"How is she?"
"She's—" Nora set the mug down. "She knows. She says all the right things. She says his body stopped and it doesn't start again. And then she goes to school and tells the class he came back with a different voice so people wouldn't get scared. Last night she asked me if Uncle Tom was 'Papa's costume.'"
"What did you tell her?"
"I said no. I said Uncle Tom is a whole separate person, with his own life, who happens to have the same face, and Papa is still dead, and he's not coming back, not in a costume, not in any way." Nora pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "She cried for an hour. And then she asked if she could see him again."
Bea was quiet.
"What do you want?" Bea asked.
"I want him to go away."
"Okay."
"I want him to go back to Louisiana and never—" Nora stopped. "That's not true. I don't know what I want. I want it not to have happened. I want Daniel to have called his brother and fixed it so I wouldn't have to. I want—" She heard her voice crack and hated it. "Do you know what she did? On the platform? She put her hand in his pocket. For the present. And he had something in it, and he gave it to her. And it was a sobriety coin."
Bea's eyebrows went up a fraction.
"My father was a drunk," Nora said. "I've told you that. I know what those coins are. I know what nine months means. It means nine months. It doesn't mean ten."
"That's true," said Bea. "It also means nine."
Nora laughed, once, without meaning to.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do about him," Bea said. "My job is Lila. So let me tell you what I see about Lila." She leaned forward. "Right now, she's got a hole in the exact shape of her father. And a man walked off a train who fits that hole. Of course she ran. Anyone would run. The question isn't whether the hole is there; it is. The question is whether having him nearby will help her learn the true shape of the hole, or whether it'll help her pretend it's been filled."
"How would I know which?"
"You'd watch. You'd see whether she's learning that he's different. Whether she can hold both things. Uncle Tom is here, and Papa is gone. If she's able to start telling them apart, that's grief doing its work. If she starts calling him Papa and getting upset when you correct her, if she starts needing him to be Papa—that's a different thing, and we'd want to slow down."
"And if he leaves? If he gets drunk and leaves?"
Bea put her glasses back on. "Then she'll have lost something twice, and you and I will help her carry it. Children can survive losing things. What they have trouble surviving is never being told the truth about what they lost." She paused. "Can I ask you something, Nora? Off the subject of Lila."