Then Gracie evidently handed the phone off.
'Iona,' said Tolliver, with the faintest pleasant intonation. 'How are things going? Really? The school called again? Well, you know Gracie isn't stupid, so there must be some other problem. Okay. When's she going for testing? It's good the state's paying for it. But you know we'd…' He listened for a while. 'Okay, call us with the results. You know we want to hear.'
After a couple more minutes of listening to this broken conversation, I was delighted when Tolliver finally hung up. 'What's going on?' I asked.
'A couple of things,' he said, frowning. 'That was almost a good conversation with Iona. Gracie's teacher thinks Gracie may have ADD. She recommended testing, and Iona's taking her this week. The state will pay for the testing, evidently.'
'I don't know anything about that,' I said, as if I could have been prepared for this. 'We'll have to look it up on the net.'
'She would have to take the drugs if she's got it, Iona says.'
'What are the side effects?'
'There are some, but Iona was more concentrating on the benefits. Evidently, Gracie's been pretty disruptive at school, and Iona wants some peace.'
'Don't we all. But if the side effects…'
We spent the rest of the evening on the Internet, reading articles about Attention Deficit Disorder and the drugs used to treat it. If this seems excessive or odd, consider this: Tolliver and Cameron and I had raised those girls from birth. My mother had been roused to try to take care of them when they were infants, but if it hadn't been for us, Mariella and Gracie wouldn't have eaten, or been changed, or learned how to count, or been read to. When Cameron had been snatched, Mariella had been only three and Gracie had been five. They'd gone to a preschool together for a few mornings a week, because we'd enrolled them and then told my mother they had to go. We'd gotten them to the preschool before we went to our own school, and all Mom had to do was remember to pick them up, which she usually did if we left her a note.
Here I was remembering, when that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
'Enough of this,' Tolliver said after a while, when we felt we knew a little bit about the disorder and the drugs used to treat it. 'We'll learn more when we know if she has it or not.'
I felt like I was drowning. I'd had no idea there were so many things that could go wrong with a child's learning processes. What happened to kids in the years before all these things were identified, and a course of treatment laid out?
'I guess they were labeled slow or difficult,' Tolliver said. 'And that was the end of it.'
That made me feel sad for all the kids who'd never had a fair shake, because their problems hadn't been understood. At the same time, we'd just read two articles about how parents were overmedicating their children for those same problems, so that even children who really did just have some disruptive personality traits were being dosed with drugs that shouldn't have been given them. It was just scary. I wondered if I'd ever have the nerve to have a baby myself. It didn't seem too likely. I'd have to trust my partner completely, to bring his child into the world. The only person I'd ever trusted that much was my brother Tolliver.
And the strangest thing happened as I had that thought. The world seemed to freeze for a minute.
It was like someone had thrown a giant switch in my head. Tolliver was turning away to go to his room, and I was getting up out of the chair I'd pulled over to the desk so I could read the screen on the laptop. I looked at Tolliver's back, and suddenly the world slid sideways and then realigned itself in a new configuration. I opened my mouth to say something, and then I closed it. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him. I didn't think I really wanted him to turn around.
He started to turn, and I bolted for my room.
I shut the door behind me and leaned against it.
'Harper? Is something wrong?' I heard his anxious voice on the other side of the door. I was in a total panic.
'No!'
'But you sound like something's wrong.'
'No! Don't come in!'
Tolliver's voice was a lot chillier the next time he spoke. 'All right.' And he moved away, going to his own room, I supposed.
I sank down to the floor.
I didn't know what to say to myself, how to treat someone as idiotic as me. I was poised in a perfect position to ruin the only thing I had in my life. One word, one wrong act, and it would all be gone. I would be humiliated forever, and I would have nothing.
I had one black moment in which I wondered if I should just go on and kill myself and have done with it. But my strong survival instinct rejected the fleeting notion even as it ran across my brain. If I'd lived through being hit by lightning, I could live through this new knowledge.
He must never know. I crawled across the floor to the bed; pulled myself up, lay prone across it. I planned the next week of my life in a few painful minutes, appalled at my own monstrous selfishness as I did so. Keeping Tolliver with me for one more minute was an awful thing to do.
But I couldn't let go, I argued with myself. If I suddenly shooed him away, he'd suspect something as sure as shooting. I just couldn't do it. In a week or so, when I could figure out the right way. Until then, hold myself carefully; guard my every action.
Life, which had seemed like such a rich crazy quilt laid out before me, suddenly assumed a grayer prospect. I climbed into the hotel bed, as I had climbed into hundreds of hotel beds.
I stared at the ceiling, at the bar of light from somewhere below that crossed it, at the bright red eye of the
