Chapter Eighteen

“I don’t like those pills, Mond,” the boy said. “I don’t know what they do, really, but I know they’re not... not good for me.”

“Don’t they help with your headaches?” she asked.

“Yeah, they stop the pain, but they stop everything.”

“But the headaches were really bad for you. Remember how you used to scream at night because they hurt so badly? You don’t do that anymore, do you?”

“No,” he said. “I guess you’re right.”

Tamara leaned away from the door with a smile. Mond was defending her. The boy couldn’t stop her now that Mond was on her side; he wouldn’t dare try. He wouldn’t want to.

She crept down the hall into her own room and closed the door behind her before turning on the light. She crossed to the desk and pulled out the chair to sit. The little brown book in the top drawer had a red ribbon sticking out the bottom of it; she opened it to that page — a blank one — and pulled the fountain pen out of its holder next to the notepad.

She recounted her day minute for minute, detailing the mundane without attempting to romanticize it. She described the unforeseeable progress Mond was making in her chess game, how she’d mastered the Sicilian defense, Dragon Variation and how, without cheating and telling Mond that there were better moves she could make, even Tamara was having a hard time escaping her traps. They played the games verbally and Mond had surprisingly little trouble keeping mental track of what the board looked like. One day, she would wise up and they would have to stop playing; Tamara would have nothing further to teach her.

At this point, her pen stopped, poised over a new line. Tamara pondered the unsettling truth of the last sentence. So many of the things Tamara was teaching Mond were having to end too quickly, as Mond was learning them too quickly and at too advanced a level for Tamara to keep up her role as instructor. Would there eventually come a time when Mond would have to leave, go to some sort of academy so more learned people could give her more sophisticated lessons? Tamara shuddered and put the thought out of her mind. Their tutoring sessions were going so well, and they meant everything to Tamara. She couldn’t imagine giving her daughter up to let some strangers fill her mind with things she didn’t herself know.

She continued writing. She included a dry list of all the ingredients she had put in the dinner salad, the new dosage she had parceled out for the boy, and then came to the conversation she had eavesdropped on just a few moments before.

Then she came to the bottom of the page. She couldn’t think of anything further to write, elaborating on her day. So she added the line, “Tomorrow, Mond will learn to dance.”