The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

a fucking liar,” Kay says. “Same as you. If I take his job, it won’t be for him. It’ll be for her.”

There’s a thread hanging from this, a loose bit of yarn. Avi’s smart enough not to tug at it. The gin sluices through his brain, moving him forward when he knows better. He pulls.

“Will you stay with me?” he says. “For her?”

It’s cheap and low. As soon as the words are out, he wants them back. Kay shakes her head.

“Not even for her,” she says.

—

They never have a conversation about it. The literature Bishop left with her disappears from the kitchen counter. It included not just the glossy bullshit meant to comfort parents and hide what their children had become but stuff Avi believed he’d been given special access to for his work. Once it’s gone, he expects they’ll have the talk. He looks forward to it. He and Kay have so much in common now. So many of the same fears. Together, they can weigh the dangers of sending her to Bishop against the dangers of not sending her. They can assess what they can give her and what they’re able to protect her from. She’ll have to forgive me now that we’re both terrified, he thinks.

But they don’t talk. Avi gets caught up with interviews and other things. There is an entirely new world to explore and report back from. People look to him to tell them what to think and how to feel. And Kay’s work is ceaseless. He remembers when she was deciding whether to take the job at a firm that handled immigration cases. Shouldn’t I pick a fight I can win? she asked him. He loved that about her, her willingness to engage in a never-ending battle.

One day he gets home and finds a letter on the kitchen counter in with the bills and the mortgage statement and every other insignificant thing that shows up in the mailbox like trash pitched up on shore by the tides. It’s open, addressed to Emmeline: “Dear Miss Hirsch. We are thrilled to welcome you.”

Kay comes into the kitchen and watches as he reads it. Her glass of wine is half empty. They have nothing to say to each other. It’s already done.

Bright winter sun through the hotel blinds casts a ladder of shadow and light across them, and the Hirsches take their waking slowly. Avi stares at the ceiling, listening to his wife and daughter breathe. It’s like a race: Emmeline a constant step behind. Kay slips out of the bed she and Emmeline slept in and sneaks into the bathroom. When the door shuts, Avi puts on his prosthetic. Emmeline rolls onto her elbow and watches from the other bed. She studies him, a little Buddha. Avi thinks of father-son stereotypes, the things you’re supposed to teach a boy-child. If Emmeline had been a boy, would she have stood next to him, examining his reflection as he shaved? Would Avi have shown her how to tie a tie, struggling to mirror the ingrained motions as he formed the knot around her neck? When Emmeline was two days old, lying between them in the bed, Avi whispered to Kay, “There’s nothing she can learn from me.” Kay assured him it wasn’t true. But Avi’s been proved right. There’s so much she needs to know and so little Avi can give her except to leave her in the hands of those more capable.

“You ready for this?” he asks her.

“No,” she says. “I want to go home.”

They haven’t told her how impossible that is. She doesn’t know the negotiations that went on while she spent her last few days at her old school in Rogers Park. The house on Jarvis Avenue is up for rent. Neither Avi nor Kay can afford to buy the other out, and Avi refuses to sell. His refusal isn’t based in faith that this will work out so much as inability to accept that it won’t. His dreams are haunted by bombs in reverse: fiery shrapnel reassembles itself into a car, broken bones knit, and rent skin heals, scarless. He called Fahima in the middle of the night to ask if it would be possible for a Resonant to move time backward.

“That’s not how time works,” she said. “Everything that’s happened has happened.” He could hear her girlfriend breathing in the background. Whatever fight they’d needed to have had been weathered. At least some wounds could heal.

Avi crosses the divide between the beds. The prosthetic gives an extra click, the leg setting into the socket at an angle that’s not quite right. He ignores it and sits down next to Emmeline. He promised Kay he won’t tell her anything. They haven’t sat down to talk with Emmeline together. Kay insists that Avi wants to tell her so he can seem like the one who’s open and honest when he’s been lying the whole time. She’s right. The saddest part is that their marriage is reduced to winning and losing. Their language now is silences and secrets.

“You’ll make friends,” he says.

“You always say that, and I never do.”

“You’ll be with kids like you,” Avi says. He wonders if Emmeline will have things in common with the students at Bishop because they all have abilities. The other kids may not read as often or as deeply as Emmeline. They may not love to draw. Regardless of the fact that they can move objects with their minds or create protective shells around themselves, the girls may be into dolls or makeup, things in which Emmeline’s never shown interest. What keeps Emmeline apart from her peers may not be her abilities but the person she is, the million ways she’s different. Everything Avi loves about her may make her a target. Bishop Academy may be full of kids with fantastic abilities who are otherwise dull as paint, perfectly normal.

“Maybe my ability will be I can fix