To Paradise

So far, though, there’s been no one. I still can’t tell how much she comprehends about what she doesn’t comprehend, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I fear that I’ve been fooling myself, that I’m searching for a humanity within her that’s been wiped out entirely. Then she’ll say something astonishingly perceptive, so insightful that I become horrified that she might have sensed I ever doubted her humanness. Once, she asked me if I had liked her better before she got sick, and I felt as if someone had socked me in my solar plexus, and had to grab her and hold her to me so she couldn’t see my expression. “No,” I told her. “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way.” What I couldn’t say, because it would confuse her, or sound too much like an insult, is that I loved her now more than I had; that my love for her was terrible because it was more ferocious, that it was something dark and seething, a misshapen mass of energy.

At the school, the dean reviewed with me a list of three math-and-sciences colleges she thought might be appropriate for Charlie: all within two hours of the city, all small and well-defended. All three guaranteed their graduates employment in a Grade Three or higher facility. The most expensive of these colleges was for females only, and this was the one I chose for Charlie.

The dean made a note. Then she paused. “Most Grade One state employees opt for twenty-four-hour security for their children,” she said. “Would you like to use the college’s service, or continue your own?”

“I’ll continue with my own,” I said. The state, at least, would pay for that.

We discussed a few more details, and then the dean stood. “Charlie will be finished with her last class,” she said. “Shall I get her and you two can go home together?” I told her I’d like that, and she left her office to tell her assistant.

As she did, I stood and looked at the photographs of her students which hung on her wall. There are four all-girl private schools left in the city; this one is the smallest, and attracts what the school calls “studious” girls, though the word is a euphemism, as not all of them are especially academically gifted. Rather, the word is meant to convey their charges’ fundamental shyness, their “delayed sociability,” as the school calls it.

The dean returned with Charlie, and we said goodbye and walked out. “Home?” I asked, once we were in the car, “Or a treat?”

She thought. “Home,” she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she has an additional life-skills tutorial class, where she works with a psychologist on verbal and nonverbal communication. This always leaves her tired, and she leaned her head against the seat and closed her eyes, both because she was genuinely depleted and, I think, because she wanted to avoid the questions she knew I’d ask and which she would struggle to answer: What happened in school today? How was music class? What did you listen to? How did the music make you feel? What do you think the musician was trying to say? What was your favorite part of the composition, and why?

“Grandfather,” she’d say, frustrated, “I don’t know how to answer you.”

“You do know, little cat,” I’d say. “And you’re doing so well.”

More and more, I wonder what her adulthood will be like. For the first three years after she recovered from the illness, my only concern was keeping her alive: I monitored how much she ate, how much she slept, the whites of her eyes, the pink of her tongue. Then, after the first incident with the boys, I thought mostly of protecting her, though that surveillance was more complicated, since it relied as much on my oversight as it did on hoping she understood whom she could trust, and whom she couldn’t. Obedience would ensure her survival, but had I trained her to be too obedient?

Then, after the second incident, I began to think about how she would continue through her life—how I could defend her from people who tried to take advantage of her; how she might live after I die. I had always assumed that she would be with me for her entire life, even as I always knew as well that it wouldn’t be the entirety of her life that she would be with me but the entirety of mine. Now I am nearly seventy-seven, and she is seventeen, and even if I live another ten years—if I don’t die myself, or if I’m not disappeared, like C.—I’ll still leave her with decades of her own to contend with.