I call Carla on a whim and make her promise to distract me the next time she’s back in town. Turns out I only have to wait two days before she’s off for Memorial Day. We catch an afternoon yoga class and go straight to happy hour. Two glasses of wine and we decide to catch a twilight show—some silly chick movie—and we laugh the whole way through. We both needed a day off.
I get home before Toby goes to bed. As soon as I open the door, Eric says, “How was your night out?”
“Fun. Yours?”
“Fun.”
Toby runs to me for a hug. “Daddy let me jump off the monkey bars!”
“Come on, Tobe,” Eric says, and I catch a glimpse of his shushing gesture.
Toby steps away and claps his hands over his mouth. I bite my lip as Eric explains it’s nothing, just a small adjustment to the game. It had to change, they both agree.
“It was jacked up,” Toby says, giggling.
“The crash angle,” Eric explains.
“Did he just say ‘jacked up’?”
“He meant to say inaccurate,” Eric says.
I’m still stuck on why Eric feels it necessary to teach a three-year-old the phrase “jacked up,” but he’s busy explaining the aforementioned inaccurate crash angle.
“Since the plane was coming in from above, it can’t crash laterally into a tree, the way Toby’s been doing it,” he explains, using that animated voice that keeps me from yelling in front of Toby. “The plane crashes from the sky, somewhere closer to a forty-five-degree angle. But,” he says—as if the distinction he’s about to reveal will change my mind—“the pilot ejects first and lands on a tree limb. From above.”
“So you’re playing the game again?”
He says, “We couldn’t climb the tree in the park, so we used the monkey bars.”
Those monkey bars are a full five feet above the three inches of gravel on the ground. I make Eric recap—give it to me one more time, describe exactly what they did, in detail. He helped Toby climb on top, encouraged him to stand up and straddle two bars, held his hand until he got his balance, then caught him when he jumped into Eric’s arms, both of them screaming “ka-boom!” the whole time.
“John Wahbuhson had to jump out of his pwane,” Toby explains. “I was bwave like John Wahbuhson.”
“And what happened to John Robberson? He broke his leg,” I practically shout at the two of them. “No. No more brave.” I shake my head and finger in unison. “You hear me? No more jumping from the top of the monkey bars.”
I hiss at Eric, “You should know better. How do you think this one’s going to end?”
I turn to our son. “Come on, Toby. It’s bedtime.”
“Goodnight, bud,” Eric says to Toby as I carry him up the stairs.
As I pull his T-shirt over his head, Toby says, “Are you mad, Momma?”
I take a deep breath. “No, baby.” I rub his little tummy in a circle, like he’s a Buddha. He giggles. “I just don’t want you to get hurt jumping off the monkey bars.”
The bedtime routine—the book, the hug, the tuck-in—relaxes me as much as it does Toby, so I linger longer than usual. His breath slows to a rhythm, but I stay and stroke his back, smoothing his monkey-printed pajamas, more for my benefit than his.
My peaceful moment is pierced by an ear-splitting siren.
Thud starts barking like there’s an intruder. Toby jolts into my arms, legs clamped around my waist. We rush downstairs, me holding him and him holding his ears. Instead of quieting Thud, Eric opens the curtains so we can all watch the fire truck turn on our street and pass right by our window.
Toby jumps up and down like a cricket.
“Let’s go!” Eric whips Toby onto his shoulders, tells him to duck when they reach the front door, and leaves me to restrain Thud and jog behind them for three blocks.
I don’t get a chance to wonder whether it’s a good idea to take our son to a fire. Who knows what he’ll see?
We aren’t the only ones following the smoke and sirens. I see a couple of the Other Mothers. Pauline is the only one who waves back to me. We join about fifteen of our neighbors on the well-manicured lawn and driveway of Mrs. Gilliam’s house, a seafoam-green clapboard cottage with dark shutters that happens to be right across the street from the fire.
Eric calls out, “Hey, good lookin’,” to Mrs. Gilliam, whose husband died right after we moved in. She’s the first person we’ve known who lost her life partner, and when we met her as newlyweds, we felt protective toward her. Eric fixed her dishwasher when he found out she’d been washing dishes by hand since her husband died. She baked him cookies when he was hurt. She offers to babysit Toby, but I’m afraid he’d wear her out, so we drop by often instead.
I tuck my arm in Mrs. Gilliam’s and join Lakshmi, Nikhil, and Sanjay, standing beside Eric. Toby is surprised the fire truck is yellow, and we all have to discuss that as we stand together and watch a surprising volume of grayish smoke billow from the formerly white shutters on a vacant house that used to be a pretty robin’s egg blue. It’s been empty for almost two years.
Pauline fills us in. Rumor has it that a California investor bought it, the first of many houses he planned to buy low and sell high. All the neighbors laughed about it. Our property values are too stable for that kind of speculation. Evidently, he figured it out, because we haven’t seen him since. The general consensus emerges: he set his own house on fire. I’m just glad it was empty and there’s not a family being displaced.
The fire truck in Mrs. Gilliam’s neighbor’s driveway has obscured our collective view, but someone points out the first flames licking at the bottom floor windows. Within seconds, we see the drapes catch, and the fire seems to take a breath and sprint up the side of the house. The firefighters get to work and motion the crowd back. There’s still a lot of smoke.
Mrs. Gilliam looks a bit disoriented. “Is it Thursday, dear?” she asks me, under her breath.
“No, it’s Wednesday. Why do you ask?”
“Well, on Thursdays, that nice young man comes by in his van.” She pops her forehead lightly with her hand. “But he wouldn’t be here this late.”
“What young man?”
She tells me he drives a white van, the kind with no windows, with nothing written on the side. He comes by once a week like clockwork, on Thursday afternoons between two and four. He always pulls all the way into the driveway along the side of the house across the street, she reports, and uses the back door. She thinks the owner hired him to water the plants and bring in the mail.
“Something funny is going on in that house,” Lakshmi says to me in a low tone.
Sanjay and Toby are now riding on their fathers’ shoulders, trying to get a better view of the fire truck with its lights still flashing blue and red, in a circle, penetrating the dusk. Toby holds Eric’s hair with both fists. Sanjay leans over Nikhil’s head, clasping him under the chin. His little arms barely reach. They shriek and wiggle, leaving their fathers to dodge their bare feet. I can’t remember being that excited about anything. It’s contagious.
Eric mumbles to Toby. I shift my weight so I can hear what he’s saying. He points to the fire chief.
“John Wahbuhson was the fire chief.”
I’m glad Eric can’t see my expression. I’ve never told Toby about John Robberson’s other career. Another item for my list of things Toby knows that he should not know.
Eric and Toby move away from Sanjay and Nikhil, a step closer to the scene, deep in conversation, pointing and commenting on the firefighters’ technique. I see Ms. Pushpa making her way down the sidewalk, and Lakshmi goes to meet her.
Wendy walks up late and waves to me despite the lopsided tug from her son Dylan. I get the impression this was not his idea. He’s trying to sit down and looks as bored as he did when the playgroup went to the science museum.
I introduce Wendy to Mrs. Gilliam and she turns toward us, unconcerned that Dylan is now lying on the sidewalk, and has her back to the firefighters as they do t
heir job. After a bit of small talk, Wendy pulls me aside and we sit on the curb together. “You know, I’ve been thinking about you. I wanted you to know, I think your focus is insane.”
She sees my expression. “Insane—like in a good way! Your focus. I mean, wow. It’s so cool. You’re paying such close attention to your kid. You’re really tuned in to him. I find it inspiring, I really do.”
“You may be the only one. My husband thinks I’m making something out of nothing.”
“What does he know?” She pats my hand. “This is textbook mother’s intuition. If there’s a threat, we moms feel it, way before it makes sense, way before we can explain it.”
I look up and see Eric, with Toby on his shoulders, sneaking even closer to the burning side of the house. They have identical trance-like expressions on their faces.
She says, “I would feel it if it were Dylan. You just know.” She smiles. “You’re his mother. Give yourself permission to trust your intuition.”
“Wendy, I can’t tell you how much I needed to hear that.” I give her a one-armed hug before we stand up.
“It’s out. The flames are gone.” Eric and Toby walk back toward the group. “They should be coming out the front.”
Our group politely applauds its thanks as two firemen file out of the house, laughing. They call the chief up to the front door. He sticks his head inside, then closes the front door, and one of the firemen tapes the door closed with yellow Keep Out tape in a crisscross pattern. The chief approaches and tells us it’s all over, everything is under control, there’s nothing to see here. He makes a point to remind the moms to keep our kids away from the house.
As we make our way home, Eric talks about the crime-scene tape, explaining that it’s standard procedure. “To make sure there’s no looting,” he says with authority.
I mention Mrs. Gilliam’s comment about the man who comes on Thursdays. “Lakshmi thinks there’s something funny going on in that house.”
“Oh no!” He puts his hands up to his cheeks in mock horror. “Does she think we need an exorcist?”
I don’t answer.
“Hey, Shel. I have an idea. Let’s live in the real world, instead of the invisible one you and Lakshmi keep making up. In the real world, here’s what happened: an empty house caught fire.”
The very next morning, Pauline interrupts my breakfast to inform me the police are in hazmat suits right this minute, confiscating what’s left of four hundred marijuana plants from the empty house that caught fire. She rants about how we all could’ve gotten poisoned from the smoke. She’s afraid her kid may have gotten high last night by accident. Eric overhears my attempt to assure her that the firefighters have it under control. He gestures at me until I ask Pauline to hold.
“Tell her you can’t get high from burning raw marijuana plants. They burn entire acres of it in California all the time. Those guys are in hazmats today because they’re handling the remnants.”
Eric, always the expert. What does he know about hazmat cleanup? I relay the message to Pauline.
“Tell her she should worry less about the cleanup and more about how the grow house got here in the first place,” Eric says.
I cover the mouthpiece while Pauline keeps talking. “I can’t listen to both of you at once,” I whisper to Eric.
“Tell her they should do a seminar on how to spot grow houses.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“No, I’ll be late for work.” He finishes his orange juice and rinses his glass in the sink.
He won’t admit it, but on this one, Lakshmi was right. It wasn’t just an empty house that caught fire. There was something fishy going on, but Eric was so caught up in mansplaining the real world to me, he refused to see what was right in front of him. And as soon as we find out the truth, he acts like he’s known all along.
The very next night, Eric changes the game with Toby. No airplane crash. Now he takes on the role of the firefighter, and Toby plays right along.
I refuse to engage in this fight in front of Toby, so I don’t say a word about it. I take notes. I listen. I do not comment when Toby takes all the airplanes out of his plastic bucket and puts the fire trucks in. I make a note on the day he and Sanjay start playing fireman. They run into a burning house and rescue each other. The game may change, but Toby still adds the John Robberson commentary.
“John Wahbuhson says a buhning house can faw down on you.”
“Wook out for booby twaps!”
“Pee-yewww! Rotten eggs!”
All these seeds sprout in Toby’s mind while Eric’s at work. I don’t know if the two of them make up new details when I can’t hear. All I see is Toby acting out a more elaborate fireman story each day: full cautionary checks for booby traps, with dogs trapped inside and rotten egg smells. Smoke. Roofs that collapse. No more plane crashes. No more broken legs.
I don’t remind Eric that the real John Robberson was a fire chief. I don’t tell him that I’ve never told Toby about the real John Robberson. There’s no way Toby could know he was a fire chief. I don’t tell Eric how completely, totally freaked out I am by this turn in the game. I have no idea what’s coming next. So I just listen and take more notes.
One night, after dinner, I flip through a magazine while Eric, on his fourth beer of the night, explains the two-by-two method, which means that no firefighter should enter a burning building alone. If there are two inside, he says to Toby, there have to be two outside, backing you up in case the roof collapses.
“The house can faw down.”
“Right.”
“Kay’s mad about the dog.”
“Oh, please.” Eric’s voice has taken a bitter tone that causes me to look up. “That’s just stupid. You want to tell her something, tell her that.”
Toby screams, “I don’t want to!”
Thud startles from his corner, his dog tags clinking as he shakes himself awake.
“Eric,” I hiss. “What are you doing?”
“How can anyone get mad about saving a dog?” Thud thumps his tail on the floor and comes over to Eric, ready to play. He ignores me and talks to the dog. “Isn’t that right, big guy?”
He rubs Thud’s head before he gets up to throw his beer bottle in the trash.
Toby starts crying.
“Come here, baby.” I put the magazine down and crouch down to Toby’s level to receive his chubby arms around my neck. I whisper in his ear, “Daddy’s just being silly. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll make sure. Who’s the boss of John Robberson?”
“Me?”
“That’s right.” I pick him up. “Let’s go upstairs.” I can’t be in the same room with Eric right now.
After I put Toby to bed, I’ve calmed down enough to ask Eric, with the most neutral tone I can muster, to explain what he’s doing with the game.
He finds ESPN, mutes the TV, and answers, matching my tone, explaining that he changed the game on purpose, after our last talk, kind of like a test. He wanted to see if Toby would follow him. It worked. Toby followed him, so he thinks that proves there is nothing to it.
“Why’s he talking about rotten eggs? What do rotten eggs have to do with anything?”
“Sulfur. It’s a sign of a chemical fire. Means you have to use hazmats.”
“And booby traps?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Eric.”
“Meth houses. Those guys don’t want anyone poking around, so they rig the house with booby traps. Sometimes first responders get caught in them.”
“Meth houses? You’re teaching a three-year-old about meth houses? He plays that game with Sanjay. Yesterday, they were on the playground, yelling about booby traps. How am I supposed to explain that?”
“Ah, come on, I don’t tell him why they have booby traps. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“All right, maybe I went too far wit
h that one,” he says. “I’m sorry. But it perfectly makes my point.”
“Which is?”
“There’s no way Toby knew about any of that stuff, no way. But when we play, he acts like he’s known all along.”
“I’m still stuck at the part where you teach our three-year-old about meth houses.”
“I’m not … I’m just giving him details … to prove a point. To you.”
“Which is?”
“John Robberson has nothing to do with it. I told you this before. He’s just an amped-up version of me. I take him to a flight museum, and John Robberson was a pilot. I broke my leg, so Toby says John Robberson broke his leg. We see a fire truck, and all of a sudden John Robberson was a fire chief.”
“John Robberson was a fire chief.”
“So?”
“You’ve gone too far.” I can’t stop my frustrated tears, but I control my voice. “Stop the game.”
“I would if I thought it was hurting him.”
“What if it is? Think about that. What if it is actually hurting our son, and you just won’t acknowledge it?”
“I would never hurt Toby.”
“Not on purpose, no. But what if you weren’t so sure? Why keep doing it?” I ball my fists over my eyes to compose myself. “You made your point.”
Finally, I pull his face back toward me. “Search your rational, logical brain and explain it to me. Give me one reason you are determined to keep playing the game. Why it’s so important for you.” I let go of his face. “If you can’t do that, I have to conclude the only reason you keep doing it is to piss me off.”
He looks at me a long time before he speaks. “I don’t know why you feel the need to make this about us. But it’s getting old, Shelly. Really old.”
He grabs the remote and pushes the volume key, extinguishing the silent static between us as the room fills with television chatter. We watch a miserable half hour of the local news. He flips me the remote. Over his shoulder, on his way to the bedroom, he says, “Okay. You win. I was out of line about the meth house stuff. I’ll stop playing”—he makes air quotes—“the game.”
Eight Minutes Page 10
