It wasn’t Maisie, but Grant, shaking in the hall outside the guest bath.
“What is it? Your mom? Your dad? Another tooth? What happened?” Patrick crouched down to put his arm around his nephew’s shoulders. He followed the boy’s gaze into the bathroom. “Do you need to use the potty again?” They had been through this once before bed. Grant said he usually had help “wiping” and Patrick stood back aghast; it was something Patrick didn’t even do for himself since he installed two eleven-thousand-dollar Japanese toilets (sorry, washlets) he’d read about in Consumer Reports.
“The toilet . . . moved.”
“What do you mean it moved?” He didn’t have the clearest view from his vantage point, but it seemed to be exactly in the place that it should be.
“The lid.” Grant finally mustered the courage to look at his uncle. “There’s a ghost.”
Up until now, their first night had mostly been a success. The kids were enamored with the house (“You have a hot tub?!”) and made themselves more or less at home. There was some awkwardness with their bedtime routine. Maisie thankfully showered herself, but Grant insisted on a bath, while bemoaning the lack of bath toys (the pool noodles Patrick had were too large for the tub), and there was a small meltdown about their uncle’s baking soda toothpaste being too paste-y. (He argued that children’s toothpastes with their bright colors and bold flavors probably caused cavities, but relented, saying he would buy one specifically labeled for kids.) Maisie and Grant agreed to share a guest room, at least to start, and Patrick laid in the king-sized bed with them, improvising an elaborate story about a roadrunner and a jackrabbit named Meep and Moop and their adventures in the desert. The kids complained about the metal sculpture that hung over the bed; it was too angular and Grant feigned a fear of rectangles. Neither of them knew their sleep numbers, laying waste to the guest mattress’s smartest feature, but eventually, exhausted from the day, they all nodded off. At some point before midnight Patrick awoke and extracted himself, even though he was surprised to find sharing was not horrifically unpleasant.
“Oh, no, no, no, Grant. It does that. The toilet. When you get close to it, the lid rises automatically. That’s what it does. It’s called a feature. You pay extra for those.”
“But there was a light inside.” Grant leaned in to whisper in his uncle’s ear. “Glowing.” He was clinging to his conviction that there was some otherworldly presence at play.
“A night-light. Isn’t that great? So if you have to use the bathroom in the night, you don’t have to blind yourself with the overhead light.”
“It’th not from another dimenthion?”
Dimension? Where do they learn these things? “No. Well, yes. But only Japan.” Patrick ran his fingers through the boy’s hair. “Where’s your sister? I suppose she’s awake, too?”
Maisie’s face appeared around the door, like she was one of the von Trapp children in a thunderstorm. Patrick bit his lip. God help him if he had to do a verse of “My Favorite Things.”
“Come here. I want to show you everything that my new washlet can do.”
Maisie crept forward in her cat pajamas. “What’s a washlet?”
“Well, it’s like a toilet. But better.”
“How do you know it’s better?”
“Because it’s Japanese and it cost more than my first car. Look, watch what it does.” Patrick stood up and approached the washlet. When he got close enough to trigger the sensor, the lid softly rose.
Maisie said, “Whoa,” while Grant still looked on with skepticism.
“And that’s not all. Check this out.” Patrick opened the drawer to the high-gloss floating sink cabinet and produced a remote control. The toilet lid lowered itself.
“Is that for the toilet?” Maisie asked.
“No, it’s for the washlet.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, if I have to explain it to you!” Patrick threw his arms up, exasperated. “First, there’s the sleek, porcelain design. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“It looks like you keep dinosaur eggs inside,” Grant observed. And it strangely made sense.
“Yeah. Isn’t it great? It has ionized water, a UV light, music speakers, a heated seat, the aforementioned night-light to guide your way in the dark, and a twelve-setting wash and dry feature with”—he waved the remote in his hand to end with a flourish—“remote control. Ta-daa!” Maybe he could rewrite the song with his own favorite things. He sang to himself: Ionized water in remote-sensored washlets.
“It does laundry?” Maisie was confused.
“What? No. That’s disgusting.”
“But you said washer and dryer.”
“Wash and dry feature,” Patrick corrected.
“What does it wash and dry?”
“YOU! Isn’t that fantastic?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” He handed Maisie the remote so that she could see it and Grant nuzzled into her side to get a good look himself. The remote was covered in illustrated buttons; some, including one with an aggressive swirl that looked like a symbol the Weather Channel might employ for a Category 5 hurricane, Patrick hadn’t yet dare try. “Well, truth be told, I don’t understand all of it. That button right there looks needlessly hostile, and I think I read in the manual that this other one is for ‘front cleaning,’ and I don’t think that applies to boys. But you can give it a whirl and report back.”
“I have to pee.”
Patrick looked down at his nephew, who was holding his crotch. Of course. This whole midnight powwow was precipitated by something.
“Step right up, boy!” he said, summoning his best carnival barker, a sort of Pee Pee Barnum.
“Will you wait right here?” All this explanation and the boy was still scared. Patrick vowed to show him the issue of Consumer Reports so Grant
