And a clean shirt, he thought, pulling the wrinkled, bloodied one over his head.
“Have you had the chicken pox?” Dinah asked, watching the progress of his shirt closely.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Twice.”
“Mr. Reed,” Winston said quietly as he stood by while Roland pushed himself to his feet and looked about for his shoes. “Doyouthink the sun is bigger than the moon?”
He managed to get himself situated into the nursery before the real bustle began downstairs, though Mae poked her head in as soon as she arrived, her eyes narrowed like she was half convinced he had absconded into the streets the instant her back was turned.
“Oh,” she said, upon finding him seated with four children, two of whom were dotted with oatmeal salve over their pox. They were huddled together watching as Roland drew out the surrounding blocks on a spool of butcher’s paper, tested them on the street names, and pointed out where the shortcuts were.
She blinked a couple of times, her eyes lingering on the pink chalk between his fingers for a moment. “All right.”
And then she was gone before he could respond.
Winston was pulled away to assist Dinah with making more of the oatmeal paste at one point, and then to shake up a jug of yellow “sunshine drink” that appeared to be a sort of barley tea meant to keep the children enthusiastic about remaining hydrated.
By midday, he was ready to crawl out the window and down the walls to get back to his work, but as though his body was aware of these mutinous thoughts, his wound would sting and radiate a glowing aura of phantom heat every time he humored the mental picture a little too vividly.
Around the time his clean clothes arrived, Mae came up to the nursery to inspect and re-dress the wound itself, clicking her tongue in approval at its bubbled and objectively hideous appearance as she dabbed a bit of waxy ointment over it before wrapping it up again.
“I was hoping for the cloves,” he said to her, watching the top of her head as she tied the end of the linen gauze into a knot. “Or something numbing.”
“Not yet,” she answered, glancing up at him through her lashes with half a smile. “But I can give you something to drink if you want to ease the pain.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ll just try to stay still.”
“Don’t be a martyr,” she told him, and sent up a glass of something silvery with herbs floating in it.
As soon as he finished drinking it, Rosalind Everly walked in, took one look at the glass, and giggled to herself.
“Ah,” she said. “Hope you’re in the mood for a nap, Mr. Reed.”
“I do not nap,” he replied, only to find out in short order that he actually loved naps more than anything else on this earth.
As he drifted, leaning against one of the children’s cots in the rear corner, sunlight streaming in over his lap, he watched Rosalind arrange a series of toys into a rough approximation of the solar system as the children gathered around her for an impromptu lesson on the heavens.
“But why does itlookbigger?” Winston demanded at one point.
“Because it’s closer, love,” she answered. “Look at wee Rachel standing here in front of you and Mr. Reed back there a-snooze. Rachellooksbigger, doesn’t she? But you know she isn’t.”
Reed tried to open his eyes to regard this Rachel in question but found he could not do so, so instead was forced to be content listening to a rudimentary explanation of gravity and orbits as Rosalind rotated the toys around a punctured ball that was standing in for the sun.
“And sometimes,” she said, “wee bits of rock might come too close to a big planet, like this one, and get sucked into its orbit. There they will stay forever, just as though they always were part of its array.”
Roland felt himself drifting, much like a little space rock that had been inadvertently pulled into some rogue planet’s orbit.
He was twelve again and rough-housing with Tod and Matthew in the Holy Comfort garden while Reverend Everly watched fondly from the window.
He was seven years old and gasping for breath through tears as Thaddeus Beck’s mother stitched up the gash in his bicep, awound taken to protect Roland from a lecher. Quietly, next to him, a chubby little Vix took his hand and squeezed it.
He was fourteen and red-faced as a brothel patron attempted to corner him, only to be distracted and deflected by Aristotle, who seemed perfectly charming and pleasant. Utterly unbothered and serene, if one did not know from the red flush under the freckles on his throat that he was enraged.
He was seventeen and introducing Sybil to the artists in Soho Commons, her little charcoal book wrinkled and clutched like a buoy in a storm.
He was himself. Now and then and otherwise, and his arm was bleeding where a man had just bit it. He had just seen Mae Casper’s face for the first time. He had just seen her and everything had changed.
His arm itched, but he could not lift his other hand to scratch it.
