by Tom Perrotta
“Yo, Ronnie?”
He stepped cautiously into the hallway and peeked into the living room. The TV was going, the sound turned way down. Someone had left a dirty plate on the coffee table, a half-eaten chicken leg and some peas.
“Ronnie?” he called again, this time from the base of the stairs.
He thought about checking the second-floor bedrooms, but decided against it. A bad feeling had suddenly come over him, the kind of feeling a cop learns to ignore at his own risk. If there was something ugly to find in this house, Larry didn’t want to be the one to find it.
He circled through the kitchen on his way out. It was cleaner than he’d expected, a lot like his own mother’s before she’d gotten it renovated. An old gas stove, pictures of the grandkids on the fridge. Everything in order except for an open liter bottle of 7-Up on the table, alongside an ashtray full of cigarettes that had been smoked down to the filter.
And a note under the ashtray, a creased and crumpled piece of paper with frayed edges on one side. Two different people had written on it, almost like they were having a conversation. The first message was a plea, written in faint blue ink by someone with a shaky hand.
Please please be a good boy.
The response was in black, in jagged block letters that could have been scrawled by a child.
I’M SORRY, MOMMY, I DON’T THINK I CAN.
Sarah pushed Lucy on the annoyingly creaky swing, forcing herself not to check her watch again. She already knew it was close to nine-thirty, how close she didn’t want to know.
Please, she thought, glancing over her shoulder to see if he might be approaching from the athletic field instead of the parking area. Would you just get here already?
It had been a romantic flourish, this plan to meet at the playground, to revisit the scene of their first kiss, that impulsive transgression that had changed everything for both of them. Right now, though, the playground felt anything but romantic. Never having been here at night, Sarah hadn’t realized how creepy and isolated it would be, backed up against the school building and overhung by shade trees, separated from nearby streets by a parking lot on one side and a vast grassy field on the other. It wasn’t pitch-black out—there were a couple of floodlights shining on the parking lot—but the weak grayish glow barely made it to the swing set.
“I sleepy,” Lucy murmured. “We go home?”
“In a minute,” said Sarah. “As soon as Todd gets here.”
He’s coming, she insisted to herself. He just got held up. Maybe Kathy had to work late. Maybe she and her mother went out shopping or something.
Or maybe Todd had just chickened out.
She knew he was worried about money, about the financial responsibilities he assumed would fall on his shoulders if he and Sarah decided to make a go of it. If he had been here, though, she would have told him not to worry. She had come up with the perfect solution to their problem.
“I’m going to be a lawyer,” she told her daughter. “What do you think of that?”
Lucy didn’t answer, but Sarah kept talking anyway.
“I could go to law school. I used to think it would be too boring and too hard for me, but now I don’t feel that way anymore. All you really need is an organized mind, and I think I have an organized mind, don’t you, sweetie?”
The decision had crept up on her over the weekend, while she was sitting in bed, plowing through A Civil Action. She’d been reading a lot of books about the law and legal education over the past couple of weeks—One L, The Paper Chase, The Brethren—thinking they might help her muster some good arguments to convince Todd to take the bar exam one last time, to not let his education go to waste, the way she’d done with her master’s in English. And then it suddenly occurred to her: Why not me? Why can’t I be the lawyer in the family? Todd could stay home, ferry the kids back and forth to school and music lessons and soccer practice, take care of the cooking and the housework if that was what he preferred. I’ll get a job with a small public interest firm, do environmental or sexual harassment law, take on the big corporations on behalf of the little people. She cultivated an appealing vision of herself standing in front of the jury box in a tailored blue suit, all those heads nodding as she made her elegant closing argument, asking her fellow citizens not to let big money trample on simple fairness, on America’s noble promise of justice for all.
“I don’t see why the man always has to be the breadwinner,” she continued. “That’s not the only way to do it. That’s not—Oh, thank God.”
Her pleasure at the sound of his footsteps was so strong that it took her a second or two to process the surprising fact that he wasn’t approaching from either the parking lot or the grassy field, which were the two obvious ways to access the playground from the street. Instead, the footsteps were coming from her right, almost as if he’d been hiding in the bushes by the school.
“What are you—?” she began, turning just in time to see a man step into the light between the seesaw and the twisty slide, a man with a cast on one arm and a far too familiar face. For an odd moment, she felt no fear at all, only the most profound, crushing disappointment of her life.
“Wait a minute,” she said, as if he were trying to pull a fast one on her. “You’re not Todd.”
The boys were catching air, zooming down the handicap ramp and launching off a small wooden platform at the edge of the street. The best ones, like G. and the gruff-voiced kid, actually managed to spin around in the air and still stick the landing. Their less skillful comrades usually got separated from their boards soon after liftoff; only the lucky ones landed on their feet. Because they were so young, though, even the unfortunates who did swan dives and belly flops bounced right up from the pavement, laughing like it was all in the service of an excellent time.
A slow surge of panic crept from Todd’s feet up through his chest and shoulders. He understood quite clearly that time was running out; Sarah wouldn’t wait forever. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to move. It was the same inexplicable paralysis that used to root him to this very spot on nights when he was supposed to have been studying for the bar.
The past two days with Aaron had been way harder than his weekend away with Kathy. They’d stuck to their well-oiled routine on Monday—playground, lunch, pool, supermarket, Train Wreck—dogged as usual by Marjorie and Big Bear. The whole time, Todd was tormented by an urgent need to explain himself, to pull Aaron aside and give him some advance notice of the tidal wave that was about to crash into his life, but he didn’t know how to do it without placing the entire plan in jeopardy—vague hints and obscure warnings just weren’t going to cut it with a three-year-old. So instead of putting it into words, Todd found himself hugging and kissing his son all day long, behavior Aaron tolerated from his mother, but apparently found worrisome, and even a bit unseemly, coming from his father.
“Da-ad!” he’d say, fending off the embrace with a stiff-arm that would serve him well in Pop Warner in a few years. “Why you do that?”
On Tuesday Todd tried a different approach, taking Aaron and Marjorie on an impromptu trip to an amusement park just over the New Hampshire border. He bought Aaron a bracelet good for a day’s worth of unlimited rides and let him call the shots. If he wanted to ride the Chinese Dragon kiddie coaster six times straight, Todd had no objection, nor to the cotton candy, SnoCone, and corn dog Aaron downed in quick succession, while his grandmother looked on, silently scandalized.
“This is your day,” Todd kept telling him. “You’re the boss.”
Right before they left, Todd and Aaron took a spin on the Ferris wheel. After a couple of continuous revolutions, they suddenly found themselves stopped at the top, swaying gently over the treetops in their green metal cage, looking down on the festive chaos below. Todd turned toward his son, gazing into his lovely, trusting eyes.
“Aaron? Whatever happens, I just want you to know one thing.”
“Something happen?” Aaron asked suspiciously.
“No,
nothing happened. I’m only speaking hypothetically.”
Aaron frowned; Todd couldn’t help laughing.
“Forget it,” he said. “I’m not even going to try to explain that. I just want you to know, no matter what happens, that I love you very much and wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Do you understand that? And if anything does happen, it’s not your fault, okay? You didn’t do anything wrong. Not a single thing.”
Aaron thought this over for a while as the operator released the brake and the wheel lurched forward and down.
“You mad at me?” he asked.
“No,” said Todd. “Not at all.”
“I thought you were mad.”
Todd reached for his son’s hand. Aaron let him take it.
“I’m not mad. I just love you so much.”
“Okay.” Aaron nodded thoughtfully, as if to say, Fair enough.
They held hands the rest of the ride, neither one looking at the other or saying a word. Even then, though, Todd’s resolve hadn’t weakened. He sang along with Raffi the whole way back to Bellington, never doubting for a second that he would be leaving with Sarah later that night, heading for the seashore and a new version of his life.
After putting Aaron down for his nap, Todd locked himself in his bedroom and wrote a long letter to Kathy, explaining what he was about to do and why he was doing it. The letter ended with a long postscript to Aaron that he asked Kathy to please read aloud to him in the morning. He sealed the note in an envelope, folded it, and slipped it into his back pocket.
A little before nine that night, Todd went upstairs and sat on Aaron’s bed for a few minutes, watching him sleep, trying to convince himself of what a luxury it would be to wake up tomorrow morning in a motel room far from here, no responsibilities, no fights about breakfast or getting dressed or turning off the TV, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. He liked dressing Aaron, as much as he complained about the relentless dailiness of it, and the extreme challenge posed by the socks. It was sad to think of him being dressed in the morning by someone else, especially in a house full of gloom and confusion.
Still, he pressed forward. He rose from Aaron’s bed with a weary sigh and ducked into his own room to hide the letter on Kathy’s pillow, a place where she’d be certain to find it, but not until after he and Sarah had ample time to make their getaway. He peeled back the bedspread just far enough to expose the pillow, and then froze.
That was when his courage faltered. Not completely, but just enough that the letter was still tucked into his back pocket when he bent down to pick up the errant skateboard that had banged into the curb by his feet, dislodging him from his reverie. It must have belonged to the kid who was sitting in the middle of the street, laughing and whimpering as he rubbed his knee.
“You okay?” Todd asked, walking toward him.
The kid nodded and stood up, but he shook his head when Todd tried to return the skateboard.
“Keep it,” he said. “I think I’m done for tonight.”
“Keep it?” said Todd. “What do you mean?”
“Take a run,” the kid told him. “It’s pretty fucking cool.”
“Yeah,” the gruff-voiced kid called out from the opposite curb, as his comrades nodded and muttered their agreement. “Give it a shot, dude.”
“You guys are crazy,” Todd said, trying to sound amused rather than intrigued. “I don’t know how to ride a skateboard.”
“Sure you do,” said G. “You been watching us all summer.”
Mary Ann stood beneath the streetlight at the edge of the soccer field, her hand shaking as she tried to light the cigarette. It was the first one she’d smoked since she was fourteen, the summer when she and two of her fellow counselors-in-training at Camp Mesquantum used to sneak down to the lake after lights-out, trading puffs on a single Marlboro and concocting clever plans for seducing older boys. It should have been a pleasant memory, but it wasn’t; Mary Ann hadn’t liked the other girls very much and was terrified of getting caught breaking two camp rules at the same time. Not to mention that she had absolutely no interest in seducing anyone at that point in her life, especially an older boy.
The cigarette wasn’t hers. It came from a pack of Camel Lights that had accidentally spilled out of Theresa’s purse at the playground a couple of weeks ago, when she was looking for a Band-Aid. Mary Ann had snatched it up from the picnic table before any of the kids had a chance to notice.
“I thought you quit,” she said, surprised by the anger in her voice.
“I’ve been backsliding,” Theresa admitted.
“I’m keeping them,” Mary Ann had told her. “For your own good.”
Ignoring Theresa’s feeble protests, she dropped the cigarettes into her own purse. And there they’d sat since the beginning of August, as if waiting for this very moment, when sneaking one would suddenly seem like an inspired idea, the perfect accessory for her mood of reckless desperation. Luckily, she’d confiscated a lighter, too, a yellow Bic some irresponsible parent had left lying on the edge of the sandbox.
It took her three tries just to get the thing lit. The first puff seared her lungs, triggering an extended coughing fit that brought tears to her eyes. Reminding herself not to inhale, she set off across the soccer field in the direction of the playground.
It was more force of habit than conscious intention that had led her to the Rayburn School after she’d barged out of the house, telling Lewis she needed a little fresh air. But it was the right place, she realized right away, a secluded spot where she could sit for a while without worrying about anyone she knew seeing her with a cigarette in her hand. She just needed a little time to think things over, to absorb the significance of what had just happened and what it might mean for her future.
Her marriage was floundering—there was no use denying it—but the truth was, it hadn’t been that great to begin with. She had never loved her husband, not even on the day when he raised her veil and kissed her in front of two hundred applauding people. She had married him in a fit of impatience that bordered on panic, after being dumped by the man she considered her soul mate. Sure, her career had been going well—she had just been named VP of Employee Relations—but what good was that? She vowed not to let herself get stranded, not to turn into one of those pathetic middle-aged spinsters she sometimes talked to at work, the ones who were always going on in these weirdly insistent voices about how much they loved their cats.
Lewis was a decent man, quiet and solid, a certified financial planner. Even when they met, when he was still in his early thirties, she’d wished that he had a little more hair and a flatter stomach, but what was the alternative? The last train’s leaving, she told herself. Better get on board.
She’d been reasonably satisfied with the trade-offs in her life until this past spring, when the Prom King started showing up at the playground. He reminded her so much of her beloved ex-boyfriend, Brian, the only man she’d ever loved—same height, same broad shoulders, same easy smile. Brian, the man she’d lived with for two years and fully expected to marry, and who’d left her, he said, because she didn’t know how to have any fun. Show me, she’d begged him, I want to know, but he said it was impossible, you either knew how to have fun or you didn’t.
Every day she sat at the picnic table with her friends and watched that ridiculously handsome man playing with that beautiful child in his jester’s cap, and it was like they were taunting her with an image of what might have been, the life that had been snatched away from her and replaced by something decidedly inferior. And then for that awful Sarah—Sarah, of all people—to become his girlfriend, it was just a little too much. She couldn’t help but take it out on Lewis. Poor schlubby Lewis. The good provider. Mr. 401(K). Talk about a person who didn’t know how to have any fun. It got to the point where she could barely look at him, let alone touch him. They wouldn’t have made love at all if it hadn’t been for the custom of the unbreakable Tuesday night date. And now he’d gone and broken it. Him, she thought bitterly.
Him rejecting me. It was almost funny.
There are times when you know you’re awake, but can’t shake the feeling that you must be dreaming, because the world is suddenly showing you something that makes no sense whatsoever. That was how Mary Ann felt as she approached the playground, angrily puffing on Theresa’s cigarette and reflecting on her hopeless marriage. There was something peculiar happening by the swing set—it was hard to make out at first, but growing clearer with each step—something so disgusting and inexplicable it could only have emerged from her feverish and vengeful brain, rather than any possible version of objective reality.
This was so not the man Sarah wanted to be embracing right now. She tried to disengage, but he held on tightly with his one good arm, his ungainly body heaving against hers in great hiccupy sobs. It smelled like he hadn’t showered in a couple of days.
“Take it easy,” she whispered, turning her head to avoid contact with his wiry hair, her heart still pumping like crazy. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“No,” he replied, snorting and sniffling the way Lucy did when she was trying to regain control of herself after a tantrum. “It’s not…gonna…be…okay.”
He dropped his head onto her shoulder, his mouth alarmingly close to her breast. Patting him awkwardly on the shoulder blade, she tried to block out the unpleasant sensation of warm moisture seeping through the fabric of her shirt.
She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down a little. Distasteful as it was to be hugging a hygienically challenged child molester, it was way better than the other possibilities that had flashed through her mind when he’d materialized so swiftly and unexpectedly out of the darkness. She’d been momentarily paralyzed by the sight of him—more out of bewilderment than fear, she thought—but then her maternal instincts had kicked in. Rushing around to the front of the swing, she grabbed her daughter under the arms and tried to yank her out of the rubber seat, but Lucy had fallen asleep, and her dangling foot got caught in the opening. Sarah was frantically trying to extract it when she felt an oddly gentle hand on her shoulder.
