Chapter Twenty-One

Tamara massaged her temples, breathing deeply, concentrating on the rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest.

“Why are they giving me so much trouble?” she asked herself, trying not to focus on the negative energy she could feel herself exuding. “Where can I improve my own actions to make the whole situation better?”

She felt like she was in a self-help program.

The main problem had come when the boy randomly turned up in the kitchen during Mond’s mathematics lesson one room over. Tamara had been demonstrating a few simple derivative equations when she heard the pantry door open and close. She handed the chalk and slate to Mond and told her to continue working on the example problems while she went to investigate the origin of the noise.

What she found in the kitchen nearly made her vomit. The boy, wearing nothing but the drool-encrusted blanket he’d been sleeping with for the past three weeks wrapped precariously around him, was sticking his head into the pantry, covering his face with confectioner’s sugar and rubbing unpeeled banana mush all over his body. When he heard her come in, he looked up and grinned stupidly, his dark yellow and disgusting, his eyes red and swollen. He laughed a low and slow laugh, and began slapping his arms, making the pasty substance fly off him in little chunks.

Tamara had nearly kicked him right there, wishing she had the stomach to just kill the boy and be done with it. And the visual of his soiled face and revolting garb would have been enough to push her over the edge in that moment, but then Mond walked into the room.

“Boy? Is that you? I can hear you. What are you doing?” she asked. She ran to him and put out her hand, wiping the tips of her fingers against his coated chest. “What happened to you?” she gasped. “Why... what is that smell?”

Tamara had successfully kept them from seeing each other for the past two weeks, and as such, she had stopped really caring about the boy’s hygiene or appearance, as it had all been a façade for Mond’s sake anyway.

Mond turned like lightning to look up at Tamara. Her startling milky eyes didn’t meet Tamara’s but the fury and hatred clearly visible on her face frightened Tamara. She envisioned the past few months of mother-daughter bonding attempts slipping away, as if down a bottomless pipe.

“Fix it,” Mond ordered. “Make him better.”

“It looks like he hasn’t been taking his medicine correctly, Mond,” Tamara said. “I didn’t realize—”

“You’re lying,” Mond said, her voice high, with a texture like gravel tossed on cement. “You’ve kept him from me so I wouldn’t see, and those medicines are making him like this. Fix it. Now.”

Tamara, speechless, and feeling practically breathless as well, caught off her guard by the ferocity of Mond’s words and the harsh expression on her face, stood stupidly slouching and still.

“Fix it!” Mond yelled. Her voice was unnaturally loud, even for an adult male four or five times her size, and Tamara thought he saw a flash of red glint across her eyes.

Tamara grabbed the boy’s arms, coating the palms of her hands in crusty banana paste. She began pulling him towards the stairs, planning on throwing him into a hot bath and soaking his blanket in a tub for a day or so, and he fought her every step. He mumbled and growled incoherently; Tamara felt like she was pulling teeth from the mouth of a loud and confused buffalo. Mond followed them both up the stairs and tended to the boy as Tamara struggled to set up the water. Tamara tried to protest, tried to hide the boy’s nakedness from Mond, even though she had sightless eyes, but Mond gave her a look that had a hint of death and suffering, and Tamara instinctually fled from it.

The cleaning of both blanket and boy took several hours, and when he was finally back into a bed with clean linens and Tamara and Mond were ready to return to the math lesson, Mond was beyond her ability to pay attention. She spent the rest of the light of day asking Tamara questions about the medications the boy was taking and why Tamara insisted he take them.

“They help him with his headaches,” Tamara kept saying. “They were hurting him so badly, and I remember when his mother had a similar issue, so I asked a doctor and he told me that these pills would help.”

“Why was he so messy, then? What about them makes him be so... dirty?”

“That has nothing to do with his medicine, Mond,” Tamara said. Not that the girl had calmed down, she seemed more amenable to believing what Tamara had to say. “That’s just how he is. He’s not like you and me. He’s more like a... like an animal or a monster.”

Mond looked crushed when Tamara said this. Her face slowly fell until every emotion but concern and despair had left it. Her eyes, though nondescript in and of themselves, were much more expressive than any other eyes Tamara had seen. Sometimes Tamara saw feelings deep within them that she could not understand.

“A... monster?” Mond asked. “What does that mean? How can he be anything different than I am?”

“You’re a smart girl, Mond,” Tamara said. “Think about the differences between him and you. He doesn’t take these classes with you because he’s not as intelligent. He gets sick more easily than you do and is not as talented or as good looking as you are.”

“I don’t think he’s bad looking,” Mond said. “That’s not any way to judge someone objectively.”

“You can’t see him, Mond. You can’t know what he looks like. He’s hideous, like a dog or a horse, not a human like you and I.”

None of this was true, but Tamara knew she was dancing on a taught string now, and the only way she could safely herd Mond back to her side of the field was to make the boy an untouchable, therefore taking the merit out of everything he said or did.

“I haven’t seen him with my eyes,” Mond said thoughtfully, “but I think I know what he looks like. It’s like I’ve felt his presence so often that I’ve assigned a visual component...”

She continued to talk, to theorize about her relationship with the boy and what it was based on, what her blindness subtracted from or added to it and what his abstractness, as she called it, subtracted from or added to it.

But Tamara stopped paying attention. She was caught up in the fear that bubbled under the surface as Mond described the boy. They had grown closer than she had seen or guessed. How much did Mond know about him, and how much did he know about her? How much had they interacted; was it to the point where nothing she said to Mond was safe from his ears? If they were passing secrets back and forth, Tamara could never be sure of her bond with Mond, because she would never be able to know if the boy was coming between them. She would have to do a lot of deconstructive work to get Mond to pull loyalty away from him.

Tamara hadn’t imagined there would be so much politics in raising children. Mond was only six-years-old. How was it possible she was already so complex?

“It’s not enough to say I haven’t seen him, you see,” she was saying when Tamara tuned back in. “I haven’t seen him like you have, perhaps, but I know he is not a ‘monster,’ as you say he is.”

“Have you considered the possibility that he is a master of deception?” Tamara suggested, choosing her words closely. “That he can imitate a creature deserving of your sympathy so thoroughly as to fool you into caring about him in the way that you do?”

Mond seemed to chew on this for a moment before speaking again. “If that is the case, how have you managed to remain undeceived?”

The question took Tamara by surprise. It wasn’t as though she hid her dislike for the boy — to do so would have been nearly impossible, not to mention very taxing on her emotions — but she had hoped that Mond would connect it with necessity, with the monster she had been portraying him as.

“I... it’s hard sometimes,” Tamara lied. “I find myself overly empathetic, too, on some days. But then I remember that he killed his mother, my sister, and I strike those feelings from my heart.”

How many times had she driven that point home? How many times had she called him a murderer? It made her feel like some sort of activist every time she said it, and the feeling never got old.

“How did your sister die?” Mond asked for the first time.

Again, Tamara found herself having to sift through her thoughts to find the correct ones to say out loud. “It was a slow... a slow, painful process,” she said. “Over the months that she was pregnant with the boy, he sapped her first of all her energy, youth, and life, until, in the third month, she was bedridden entirely, and then he attacked her brain, draining her personality and intellect until she was an empty shell, broken, a shattered image of the woman she had once been.”

“How do you know that it was his fault?” Mond asked. “Maybe your sister was unfit to carry a baby. Do you have any conclusive proof that another baby would have behaved differently?”

Tamara felt as though she had been slapped in the face. In the long time since her sister’s death, no one had ever come close to insulting her memory, and aside from the boy’s mere existence, nothing had dredged up the pain from those nine long months. Mond, just then, had done worse damage in one short sentence than anyone else had done in four years.

“My sister was not ‘unfit’ for anything,” Tamara said, keeping her calm. “The doctors couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it, and she couldn’t understand it. There was nothing wrong with my sister that would cause her body to do that to itself naturally.”

Mond looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re deceived by some force, Tamara, just as you suggest I am deceived by the boy. Maybe your sister deceived you.”

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Again, more stuff I'm going to have to fix later, like my changed tense in the middle there. Also, unpublished here was Tamara's recitation of a Sociology textbook.