The Silenced Tale, стр. 14

“And the trilogies,” Pip says, and there is a bit of desperation in her tone. She seizes my gloved hand tightly.

I don’t want to tell my wife that I worry she is overthinking things. After all, only a few months ago, it was I who was paranoid, and worried, and afraid that my spouse thought I was turning mad. I will not dismiss her fears lightly.

Instead, I kiss her hand a third time. “If I promise to resume my exercises with the sword, will that appease you?”

Pip nods tightly.

“Very well. I shall. And you must promise me that, until we are certain something big and awful is actually coming for us, that we will fill Alis’s life with joy and comfort, and try to keep a happiness between us?”

Pip puffs out another sigh, and nods again. But I am not appeased. She is agreeing too easily.

I am about to say as much when Pip stops dead on the street, eyes going wide and shoulders locking up. Hastily, I pull us off to the side, next to a large concrete planter box topped with gray slush. Pip stumbles, head rolling back on her neck, and I have just enough time to snap the locks on the wheels of Alis’s stroller before Pip falls and I catch her, keep her from striking her head on the concrete planter.

“Hey, man, is she having a seizure?” someone behind us asks. “Do you want some help?”

“I . . . I d-d-don’t . . .” I reply, sudden terror gripping the root of my tongue, fisting in my throat, making it hard to breathe. The suddenness of Pip’s fit has blindsided me, and I am frozen with shocked indecision.

“Hey, it’s okay,” the someone says, and a young black man, perhaps the age of Pip’s students, appears in my line of sight. “Here, lay her down here. You can use my hoodie.” He shoulders out of his down jacket, strips off the garment in question, slips his jacket back on, then bundles his hoodie up under Pip’s head. My wife gasps and jerks when he touches the middle of her back, cringing away from him, and I manage to croak:

“On h-her s-si-side.”

We bracket Pip between us on the dirty, puddly sidewalk, keeping her safe but—the young man advises me as he checks his watch—not holding her down. Melting snow seeps into the knees of my trousers, crawling chilly across my calves. “If this goes on for more than five minutes, we should call 911.”

“I . . . I d-d-don’t—” I manage to say again. Alis makes a sort of distressed noise and shouts, “Bu, da, bu!” An Asian woman, perhaps Mei Fan’s age, is standing by Alis’s stroller, keeping her body between it and the street. Guarding my baby, I realize.

“Nǐ hái hǎo,” the woman murmurs to Alis over and over again. My Mandarin is still new, but it sounds as if the woman is trying to soothe.

“No!” Alis shouts, having none of it, reaching out with grasping fingers toward her mother. She only uses the English word for no when she is really insistent. “Ma!”

“All w-wuh-will bewuh-well, swe-sweeting,” I reassure her, reaching up to grasp Alis’s hand in mine, keeping my other on Pip’s shoulder as she jerks and twitches on the sidewalk. I hope desperately that I am not lying.

All at once, Pip goes lax, a puppet whose strings have been cut suddenly. The young man sits back on his heels, nodding to himself as he checks his watch again.

“Two minutes forty seconds,” he says. “Average for a grand mal.”

“I . . . I b-beg par-pardon, I don’t kno-know what th-that—” I cut myself off when the young man looks up at me, eyebrows furrowed.

“Was this her first seizure?” he asks, deeply concerned. “You should take her to the hospital, or at least your family doctor, as soon as you can.”

“I . . . I wi-will do s-so, ye-yes,” I tell the man, shaken to the core by the thought that while Pip and I have spent the last two years fighting off magic and monsters and terrible archvillains, something like this, some secret horror, something I cannot fight, may have been lurking inside of her.

Between us, Pip groans and grabs my shoulder hard to lever herself up to sitting. Her whole side is wet with sandy snow, and it breaks my heart to have to release Alis’s hand to help Pip. Our daughter howls. Pip blinks around, clearly wondering how she got on the ground, her eyes hollow-looking and her lips pinched.

“Slowly, now,” the young man says. He wipes grit off his palms. “You’ve had a seizure. But you’re safe. You’re fine.”

“Alis?” Pip asks.

“Safe also,” I promise, glancing up at the woman pulling faces at Alis in a futile effort to distract her.

“Listen, let me get you guys a cab,” the young man says as he helps us to stand. Pip perches on the edge of the planter box, and curls down over the stroller so Alis can hug her head and babble reassurance in her English-Mandarin mash-up baby talk. “You should let her rest.”

“That isn’t necessary—” I begin, not because I am offended by his charity, but because I am wrong-footed by his gallantry. It is my duty to take care of my family, not a stranger on the street’s. The lad retrieves his hoodie and shakes it out. It’s sopping and filthy, but he just drapes it over his shoulder, unconcerned.

My mind is whirling, connections coming together, clues niggling at me. My head seems to be spinning as I grasp for the answer to a question I didn’t even realize I would have to puzzle out when I stepped out of the house an hour ago.

What has just happened? Why? And how could I let it? Is it something I could have prevented? Was there some sign I had missed?

Oh, stupid, foolish Forsyth. Blind and never enough.

“My brother gets