daddy, you look funny wrapped in the flower plastic.” Leisha laughed. Daddy did, too. But then she said, “When I grow up, I’ll make my specialness find a way to make Alice special, too,” and Daddy stopped laughing.
He took her back to Mamselle, who taught her to write her name, which was so exciting she forgot about the puzzling talk with Daddy. There were six letters, all different, and together they were her name. Leisha wrote it over and over, laughing, and Mamselle laughed too. But later, in the morning, Leisha thought again about the talk with Daddy. She thought of it often, turning the unfamiliar words over and over in her mind like small hard stones, but the part she thought about most wasn’t a word. It was the frown on Daddy’s face when she told him she would use her specialness to make Alice special, too.
Every week Dr. Melling came to see Leisha and Alice, sometimes alone, sometimes with other people. Leisha and Alice both liked Dr. Melling, who laughed a lot and whose eyes were bright and warm. Often Daddy was there, too. Dr. Melling played games with them, first with Alice and Leisha separately and then together. She took their pictures and weighed them. She made them lie down on a table and stuck little metal things to their temples, which sounded scary but wasn’t because there were so many machines to watch, all making interesting noises, while they were lying there. Dr. Melling was as good at answering questions as Daddy. Once Leisha said, “Is Dr. Melling a special person? Like Kenzo Yagai?” And Daddy laughed and glanced at Dr. Melling and said, “Oh, yes, indeed.”
When Leisha was five she and Alice started school. Daddy’s driver took them every day into Chicago. They were in different rooms, which disappointed Leisha. The kids in Leisha’s room were all older. But from the first day she adored school, with its fascinating science equipment and electronic drawers full of math puzzlers and other children to find countries on the map with. In half a year she had been moved to yet a different room, where the kids were still older, but they were nonetheless nice to her. Leisha started to learn Japanese. She loved drawing the beautiful characters on thick white paper. “The Sauley School was a good choice,” Daddy said.
But Alice didn’t like the Sauley School. She wanted to go to school on the same yellow bus as Cook’s daughter. She cried and threw her paints on the floor at the Sauley School. Then Mommy came out of her room—Leisha hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, although she knew Alice had—and threw some candlesticks from the mantelpiece on the floor. The candlesticks, which were china, broke. Leisha ran to pick up the pieces while Mommy and Daddy screamed at each other in the hall by the big staircase.
“She’s my daughter, too! And I say she can go!”
“You don’t have the right to say anything about it! A weepy drunk, the most rotten role model possible for both of them…and I thought I was getting a fine English aristocrat!”
“You got what you paid for! Nothing! Not that you ever needed anything from me or anybody else!”
“Stop it!” Leisha cried. “Stop it!” There was silence in the hall.
Leisha cut her fingers on the china; blood streamed onto the rug. Daddy rushed in and picked her up. “Stop it,” Leisha sobbed, and didn’t understand when Daddy said quietly, “You stop it, Leisha. Nothing they do should touch you at all. You have to be at least that strong.”
Leisha buried her head in Daddy’s shoulder. Alice transferred to Carl Sandburg Elementary School, riding there on the yellow school bus with Cook’s daughter.
A few weeks later Daddy told them that Mommy was going away to a hospital, to stop drinking so much. When Mommy came out, he said, she was going to live somewhere else for a while. She and Daddy were not happy. Leisha and Alice would stay with Daddy and they would visit Mommy sometimes. He told them this very carefully, finding the right words for truth. Truth was very important, Leisha already knew. Truth was being true to yourself, your specialness. Your individuality. An individual respected facts, and so always told the truth.
Mommy—Daddy did not say but Leisha knew—did not respect facts.
“I don’t want Mommy to go away,” Alice said. She started to cry. Leisha thought Daddy would pick Alice up, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at them both.
Leisha put her arms around Alice. “It’s all right, Alice. It’s all right! We’ll make it all right! I’ll play with you all the time we’re not in school so you don’t miss Mommy!”
Alice clung to Leisha. Leisha turned her head so she didn’t have to see Daddy’s face.