But that was between Silas and his sister. Not me, because I wasn’t Octavia’s mother and I also wasn’t Lyra’s. I didn’t want to take on that role for either of them, although they both needed it, but I had always thought that I’d besomeone’smom. I had thought that Dax and I would have kids, and I had planned out their names just like I had planned our wedding. I hadn’t done anything concrete for that event, though, because you couldn’t put down deposits unless you had a date.
And as for kids, I had considered becoming pregnant without the wedding, but I’d held back on that. Something had told me to wait and now…now I was glad. Kind of. I would have liked to have his baby, or at least, I would have liked to have my own baby.
“Camille?” A knock on the bathroom door accompanied Silas saying my name.
“I’m in the shower,” I called back.
“Can I come in and talk to you?”
“I’m in the shower!” I repeated, which meant nothing to him and these darn doors didn’t have locks.
“I’m not looking,” he said as he entered. “I don’t want Lyra to listen and she’s busy downstairs.”
“What part of ‘no’ do you not get?” I asked as I frantically tried to stretch the curtain to cover any gaps where he could see in.
“Did you say no? I thought you were telling me what was happening, why you couldn’t open the door. I’m really not trying to sneak a peek,” he told me, and it was true that he hadn’t expressed any interest since I’d shown up here. It had made me slightly nervous to think that we were sharing this house but he hadn’t looked at me twice, not in that way.
I heard the old toilet creak as he must have sat on its lid, and the shower curtain ruffled a little with his movement. This wasn’t a big bathroom so he was very close, and I held a washcloth over my breasts to shield them. “What do you want?” I asked.
“I wanted to say that I didn’t mean to contradict you about Lyra. I didn’t get your point at first, and that was why I argued. You’re right about jumping to conclusions about someone but actually, I know from experience that Mrs. Alford is a real—”
“Why don’t you practice saying something besides cusswords? You know that your sister is repeating them at school.” Wehad gone over the list of Lyra’s problems more specifically and he’d let me read emails from her teacher and principal the year before, when she’d been in first grade. Her bad language was showing up in the classroom and on the playground, and they didn’t like it. Neither did I.
“I was going to say that Mrs. Alford is a real piece of work,” he told me. “She lives in that house with her grandson and they’re both…they’re both meanies. Is that better?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“Are you washing your hair?” I heard him inhale deeply. “Mmm,” he murmured.
“Are you sitting there smelling my shampoo?”
“I like the scent of it,” he said. “Is that what my sister is using, too?”
“I hope so. I hid the two-in-one stuff you had put in here because she needs separate conditioner, and then I pretended to talk on the phone to a friend about how to apply it.” I gave up on covering myself with the washcloth and started to rinse out my hair.
“You had to do that, since Lyra won’t listen if you say things to her directly.” Even with the water running over my ears, now I heard him sigh.
“It’s hard to listen to a stranger, and I know that from experience,” I answered. “I’m not holding anything against your sister but I do get irked at you. If you disagree about somethingI’m saying, come tell me quietly unless you really believe that it’s harmful.”
“Like you might be explaining how to hotwire a car. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that, not until she’s older.” I didn’t bother to respond and he sighed again. “I made a dumb joke but I understand what you’re getting at, ok? I understand that.”
“Good, because she’s already thinking that everything that comes out of my mouth is wrong, and that won’t get better if you keep reinforcing it.” I smoothed the conditioner into the ends of my hair and then used my comb to gently separate it. I had told my “friend on the phone” about how to do that, and the next morning, Lyra’s hair had looked a lot smoother and smaller.
“She showed up here four years ago, when she was three,” he said. “She was like a tornado, running around naked and breaking shit.”
“Naked?” I repeated, and looked down at myself. I started to quickly wash.
“Yeah, because she hardly had any clothes to wear. She ate with her hands, and I didn’t mind too much, but she’d never even tried to use forks and spoons before.”
“How did you get her to do that?” I rinsed my hair again.
“I showed her. You know, like, ‘Can you hold it here by the handle? Now can you put it in your mouth?’” I could see the shadow of his movement as if he was pantomiming that again. “I got her clothes and explained about having to wear them.”
“Ok, so now…what?” I asked. I turned off the water and put my arm around the shower curtain to feel for my towel. “You think that you’ve done enough, and she doesn’t need to learn anymore?”
“No!” he told me, and he sounded angry. “That was why I wanted you to be her mentor, so that she could keep learning.”
“Then why do you always stop me from teaching…where is the towel?”
