She is halfway done with the second page of problems. “What are you working on?” I ask.
“My math packet.”
“I know it’s math. What kind of math?”
“Calculus.”
I look at the pages, study them. Christ, it is calculus. “They give you calculus in fifth grade now?”
“No, I go to Kumon.”
“What’s Kumon?”
“Sort of a math club. Mom makes me go. She says the US educational system is so poor I need to go to math club to learn anything. It’s mostly geeks and foreign kids, but I really like math and I’m good at it.”
“You must be good at it to be learning calculus in the fifth grade.”
Krystal’s bright blue eyes fix on me. “Kaley’s the one who is wicked smart. She got nearly a perfect score on her SATs. It would have been a perfect 2400 but she said they took off fifty points for her essay being politically incorrect. Still, 2350 is going to be a tough score to beat. I’m not nearly as strong in the verbal as Kaley is.”
How intense Krystal sounds over all this makes me want to laugh, but this is serious to her so I don’t.
“What are the SATs?” I ask.
She stares at me, surprised. “You don’t know anything, do you? The college admission exams. Don’t they have SATs in the UK? In the US if you don’t get a good score you end up in community college.”
“Is that bad?”
“The worst. Kaley got into USC.”
“Is that good?”
“The best. They only take like a handful out of like a gazillion applicants into their film program. It’s the best. She hasn’t told Mom yet so don’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
Krystal shrugs. “She doesn’t have enough money for school. She needs to accept admission by next week or she loses her slot. But I guess it costs even to accept and she’s too pissed off to ask you guys.”
“That’s foolish.”
“Kaley is stubborn.”
Stubborn. Understatement of the century. I stare down at Krystal’s math problem. “You got the answer to the second problem wrong. Just the last step. The rest is perfect. Am I supposed to show you, or just tell you and let you fix it yourself?”
Krystal stares down at her paper. “No, I didn’t get it wrong. You don’t know the answer. Daddy use to say my packets looked like Greek to him. You just wanted to change the subject. You don’t want to talk to me about Kaley.”
Well, that’s true enough. I don’t want to talk to Krystal about Kaley. I want to talk to Krystal about Krystal.
I watch her and admit to myself I’m a little bugged by the Daddy comment. She means Jesse. I am now Dad, but Jesse will always be Daddy. It is how Krystal organizes things in her mind, in a manner that so resembles Chrissie’s internal working. Whatever life tosses at her, if she can organize it then she is comfortable in it.
It shouldn’t bother me—I don’t have a right to expect anything different with these kids—but it does.
“No, you got the answer wrong. I was always good at math. It just made sense to me. The answer is—” I take the pencil to write out the correct answer.
She studies the paper. She erases with a fury. “You’re right. They must have a better education system in the UK. At what grade did you start learning implicit differentiation problems?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I never went to school.”
Her eyes go wide. “If you didn’t go to school then what did you do? Where did you learn? How did you make friends? Who did you play with?”
I tense. The questions are shot at me like bullets from a machine gun. Why the fuck do kids ask so many questions? I don’t know what the correct amount of sharing with a nine-year-old should be. And fuck, this isn’t just any nine-year-old. She’s my daughter. I feel myself choking up again.
Those wide blue eyes are fixed on me, waiting expectantly.
“I had private tutors at home,” I say in an inflectionless way. “I wasn’t permitted friends and I didn’t play. I worked.”
“Always?”
She says that as if it’s inconceivable to her. Maybe it is. Maybe my life is hugely inconceivable to everyone. It definitely is to me at times.
I nod. “Always.”
“I don’t think I’ll like Grandma Lillian.”
“She’s not so bad,” I find myself saying, amazed by the carefully articulate responses I am learning to force through my lips for my children.
Krystal tucks her math packet back into her bag. She studies me for a while. “I can teach you what you need to learn.”
I pucker my lips to keep from smiling. She’s deadly serious. How simple Krystal’s world is to think that she can help me fix any of this. Fuck, I’m smiling even though I don’t really feel like it. It is part of the strangeness of being with these kids; my uncontrollable smiles that come out of nowhere.
Christ, what a mess I’ve made of my life. Everything is unfamiliar now: me, Chrissie, the kids. The cycle of my life has at last been broken: periods of Chrissie, followed by periods without Chrissie, followed by sex and despair, followed by a return to Chrissie and the cycle all over again. But that cycle is finally broken. A new cycle has emerged and this will not be a passing state. It redefines me and alters the course of my future.
Six months ago I thought myself alone in the world. Now I have five kids and a wife I love who is never going to forgive me for the things I should never have said. The things I didn’t mean because these kids are our kids.
I study Krystal. My daughter. My sweet, beautiful, intelligent daughter. The thought still chokes me up. It’s been nearly two weeks. How long will it be before I can think of these kids as mine and not choke up at the thought?
“You look tired,” I say. “Do you want me to get you a pillow and blanket so you can sleep?”
Krystal nods and yawns. I motion for the attendant, hand her the book bag, put up the arm rest, then set the pillow on top of my thighs and tell Krystal to sleep.
I place a blanket over her. She stares up at me.
“It’s going to be OK, Dad. Kaley usually gets over things if you leave her alone.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that.” I lean down to kiss her on the forehead and she gives me a drowsy smile. I watch her close her eyes.
“Do you want a drink? They’ve opened the wine.”
I look up to find the flight attendant hovering over me. I shake my head.
“She’s a beautiful girl,” the attendant says, smiling.
I nod. “She looks like her mother.”
“No, she’s the image of you, except for the eyes. But the older girl is definitely you, especially her eyes. I almost dropped the wine I was holding when she stepped onto the plane.”
“Thank you for not saying ‘especially the personality.’”
The flight attendant laughs. “It’s a tough age. Don’t take it personally.”
“That’s what everyone tells me.”
She smiles. “Well, it’s true.”
I watch Krystal sleep for a while, completely content doing nothing but watching her, then I feel my lids grow heavy when it usually takes a benzodiazepine to sleep on a plane.
“Can I take pictures and film if I promise not to post it?”
I’m startled from sleep. The voice is soft and near me. I find Kaley sitting in the aisle next to my seat. She has her camera in her hand. She’s finally talking to me, in a normal conversational way. At last. Maybe things will start to get better all around. I feel Linda watching.
“Why do you want to film?”
Kaley’s eyes widen. “Because that’s what I do. I film everything. Bobby said that this is the last tour. You haven’t got a film crew. There’s no photographer. I film everything. That’s what I do. Can I film?”
“Did you really get into USC film school?”
That question pisses her off. I see it in her eyes. “Why do you want to know?” Her voice is tightly leashed, controlled. She still wants something from me, wants it enough not to drift back into battle.