54
“Here they come,” said Father Jane. She was peeking out their door, down the hall at the line of approaching children.
“I’m never going to remember all the names. Nine! It’s ridiculous. How many times do I have to point out that it’s ridiculous?”
“Maybe it’s ridiculous, but it’s wonderful, too.”
“It’s not too late to make nametags.”
“That’s cold. Quick, light the candles.”
“Is it someone’s birthday?” Grampus asked. “How will we remember all the birthdays?” But he lit the candles, and stood in the doorway with Jane, holding the welcome cake she had baked, and singing the welcome song she had composed. Arms occupied, he didn’t have to hug them, but kissed them all as Jane greeted them. They all had the same face — soft and round and framed in white-blond hair. The differing ages and sexes hardly made any difference in the features, but the expression worn by the teenagers — wary mistrust — set them apart from their siblings.
“Welcome Shout!” she said. “Welcome Kidney! Welcome Valium! Welcome States’-Rights! Welcome Jesus! Welcome Bottom! Welcome Salt! Welcome Sand! Welcome Couch!”
They all nodded and smiled and the littlest one gave Jane a plant — a tall spindly thing with spiny leaves and a single drooping blossom that looked like a slack mouth. There were enough of them that they ought to have sung back to them, or done some complicated dance, but instead they piled directly onto the couch, squeezing in a double row of four and a single triple column in the middle. They arranged themselves so swiftly it was obvious that they had been squeezing themselves like that onto all sorts of furniture all their lives. They all stared around the room, taking in their new home, except for Kidney — that was the smallest one, he suddenly remembered — who looked squarely at John Grampus and said, “Well, now what do we do?”
55
Whichever one is left over, Rob had written. Whichever one nobody wants. Give us that one. At eight o’clock on Match Day, a half hour after the show ended, when much of the audience was still trying to crowd into Connie’s bar for a drink, to fortify themselves against both the final, agonizing minutes of waiting, and mute the lingering horror of the awful puppet show performed by Ethel and Pickie Beecher, the angel released swarms of tiny insectoid waldoes, each only as big as a cookie, outsized by the yellow slip of paper that every one carried, like a sail, on its back. The high whine of their engines preceded them down the ramp — they rolled into the lobby in pairs but split up to find the recipients of their news. When one of them crashed into Jemma’s foot she’d thought she’d just gotten in its way, but when she stepped aside it backed up and rammed her foot again. She looked over at Rob, who was staring fervently at his own shoes.
“There’s something I should tell you,” he said, and then confessed that he’d entered them in the Match.
“You what?” she asked him, over and over while children and adults ran back and forth around them, waving their golden tickets and seeking their match. She kept pointing at her belly, now with one hand, now with the other, now with both. “Hello!” she said. “Didn’t you notice this?”
“Whichever one was left over, is what I asked for,” he said. “I didn’t want one of them to be left out.” The waldo was still bumping insistently against her foot when Pickie came slipping through the crowd, ticket in hand. “Hello,” he said simply, when he arrived.
“There you are!” Jemma said brightly. Rob looked surprised to see him — that only aggravated her fury. “You may as well just have asked for him,” she told him later.
Pickie moved into their room that night, bringing only a suitcase full of lavender pajamas and the cloud-colored puppet to which he’d given voice in the puppet show. There wasn’t any magic button to press, to make the room bigger, and the angel would not or could not accommodate them with another room, or a balcony-bubble, or an extra-dimensional pocket. Rob dragged in another bed and set it atop the one they slept in. They discovered the first night that he had a habit of rolling out of his bed, both of them waking around two a.m. to a leaden thump, and both too sleepy and disoriented to possibly know what it was until they heard Pickie say, “I am not injured.” After that they took the top bunk, but the next morning they found Pickie sleeping in the tub, which he said he preferred, anyway, and asked them to cover him over as he slept with a piece of plywood. They refused. He made do with a blanket tied to the soap holder at one edge, draped over the tub, and weighted on the side with books.
“Whichever is left over,” she said again on the second night he was with them, after they were reasonably certain that he was asleep.
“Aren’t we done with that?” he asked. “I said I was sorry, and that I wasn’t sorry. I’m glad he’s here. You’re glad too. You admitted it. Are you taking it back now?”
“No. I know,” she said
“You can’t take it back,” he said.
“I’m not. Don’t be a goon.”
“You’re the goon. Cheap and squeaky goon with no room in your heart for a bald little blood drinker.”
“He’s given up the hooch,” Jemma said.
“I guaiac’d a stool,” Rob said.
“At least you didn’t get us Snood in a big diaper. “
“That would have been worse. Not that this is bad. It’s just new, like for everybody else. I can’t stop thinking about them, everybody going back to their rooms with new kids and new lives, to be new families. It’s all different and better for everybody, and we’re twice as lucky because we get to do it now and we get to do it again in four months.”
“I didn’t say it was bad. It all worked out. It’s all fine. I’m fine with it. Who else does he belong with?”
“Nobody,” he said, and lifted her shirt to kiss her between the shoulders. Just as he did it there came a horrible screech from the bathroom. They both recognized it instantly, the same noise that had rang out in the puppet show. They threw open the bathroom door and turned on the light. Pickie was sitting calmly in the empty tub, his hand in his gray puppet.
“What’s the matter?” Rob asked him
“All’s well,” he said.
“You screamed,” Jemma said.
“I am playing with my puppet.”
“Okay,” said Rob. “Don’t.”
“We mean don’t scream,” Jemma said. “You can play with the puppet.”
“Just do it quietly,” Rob said.
“It’s very late,” Jemma said.
“It is one twenty-three,” Pickie said.
On the fourth night she and Rob had sex, to assert their authority over their room, Jemma thought, and because they both really wanted to. It was a quiet affair, Jemma on her side and Rob behind her. For ten minutes they were silent and unmoving, both of them listening intently for noise from beyond the bathroom door. It was closed, and they could hear nothing but the hum of the bathroom fan — Pickie liked to have it running while he slept. It was the sort of sex very old people must have, Jemma thought, whose bones hurt when they move, or the sex available to lovers buried together in a coffin, for whom space is at an utter premium, whose hips can give or take no more than a few inches. It would have been enough, and it was its own sort of new pleasure, the quiet and the constraint, but still they told each other the things they would have done, in a different room, or with the tub empty in the next room, and Jemma was a little distracted by how curious it was to have whispery phone sex with no phone, and the person right behind you, and the actual thing going on too.