Precise (Pulling Me Under)

by Rebecca Berto

  She claps her hands, wiggling in her stroller.

  “I do believe that means I won, Pauly.”

  He throws a pink bag with pictures of dolls over his shoulder and stomps to the front door. “What’ll it be?”

  “Oh, man,” I say, “definitely a back massage. Picking up and putting down this girl kills my back.”

  “You’re twenty-three, you old bag.”

  I slap his butt and overtake him outside the front door with Ella in her stroller. “See? Old bags need massages.”

  The sun heats up our backs while we walk to the point my skin is perfectly warm. It’s the beginning of summer and the perfect time to spend all day outside without freezing our butts off or coming home red raw.

  Paul nuzzles at my neck once or twice, the other ten times leaning in for a mouthful of me. He bites down until just touching my skin, increasing pressure until I swat him away and threaten to strap him in the man-size, high-tech stroller with our baby.

  For just fifteen minutes I feel like my family friends, Liam and Brent Dayle—traveling, enjoying sunny days with other people, feeling okay that I can do something to make me happy.

  Then we see her. I know Paul has seen her too because his hand stiffens in mine. We give each other a squeeze without looking at one other. Do that, and she catches it? She’ll pester us if Ella has been too difficult to get to sleep again, and do we need a break from her for a little while?

  When Mom takes Ella and Dad isn’t home, I spend the day with a twisted stomach, smiling at the world and wondering if anyone sees the fear inside me, or if my façade is a good enough act. She has to have some love there in a twisted way. Sure it skipped me, but she hasn’t harmed Ella yet.

  “How did she find us this time?” Paul says under his breath through clenched teeth.

  “She’s Satan with all inherent powers.”

  “No comment.”

  “You guys made it!”

  Mom is waving, her hand an inch higher above her head than she should technically be able to reach. Her hand spans both shoulders when swinging.

  “I wondered why you guys were never home mid-morning on Saturdays.” She holds a hand to her heart. “Aw, baby, Elly.” She smooches her lips, curls over, hands extended to our child, and adds, “Come to Nana!”

  “Do it,” Paul says under his breath.

  I shoot him a look, my eyebrows aching with the tension. Why would he say that? What if she’s off her anti-depressants again? But … I’m exactly ten months tired of fighting my mother for the rights to our child, so I give in, pushing the stroller forward, which Mom snaps up before I let go.

  “Here,” she coos, rocking it back and forth. Then she looks at us. “Go and have some alone time.” Her smile lasts as long as Paul’s there. When he turns away, I lip-read, more than hear, “Pathetic. She’s mine.”

  Mom takes off with Ella, singing a nursery rhyme.

  “She’s a new adult trapped in an old body. This is probably therapy for her. Maybe we should cut her a break?” Paul says while we walk along the path skirting the blue stream.

  Flinging away blonde curls, I widen one of his emerald green eyes with my fingers and sniff his breath. “Definitely high.”

  We’re silent for the rest of our walk. There’s something refreshing about having time alone with Paul. In broad daylight, it’s likely Mom wouldn’t do anything to Ella.

  Somewhere along the way, we find a park bench and Paul pulls me to it. He squeezes me by his side and caresses my waist and moans, his lips tugging at mine over and over.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” I say.

  “You can’t say it isn’t nice sitting here next to your hubby all sweaty with my guns,” he rolls up a sleeve to expose the bulge in his bicep, “out to touch, and no baby or monster-in-law to interrupt us.”

  “Yeah, it’s nice.”

  “Super nice,” he adds, shouldering me.

  “It’s almost like everything’s normal.”

  Paul dips his head, almost imperceptibly. “Yep.”

  Again, it’s silent, so we listen to the stream of water gushing between reeds and rocks. It splashes and kicks up. The trees rustle in the breeze, and when I close my eyes, I’m removed from here. I’m back at the place where I don’t feel like my mom has to save me from being a failure of a Mom to Ella.

  When my thoughts return to the real world where I’m a failure regardless, I fear that place will never be mine.

  “What do you reckon we’d be doing if we didn’t have Ella?” Paul asks.

  I turn to him, surprised. His head is hung, concentrating on kicking some stones near our bench. This isn’t my Pauly.

  “What’s up?”

  “Hey, I asked you first. You don’t take me for a dumb househusband, do you?” he says in a high-pitched voice, flicking away blonde curls.

  “Well, you’re acting like a normal person, examining the strange and wonderful way life is. So yeah, I sense you’re going crazy if this is the day you start acting normal.”

  He undoes the button to his jeans, unzips the fly and has his hand on the elastic of his boxers before I can stop him.

  “Okay—point proven. You’re not normal,” I say, tapping him. “But that’s mine.”

  He does his jeans back up and grins, satisfied.

  “Okay,” I say, picking at the ends of my hair. “We’d be back in Paris on our second vacation. We’d also have visited Greece, like we’ve always wanted. Hm, I’d be lead designer at a toy shop and kids would forever adore my toy creations. Oh, and we’d keep the air conditioning on all night during summer because what else are we going to spend all our cash on?”

  “Nice. I’d have a Ferrari ‘cause what else would we spend all our cash on? And I’d buy you the fattest diamond ring just to watch you drag your hand behind you every day cause I’m that awesome of a husband.”

  “And I’d be the type of person who deserves a husband and daughter like the two of you,” I add.

  Shit. Too late to drag that back. Prickles start in my chest and they nip all over me, sending shivers over my skin, though the sun is still out and the temperature hasn’t changed. Why did I have to say that for?

  But then Paul says, “I’d be home to have dinner with you at the table.”

  “Oh,” I say, somehow laughing during this very non-funny conversation. “But I would be able to make a truckload of cash from my awesome toy designs so you wouldn’t have to work at all.”

  “No, wait for it: I’d get to fuck my wife and come inside her without her mother fucking calling ten seconds too early.”

  Paul stands, swats away his words as if something like that could be swatted away, and holds his hand out to me. I watch his hands. They’re expectant, hoping I can overlook what’s been leaked. How do we go back from that?

  I’d thought Paul and I matched so well, but maybe we just hide everything that really matters. Paul’s been my best friend for years. He’s the only one I can fully trust, because he believes me when I tell him about Mom. I’m not a nasty devil person like other people show in their looks if I insinuate anything bad about her.

  If I don’t have Paul, I have no one who believes me. Who will listen to me and keep my secrets, so Mom won’t crush me from reminding me of the failure I am?

  Knowing Paul, his words were probably a joke. But joking is also his way of being serious.

  The truth always has a way of hurting more than lies.

  “Baby, Kates,” he says, leaning down to kiss my forehead, my nose. Lips.

  “I was kidding. I love you,” he says.

  I flop out my fingers, which he grasps, gathers up the rest of my hand and drags my purposely limp body up to his. I break my stone face by accident when he kisses my lips and blowfishes on them because this is the Paul I know.

  That’s when I realize my pulse is pumping right out of my skin like a heart leaping out of a cartoon character’s chest.

  I also realize I’m as good as dead i
f my husband isn’t on my side.

  Chapter Five

  “Yoo-hoo,” I call down Liam’s hallway, adjusting Ella on my hip.

  “Here,” a faint voice replies. It comes from the backyard.

  Outside, Liam is on his hands and knees. His butt and legs stick out of the open shed doors, which are pinned against the outside. His torso, arms and head are hidden behind the side wall, which cuts off our view.

  “Hey,” Liam says, crawling backwards out of the shed. “Look what I found.”

  He dusts off his hands and knees after retrieving a ragged cardboard box. It’s a square, thin thing, caked in dirt and dust. Its brownish-gray film obscures the pictures and name.

  I squint at the writing. “Antique dinner plates?” I say, taking a stab.

  Liam grunts, disgusted and swipes at a section of the box. The swipe, mostly clear, shows green squares on a board with raised cream tokens.

  “Scrabble!” I cry.

  Ella squeals at the sound of my voice and Liam nods appropriately. He leaves the boxes half opened and stuffing bleeding from toys, children’s clothing from decades ago, tools.

  “Don’t ask,” he mumbles as he leads us back inside.

  “You’re going to leave them like that?”

  “It a crime?” he asks, looking back over his shoulder.

  “I didn’t take you for the shed-cleaning kind.”

  “I’m not, but a week of back-to-back meetings across the states will do that to ya.”

  I know.

  Except Paul doesn’t clean sheds. He drinks coffees when I finally see him after a week of ‘Oh, when did you get home, hon’ but flakes out in bed by eight pm. He’ll reach out to touch me or ask a question, but he always falls asleep before I respond.

  Liam ducks into his pantry, his hand popping out of the door frame with a bag of Doritos waving in the air.

  “Yep,” I call, “and the apple puree.”

  Liam takes out the Scrabble board and turns away from us while blowing on the board and letter pieces. He blows so hard his face is as red as a radish and he’s swaying a bit, his gaze unfocused. Baby in one hand, I steady his shoulder with the other until his eyes uncross.

  “My best friend is a hardcore gamer,” I profess.

  Liam puffs out his chest, handing me letters to put on my line-up. “Well, well,” he says in a level, posh voice. “I am known for my speciality in that sweet spot where games and literature meet.”

  That’s bullcrap. I forced him to read a novel and he came back to say Titanic the movie was much better. Um, Titanic was only ever a movie?

  Liam manages a double letter every other turn, while I pick up double words and triple letters on words such as ‘puppy’, ‘pink’ and ‘sun’, thanks to the type of reading I’ve been doing lately.

  “This reminds me of when we’d have those Friday night rendezvous at our parents’ house,” Liam says, spelling out ‘quiz’.

  “Nice.” I scan my letters for hope. “I know.”

  I prop Ella beside me, dropping a rattle toy from my pocket into her lap. Free to stretch, I feel a little naked without her weight. Until my legs and tummy become accustomed to the feeling of air on them, I gasp swift breaths small enough that hopefully Liam won’t notice. I scratch my temple, hiding my eyes, and follow Ella with the rattle. Her smile grows as she bangs the thing on the sofa leg.

  It has been driving me nuts lately, not doing something constructive with my days, as I had been when I was working. Yeah, it was an office job, but it kept me busy. Just the other day I went shopping to buy Ella a new teddy to play and sleep with. The kind she’d pull out a decade later and wonder what the poor ragged thing did to deserve that kind of dirtying and beating up.

  A child’s love will do that to a teddy.

  I wanted Ella to have one of those toys with all those memories locked inside that only she’ll know when she pulls it out of that dusty box. But the mall didn’t have any teddies like I wanted. Those that were fifteen dollars were the wrong color or the wrong type of fur and those that were the right color and fur were fifty dollars, which is more than I could justify given all the rest of Ella’s expenses.

  For the first time since my classes in school I have started designing again. I haven’t told Paul, ‘cause I feel silly at this stage, but I’ve started sketching an idea that maybe I can make and show off to Ella and one day she’ll ask, “Did you really make that, Mom?”

  Liam seems to be waiting for me, so blinking back to Scrabble, I grab a few Doritos and search for a possible word from my lineup. “Your brother, Brent, was and probably is still better than you could ever be.”

  “Nope.”

  I scan Ella quickly, and she’s now banging her rattle against the sofa arm. “You’re jealous. We all knew he was the better brother.”

  “You’re deluded.”

  “You’re in denial.”

  “You’re … unhappy.”

  Ella stands up then, leaning over the arm to the ground below. I snatch her up, my heart leaping just as fast to wham me in the back of the throat. I pick up her rattle, tell her to stay seated, please, and drop it back between her legs.

  I don’t know why I panic. I’ve had almost a year to realize she’s going to have plenty more scrapes and knocks, but I’d rather bury my head and hope they don’t happen.

  “I was joking,” I tell Liam, arranging the word ‘computer’ on the board and scoring a ton of points. I note them down, also seeing that I’ve got twice Liam’s score.

  “I didn’t mean with Scrabble—you seem tired or pissed?”

  “Mindreader!” I exclaim.

  Liam goes to ask something, trying to peer over at my letters and then gets that I’m not talking about Scrabble either. He grabs a handful of Doritos, shoving most of them into my gums, since I’m so taken by surprise I forget to open my mouth.

  “What’s that for?” I say eventually, after I wipe the powder and crumbs from my nose, mouth and shirt.

  “Well, you can’t fall asleep or stay angry with a mouthful. Not with all that MSG. No sirree,” he says, clucking happily. “And I figure after you get over any pissiness you felt toward my Doritos-shoving incident, it’s too damn funny not to laugh at.”

  “Touché,” I reply, clicking a chip with him.

  We munch some more, arranging letters, until we conclude that even if we play this game out, I’ll 100 per cent still beat his butt. Ella moves about from crawling on the sofa cushions to eating, slobbering and slamming her rattle, sometimes flopping onto the floor and crawling within the space we can see her, standing up when she can grab onto a chair leg.

  “This was nice,” I say, as I clutch Ella to my hip and stand by Liam’s front door.

  “What?” He rustles his hair, looking around in case he’s missed something.

  “Tonight.”

  He expels his breath, and his expression loosens. “Phew. I seriously contemplated sending you off with a coffee-to-go and a present just to entice you to ever come back.”

  “It was amazing. I remember how we’d do this years ago when our parents would drag us along while they talked about their dancing group, political debates and whatnot. I guess I’m a bit shocked at how fun Scrabble was with Ella providing the entertainment, your catering filling our stomachs, and my awesome words winning the match.”

  “I’m glad you’re easy.”

  “Yep. Easy to please with Scrabble,” I say, emphasizing the Scrabble part and not the sexual innuendo.

  I strap Ella in her seat and drive us home, thinking that tonight didn’t feel like Scrabble at all. It almost felt as though Liam and I were kids again.

  When I pull into our garage, my eyes are fluttering with the weight of sleep. I put Ella in her crib and sing songs, waking up a few times to a blood-curdling scream and the side of the post imprinted on my cheek. I unlatch the side and tell her stories with my hand to the sheets tucked around her. She isn’t interested in any of them. Out of desperation, I grab at her toys—
the teething ring, her blocks, lots of random stuff. The last one I find is a ragged teddy and she latches on to it.

  Ella falls asleep tangled with the teddy but I have to take it away as soon as her breathing steadies and she’s all but gone to the world. Although my eyelids are made of lead, the teddy is pasted to my palm with invisible glue made of ideas.

  I think of the sketch I’ve started. It’s not much, and the design resembles more of a fat, giant stick figure than any of my creations from school when I was practicing but I know holding this teddy—the only toy that helped Ella fall asleep—what I need to do.

  Mom used to mock me for thinking that drawing pictures or designing toys and logos would get me anywhere. It’s not until now, as I pretend I’m using my pencil to create this teddy when it had both button eyes and when the cotton-strung mouth had both ends curling up the cheeks that I realize it did mean something.

  Creating designs would make me proud that I was able to design things that made people look up to me. Like the badge my school wanted to use to represent its 100th year, or the T-shirts I designed for Liam, Paul and our friends. Once, our friends were so engrossed in checking out each other’s T-shirts that I’d designed that they almost missed a key goal during one of our soccer final parties.

  As those memories end, I remember I’m now almost twenty-four, and maybe those things are silly and I should keep trying to be no one.

  I stumble to Paul in our bedroom, zombie style, flick on the baby monitor and fall onto my side of the bed. Bra on, shirt buttoned up, I fall into a half-sleep instantly, once I’m too far removed to even think about the process of getting up and walking all the way over to the dresser to decide on a tank and shorts, all before even putting them on.

  Instead, I tangle my feet between Paul’s. Numbly, he lets me slip my feet between his as I stroke the soft top of his foot with my toes.

  Paul clears his throat, and when he says my name it sounds gravelly. “Kates?”

  I find his face and feel my way to his lips. I love the way they feel, all soft. “Hey, Pauly.”

  “Thanks for putting Ella down.” He moans, still coming out of sleep. “She good?”