The Submission - Amy Waldman [71]
“Not lately,” she said with a vague smile. “You?”
“I told you about the surgeon, right?”
“Only three times,” Claire teased gently.
They were laughing when William showed up on the verge of tears. “Mommy, they won’t let me play the fireman.” Claire tousled his head. “William is obsessed with firemen,” she told Nell. “His sheets. His pajamas. His Halloween costumes. I keep trying to propose new obsessions: no luck so far.” Nell smiled at William with a sympathy Claire feared she herself had failed to demonstrate. Then Nell excused herself to go check on her own kids, saying, “They’re probably the reason we need a fireman in the first place.”
Claire knelt before William. “What happened? Don’t you want to play something else? Why did they say you couldn’t be the fireman?” He wouldn’t meet her eyes, which was unlike him, and when she took him on her lap he began to cry. Around them the party for the “Heroes’ Kids” was in full swing, and the microphones and cameras were roving—she saw one hesitate near her, then move on, sense enough at least to leave a crying child alone. “What’s wrong, William?” she asked again. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“They said I couldn’t be the fireman because of you.”
“Who said?”
“Timmy and Jimmy.”
The Hansen twins. Bulky, ruddy-faced redheads. Bullies, she considered them. At a birthday party she had seen them asking Bozo the Clown how much he earned as their mother pretended not to hear and the clown’s runny mouth turned down farther in response. But they were also only eight years old. She knew children lived between the poles of invention and imitation. They had to have gotten this idea from their parents. At least they hadn’t made William play a terrorist.
“And they said what, exactly?”
“That you like the bad guys. So I can’t play the good guy. Do you? Do you like the bad guys?”
“Of course not,” she said, kissing his head. “They’re mixed up.” She asked William to check on Penelope, who with a half dozen girls was keeping vigil by the uncut cake, and went to track down Jane Hansen. She lived in New Jersey and still looked like the sorority president she had once been. All of her features, even her up-do, looked chiseled.
“Your boys seem to be giving William a hard time because of some idea they have of me,” Claire said, not bothering with hello. “Where would they possibly come up with something like that?”
“How should I know?” Jane said. “They have minds of their own, unfortunately.”
“Come on,” Claire said. “He’s six. He lost his father.”
“Didn’t they all,” Jane said evenly, looking not at Claire’s eyes but at the roots of her hair, as if trying to ascertain its true color.
“Leave it,” said the voice in Claire’s head, but her actual voice said, “If you have something to say, say it to me. Your children need to learn how to behave.”
“Did it ever occur to you that my boys behave the way they do because of what happened?” Jane asked. “I’m not going to pretend they were angels before, but they were a lot easier. They’re different kids.” Claire felt an unwelcome twinge of recognition. She often wondered what William would have been like if he hadn’t lost his father. Less petulant, maybe; more carefree.
“Hundreds of hours of counseling,” Jane was saying, “and now I need to feed them a bunch of crap about how America is such a great country that it let the very people who murdered their father design a memorial to him? An Islamic garden, no less.”
“But it’s not the same people—that’s the point,” Claire said. “And there’s no proof the garden is Islamic. If it is, it could be benign. A gesture of peace, even.”
“You try explaining that to an eight-year-old. Or have you? Have you given William your little civics lesson?”
William was suddenly behind her. Or maybe he had been there all along. What had he heard? “Where’s your sister?” she asked.
“With-the-girls-at-the-cake,” he said, running all the words together. And, although Claire hadn’t asked: “She’s fine.” His feet were planted in place. His expression,