She was wearing her flowery pink-and-white pajamas that I had ironed for her earlier-Holly loves fresh-ironed clothes-and she had Clara perched on her pulled-up knees. In the soft golden halo from the bedside lamp she looked perfect and timeless as a little watercolor girl in a storybook. She terrified me. I would have given a limb to know that I was doing this conversation right, or even just that I wasn’t doing it too horrifically wrong.
I said, “It looks like that could have been what happened. It was a long, long time ago, so it’s hard to be sure about anything.”
Holly gazed into Clara’s eyes and thought about that. The strand of hair had found its way back into her mouth. “If I disappeared,” she said. “Would you think I had run away?”
Olivia had mentioned a nightmare. I said, “It wouldn’t matter what I thought. Even if I thought you’d hopped on a spaceship to another planet, I’d come looking for you, and I wouldn’t stop till I found you.”
Holly let out a deep sigh, and I felt her shoulder nudge in closer against me. For a second I thought I had accidentally managed to fix something. Then she said, “If you had married that girl Rosie. Would I never have been born?”
I detached the strand from her mouth and smoothed it into place. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo. “I don’t know how that stuff works, chickadee. It’s all very mysterious. All I know is that you’re you, and personally I think you’d have found a way to be you no matter what I did.”
Holly wriggled farther down in the bed. She said, in her ready-for-an-argument voice, “Sunday afternoon I want to go to Nana’s.”
And I could make chirpy chitchat with Shay across the good teacups. “Well,” I said, carefully. “We can have a think about that, see if it’ll fit with the rest of our plans. Any special reason?”
“Donna always gets to go over on Sundays, after her dad has his golf game. She says Nana makes a lovely dinner with apple tart and ice cream after, and sometimes Auntie Jackie does the girls’ hair all fancy, or sometimes everyone watches a DVD-Donna and Darren and Ashley and Louise get to take turns picking, but Auntie Carmel said if I was ever there I could have first pick. I never got to go because you didn’t know about me going over to Nana’s, but now that you do, I want to.”
I wondered if Ma and Da had signed some kind of treaty about Sunday afternoons, or if she just crushed a few happy pills into his lunch and then locked him in the bedroom with his floorboard naggin for company. “We’ll see how we get on.”
“One time Uncle Shay brought them all to the bike shop and let them try the bikes. And sometimes Uncle Kevin brings over his Wii and he has spare controllers, and Nana gives out because they jump around too much and she says they’ll have the house down.”
I tilted my head to get a proper look at Holly. She had Clara hugged a little too tight, but her face didn’t tell me anything. “Sweetheart,” I said. “You know Uncle Kevin won’t be there this Sunday, right?”
Holly’s head went down over Clara. “Yeah. Because he died.”
“That’s right, love.”
A quick glance at me. “Sometimes I forget. Like Sarah told me a joke today and I was going to tell him, only then after a while I remembered.”
“I know. That happens to me, too. It’s just your head getting used to things. It’ll stop in a while.”
She nodded, combing Clara’s mane with her fingers. I said, “And you know everyone over at Nana’s is going to be pretty upset this weekend, right? It won’t be fun, like the times Donna’s told you about.”
“I know that. I want to go because I just want to be there.”
“OK, chickadee. We’ll see what we can do.”
Silence. Holly put a plait in Clara’s mane and examined it carefully. Then: “Daddy.”
“Yep.”
“When I think about Uncle Kevin. Sometimes I don’t cry.”
“That’s OK, sweetie. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t either.”
“If I cared about him, amn’t I supposed to cry?”
I said, “I don’t think there are any rules for how you’re supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.”
“On American Idol they always cry when they talk about someone who died.”
“Sure, but you’ve got to take that stuff with a grain of salt, sweetie. It’s telly.”
Holly shook her head hard, hair whipping her cheeks. “Daddy, no, it’s not like films, it’s real people. They tell you all their stories, like say if their granny was lovely and believed in them and then she died, and they always cry. Sometimes Paula cries too.”
“I bet she does. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to, though. Everyone’s different. And I’ll tell you a secret: a lot of the time those people are putting it on, so they’ll get the votes.”
