Klara and the Sun

‘You’re so going to love it up there, Klara. Here’s you, only once been outside, then suddenly you’re up there!’

***

Josie became stronger each day, so that as the weekend approached there seemed no reason to suppose we wouldn’t be able to go to the waterfall. On the Friday evening, the Mother came home late — long after Josie had finished her supper — and called me into the kitchen. Josie had by then gone up to her room, and the kitchen was in near-darkness, with only the light from the hall to illuminate it. But the Mother seemed happy to stand there before the large windows, staring out into the night as she drank her wine. I stood near the refrigerator where I could hear its hum.

‘Klara,’ she said after a while. ‘Josie says you wish to come with us on Sunday. To Morgan’s Falls.’

‘If I wouldn’t be in the way, I’d very much like to come. I believe Josie also wishes me to come.’

‘She certainly does. Josie’s become very fond of you. And if I may say so, so have I.’

‘Thank you.’

‘To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure at first what I’d feel. Having you around, moving through the house all day. But Josie’s so much more calm, so much more cheerful since you got here.’

‘I’m so glad.’

‘You’re doing very well, Klara. I want you to know that.’

‘Thank you so much.’

‘You’ll be fine up at Morgan’s Falls. Plenty of kids take their AFs up there. Even so, it goes without saying. You’ll need to look out, both for yourself and for Josie. The terrain can be unpredictable. And Josie sometimes gets overexcited in places like that.’

‘I understand. I’ll be cautious.’

‘Klara, are you happy here?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Curious thing to ask an AF. In fact, I don’t even know if that question makes sense. Do you miss that store?’

She drank more wine and stepped towards me so I could see one side of her face in the light from the hall, though the other side, including most of her nose, stayed in shadow. The one eye I could see looked tired.

‘I sometimes think about the store,’ I said. ‘The view from the window. The other AFs. But not often. I’m very pleased to be here.’

The Mother looked at me for a moment. Then she said: ‘It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time. Everything must be so much more…’ She paused, then said: ‘Okay, Klara. So you’re with us Sunday. But remember what I said. We don’t want accidents up there.’

***

There must have been signals all along, because although what happened that Sunday morning made me feel sadness later, and reminded me again how much I had still to learn, it didn’t come as a true surprise.

By the Friday, Josie was confident she’d be well enough for the expedition and spent many moments trying on different outfits, and studying herself in the long mirror inside the wardrobe. Occasionally she’d ask me what I thought, and I’d smile and be as encouraging as I could. But I must even then have been aware of the signals because when I praised her appearance, I was always careful to hold something back.

I knew already that Sunday breakfasts could become tense. On other mornings, even when the Mother stayed beyond her quick coffee, there was still the feeling that every exchange could be the last till the evening, and while this sometimes made both Josie and the Mother speak sharply to each other, the breakfast couldn’t become loaded with signals. But on a Sunday, when the Mother wasn’t about to go anywhere, there was the feeling that each question she asked could lead to an uncomfortable conversation. When I was still new in the house, I believed there were particular danger topics for Josie, and that if only the Mother could be prevented from finding routes to these topics, the Sunday breakfasts would remain comfortable. But on further observation, I saw that even if the danger topics were avoided — topics like Josie’s education assignments, or her social interaction scores — the uncomfortable feeling could still be there because it really had to do with something beneath these topics; that the danger topics were themselves ways the Mother had devised to make certain emotions appear inside Josie’s mind.

So I became concerned when, on that Sunday morning of the trip to Morgan’s Falls, the Mother asked Josie why she liked to play a particular oblong game in which the characters continually died in car accidents. Josie had at first replied cheerfully: ‘It’s just the way the game’s set up, Mom. You get more and more of your people in the superbus, but if you haven’t figured out the routes, you can lose all your best people in a crash.’

‘Why would you play a game like that, Josie? A game in which something awful like that happens?’

Josie continued for a while to answer the Mother patiently, but before long the smile left her voice. In the end she was repeating that it was just a game she enjoyed, while the Mother asked more and more questions about it and seemed to become angry.