by Melinda Minx
I kept us just behind Elijah as we picked up another weapon—a banana peel this time. I checked the rearview mirror and saw a red turtle shell coming for us. I shot the banana peel behind us, and it absorbed the turtle shell, protecting Emily and Elijah.
Elijah hit a weapon box and just immediately fired his green turtle shell the moment he got it. It started bouncing wildly between the narrow walls of the track.
Emily screamed and giggled as she realized it was about to hit us. She tried to swerve, but I realized we were going to hit it. I couldn’t fire our red shell because it would lock on to Elijah and take him out. Emily didn’t manage to dodge the shell. It hit us dead on, and we spun out. The race was almost over, and I knew Emily and I wouldn't be able to get ahead of Luigi at this point, so I cut our losses on Wario and jumped over to Elijah.
“Let me steer, buddy! You man the weapons!”
I grabbed the analog stick and started steering as Elijah held down the gas. As a four-year-old, he never let off the gas, so I had to use some clutch drifting tactics to get us around the sharp corners with so much speed and zero braking. I drove into a question mark box, the little icon on the top of the screen spun around like a slot machine. It was somewhat random what weapon we’d get, but since we were in fourth place, I figured a green turtle shell was most likely.
Luigi was just in front of us, and Elijah was already slamming the “fire” button as hard as he could in preparation for the weapon being ready. Telling a 4-year-old not to shoot the weapon off the first nano-second it was available was never going to happen, so I got ready to aim.
Just as the slot machine animation stopped and I saw it was indeed a green shell, I steered our kart slightly to the right, anticipating Luigi’s path.
Elijah fired the shell the moment it was ready, and after it had been let loose, I drifted us into the final curve.
Sparks flew out of our kart as I drifted, and just before Luigi hit the finish line, the shell struck him from behind. Luigi spun out and lost all of his speed just as I cut the drift and boosted past the finish line.
“We did it!” Emily shouted.
“Stupid Luigi loses!” Elijah said, looking up at me with his chin held high.
“High five!” I raised both hands up, and we all high-fived each other.
And then, as if cutting right through all of our laughter and joy, I heard my father’s voice.
You just couldn’t stand to watch him lose, could you?
“Everything okay, Silas?”
I shook my head to get his voice out of my head. “Yeah, everything’s great.”
We went to put Elijah to bed together. I’d set up one of my spare bedrooms to be Elijah’s room. I figured he’d want to stay with me from time to time, and I wanted him to have a nice place to sleep. I’d gotten a toddler bed, and some storage shelves with colorful plastic bins in them. I’d gone ahead and filled those up with toys, but Elijah hadn’t noticed that yet.
On the walls, I’d put up different ABC and learning numbers activity boards. They were electric posters that would talk when you pressed the buttons on them, reading out the letters, and giving examples of words that started with those letters.
Once we got up to his room, Emily set the alarm on her phone for ten minutes. “The timer is running, Elijah.”
“It’s play time, Daddy!” he said, as Emily unzipped her diaper bag and dumped out five stuffed animals onto the floor.
“Wait a minute!” Elijah said, looking around the room. He sauntered over to the bins and opened one up. His mouth opened wider than I thought possible, and he balled his hands up into fists and shook them back forth. “Mommy! It’s full of toys!”
He started tearing open all the bins. “There’s more of dem in here! More toys! Wow! Paw Patrol! It’s Chase and Rubble and Sky! Look! Look!”
Emily gave me a look that was an even mix between impressed and nervous. “He’s never going to sleep now.”
We played until the timer went off, at which point the fun and games were apparently over. Emily forced him to the bathroom so he could pee, and then she got his pajamas ready.
I had to help pin him down, because he was not having it. “One more minute, Daddy! Please! I wanna play a little bit!”
“You can play more tomorrow,” she said, stuffing his foot into the pajama leg and pulling the zipper up before he could jerk his foot back out.
“Can I sleep with dem?” Elijah asked, looking up at me.
I looked at Emily for permission. She sighed. “You can choose three.”
Once his pajamas were on, he assessed all of the new toys. It took him several minutes, during which he was more concentrated than I’d ever seen him. He moved Rubble away from the lineup, and then brought Iron Man in. He furrowed his brows and looked at the new group of three.
“This is the most important decision of his life,” Emily whispered to me. “Come on, Elijah, they’ll all be here in the morning.”
He finally settled on Iron Man, Chase, and Buzz Lightyear.
We tucked him in, and kissed him good night. He waved goodbye to us, and once we closed the door, I immediately heard Buzz Lightyear talking to Iron Man.
“He’s not going to sleep, is he?” I whispered.
“He will eventually.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m glad you got him a room he likes so much.”
I opened up a bottle of wine, and I let Emily go through my movie collection to pick something out.
She sat on her knees in front of my movie shelf. “You’ve got a lot of fancypants stuff in here, Silas. Where’s all the Nicholas Sparks movies?”
“The what?”
“You don’t even have Titanic.”
“I have A Night To Remember. Why would I need Titanic when I have that.”
She pulled the case off the shelf and frowned at it. “It’s black and white. Is there at least a romance plot?”
“It’s more about how everyone dies.”
She laughed. “That’s why you need Titanic, Silas. At least Rose survives.”
“If you don’t like my movies, you can pick something out to stream.”
I let her go to town on the streaming box, and she picked out a Nicholas Sparks movie. When the couple started kissing in the rain at the end of the movie, she got on top of me and kissed me. I kissed her back, but the moment our lips touched, I heard my father’s voice again.
You’re just bribing that kid’s love with toys. She’s trying to get romance out of you, and you just want to watch people die in black and white. You’re like the Titanic yourself, doomed to hit that iceberg, but you still think you’re unsinkable.
I tried to force myself to get lost in the kiss, but I felt distracted. I couldn’t tell if Emily sensed anything was off or not. We kissed for a long time, and then she asked if I wanted to go to bed.
I watched nervously as she grabbed her giant tote bag. She took it into the bathroom with her, and I laid down on my bed and looked out the window. It was a billion-dollar view of Manhattan and Central Park. I had Emily in here for the second time, and I remembered that she liked the window closed.
Windows closing, my father’s voice said. She’s boxing you in, boy. Soon you’ll be trapped.
I hit the button to shutter the window, ignoring my father’s incessant nagging. I wasn’t going insane. I didn’t really hear him, it was more like a voice in my mind’s eye. A voice speaking to my growing doubts about everything.
The door opened, and Emily came out of the bathroom buck naked, wearing nothing but makeup. She bit her lip. “You’re still wearing all your clothes.”
I grinned and undid the top buttons on my shirt. “You’ll have to get them off me then, won’t you?”
“Wake up, everybody!” Elijah shouted from his bedroom. “It’s time to play!”
I jolted up and looked at the clock. It was 5:58AM.
I tapped Emily on the shoulder, and she just smiled. “G
et used to it, Silas.”
“Should I go get him?”
“What time is it?”
“5:59.”
“Ouch,” she whispered, “if it weren’t for those new toys, he’d probably have slept past 7. So yeah, you can go get him.”
I laughed and got out of bed. “Go ahead and sleep in, you’ve earned it.”
The sex had been good. Not great, but good. I needed some time to think. Or I needed to talk to Noah. I needed to do something to get my father’s fucking voice out of my head. I was just in a funk, and I knew I could get out of it soon enough. Just not yet.
I slid some track pants on and a t-shirt, and I walked down the hall to Elijah’s room. I always took a shower, brushed my teeth, and got fully dressed the moment I woke up. I was never the kind of guy who could laze around in his pajamas all day. It felt odd. My hair felt heavy and greasy, and my breath couldn’t have smelled very good. I didn’t want to make Emily wake up though. I realized she’d been doing some version of this for four years without me. It would take me a lot of mornings to even things out for her.
I knocked on Elijah’s door. “Mind if I come in?”
“Come in!” a raspy little kid voice said. That was Iron Man.
I opened the door, and all of the new toys were all over the floor, with Elijah in the middle. He was wearing his pajamas still, and he looked more wide awake than anyone had any right to at 6:00 in the morning.
“Can you be a car, Daddy?”
“A car?”
“Yeah, I show you.”
He had me lie on the ground with my elbows pressed into the ground. He slid between my legs, his back facing me, and he gripped tight to my lower thighs with his arms.
“Vroom vroom!” he said. “Now you move around.”
“Like this?” I started to sway from side to side as Elijah steered.
“Yeah! Vroom vroom! Oh no, look, Chase is coming!”
He moved Chase as if he were walking into our path.
“Stop! Daddy!”
I stopped swaying.
“We almost hit Chase! Okay, drive again. Vroom!”
I started driving again, and soon Chase was coming up again.
“Should we stop?” I asked.
Elijah looked back at me and grinned, which told me we weren’t going to stop.
He had Chase hit my shin, and the little toy dog fell onto its side. “Oh no! We hit Chase! Now we gotta be a ambulance!”
I started making ambulance noises, and I swayed hard left and right to simulate us driving very quickly to Chase’s rescue.
Elijah jumped out of the Ambulance and put a hand on Chase. “He don’t got a heart beep.”
I realized then that this was a game he must have played often with Emily, who would be much better at pretending to be a doctor than I could.”
“No heart beep? What do we do then?”
“We gotta defibiliate him.”
“Ah, want me to count?”
He nodded, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world that I should count. I waited until Elijah had both pretend defibrillators hovering over Chase before counting.
“3, 2, 1...clear!”
Elijah looked up at me with impatience.
“What?”
“You gotta make the sounds!”
“Bzzzzzzz,” I said, making the sound go higher and higher pitch the longer I held it. Finally I let out a satisfying “Thump” sound, and Elijah jerked his hands back.
“Again!” he shouted.
“3, 2, 1…”
It took three tries to get Chase’s heart going again, at which point he jumped up, wagged his tail, and said “Thank you, Doctor Daddy!”
He then turned Chase around and started walking him away.
“That’s it?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he stay overnight for observation?”
Elijah shook his head. “No, Daddy, we gotta hit some other people with the car, and then helping them with the ambulance.”
“Ahhh.”
Nearly an hour later, when our car had turned into a fighter jet, and we were trying to hit Ironman, who was flying through the clouds, Emily walked in with one of my tshirts on.
“Ahh,” she said, “you’re playing doctor?”
“We were, but we’re fighter pilots now,” I said.
“I see.”
Elijah made a beep beep beep sound, which signified that our missile had locked onto Iron Man. Iron man flipped around and shot his plasma beams at the missile. I made a “boom” sound and pretended that the explosion had hit our plane. I jerked wildly from side to side, and I let go of my legs’ grip on Elijah enough that he fell down onto the ground, laughing. I tickled him for good measure. “Iron man got us again!”
I went down to start breakfast. I cooked some basic bacon and eggs, and we all ate together.
As I was cleaning the plates, Emily stretched and said, “I think we need to get going. I’m starting work tomorrow. I need to get myself mentally prepared.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll call my driver.”
I went to go brush my teeth, and that’s when I saw an entire section of my bathroom swallowed up by Emily’s stuff. There were creams, lotions, various types of makeup, her toothbrush. I looked into the shower and saw three different types of hair product that hadn’t been there before.
When Emily was at the doorstep, fully dressed with my driver idling on the street, I kissed her goodbye and tousled Elijah’s hair. He gave me a hug, and then I helped him into the car.
We got him strapped in, and Emily smiled up at me.
“Oh,” I said, reaching into my pocket. I held up a ziplock bag with her toothbrush in it. “You forgot this.”
Her smile disappeared. “It’s an extra one I bought. To leave at your place.”
“And all the other stuff? Is that extra?”
She snatched the ziplock bag out of my hand. “Just throw it all away then. I guess I won’t be needing it.”
I grabbed her arm. “Wait, Emily, I wasn’t saying that...I just want to make sure we don’t make a step we can’t take back.”
She shook her head at me. “Are you for real? You’re afraid of a toothbrush, Silas?”
We were speaking in low whispers so Elijah couldn’t hear us.
I’d decided ahead of time that I needed to stand my ground here. I didn’t want to take ten steps backward, but I wasn’t quite ready to take the next step forward. Not yet. Just because Emily was visibly angry with me didn’t mean I should be totally spineless, buckle, and do whatever I thought would make her unmad at me. I needed to stand my ground.
“Let’s do more sleepovers. We’ll ease into things. There’s no need to rush this. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I told myself this wouldn’t happen,” she said, shaking her head. “I told myself I could finally let my guard down, and the second I did, you do this on me. It’s easy to be the cool Jiu Jitsu Guy, Racecar Driver, whatever, to play around and fuck around for a while. To whisk us around in private jets and buy toys. Then you get woken up at six in the morning. You have to see a second toothbrush and toys all over the floor in your pristine bachelor pad. Suddenly you get cold feet even through those fancy heated tiles in your bathroom. Reality comes crashing in, and you’re not sure you want to play this game anymore.”
She squeezed the ziplock bag and threw it. It landed somewhere on the sidewalk behind me. “That was an extra toothbrush. I don’t need two toothbrushes anymore, Silas.”
She slammed the door, and the car drove away.
Now you’re free, son.
My father’s voice was laughing, or maybe it was cackling.
I picked the toothbrush in the ziplock bag up off the sidewalk. I realized then that I’d fucked up, badly.
We were golfing on Staten Island.
It was Noah, Dave Grussler, and me.
Grussler was one of our top authors. He loved golfing, and even though I fucking hated it, I didn’t mind shooting the shit with him between holes.
Grussler was an ex-marine, and he wrote the kind of books you’d expect an ex-marine to write. The protagonists were always grizzled military men out to save the country, and sometimes the world, from impending threats of terror or espionage.
You could find his books in every single bookstore and airport, and his books made us tens of millions every single year. It was worth golfing to keep him happy.
He still had big arms, but he’d grown a big gut too. He watched me under the bill of his baseball cap as I got ready to swing.
I hit the ball, and it sliced hard. Right into the sand trap. “Fuck!”
Grussler laughed, and I glared at him.
“What’s the matter, Winters?”
“I’m in the fucking sand trap.”
He shook his head. “Nah, something else is up.”
Noah teed up. “He fucked up with a woman. With the woman.”
Grussler shot me a knowing look of sympathy, the smile wiped off his face. “Women are worse than a sand trap.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You guys mind if I take a mulligan on that? I don’t want to dick around with a sand wedge.”
Noah shrugged, but Grussler shook his head. “Get the sand wedge out, Winters.”
“You bastard,” I hissed at him.
He laughed. “You can’t take a mulligan with a woman, Winters. Why should you take one in golf?”
“She won’t return my calls. It’s been like a week? I tried showing up at her place a few times, but she hasn’t been home. It’s almost as if she’s arranging her shifts to dodge me. It’s hard to fix things if she won’t even speak to me.”
Noah managed to land his ball onto the fairway, which pissed me off even more. We got into the cart, and Noah drove Grussler and me toward the sand trap.
“Seriously. I’ll just take +4,” I said, “we can save all the hassle.”
Grussler shook his head. “This is the kind of attitude that got you into the sand trap in the first place, Winters. How are you going to dig yourself out of this hole with the woman? Are you going to just pretend you never fucked up in the first place and hope she just takes that? Or are you going to get your sand wedge out and dig yourself out of the sand?”
