Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  “What was in there?” Lincoln asks, pressing his face to her hair.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  She knows he is still talking, not willing to let it go, but she speeds them up, leaving the trash can behind. The music intensifies. An electric guitar spirals into something ecstatic, and a flurry of leaves, yellow even in the dimness, scatters across the grass in front of their feet. When they reach the wide mass of the tree by the turtle exhibit, they run across the shadowed concrete, holding hands, and then she kneels by a low fence. A pause and a reassessment. They are only a few steps away from the snack machines, which are mostly hidden by a bamboo partition, but she can see the electric lights glowing in red-and-white stripes through the poles of the wood.

  A few more steps. She slides a hand into her purse, feeling in the side pocket. She tucks her credit card against her palm and closes her fingers around it.

  “What kind of crackers will they have?” Lincoln asks.

  “Cheese, surely,” she says. She is unreasonably angry that he has brought up crackers again. “Whisper.”

  “I want cheese.”

  She can feel him slow down, and his drag increases like a fishing line caught below the surface. Her hip brushes against the bamboo fence cordoning off the snacks.

  Another ten or twelve steps and she can feed him.

  “I don’t want peanut butter,” he says, voice rising. “I want cheese ones. Unless they have the cookie kind with peanut butter in them that Daddy likes.”

  “Hush,” she snaps. It is unfathomable that he might bring down gunfire over peanut butter at this stage, and does he not realize what she has done for him? He does not, of course, thank God. But she cannot argue with him over crackers.

  She calms her voice. “There’ll probably be cheese,” she says.

  “Promise me,” he says.

  Tears come to her eyes—she was wrong: it is not exactly anger she’s been pushing down. Her hand is sticking slightly to his as she yanks him closer to her: she will not think of the syrupy gunk on the trash can lid. As he stumbles toward her, Lincoln makes a whining, growling sound, like she has tried to wake him too early in the morning, but now they are past the fence.

  She freezes.

  Then she staggers backward, stepping behind the fence, pulling Lincoln against her legs. She feels panic again, and that is good, because it burns off every other emotion. She is scalded clean.

  Between the bamboo fence where they are standing and the bricked side of the Savannah Snack Bar there is near-daylight. Glowing machines are lined up against the wall: Coke and Pepsi and Dasani water and, at the far end, a metal box full of small packages. She has never seen them at night. The cheerful lights feel aggressively mechanical. The machines are completely unaware of her predicament, and she hates them for their brightness.

  She has to shield her eyes from the light.

  To the left of the machines, the bamboo fence curves around, eventually abutting the wall of the restaurant. Banana plants are growing thick and high at the curve of the fence, and so on that side, at least, there is some kind of barrier.

  But from where she is standing to the credit card slot of the vending machines—please, God, let the credit card reader work, because occasionally it doesn’t and she never has coins—from here to the machines there is no hiding. Nothing but concrete. Not only are the machines themselves lit from within, but the recessed lights along the eaves spotlight the entire area.

  She studies the thicket of banana plants past the machines. Their leaves spread out in parasols, and underneath them are thick trunks sloping into the mulch of the beds. Three trash cans are jammed into one corner of the fence, but the corner next to the building is dark and empty. The banana plants offer cover, and she thinks she and Lincoln could push themselves deep into the plants, against the fence itself.

  There is no advantage to standing here endlessly. They are not safe here, either.

  She studies all the things she can see and all the things she cannot. She lifts Lincoln again, waiting until his arms and legs are around her.

  “This way,” she tells him, darting across the light—her shadow massive and shapeless on the cement—past the drink machines and past the food machine and right to the edge of the banana plants. Up close she can see decorative stones set into the dirt, square mosaics of black and white. She lowers him into the leaves, pressing herself against the brick wall of the restaurant. The snack machine is close enough that she can touch it. It is blocking them from some angles. She gently pries his hand from hers and pushes him backward, steadying him, step by stumbling step, into the bed.

  “Stand on that stone,” she whispers. “Stay there and I’ll get food.”

  She is satisfied with his position. She can barely see him, even this close.

  From this side of the machine, she can stand in the shadows and expose only her arm as she reaches around with her card. Fumbling slightly—her fingertips are so dry—she slides in the card, and the machine accepts it, and she chooses the cheese-and-wheat crackers, shoving her wrist through the slot at the bottom of the machine and grabbing the crackers before they hit the bottom. She pulls them out and listens. Then she buys a second pack because, really, how much more dangerous are the extra five seconds—only she hits the wrong button, A6 instead of B6, and a Zero candy bar falls out, but she snatches it up.

  She steps back into the shadows, and the leaves are damp against the back of her neck.

  7:12 p.m.

  His shirt rides up as he eases down into her lap, and she thinks of the boniness of his spine and the narrowness of his hips. He was a huge baby—over ten pounds—and he had multiple chins for a while, although it was a handsome fatness that made unknown women stop her on the street to squeeze his thighs. He stayed round for so long, but somehow he has turned long and lean.

  She unwraps his crackers and hands him one—the wrapper is louder than she would like, but she tears it down the middle, the crackers falling loose on top of the plastic—and she adjusts herself so that she is solidly on stone instead of mulch. The wide, flat leaves, cold, fall against her head and shoulders. The speakers are now playing the whirling instrumental number that always signaled the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The woodwinds are loud and frantic. The sound is grating, but she does not want it to stop. She does not want to hear anything else.

  Lincoln has eaten two crackers before she realizes it. She fishes his sips from her purse, shakes the cup, and thankfully it is at least half full. She pops the stopper and sets the bottle between his knees, which are tucked between her knees.

  “Thank you,” he says. He is bouncing slightly, his rump nearly levitating off the ground. The crackers have had an effect that seems barely short of magical.

  “You got a candy bar?” he asks. “What kind is it? Can I have some?”

  She breaks off a piece and holds it out to him. She is slow making the words come. “It’s called a Zero bar,” she says. “It’s white chocolate and caramel.”

  “You don’t like white chocolate. It makes you throw up.”

  This is normally true. It is a remnant from her time in Thailand. She had been working with nuns in Ireland before she went to Bangkok, and it had been Lent, so she had given up chocolate because when you are around nuns you pick up ideas of self-denial, and then it was Easter Day in Thailand, and she bought a solid white chocolate bunny—why did they even have Easter candy in Thailand?—but she ate it all, and then she threw up, and that was it for her and white chocolate.

  “I used to like white chocolate a long time ago,” she says. The edge of the rock is sharp under her thighs, and when she shifts to adjust herself, she scrapes her hand against the stone. She feels a sting and then a rush of liquid—she has reopened the cut in her palm.

  “Before I was born?” Lincoln asks.

  “Yes,” she says, clenching and opening her fis
t, feeling the stickiness of the blood. “Way before you were born.”

  “Back when you went to different countries.”

  “Back then.”

  He tries the candy bar tentatively, and he hums a pleased sound, and the whole piece disappears in his mouth.

  “You ate this all the time before I was born,” he says. “When you liked white chocolate. But there was no white chocolate before I was born, so that can’t be right.”

  “No?” she says.

  There is a malfunction in the Coke machine—some kind of short. The Sprite button is flashing softly, on and off.

  “Before I was born,” he says, “there was no chocolate at all. There were no houses. Only castles. There was no furniture. No plates, no hats, no dirt. There were dinosaurs. There was no world. There wasn’t anything. But there was one hospital, where I was born.”

  She looks at him.

  He once started crying at a voice over the loudspeaker in the grocery store. He thinks the monsters on Scooby-Doo are terrifying. And he seems, at the moment, to have no recollection of the past hour. He has sprung back into his normal shape.

  “I didn’t know that,” she whispers.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  They should leave here soon. They are right next to the building, just off a main walkway. She shrinks against the brick wall, making sure they are both tucked into the shadows, and, thanks to a trickle of light through the leaves, watches him eat.

  “Good, sweet?” she whispers.

  “Yummy,” he says, mouth full of wet crumbs. He is back to the crackers. “Yummy. So good I said yummy twice.”

  “Shhh,” she says. “Quieter. Remember not to wolf them up. Enjoy them.”

  Another of his word inventions—“wolf them up.” Instead of “wolf them down.” And he has asked her, Why do you say good grief? Shouldn’t it be bad grief?

  “I am enjoying them,” he whispers, proving it by taking a bite so small it barely grazes the cracker.

  She often tells him to savor his food, but she particularly wants him to go slowly now. She likes watching him caught up in the pleasure of processed cheese. He chews loudly, not quite openmouthed but with his jaws and lips moving more than necessary. He licks his wrist, and she assumes there were crumbs.

  She wants him to think only of crackers.

  He wriggles closer to her, his hip hitting hers, and she thinks of her uncle in his old recliner—penny-colored—sliding over to make room for her own small self, saying, One of us must be getting bigger. Her uncle always smelled of cut grass and a nice sweat, and after she’d squashed herself into the recliner, hip to hip with him, he would lay his cheek on her head and she would feel his heart beating against her temple, and she was so content to feel him solid and safe next to her.

  From what she can tell—from movies and books and lunches with friends—people are not content. They want different jobs and different spouses, and, at her age, she is supposed to be hitting some great existential crisis where she should start questioning all her choices and wishing she could start over, and it should be even worse because she is a woman and she has a child and she works, and she is supposed to want it all but be thwarted at every turn, drawn and quartered by her desire to carve a place for herself in the world and by her maternal longings.

  She does not feel that.

  She read a story when she was small, back when she was obsessed with anything involving spontaneous human combustion or voodoo, and she assumes this story was from one of her thick books filled with ghosts. It was about a man who was given a watch by the devil, and the watch could stop time. All the man had to do was to push a button on the watch, and his life would freeze forever, unchanging. He would never die. He would never grow older. He would live each day exactly like the one he was currently living. All he had to do was choose his time and push the button. But he was never quite ready to push it—he kept thinking he would like to meet the right woman, and then, once he thought that he had met her, he decided that he would like to be a father, and then, once his child came, he was not so sure the woman was the right one, and then he wanted to make more money, and, finally, he had become an old man, and the devil came to claim his soul. The devil told him, well, he had been using that trick for an eternity, and the kicker was that no one ever pushed the button. No one was ever willing to say that this moment—this moment—was the one that was perfect.

  She would stop the clock. Any day. Any moment.

  It is possible that contentment is her one great gift. She appreciates what she has. Her son is warm and pressed against her, and that is nearly enough to cancel out everything else.

  Only her hand is wet again, blood dripping down her fingers.

  She lifts it, ready to put pressure on her slashed palm, but it is the side of her arm that is bleeding now, a raw spot just above her wrist, and as she stares at it, she realizes she has been rubbing her skin against the jagged piece of stone under her, back and forth, and it has been hurting, it occurs to her, but also—a red drop has splashed onto her thigh, too close to Lincoln, and she jerks her hand back—she would like to rub it against the rock some more.

  She presses the scraped skin against her skirt.

  She would like to stop the clock. Lately she’ll catch the reflection of herself in a lacy nightgown, maybe the one with the see-through bodice and the slits up to the hip, the one that Paul asks her to wear when he comes home at lunchtime on a Thursday afternoon, and she’ll think, One day I won’t wear these anymore. One day my skin will be loose and there will be bulges and I will be an old woman who does not wear sexy lingerie, and one day Paul will be dead and I won’t have anyone to wear it for anyway. Or she will do cartwheels for Lincoln, counting them—eighteen, nineteen, twenty—and part of her is proud and part of her is laughing, and another part is thinking, Someday I won’t be able to manage cartwheels and I hope that he can at least remember the days when I could, and what if I died in a car crash tomorrow, would he remember me this way and would he remember how we say magic words to make the stoplights turn green and how we turn the dining room table into a fort?

  She does not know when she started imagining the end of things. It’s possible that turning forty triggered it or that Lincoln triggered it from the moment he began changing from a baby into a boy and she realized how he was going to vanish, over and over again, until finally he was grown and gone, and it’s possible that she has such dark thoughts precisely because there is nothing she wants more than for life to stay exactly as it is, never changing, and maybe she loves it all the more because she knows it can’t last. She wonders if everyone has these thoughts of car accidents and dead husbands or if she is unusually morbid.

  “Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?” asks the bass voice on the speakers.

  Lincoln has one cracker left in the wrapper. She should get up. They should find somewhere more remote.

  No. She should decide what comes next. She does not need to step back into the light until she is sure of where they will go. And he is being so quiet. So still. When he is this silent, they are almost invisible. Also, when they move, she has to pick a direction, and that involves deciding whether to go back past the trash can or to avoid it.

  The torn skin on her arm is throbbing, and she thinks it is possible that a few more bloody swipes against the edge of the stone would make the ache go away, like scratching an itch.

  The impulse scares her. She is not someone who has these kinds of thoughts.

  “Do you want the rest of the chocolate bar?” she asks Lincoln.

  He pulls out his final cracker with one hand and holds out his other palm for the chocolate bar.

  “Yes, please,” he whispers.

  She hands it to him. Something crawls across her foot, feathery and quick, and she makes sure not to look down to see what it was. She learned that in her mother’s house: if you ca
n avoid seeing it, you can pretend it’s not there.

  Still, she imagines. She thinks of glossy black shells and twitching antennae.

  There is a scene in Scarecrow and Mrs. King where Lee and Amanda are hiding in a swamp, huddled in plants and dirt just as she is now, and Amanda shivers and Lee slides his arms around her. This is Joan’s secret: she has been rewatching more episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King than she has admitted to anyone. She thinks that she feels about these episodes she spends hours watching as some people must feel about alcohol or porn. Sometimes she abandons her home office and sneaks in a show at lunchtime. Sometimes she climbs out of bed at night, kissing Paul’s shoulder, and stays up until 3:00 a.m. binge-watching.

  She should not be thinking of television now. Or maybe she should. There are worse things.

  She used to think that Bruce Boxleitner was handsome, and she still thinks that he is—the 1980s version of him—and that version is right in front of her, anytime she wants, because these people—no, they are not people, they are characters—they have not changed at all. Lee and Amanda were grown-ups, she used to think, and now she is older than they are. They are splendidly frozen.

  When she was a little girl, she would sit on the too-shiny hardwood of the den floor, next to the coffee table that was sickeningly liquid because her mother always used too much polish, and the slickness of the floor was worse because of the roaches, which would skitter across it noiselessly, like on ice, always roaches because her mother thought an exterminator might accidentally kill the dog. Joan would turn on the television as soon as she got home from school—was she the only one who never wanted to leave school? Who walked as slowly as possible out the double doors when the last bell rang? Who looked in the classrooms to see if there were any teachers she could finagle into conversations and maybe get to perch on their desk so she could breathe in their attention? Teachers liked her. In sixth grade there had been the Maypole Dance, and only twelve girls were chosen by the teachers, and she was one of them, and it had meant long hours of practice after school—heaven, not home until after dark.