"Ten what?"
"Cash. Ten thousand."
I mumbled something legalistic about my marriage and my divorce; the answer would have to be no for now, but thanks, thanks for thinking of me, as if he'd offered an extra ticket to the theater. When I turned and saw Vicki, to whom I could not mumble something so glib and final, she was ensconced on my couch, reading a book she must have had in her knapsack. She wore the glasses with tortoise-shell frames that she needed for reading, and she suddenly looked official, like a university librarian. I wondered whether she thought her invitation was one I had to reply to, like Jesus's, or one she held out to me as an expression of feeling, like an invitation to a hug.
"What are you reading?"
" The Secret Garden. I'm at the scene where Mary Lennox got the key to the garden where her aunt died and where no one's been for ten years. Do you know what she does after that?" I shook my head. "I know, because I read it before. She sneaks into the messy garden every day without telling anyone and makes it beautiful." Then Vicki bent her head and continued reading, as if there were no handmade greeting card on the coffee table between us.
If she were smaller or younger or mine, I could simply have gone to her and held her on my lap and played with her hair, and there would have been the illusion of security for those minutes. And then we'd have separated and she would have returned to her brothers and sister, to the life that must feel to all of them like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The near-dead in this new country of theirs do not have the decency to die, and the living put on a good show, but a lot of it-Dorothy, Toto, the sight of me in their mother's place at the breakfast table-must end up feeling like make-believe.
"The card is beautiful," I said, and she looked up, with her broad brown face, her jet-black hair, teeth as white as paper. "The most beautiful card anyone ever gave me." She cracked a tight, embarrassed smile, like a shy suitor, and looked at her lap. "In my whole life." I was laying it on thick, but the kids had too, and it was true. "I would love to live with all of you." Her eyes shot up to mine, though her face was still, reluctant to smile. She must have heard the tentativeness, the dip in my voice, in the last few syllables, indicating that a "but" would follow. "I know I'd be very happy." At this she began to smile, still shyly. "But your father's life is complicated, and so's mine. It wouldn't be the best thing to do right now."
"You could stay for a while, and if my mom gets better and wakes up, you could go home and still visit us."
This was a kid's somersaulting logic. It all made perfect sense in some other universe, a fantastic, Oz-like place in which, for starters, her father and I might be able to have a serious conversation.
"You wrote the card, didn't you? I mean, you composed it?" A nod, chin at her chest. She folded her hands in her lap, interlocked her fingers obediently-a reflex, I suppose, from living in an orphanage, to show others that you're well-behaved so that maybe they'll take you home with them. "Was it your idea?"
"No. But I won't say whose."
"You don't have to, sweetheart."
"We all voted."
"That's sweet." How darling, how quickly they had made the essential democratic gesture their own. I was charmed by the theater, and touched down deep by their wanting me, but still uneasy about turning her down, and about what to tell her father about this visit. Did I need to remind him that his children's enthusiasm for me-in contrast to his own-was worthy of a splashy handmade proclamation? Did I need to rub it in his face that if his house were a democracy, they'd vote me in by a landslide?
"It was three to one," Vicki said, "but we all signed the card."
I felt the blow, this blow, in my chest and my eyes. I gaped at her in a gust of fury as she did what bookish children always do: she lowered her eyes and read. Or pretended to. How dare you! I almost said aloud. After all I've done for you! My thoughts caromed from one child to the next, swooping down on evidence of betrayal. Betrayal! Had I lost my mind? Did I think I was Richard Nixon in the White House? Hitler after the bomb in the briefcase?
She glanced up with a blistering indifference, as if she wouldn't deign to notice me. "It wasn't me," she said icily, as if the transcript of my thoughts had been projected above my head in a comic strip balloon, "in case you're wondering."
"Your father will call the police and the FBI and Scotland Yard if Toinette tells him you're missing."
"What's Scotland Yard?"
"Let's go." A bucket of cold water on my sentimentality, and a sharp fear that I had betrayed Daniel by not letting him or Toinette know right away where Vicki was. "Get your knapsack. Now." I was sure she could hear the rising anger in my voice.
"Sophy?"
"What?" I had grabbed my purse, tossed my keys into it, and was about to open the front door.
"Is Henderson gay?"
I looked at her, in her sorbet colors, the little wristwatch with the dinosaur face around her tiny wrist, the book in her knapsack about the girl with no parents. What made her mind loop back to Henderson, and how could she tell?
"Yes, he is."
"But didn't he have to get married to have a son?"
"He changed his mind after he had his son."
"Why didn't he know right away?"
"It's hard to know who you'll want to love. Some people know early on and some don't."
"But if he's gay, how come he was visiting you?"
"We're friends. He likes women as friends but men in a romantic way"
"Romantic like you and my dad?"
"Something like that." Though romantic wasn't the first word that came to mind. "What made you ask if he's gay?"
"Nothing. But I hoped he was."
"How come?"
"Because I didn't want him to be your boyfriend."
In the cab going west on Eleventh Street, I did what I'd wanted to do on the couch. I drew my arm around her and pulled her to me, and she came willingly. I apologized for getting angry, apologized for not being able to live with them. I said she'd made a magnificent card, and I'd spend as much time with her and her brothers and sister as I could. Her cheek lay against my bosom and my chin on the top of her head. Her scalp smelled of coconut, and the faces of everyone I saw out the window of our air-conditioned cab were shiny and slick with the unbearable heat of the day.
"Sophy?"
"Yes, sweetheart."
Her hands were curled in my lap, and I was running my fingers along her suede-soft forearm. "I lied," she said.
"About what?"
"That I remember when I slept in the basket on the boat. And that I remember when my mother died. I don't. I was only one."
"That's not such a bad lie. You must miss her a lot. And Blair too." She snuggled closer. The West Village crawled alongside us-Sammy's Noodle Shop, the Espresso Café, the Arab newsstand, Patchin Place, where E. E. Cummings had lived-and I wanted our cab ride to go on forever. Maybe Vicki and I could drive around for the rest of the day, go to a drive-in food stand and a drive-in movie. I could call Daniel from the highway and confess everything, and then we'd keep driving, like fugitives, Vicki and I, like Thelma and Louise.
"I lied about something else too."
"What was that?"
"The card for you."
"What about it?"
"I wrote the names myself."
"That's okay, to help the littler ones."
"I didn't help. I pretended they wrote their names, but I did."
"But you told them afterward? You showed them the card?"
"No."
It took a moment for the full meaning of this to circle back through all the psychic congestion of the last hour. "That must mean there was no voting either."
She was silent.
"No three to one?"
"No."
"Hmmmm."
"Are you angry, Sophy?"
I didn't answer right away, not because I was angry but because I was embarrassed at being so jubilant that one of the children hadn't cast a ballot against me. And silent because I wasn't sure whether to lavish on her all the praise she deserved, aesthetically speaking, for the elaborateness of her caper, or say a few words about the ethics of deception.