Nothing to See Here

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Book Review

As the grandmother of twins, I wanted to read this book as soon as I heard of it. I expected the book to be kind of a joke as I tried to imagine spontaneously combusting twins, but Nothing to See Here is a poignant story of children who have not been well cared for, including the narrator.

Lillian tells the story with her cool, painfully honest but don't-give-a-damn voice. She's 28, smoking a lot of weed, and living in the attic of her emotionally detached mother's house when her college friend Madison asks her to come live with her and her senator husband and his twins who will be moving in after their mother's (the senator's ex-wife) death. Lillian will be paid well to take care of them, and oh, there's one little important detail to be dealt with that Lillian isn't told until she gets there: they spontaneously combust when they're upset.

Lillian doesn't see many options for a better life and she's curious, so she agrees to come to their mansion in Franklin, Tennessee. She and Madison are friends but not in a confiding, companionable way. They keep in touch by letter (it's 1995) and Lillian knows nothing about Madison's interior life. At one time Lillian was ambitious and smart and pursuing a good college education without a drop of help from her single parent mother, but her relationship with Madison led to the destruction of that dream. Lillian wonders if there will be a reckoning between them, but soon realizes there won't be.

Instead she decides to take advantage of living like a rich person--Madison's life instead of the life Lillian had wanted for herself. But it's awkward, starting with cucumber sandwiches that look like dollhouse food.

We were, I understood, being polite. "But now you're here!" she [Madison] said. She poured sweet tea, and I drank it down in, like, two gulps. She didn't even look surprised, just filled my glass up again. I ate one of the sandwiches, and it was gross, but I was hungry. I ate two more. I didn't even realize that there were tiny plates stacked on the tray. I'd held the sandwiches in my dumb hands. I didn't even want to look down at my lap because I knew there were crumbs there.

When the twins move in, Lillian has to immediately invent a way to keep them from burning down the special house away from the mansion that's been built for them, which she does almost instinctively. She also invents a curriculum to occupy the days.  Lillian has no idea what she's doing but hour by hour, day by day, she recognizes they share her feeling of belonging to no one and a kind of existential despair. They don't trust her at first and she doesn't blame them. She earns their trust by letting them see the truth about her loser self. And they share a growing mutual distrust of Madison; their father, Senator Jasper Roberts; the employee Carl who tries vainly to manage the three of them, and even Madison and Senator Roberts' three year old son (the twin's half-brother), Timothy.

It was a little harder to believe Lillian found her way with the twins so surely than it was to go along with the spontaneous combustion condition, yet I did love this book. The ending came together in a satisfying way. Kevin Wilson is a smart, funny writer. An extra little kick of delight for me was discovering he is a nephew of my husband's high school classmate, whom I'd just met this past summer. At that time I heard the story about how the horses were hidden during the Civil War from the Union Army by leading them up the stairs of his mansion. When that same thing showed up in this book I thought maybe all the mansion owners took their horses up the spiral staircase to be hidden from the Yankees.