Mama and Kate are hiding under the kitchen table. A linen tablecloth is hanging off the side. They’re sitting on two sofa cushions, and Kate has propped up the third one between them as a door. They’re slowly eating peanut butter cookies, feeling a little embarrassed of each one they take after the first one. The air is warm. They go on breathing each other’s breath.
It makes Mama think of Kate’s funeral. There were cookies people were too shy to eat and a lot of soft lighting. It was eighty degrees in the chapel because nobody wanted to be reminded of feeling cold outside in winter.
“I know,” says Kate. “Let’s tell secrets.”
“What kind of secrets?” Mama asks. Weird, hearing Kate suggest things for them to do. Mama’s the one who baked the cookies and built the fort. Kate usually sits at the table and smiles gently and waits for things to be brought to her. But it was Kate who made the door, this time. Is she working up to something?
“About things we stole, or did wrong. Or just about feelings. The rule is it has to be something you’ve never said out loud before.”
Independent extrapolation. Mama’s hand shakes slightly as she reaches for another cookie.
“Are you going first?”
“Yes. Because it’s my birthday.” It’s always Kate’s birthday. Or Christmas. Once in a while it’s the day of her school play, and she wears a pink party dress and is asked to spin straw into gold.
She says, “I used to go into Ella’s room and take her Halloween candy. Every year I told myself I wouldn’t do it again, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was there in her closet in a plastic pumpkin, jumbled up so that she wouldn’t be able to tell if one piece was missing.”
Rote. Last night while massaging cookie dough into balls, Mama remembered all the Halloweens, how Kate ate her whole bag of candy right away and then wanted more. She made Kate remember too. More data can only help, right? Especially about clandestine activities.
“Your turn.”
Sun’s going down. Glare shines through the heat-trapping polycarbonate panes in the French doors, lighting up the white kitchen tile and making the pillow fort even warmer. A sudden ache in the arch of Mama’s foot causes her to shift on her cushion. She thinks about cracking open one of the doors to let a little breeze through. “I don’t want to scare you,” she says.
“I’m already scared.”
Mama looks up from her feet. Usually, there’s a pause before unique responses while the algorithm works. Scared. They’ve never talked about this before. She clears her throat, tongue coated with sugar granules.
“Of what?”
Kate doesn’t look scared. Never once looked scared in the source material, not even stage fright.
“Of you,” she says. “Or of me.” She has on her birthday smile. It is a smile of mystery and maturity, one that shows how much wiser, how much more patient, this year’s Kate is. That’s what Mama always thought. Now she’s seeing it differently. Noticing the flatness of it. She clutches the tile floor with her bare toes. Her feet are too cold and the rest of her is too warm. She thinks she might be suffocating just a little.
“It’s like I have these memories. But I’m not thinking about them. I’m made up of them. I’m made up of scenes. I’m unwrapping presents, I’m saying lines in front of an audience. I’m a queen with a necklace and a ring and a baby doll.”
All of those facial expressions from Kate’s amateur acting. How does the algorithm interpret them?
“And then I have these feelings. You adapted your psychotherapy AI to scan our home movies and analyze the muscles in my face, the microexpressions, the tone of my voice, in order to extrapolate my feelings. So I have guesses for feelings. And you want me to make more guesses based on those guesses. I think I should hate you, but mostly I’m made of times when I was happy with you. Your turn.”
“To tell a secret, or to say what I’m scared of?”
“Secret,” Kate answers.
“They’re the same thing anyway, now that I think about it.” Mama’s arthritic toes pulse with pain. “I’m scared I’ll never find out why you left the house.”
“That’s not a secret,” Kate says, cross and suddenly rosy with sweat. She has just fallen off her new bike. “It’s the whole reason I’m here.”
Mama straightens up on her cushion. “I have to ask you the questions now.”
Kate’s smile slips for a moment, a hint of aversion. Mama knows that face, too. It’s from her seventh birthday party, when Granddad brought in the cake and started to sing at the top of his lungs, off-key, in front of all her friends. Embarrassing. She does her best to keep looking happy for the camera, for the friends who aren’t here.
“Were you going out to meet someone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you trying to run away?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why were you only wearing slippers and a bathrobe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you try to walk out to the road, or through the woods to that subdivision with all the blue houses?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you guess what was going through your head? Just a guess, it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Kate refuses to answer. The algorithm stutters and her face goes blank. Mama sees frozen eyes staring up at the French doors, the panes of shatterproof, eco-friendly polycarbonate that accidentally locked behind Kate when she walked out onto the porch that night. They found bruising on the heels of her hands. She had pounded and probably screamed her head off, for how long? Mama was sleeping with five-year-old Ella, little restless Ella, who needed another body beside her and white noise so loud Mama used to think she would drown in it.
The AI finally unknots itself. Kate shivers. She picks up another cookie and pretends to eat it.
Mama breathes again. “Ella says this is a ghoulish exercise.”
Ella can’t possibly understand, because she doesn’t have kids of her own. She straitens herself with routines now, with concrete opinions on every subject. Where did her restlessness go? But Mama feels for her. All the time she spends on Kate, fascinated by Kate, like candy being pilfered again.
“Maybe you’ll listen to her one day,” Kate says, sulking. Her stage tears; she can’t spin the straw. “And I’ll never come back again.”
“That won’t happen,” says Mama. “I won’t let it.”
Something has gone wrong. Kate’s talking too much like Mama. She shouldn’t suggest secret-telling. She should probably be complaining that she’s too old for pillow forts.
But it’s not so bad, it’s not so bad. This Kate realizes how much Mama loves her. She lets herself be comforted instead of pulling away. She crawls close enough that Mama can hear the whirring of her body, fans expelling air like warm breath. Kate’s appearance filter flickers, and three untouched cookies reappear on the plate. Mama cradles the light hexagon of plastic and polystyrene foam in her arms.
Being scared, that’s progress, isn’t it? Some kind of progress. Mama will keep at it, she thinks, just a little while longer. Maybe she’s not asking the right questions, maybe she shouldn’t be asking questions. Next time, she’ll try something less straightforward. Kate is getting older, after all.
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Alexandra Munck‘s fiction has recently appeared in Clarkesworld, Boulevard, and the New England Review. You can find more of her writing in Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and F&SF. She lives in Chicagoland. |