✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

Act I: 1. My Baby Cousin

Author's Note: This was written in a writing sprint between midnight and 1 am, as soon as NaNoWriMo started. I'd drunk significantly more than usual (wine with dinner, then 2 glasses of 5.9% porter), so there may well be errors here. Still, I hope you enjoy seeing this unpolished draft; and please leave a comment if there's anything that doesn't seem to work.

"I'm not a baby!" Tess protested. Of course she'd say that; she didn't understand yet. She'd said the same the last time we met, if I remembered correctly, although nobody would have taken her seriously at that age.

"I'm sorry," I told her, and shook my head. "I didn't have time to redecorate. The house was sold furnished, you know? It was like this when I got it, and I don't have any kids so I never needed the kids' rooms."

"Okay, fine," she said, but the scowl certainly said that wasn't what she was thinking. I tried not to show my disappointment; she'd understand soon enough. For the last few years she'd been living among people who would have told her that she needed to act like a grown-up, treated like a child's opinions were only worthwhile if she could act like an adult. She might not understand yet, but some day she was destined to be a little, and I wanted to help her find that path as effortlessly as possible.

* * *

"Gabby, can you look after Tess for a few minutes? We need to talk with her parents."

I'd probably groaned, and muttered something impolite under my breath. I didn't remember it clearly, but that seemed what the average teen girl would have done. All I knew about my cousin Tess at that point was that she was a baby, and it had been a last minute decision to bring her to the family gathering. Still, I didn't want to risk angering my parents when they might just have been willing to let me get a cellphone. I was the only kid in school who didn't have one yet, and I didn't want to keep on being left out of everything that mattered to me.

"Sure, Mom," I moaned, and looked with distaste at the bundle of joy bounding towards me. She was practically dancing on the spot, excited by all the new relatives she was meeting today.

"Tess?" an older woman with obviously-dyed ginger hair managed to get her attention. "This is your cousin Gabby. Okay? Be good for her."

There were only a few words spoken, and then I was leading the tiny rugrat out to the back garden, while she babbled incessantly about whatever kids were into at the time.

She was barely taller than my waist, and seemed to be so happy about everything around her. The day was a family gathering, when I was surrounded by a dozen different aunts and uncles and innumerable cousins. Some of them I'd met at similar gatherings every year or two, while others only came occasionally. It was an odd kind of family tradition organised by my great-grandma, who wanted to see her whole clan in one place. There weren't many babies; if they were young enough to require constant attention, their parents could get a sitter for the night. But Tess, apparently, was just old enough to come along. And just young enough that her parents didn't have the energy to keep paying attention to her for the whole day.

I'd been expecting to hate the experience, that first time I looked after her. I'd never been a babysitter before that point. But as the day went on, running around the garden and just laughing, I started to realise how good life was for the little kid. It was actually fun looking after her, and I realised that playing with a kid wasn't quite the chore that my parents thought it might be.

After that, I looked after her more than a few times. Our parents often had a lot to talk about, as they were all involved in the world of finance, and they saw no problem offering me a crisp twenty to look after the kid for a day or an evening. Sometimes it was a little more, and that was a great wage for a girl in her mid teens, especially when it was supplemented by being able to order whatever kind of pizza I wanted on her parents' account if I was looking after her at their house. It wasn't just when our parents were together; and in those days I took every opportunity to look after my cousin. I'd avoided babysitting before that first time because of horror stories from my friends in school, but Tess showed me that there was nothing to be afraid of. And once they knew I was willing, the Naylors were always willing to hire me. I tried looking after other kids too, some sweet and some bratty, but Tess was always the most fun. She showed me that babysitting could be something I'd enjoy, and I thought I'd be looking after her at every opportunity through high school and beyond.

* * *

"Fwd: Re: Fwd: Cousin Gabby"

I was on the train back from a conference in Lincoln, leaning against the doors and idly checking my phone in case there were any interesting messages on there. Interesting, at that point, meant just about anything from Ffrances, she of the divine body, incisive wit, and the ability to make me smile just by being there. In the absence of a missive from my beloved, I would have settled for a picture of a cat doing something delightfully stupid or, given the seeming trends this month, a fox nosdiving into a snowdrift.

This wasn't any of the above. Grandma Mason didn't email often, and still seemed to have habits left over from the days when writing a letter was a special occasion, and note paper was so expensive that you had to make it count. The email was almost painfully long to read on a phone screen, although I would have thought nothing of the same wordcount if it had been purple prosed from Ffrances about what she wanted to do the next time she saw me.

I eventually understood that various parts of the message weren't actually written by an octogenarian with one foot in the current century. They were in fact quoted messages from some uncle I couldn't remember meeting, and a couple of other people who had been involved in getting a message to me. My parents hadn't been good at staying in touch with all their family members, especially not an uncle who'd somehow offended almost everyone in the extended family with his goodbye message when he left the country. So it had taken nearly three weeks for the email to get to me, passed through a circuitous chain of intermediary messengers and modified along the way with different parts being quoted, cut, or referenced.

The message, as much as I could read in between all the irrelevant gossip that had been tacked on as it passed along the chain, was very simple:

"Hi Gabby! Would you be willing to babysit for your cousin Tess again?"

Standing there on the train, the name conjured up memories immediately. It had been a long time since I'd seen Tess, but the bundle of joy with boundless optimism couldn't have changed. I'd loved every minute I spent with her when I was in school, and I'd been devastated when her parents had moved to Azerbaijan for some work-related reason. I tapped out a quick response in the affirmative, before spending the rest of the journey trying to figure out who had said what in a message where too many eldery intermediaries hadn't seen fit to keep the attribution lines when forwarding the request.

The second and third messages, from John Naylor and from Tess herself, were more concise and got to the point. This wasn't just an evening after school. The Naylors were living eight miles away from my home now, and we'd somehow never been in touch since they returned to this country because the only person who knew we were in the same city was a grandma who didn't think it was interesting. But at the end of the month they were planning to move half way around the world on business, and Tess was angry about having to leave her school friends. If she could stay with me for a few months, she would have less disruption.

Maybe I should have thought more. Maybe I should have thought that the little kid I remembered from ten years ago wouldn't be there anymore. Tess was a teenager now, as old as I'd been the first time I had to look after her. But I didn't think about that. I just thought about how much fun it would be to look after a toddler again. If she'd grown up a bit that didn't really matter. I knew that 'little' was more a headspace than a number of years lived, and if she didn't want to be a baby anymore I had some ideas how to fix that.

Of course I said yes.