The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

laid out in a neat grid of alternating squares. Helix nosed the cage and yipped.

      ‘Stop already, Helix,’ Grace said. ‘It’s not like you’ve never seen gerbils before.’

      Through the archway in the small, sunny kitchen, Jeanne poured kibble into a porcelain bowl and the sound brought Helix clacking into the kitchen as Katie put on her first shoe and adjusted the Velcro straps. She found the note and the balloon under the second shoe and put it on before she handed the note to Grace to read out loud. Grace had written in block letters:

      ‘You have fun!At school, at playAnd know I love you!All the day!’

      ‘That was fast today,’ Katie said wistfully.

      Grace was silent, thinking about how she still had to tell her daughter what had happened, how her instinct was to delay. ‘Come on, sweetie, maybe you can practice at breakfast.’

      

      ‘Okay, so the front page is the section you don’t want to read,’ Jeanne said. She turned to a new section. ‘Oh, and also Metro. You can skip right over that part today.’

      Grace shot her a look.

      ‘Why?’ Katie asked. She looked up from her bowl, where she had been picking out all the letter M’s and putting them in a soggy row on the table.

      Grace reached for a hairbrush on the counter and moved behind her. ‘Tip your head.’

      ‘Why doesn’t Mommy want to read the front page or Metro, either?’ Katie said more loudly. Grace brushed through a golden tangle, snapping a tie around Katie’s ponytail.

      ‘You want to practice now? Pretend you’re holding Yin up in front of the class?’

      Jeanne glanced pointedly at the kitchen clock. She was wearing a blue muumuu that matched her vivid blue eyes. Her eyebrows rose in penciled wings that waggled, giving Grace the clear message that time was passing and she had a job to do. Katie was absorbed in the soggy cereal, oblivious.

      ‘I’ll tell everybody Jeanne did it. She’s a scientist and she did it.’

      ‘Was,’ Jeanne corrected. She reached across the table and snapped a dead leaf off an iris. She’d brought a bouquet the night before. Jeanne’s home overlooked a canyon and she cultivated flowers in her backyard.

      Part of what Grace had learned from her sponsor during the three years they’d been paired in AA was the names of flowers. The other part was more subtle, and had to do with how to live life. Grace was working on not beating herself up so much. She’d never drunk when she was pregnant, no matter how bad the flashbacks; that was the big one. But she was still working on facing things head-on. She had no idea how she was going to tell Katie.

      ‘And it didn’t hurt them,’ Katie said.

      ‘No,’ Jeanne said.

      ‘Okay, pretend I’m holding Yin.’ Katie stroked a finger down an imaginary back. ‘See, we each carry these things inside – these fighter things …’ She looked to Jeanne for help.

      ‘T cells.’

      ‘Right. And they’re like commandos, like Rambo or something, and they fight with everything they think’s bad. So …’ She stopped, her knowledge exhausted.

      ‘So what happened was,’ Jeanne picked up the thread, ‘scientists figured out a way to make it be okay.’ She hesitated and cut a quick look at Grace. ‘Your mom actually did this kind of thing when she was a doctor.’

      Grace froze over the paper, waiting, always waiting for Katie to ask why: why she’d quit doctoring. Jeanne shot her a look of apology, a shrug, a what was I thinking? look.

      Katie beamed at her mother, oblivious, and crowed, ‘But now she does CSI, like on TV.’

      Jeanne’s shoulders relaxed. ‘That’s right. So. This little guy started out brown. And Yang, the one in the cage –’

      ‘He bites, that’s why we left him there. He’s the all-white one,’ Katie said.

      ‘Usually you can’t take white fur and put it on a gerbil that’s brown.’

      ‘They’d fight,’ Katie said. ‘Not gerbils. Those fighter things. Those T things.’

      Jeanne nodded. ‘So we figured out a way to fool the brown fur into thinking the white fur was okay. It’s called breaking the immunity barrier and it’s a pretty big deal.’

      Katie grinned and Jeanne reached across the table and gave her a high-five.

      ‘Great, you did great,’ Grace said. She hesitated and took a sip of coffee. ‘Honey, you know how we had to leave Party Savers yesterday?’

      Katie’s eyes warily shot up. ‘You want to put the treat in my shoe?’

      Grace took the curled balloon off the table, lifted Katie’s feet easily onto her lap, and pried apart a tiny pocket on the shoe. There were two secret pockets on each shoe, flat and sealed with Velcro, where Katie liked to stash emergency treats. Grace reached in and pulled out a dime.

      ‘Something bad happened yesterday. At work.’

      She felt a small tremor run through Katie’s foot. She sealed the dime back up and opened the next pocket. Bubble gum. She closed the pocket and opened one on the other shoe. It was empty. She rolled the small pink balloon and stuffed it carefully into the pocket, sealing the Velcro, taking her time.

      ‘That’s why I got the bruise. I’m fine. That’s the thing. I’m okay.’

      Katie’s eyes dilated to almost black. Grace knew it was Katie’s oldest fear, losing the only parent she’d ever known.

      ‘A man hurt some people –’

      ‘No! I won’t hear!’ She clamped her hands against her ears.

      ‘– and Mommy ended up having to hurt him.’

      ‘NO!’ Katie scrambled out of her seat and flung herself into Grace’s lap, her small arms tight. Grace held her and could feel her heart beat.

      ‘Don’t talk. Don’t.’

      ‘I won’t. But somebody might at school. That’s why I brought it up.’

      ‘What happened?’

      Here it was. In a perfect world, no terrified kids ran screaming out of schools, no splintered car bombs mangled babies, no planes crashed into buildings crumpling into a blue sky.

      ‘Some people died yesterday.’

      ‘Oh.’ It was a wail, low and heartrending.

      ‘Mommy’s fine.’

      ‘Daddy died.’

      ‘It wasn’t like that, honey.’

      ‘No, no,’ Katie moaned. ‘Daddy died. You can’t die, you can’t.’

      Grace murmured over and over like a song, a prayer, ‘It’s okay, Katie, it’s okay, everything’s fine, Mommy’s fine, nothing bad’s going to happen.’

      Another lie.

       SIX

      Grace stopped at the post office on Cañon and mailed Katie’s letter, feeling a sharp stab of anxiety. Katie should have nothing more important to worry about than holding Yin by his neck so he didn’t nip her during Show and Tell, not thinking about whether something terrible would happen to her mother.

      He’s coming for you.

      Not if Grace could find him first.

      The vehicle-processing storage facility was across from Lindbergh Field on Aerodrive. Grace parked, identified herself