Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

  They trail him like ducklings into the kitchen. Neither one seems particularly concerned about the fact that they’re already late for their morning meetings on Zoom. “Can we read this?” Seth asks, holding up the book his mother had been reading the previous night. The cover of The Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Flaming Footprints features a pulp-style illustration of three teenage boys. The one in the foreground, extinguishing the titular pair of flaming footprints, is a fat kid in a Hawaiian shirt.

  “What? Now? You’re already late for school. Go find your bag and get your laptop out.”

  “You smell bad,” Nora informs him.

  “Okay, look. I can either make breakfast or take a shower right now, kid. Pick one.” Although now that he looks down at himself in the daylight, he realizes it’s not just dried sweat and rain. The roll of Tyvek had apparently been sitting for some time down in the barn, and his arms are streaked with dirt and sawdust, so thick in places it’s crumbling off in brown eggshell flakes. The bedclothes are going to need washing. Robin will have to shower, too, probably. Why hadn’t she said anything?

  Nora thinks about this as he flips the water on and uses dish soap to give his hands and forearms a good scrub. Finally, she nods. “Breakfast.”

  “Good choice. Eggs or pancakes?”

  “Greta made us French toast.”

  “Okay, I can do that. Is that what you want?”

  “With coconut.”

  “It was crunchy,” Seth chimes in. He has not made a move toward finding his bag. He holds the book open, flipping pages as he reads to himself.

  This asshole is too exhausted to deal with this shit. “See, now, neither of those things was a direct answer. Any chance I could get a yes or no?”

  Seth shrugs. “Sure.” He is already drifting out of the kitchen, reading as he walks.

  “Again, not a yes or a no, but I’ll take it.”

  “I want a doughnut,” Nora decides.

  There are five pills arranged in a line on Robin’s bedside table. She places the first on the back of her tongue and downs it with a gulp of water. “What’s Nora crying about?”

  “I made French toast.”

  “You’re a monster.”

  “I’m gonna shower. I told the kids not to bother you, but—” He points to the doorknob and then turns the lock. “I’m locking this just in case.”

  “Wait—don’t they have school?”

  “Turns out it’s Sunday.”

  Chapter 19

  Cyril slams Robin’s lunch down on her bedside table. The glass of orange juice rattles. “It’s a fucking abomination.”

  “What,” she says, looking up from the clipboard where she’s sketching cabinet designs, “did you think Zoom school was gonna be a walk in the park?”

  He’d thought he knew how to use a computer, is what he’d thought. He’d thought he could be fun, and about ten times as useful as “Ms. Greta.” Maybe show the kids a few shortcuts or tricks. “Seth is limited to four open tabs—four—and Nora's teacher had to restart their interface and spent over an hour trying to walk fifteen kindergarteners through logging in.”

  “Welcome to distance learning.”

  “Pull them. They’ll learn more reading and playing Lego.”

  “Can’t.” She flips her pencil over to erase a line. “Healdsburg doesn’t have enough room for all of its students. If we leave, their spots get filled and then I have to spend the next six years driving them to Windsor. Just do what you can. And mute yourself if you feel like yelling at a teacher.”

  “When can Greta take them back?”

  Robin looks up, surprised, and laughs. “I told her you were taking over.”

  “You—what?”

  “You offered to, didn’t you? She’s had them for long enough already. And her husband’s not exactly what you’d call a kid person. Speaking of which, Greta was gonna drive me to my post-op appointment this afternoon, but he’s still not feeling great, so we’re all gonna have to get in the car and—”

  “This is it,” Cyril says. “This is why you got me out of jail.”

  “You got me. Children are the best revenge.” She looks up as Seth appears in the doorway, open laptop balanced in the crook of one arm. “What do you need, sweetie?”

  “What?” Seth says, looking from his mother to Cyril and back again. “What does that mean? How is a kid revenge?”

  Cyril ruffles his halo of red hair. “Inside joke, kid.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s... what? An inside joke?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nora’s footsteps come pounding in. “I want one! Give me one too!”

  Nobody but Robin is permitted into the office building adjacent to the hospital. Cyril pulls into the roundabout, turns the truck off, and fetches one of the hospital’s blue patient wheelchairs. “I’ve got it from here,” she says, when he parks her at the back of the line to get into the building.

  “But—”

  “Get back to the kids before someone calls the cops. Take them to the park on Second Street.” She waves him off. “It’ll be fine.”

  It is not fine. It is raining. Not a gentle sprinkle, like when they left the house, but a downpour.

  He takes the kids to the park anyway, because the other option is to let them destroy the inside of the truck, and within two minutes Seth has stomped a puddle about two inches deeper than the top of the tennis shoes he wore because his feet were too big for his rain boots and Nora has slipped and fallen and is screaming bloody murder, not because she’s hurt but because her precious yellow rain jacket is now smeared with mud.

  A stranger walking his dachshund stops, tugging his mask down to pop a stick of gum into his mouth as he surveys the scene. When Cyril shoots him a glare, he says, “Still better than fire,” tugs his mask back up, and keeps moving.

  Cyril gets Seth to sit down long enough to take his shoes off—“socks too, if you’re gonna run around some more”—when he feels the phone vibrate in his pocket. But his hands are smeared with rain and mud, so he takes Seth’s things back to the truck, using the kid’s socks to wipe his hands before tugging his phone out of his pants. There’s a one-word text from Robin: Done!

  “Guys. Hey.” He tosses Seth’s shoes and socks into the back of the cab, fishes an umbrella out of the center console, and wades back into the soupy grass. “Seth. Nora. Your mom’s ready. Come on.”

  “Awww,” Seth whines. He is shirtless now, drenched and panting with exhilaration. “I just—”

  “I know. Come on. She’s waiting.”

  Nora has to be dragged to the truck, kicking and screaming.

  It’s half an hour back to Healdsburg on a clear day, but nothing slows traffic in California like precipitation. After the first two times Robin asks the kids to tone it down—they're screeching at each other in the back of the cab—she flicks on the radio and cranks the volume up. “Sometimes I play this game,” she tells Cyril, raising her voice above the cacophony, “where I just keep turning it up every time they get louder. Just to see how long it takes for them to notice.”

  “Do they?”

  She shakes her head. “Not a-once. Although Seth sometimes asks me to turn it down because he can’t hear himself talking.”

  Cyril chuckles. “Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid? Poor me!”

  “Well, that goes without—” He cuts himself off as the noise reaches a crescendo. “That goes with—That—Oh my God,” he roars, finally, killing the radio with a jab of a thumb. “Will you two just shut up?”

  The truck goes dead silent.

  “Sorry,” he growls, glancing at Robin. “Sorry, I just—”

  Nora giggles.

  “Sorry,” Seth says, in an unapologetic singsong.

  “Christ,” Cyril mutters, under his breath.

  Robin bites her upper lip, concealing a smile.

  He turns the radio on again, quieter this time. “Seriously, though, these two have got to blow off some
steam.” They’ve been trapped inside for days thanks to smoke, and thanks to COVID there’s nowhere else to go. But if he takes them back to the house, they’re going to tear it down to the foundation. “Isn’t there, like, a mall or something around here? But not a mall, obviously, because COVID.” There’s just no way out.

  Robin shrugs. “We could drive into the woods and set them free. Oh—wait!” Robin flaps her hand at the windshield, indicating the exit on the right. “Get off here! Turn under the freeway.”

  Seth leans forward, poking his head between their two seats. “Yeah!” he exclaims. “Ice skating!”

  “The rink’s not open, bud. But there’s benches and that big overhang to play under. Maybe the museum will be open. We can check.”

  Cyril follows Robin’s directions to a parking lot behind two Swiss-chalet-inspired buildings encrusted with gingerbread trim. A five-foot tall statue of Snoopy stands in the manicured garden patio out front. “Well this is adorable,” he says.

  “You should see inside. This is Charles Schulz’s place—the guy who did the Peanuts comic strip? He lived in the area. And he really liked ice skating, apparently, so here we are.” She laughs as Cyril parks next to one of only two other cars in the lot: a canary yellow Chevrolet pickup with a black zigzag stripe down the side. “Looks like someone from the family’s here, anyway.”

  The rain has tapered to a light drizzle. Cyril exits the cab, and since there seems to be no imminent danger of anybody getting run over, he pops the driver’s seat forward to let the kids out before going around to help Robin. When she’s standing, hand on the open door, he stoops to pick her up.

  “What are you—no.” She smacks his hand away. “I can walk.”

  Seth appears in the passenger seat. “Shoes?”

  Robin looks down at his bare feet and laughs. “There you go. Carry him. Where’s—oh.” Nora is already streaking across the lot towards the garden in front of the building. “I’ve got her.”

  “Be care—oof!” Cyril stumbles, catching himself against the side of the truck as Seth leaps from the cab onto his back. He makes a grab for the kid over one shoulder, but Seth, having not quite made it to Cyril’s neck, slides down to the ground. “Okay,” Cyril growls, “shall we try that again?”

  The patio outside the entrance to Snoopy’s Home Ice is composed of smooth, multicolored pebbles. Nora, having abandoned her yellow boots by the Snoopy statue, is now sliding her bare feet up and down the walk, protected from the drizzle by a broad overhang. Cyril lets Seth down and bends to pick up the boots before joining Robin, sitting on a bench by the entrance. She slides over to make room for him. Whether by chance or some unseen observer, Peanuts movie music tinkles from speakers overhead.

  They sit there, blessedly silent, watching the kids cavort for a good ten minutes before he finally asks what he must: “How was, uh, the appointment?”

  “Doc said everything looks good.” She glances up at him. “Or do you mean when’s the chemo? Still a couple weeks out. She wants me healed up before they start injecting poison.” She sighs. “Again.”

  “So—how’s this go? You gonna go bald and puke a bunch?”

  Robin snorts. “Sounds simple, when you put it like that. But yeah.”

  Silence again. Then the clack of the release bar on a door. He and Robin look toward the entrance as a slender young woman in a sequined skating leotard steps out of the building. Her thick brown hair is slicked back into a tight ponytail, long enough that it falls to her elbows when she reaches back and runs it through one hand.

  “A princess!” Nora gasps.

  The girl breaks into a dimpled grin. “Thank you, sweetie,” she says, hurriedly pulling a mask out of her canvas shoulder bag and slipping it on as Nora runs up to greet her. She looks from Nora to Robin, obviously flattered but confused. “You know the rink is closed, right?”

  Robin offers a brief wave of greeting. “Just trying to find somewhere the kids can let off steam. They’ve been cooped up in the house too long, and... we have a lot of happy memories here.”

  “Me too.” The girl looks down as Nora slips a hand into hers, and then lifts her eyes to acknowledge Seth, hanging back a bit less enthusiastically. “Do you two like to skate?”

  “Yes!” Nora declares.

  Seth rolls his eyes. “She just likes to be pushed around in a chair.”

  The girl laughs. “Well, who wouldn’t?” She chats with the kids for another minute, bending down to open her bag and show Nora her skates before checking her phone. “I’m sorry, I have to get going, but hold on one second.” She stands, shouldering her bag, and raps a knuckle on the glass door before opening it and leaning in to talk to someone. “You’re cleared!” she announces, tossing the kids a wave as she dashes off toward the parking lot. “Enjoy!”

  Cyril looks at Robin, who shrugs. Before either of them can act, the door opens again. “I was told there were two little ice skaters out here!” says a petite woman with head of carefully coiffed burgundy curls. A sky-blue mask printed with flock of yellow Woodstocks covers most of her face, though her reedy voice and lined eyes say she’s at least seventy. She waves them toward the open door with one gnarled hand. “Come on in. The rink’s all yours.”

  “I—what?” Robin looks at Cyril, and then at the woman again. “I thought you were closed—”

  “For public skate, yes. But we still accept private bookings so our athletes can practice. Sarah just got called back in to work, so the next two hours are free.”

  Robin uses Cyril’s shoulder to help herself to her feet. “I don’t—I honestly don’t even know what to say.”

  “Yes, I hope!”

  The kids don’t need a second invitation. They scoot past the little woman, who steps out onto the patio and holds the door wide for Robin and Cyril. Inside the lobby, the kids are already measuring their bare feet against outlines on a big brown mat to find their correct skate size.

  “Look,” Cyril mutters, watching the woman vanish into a hallway and reappear behind the ice skate counter with a box of multicolored socks, “There’s no fucking way I’m getting out there and—”

  Robin interrupts him with a snort. “No,” she says, “you are not.”

  “And I’m not letting you—”

  “Relax, big guy.” She gestures towards the double doors leading into the rink. “They have chairs. You know, for kids who can’t skate? All Nora wants is to be pushed around.”

  “Wow, lazy.”

  “You should talk.”

  The kids approach the high counter, where the little woman asks them their sizes—Twelve? Are you sure? Better check twice!—and produces a pair of worn brown skates for each of them. “I know these don’t look as pretty, but I promise they fit better when they’re broken in.”

  Robin steps up to the counter to sign as the woman holds out a pen and two waivers. “How much do I—”

  “Oh! Honey, no. No, no. Please. My treat.” The woman waves a hand in front of her face, like she’s swatting a fly, and then pops back around the hallway and into the lobby. “You said you’ve been here before?” She pauses for Robin’s nod. “You know where to go, then. I need to take care of some things upstairs, but when you’re done just put your skates here and let yourselves out. My next booking is at”—she checks her wristwatch—“three o’clock. So let’s say two forty-five?”

  Robin finally seems to start back to life, reaching out a hand as the woman turns to go. “Thank you. Really. I just—Thank you so much. If you knew what these kids have been through—”

  Above the mask, the woman’s eyes crinkle. “I know,” she says, softly. “We’ve all been through the wringer these past few years. Try and steal a little joy.”

  “Are you gonna cry?” Cyril asks, when the woman has gone.

  Robin smacks his arm with the back of her hand. “Shut up.”

  They follow the kids through a set of heavy wooden doors into the rink. “Oh my God,” he sighs, as the kids take off running. It’s like w
alking into a meat locker. Which is to say, amazing.

  Robin cocks an eyebrow.

  “I could live here.” He could sleep here.

  The kids rush back, having realized that the skates need to be on their feet before they can go on the ice. Robin directs them around the curve of the rink to a staging area filled with low benches and lockers. “You’re gonna have to do the skates,” she tells him.

  “Yeah. Okay.” Cyril manages to lower himself onto a bench which is no more than twelve inches off the floor and pulls Nora’s foot onto his knee.

  “Tight around the ankles,” Robin says. “Tighter than you think. Or she’ll be wobbling all over the place.”

  “Yeah. I know. I haven’t—” He pulls the waxed laces taut, passes the long ends twice around her ankle, and ties a double knot. “—Always been this fat.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve never not been a killjoy, so.”

  He swaps Nora’s left foot for her right, laces her up, and then motions for Seth to scoot into her place. Robin stands, arms folded over her chest, watching until he pats Seth’s foot and says, “Go get ‘em, kid.”

  “Please,” Robin adds, “don’t get too crazy with your sister, okay? No spinning.”

  “Aw,” Seth moans. “Just some spinning? I’ll be careful.”

  Robin sighs. “A little spinning. But don’t think I won’t pull you off the ice if I have to. Here. Let me have your masks.” She tucks the kids’ masks into the pocket of her hoodie, sighing as she watches them clomp off toward the rink. “We’re gonna have to pull him off the ice. It’s inevitable. He just gets carried away and forgets everything else.” She looks down at Cyril, still seated on the bench. “You stuck?”

  “Maybe I’ll just hang out here until it’s time to go.”

  She laughs and holds out a hand, but he shakes his head. Leaning forward, he gets a grip on the nearest bank of lockers and uses the leverage to get himself up. He yanks his shirt down, hikes his pants up, and then follows her to the plexiglass half-wall bordering the ice. Robin leans on the rail, and they watch Seth flounder until he gets Nora’s chair up to speed. Inertia’s a bitch.