Mouse, Bear, Maggie, and I were in the gym. Maggie had begun doing gymnastics when she was small and had kept it up here and there after her original foster family had been massacred and she’d gone on her own healing journey in the Carpenter home. She liked to practice her basic tumbling, and Bear and I often set up the mats for her to work on when she was in on the weekends.
She went by me doing lazy-looking cartwheels. Bear had assured me that making it look that easy meant that my girl had real skill. I wasprobably feeling irrationally proud of her and figured that I was probably being a good father by doing so.
“So, he didn’t even say hello to me while he was here?” Maggie asked, as she went by in circles.
“I know, kid. I’m sorry. Thomas is hurting a lot right now.”
“But I made him pancakes,” she said. She came to her feet at the far end of the mat and crouched down to sink her hands into Mouse’s fur. That was the kind of thing she did when she was feeling her own demons haunting her.
Mouse came up on his forefeet and leaned his giant shaggy head gently on her shoulder, and she put her arms around him.
“I could make him more pancakes?” she asked, without looking up.
“You know what?” I said. “Give him a little time to rest up, and I’ll let him know you want to make him pancakes. Maybe you and he can have a nice breakfast morning sometime soon.”
She looked back at me uncertainly. “You think he’d like that?”
“Can’t think why he wouldn’t,” I said, more confidently than I felt. “Hey, how is Bonea doing?”
Maggie turned to face me, settling down, though she kept an arm around Mouse. “Oh, you know. She’s the smartest person I know and the dumbest person I know at the same time.” She frowned. “Is that mean? To say that?”
“Well,” I said, “you might be able to phrase it a little less harshly. But I can see how it’s basically true. She’s still kind of a baby.”
“Oh my God.” Maggie sighed. “Yeah, she wants little-kid stuff on YouTube, all the time, and then she won’t stop asking me questions about why things don’t match up to Newtonian physics.”
“It’s going to take several years for her to start putting things together,” I said. “Bob said he was almost forty before he really started understanding the world. But he’s over a thousand now, and I gotta be honest, he still only gets so much, you know? It’s not his fault. He just has a very different life than someone like you or me.”
Maggie frowned. “How?”
“He doesn’t have a body,” I said. “Doesn’t age. Doesn’t feel things or experience them the way we do. He doesn’t understand as much aboutpain, or fear, or being tired, or being hungry. He’s kind of…like Bugs Bunny, you know?”
“Who?” Maggie said.
I sighed and felt old. “A cartoon character whose antics are seen as much less appropriate for children lately.”
“Oh right.What’s up, doc?That guy?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
She frowned. “So even though Bonea knows everything, she doesn’t know anything.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And it’s going to take her a long time to learn. And some things she won’t ever get.”
“She’s a big help when I’m studying sometimes,” Maggie said. “Like, she can check my work in a second and a half.”
“Sure,” I said. “She has access to a lot of information. Just remember that she’s unaware of alotof things, too. So the information she does have has to be weighed carefully against what you know, what makes sense, all kinds of stuff like that. Don’t rely solely on Bonea, even though she really does want to help, and really does mean well. Look in lots of places. When you look for what’s true, the truth tends to line up over and over, and that’s a good place to start. After that, it gets a lot dicier.”
“That’s…confusing,” Maggie said.
“Welcome to the world, kid,” I said gently.
“My teachers just tell me to follow the textbook.”
“You’re young. That’s probably not a bad way to start.”
“And it gets less confusing?” she said hopefully.
I thought about that one for a minute. “The confusing part gets less scary,” I said. “Mostly, the answer to lots of questions in your life is going to be ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t be afraid to say that, ever, especially to yourself. Then you’re free to go look for answers. Sometimes they’re hard to find. There’s a lot of easy answers and they often aren’t very good ones. But it’s okay to not know things.”
