Between

by Angie Abdou

  making a futile effort to catch his older brother.

  By then, the boy in the ball cap is sliding down, banging into Jamal

  at the bottom. Jamal laughs. Things have turned rough, just the way

  Jamal likes. Vero ignores the laughter. “See!” She yells. “See! This is

  why there’s no climbing up the slides.” Her heart beats fast, rattling

  her ribcage. “That’s why they’re called slides. You slide down them.”

  She tries to reason with the boy. His face shows no expression of inso-

  lence. It shows no expression at all, not even the slightest awareness of

  Vero’s presence flickering in his pupils. He takes another big step back

  up the slide, with Eliot following fast at his heels, his face alight with

  the glow of mischief.

  Vero lunges for the strange boy, locking her strong grip around his

  ankle. “No. Climbing. Up. The. Slide.” The boy tries to pull his foot

  from her grasp, a flicker of awareness in his eyes now, but Vero holds on

  tight. Eliot races by the boy to the top of the slide. “See!” Vero shrieks

  now. “See! The little ones will copy you. You must follow the rules.”

  Her hand aches with the force of her grip. She imagines yanking hard

  and pulling the boy to the dirt, holding him firmly by the shoulders,

  fingernails digging into his chest, as she marches him around and then

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  watches him climb up the ladder. Why has nobody taught him the

  basic rules? Why can’t he see that someone will get hurt?

  “Tyler!” Vero feels his father’s deep voice close behind her.

  Good, she thinks, his father will tell him. Finally there will be disci-

  pline. Respect. She feels saved. From the moment. From herself. She

  breathes.

  “Tyler! Let’s go. Come on.” The man holds out his hands, lifting

  his son off the slide.

  Here’s where he’ll make the boy apologize, Vero thinks. Here’s where

  order will be restored. She tries smiling at the man, staring at the

  auburn stubble of his chin, but he has a matching ball cap pulled low

  over his eyes and refuses to look at her. Vero watches and waits as he

  and his boy march away in their matching leather hiking boots.

  “It’s okay,” the man says to Tyler, both of their backs turned to Vero.

  “Let’s just leave the grumpy lady alone.”

  Vero’s eyes bug. Her kids gasp. “Grumpy,” she lobs the word toward

  them, a weak repetition. “Grumpy? I was just…I had to…I was

  trying…” She drops her eyes to Eliot and Jamal, both stalled open-

  mouthed at the bottom of the slide, legs wrapped around each other.

  They look as small and cold as she feels. “There are rules. We need

  to have rules,” Vero shouts at the man’s back. “They could have been

  hurt!”

  She sits down on the slide next to her boys and drops her forehead

  into her hands, listening to the long-haul trucks roar by on the other

  side of the fence. “Mommy,” Eliot finally says, looping his small hand

  through her arm and holding her elbow. “Is this what Daddy means

  when he says you’re going a little bit crazy?” Jamal puts his lips to

  Vero’s cheek and opens his wet mouth, the best he can do for a kiss

  so far. Eliot gets her on the other side. “We love you, Mommy.” Vero’s

  heart does that thing that only her kids can make it do. Her chest

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  turns so soft that Eliot and Jamal could reach out and put their little

  hands right through it.

  She remembers seeing her obstetrician just a few weeks after

  Jamal’s birth. “Have you bonded with the baby?” His pen marked

  the spot on a list of post-partum questions, and his eyes stayed there

  rather than reaching for Vero’s.

  “Of course I have bonded with my baby.” Jamal slept, his head

  warm and heavy in the crook of her elbow, his tiny mouth resting

  against the bulge of her breast. “Of course.”

  “Good. Perfect. Some women don’t.” The doctor tucked his pen

  behind his ear and pushed the clipboard away from him on his desk.

  His eyes followed it before darting to Vero. They rested on her for a

  moment, and then he rose to signal the appointment had come to its

  end.

  “Well, I most definitely have.” Vero focused on Jamal’s long slow

  breaths, rising and falling in synch with hers, and knew she would

  never tell this doctor that he had asked the wrong question. This

  thing that had her in its grasp—it could just as easily take a hold of

  a man. It didn’t have to be about motherhood. Not exactly. Vero sus-

  pected that if she touched this doctor’s arm and really explained—

  it’s too full, it’s too fast, it’s too busy, it’s too much—his shoulders would

  sag, he would meet her eyes, and he would say, “I know. I feel it too.

  Yes.”

  ◊◊◊

  “Don’t use the word ‘power.’” Edward, her boss at the LAV plant, sits

  behind his giant oak desk, fondling a golf trophy shaped like a driv-

  ing wedge. “The Arabs don’t like it.” He pronounces it “eeee-rabs,”

  pounding out the syllables on a stack of manuals Vero must edit for

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  the Saudi Arabian National Guard. “Only Allah has power or some

  such shit. Power off. Power on. Power switch. No good. Fix ’em all.”

  Vero leans against the wall next to Edward’s desk and keeps an eye

  on the clock: she’s on babysitter time. She forces herself to hold onto

  each of his words, line them up into a row like a sentence, decipher

  their meaning. She’s too tired for this process to come naturally. Jamal

  kept her awake through most of the night with a rear-end explosion,

  liquefied apricot acid drenching his sheets and smearing the walls.

  She knows she looks at least as rough as she feels, her hair gathered

  into a paisley scrunchy on top of her head, a throwback to ’80s fash-

  ion. She sported this look often, circa-1985, after she’d snuck off to

  have sex in her boyfriend’s car between English and algebra (instead

  of attending physics). She fingers the worn scrunchy as Edward talks,

  wondering if it could be the very same one she wore to post-coital

  algebra more than twenty years ago.

  “So Ed ward—” she stresses the last syllables. He hates being called

  Ed. His ex-wife called him Ed. “What word do you suggest I use, if

  not power?” Vero tries to concentrate, but can’t stop thinking of last

  night’s little finger smear of shit on Jamal’s music box, evidence of his

  attempt to self-soothe before giving into his urge to release a scream

  that would wake even Drunkle Vince from a coma.

  Edward’s office always smells of red licorice, and Vero breathes the

  synthetic candied smell deeply to block the memory of shit-soaked

  Jamal.

  “Hell, fuck. That’s what we pay you for, isn’t it?” Edward pounds

  his trophy on the desk, the clunk reminding Vero of the heavy thud

  Jamal’s pyjamas made when she dropped them in the trashcan. “Use

&nb
sp; voltage, fuck.”

  He is a healthy dose of military crossed with head-of-the-class at

  engineering school, lightly sprinkled with the niggling fear of death

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  that comes when a man can just about touch his retirement. So far,

  his primary response to a long-range forecast of mortality has been to

  buy a motorcycle and a good camera. Vero avoids his eyes by studying

  the wall behind him, plastered with pictures of Edward straddling

  his machine—on the Vegas strip, at the Mexican border, in front of a

  sign for Route 66—a photo-journalistic rendering of his bucket list.

  “Okay, sure, voltage.” Vero scribbles it in her notebook, doing a

  quick calculation of how much each minute of this meeting is costing

  her. She’s left the kids home with Chantal, the boys’ favourite babysit-

  ter. Little Chantal probably has them both performing back aerials

  off the top bunk by now. Or, worse, Shane’s home, sitting with her in

  the kitchen; she’s probably wearing a short skirt, knees open, a bright

  triangle of candy-apple red showing at her crotch.

  “And the Arabs also don’t like talk about male and female parts.”

  Edward’s black bushy eyebrows grow right together in the middle.

  He jiggles that fuzzy worm of an eyebrow on the word “female.”

  His wife left him more than two years ago. He spent one long

  year in puffy-eyed grief and another in dogged pursuit of the only

  female engineer on staff, a provincial squash champion in the over-

  forty age category. Danilla, three years divorced herself, was all in at

  first. (“He lets me call him whatever I want,” she winked at Vero.)

  Within less than a month, Danilla and Edward quit eating their

  egg-salad lunches together on the front lawn at the plant. No more

  holding hands across the picnic table. Eventually, Danilla confided

  to Vero that the bushy black eyebrow was only a small hint of the

  dense fur covering Edward’s chest, back, and arms. “It’s like going

  to bed with a grizzly bear,” she said. “The mind is willing, but the

  body is out.”

  “The Arabs find the sexual innuendo of female parts offen-

  sive,” Edward continues, pulling two pieces of red licorice from

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  his top drawer and handing one to Vero. “Screw, socket, whatever, find something else to call them. Not male. Not female. They don’t

  want to think about dicks and cunts when they’re operating heavy

  machinery. Here it is, Vero Baby, a chance to earn your keep.”

  With the new, unedited Saudi Arabian National Guard manu-

  als stuffed in her briefcase and a piece of licorice dangling from her

  mouth, she follows Edward through the plant. He wants to show her

  the anti-tanks. “Can’t write about ’em, if you’ve never seen ’em.”

  But Vero doesn’t want to see them. She wants to believe in her own

  etymology:

  anti-tank = the opposite of tank

  Whatever the opposite of tank might be—she doesn’t care—a

  bouncy castle, a skateboard, a bar on wheels. Her capacity for denial

  is astonishing, matched only by her capacity for rationalization. She

  knows this. Again, she doesn’t care.

  Vero has no interest in learning how fast a real anti-tank will blow

  an oncoming enemy to smithereens. She simply wants to move the

  commas around. That, and that alone, is her job. But Edward drags

  her right up to the anti-tank, makes her touch its cannon. “Here,”

  he points at the pipes running just underneath the benches in the

  back, “we have a design flaw. Where are the soldiers sitting? Right

  here.” He pounds his flat palm on the bench. “Where are their calves?

  Right here.” He raps the hairy backs of his knuckles hard against the

  pipe. “The poor fuckers are burning their calves to shit. Put some-

  thing about that in the manual. Tell the Arab saps to straighten their

  goddamn legs.” For a moment, Vero thinks that Edward, on the

  verge of tearing up, is sad for the soldiers, but then she realizes he’s

  caught sight of Danilla across the plant. “Next month, you’re on-site

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  full-time, Vero Baby. Government inspection season. Enough staying

  home and playing happy housewife.”

  By the time Vero gets home, her Subaru packed to the roof with

  Edward’s binders, the family’s groceries, and her own guilt, she feels

  squished right out of the car, squished right out of her own life. As

  she moves from the driver’s seat onto the driveway, loaded down with

  bags of food that will need replacing within the week, she acciden-

  tally bangs the voice-dialing button on her Blackberry.

  “Say a command,” the cheerful voice prompts.

  “Fuck off!” Vero clenches the demonic device in her palm, poking

  savagely at its buttons, kneeling in the driveway as apples and canned

  soup roll into the neighbour’s yard.

  “Say a command,” the mechanical but happy voice insists.

  “Fuck off!” Vero smashes the Blackberry against the car door.

  “Say a command.” This lady doesn’t give up.

  “Fuck off is a command!” Vero throws the phone at the garage

  door.

  She can feel the rise in her blood pressure, a dull pounding at her

  temples, an ache in the veins at her wrists.

  In the house, she storms by Shane, who squats in front of Jamal.

  Her son screams on a potty in the middle of the living room. Shane

  pounds his fists in the air in time to an enthusiastic cheer: “Poo it out!

  Crunch it out! Waaa-aaay out!”

  Neither of them looks at Vero, but Eliot grabs her pant leg, “JJ’s

  poo’s stuck, Mommy! It’s stuck in his bum!”

  Jamal yells and tries to squirm out of Shane’s grip and away from

  the potty. He cries so hard a long worm of saliva falls from his mouth

  and sticks to his chin. Shane holds his shoulders, pushing him down,

  and sings to the tune of “Baa, Baa Black Sheep”: “Baa, baa brown

  poo/When you gonna come…”

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  Vero shakes her leg trying to loosen Eliot’s grip on her pants, but

  he clings hard.

  “…coiling, stinking/out of JJ’s bum?” Shane drags out the

  “mmmmm” on bum, and Vero hopes that signifies an end. JJ’s scream

  has lowered an octave, which could be promising. But then Shane

  starts in again: “Baa, baa brown poo…”

  “You should sell your songs, Daddy!” Eliot still tugs at his mother’s

  pants. “You could make money, and we could buy more cars.” He

  smiles up at Vero, proud of his grasp of the North American eco-

  nomic system. She shakes her leg with greater force and drops the bag

  of groceries on the cluttered counter. Her phone falls with it—“Say a

  command! Say a command! Say a command!”

  “Good idea, E!” Shane still squats before the potty, and Vero

  notices he wears spandex pants and a fleece jacket. Now she remem-

  bers seeing his fat-tire winte
r bike propped in the driveway, and she

  knows he’s planned his escape. “We could sell our songs with a potty

  shaped like a train. We could call it the Potty Train. Get it? The Potty

  Train.”

  “Put your flushing song in the book we sell too, Daddy!” Now Eliot

  sings: “Bye-bye brown poo/So sad to see you go/swirling, twirl-

  ing/down the toilet bowl.”

  “Shane, this room smells like shit! Can’t you put the potty in the

  bathroom?” Vero swings her whole body, trying to loosen Eliot’s grip

  on her pants. Her elbow hits the grocery bag. One by one, beauti-

  ful ripe tomatoes roll to the floor, each splat tightening the vice-grip

  around her scalp. “For god’s sake! ” Vero holds her hands to her head,

  covers her eyes. “Eliot! Let go of my leg. Now! ”

  Suddenly, Shane stands at Vero’s side, his hand moving up and

  down her arm. “God, Vero, breathe. You’re so stressed, you’re brittle.”

  He clicks on the TV, and the boys fall silent, the bright moving

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  images rendering them stupidly good. Vero keeps her eyes covered.

  Shane’s words expose her, leave her standing naked in the kitchen,

  cold under his stare. He’s nailed it: she feels brittle. If he touches

  her, she will fracture, dissolve into a thousand particles of dust. Or

  explode, dangerous shards of her flying everywhere. Destroying

  oncoming enemies, just like her anti-tank.

  But she won’t give him the satisfaction of being right.

  “I’m fine. I could use some help around here.” Vero turns her rage

  on him. “You could pick up a dish once in a while. You could get up

  with the kids in the middle of the night. You could act like some of

  this mess had something to do with you.” She swipes her hand across

  the kitchen counter, sending dishes flying into the sink.

  “You know what this is?” Shane uses the voice he usually saves for

  his patients. “A bumpy landing. You always have a rough time with

  work-to-home transitions. Maybe go upstairs, take a few minutes.

  Can I fix you a drink?”

  “Oh yes, that’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Candy Man? Drown the

  problem.” He looks at her like she’s pulled out his brain, plopped it on

  the kitchen table, and labelled it for him. She stomps across the room

  and turns off the TV. Jamal and Eliot scream.

  Shane holds up a hand to them, but keeps his eyes on Vero. “You