Heart Stealers

by Patricia McLinn

  “That’s wonderful.” Sharon sprang out of her chair, circled the table and gave Deborah a hug.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you all this,” Deborah said once Sharon had returned to her chair. “Here things have gone south for you and Mr. Wrong—”

  “You’re the one who coined the name,” Sharon reminded her. “And it’s accurate. He’s all wrong for me. I knew that going in.”

  “But you had hope.”

  Her eyes met Deborah’s. Deborah looked as if a shroud had lifted from her face. She now had hope of putting her family back together again. Was having hope such a bad thing?

  In the years since Steve’s death, Sharon hadn’t even considered it. Hope was a luxury, and she’d had no time for luxuries. Sure, she’d hoped Max would stay safe and healthy, and that he’d grow up to be a strong, kind, moral man. But to hope for love? She hadn’t been able to afford that kind of hope.

  Then love had crept into her life and caught her unaware. Hope had infected her like a joyful virus. She’d suddenly found herself believing love could exist between her and a man like Brett Stockton.

  Apparently, it couldn’t. But she’d experienced hope, and she didn’t want to be cured. Let the virus slip into remission if it had to, but she wanted it to remain in her blood.

  Maybe someday she’d have reason to hope again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Did you bring Max with you today?” Molly Saunders-Russo asked.

  Brett shook his head. He wasn’t even sure why he’d brought himself to the Children’s Garden Preschool for another session of the Daddy School. He had no reason to. He was never going to be daddy material.

  He’d just slogged through the longest week of his life. He’d skipped Wednesday’s Daddy School class at the YMCA, choosing instead to spend that evening whipping his friend Murphy’s butt on the tennis court. But all that sweating and running and whamming a ball with his racket hadn’t made him feel any better. Nor had Murphy’s comment that his wife had received a portfolio of photographs from Sharon Bartell, her submission for the city’s birthday committee to consider. “If you want to put in a good word for your girlfriend, now’s your chance,” Murphy had said, swabbing his face with a towel. “You’ve just humiliated me in two straight sets. You may as well collect your spoils.”

  “She’s good,” Brett had claimed, trying not to choke on the words. “Her work speaks for itself.” He hadn’t seen the photographs she’d submitted, but he knew the pictures she had hanging in her living room. He’d practically memorized them, certain he would never have a chance to view them again. His mind conjured her photo of the staggered townhouse roofs; the shot of the curling ocean wave breaking over the stone jetty; and the portrait of the children, her son and his friend Olivia, looking deceptively cute and peaceful.

  Christ. He couldn’t think of Max without remembering that day, the deathly silence that lingered long enough to stop his heart, followed by a scream loud enough to knock Mars out of its orbit. Max, flushed and bleeding and moaning with each labored breath, and screaming in shock and fear, screaming the way Brett would have liked to scream.

  All because Brett had had his fill of children. Because he’d grown tired of Max’s neediness, his leechiness, his oppressive presence. The accident had been his fault.

  “So, any hints you want me to pass along to Gail?” Murphy had asked.

  “Tell her to give Sharon a fair shake, that’s all. She wants the commission and she deserves it. I’m sure she’s got more talented than any of the other photographers in the running.” He’d busied himself zipping his racquet into its case and trying not to think about everything he’d given up when he’d walked out of her house last Saturday.

  He loved her.

  That was the cruelest irony, of course. If he didn’t love her, he could have continued to see her. Building a rapport with her son would not have been necessary. He and Sharon could have enjoyed each other’s company and moved on when they were done. But loving her meant signing on for the whole package, and the whole package included Max.

  Even if Brett had been willing to accept Max, he couldn’t remain in their lives. Max wasn’t safe with him.

  So what was he doing at the Daddy School?

  Obviously, Molly was wondering the same thing. “I didn’t bring Max with me, no,” he answered her.

  “He’s recuperating really well,” Molly remarked. “His chin is nearly all healed, and that bruise on his back has gotten a lot smaller. He was so lucky.”

  Not lucky enough, Brett thought with a surge of self-recrimination. If Max had been truly lucky, he would have spent Saturday with of someone capable of taking proper care of him, someone who wouldn’t have grown sick of him and tuned him out just when harm was careening toward him in the form of an out-of-control skateboard.

  But Brett held his face impassive and nodded at Molly’s comments. “It could have been worse,” he agreed.

  The other fathers were already assembling in the enclosed area where the class met. The morning was milder than usual, September sucking a little of the oppressive heat out of the air. Someone—a teacher from the preschool, Brett assumed—had escorted the children who’d come with their fathers to the Daddy School outside into a fenced-in playground. The door to the playground remained open, and through it drifted the sounds of laughter and chatter.

  Molly gestured for Brett to join the group. He took his usual place on one of the low tables. Several smeary paintings lay across the surface to his right, apparently left there to dry. More paintings were tacked to the corkboard lining one wall, brightly colored abstracts, slashes of random color. Ugly paintings, he thought—but they were displayed with as much pride as the photographs on Sharon’s living room wall. The kids who painted them must consider themselves brilliant artists.

  And why shouldn’t they? They were two and three years old. They should be allowed to believe whatever they wanted about themselves: that they were artists or doctors or kings and queens or kangaroos. Why not hang their paintings and let them think what they’d created was important?

  He tried to remember if his mother had ever displayed any of his childhood artwork in his house. He couldn’t recall ever owning a set of paints, but he must have drawn pictures with crayons or colored pencils. He had no doubt produced his share of meaningless masterpieces. But he couldn’t recall ever seeing one of his creations on display.

  His brothers’ creations, yes. And his sister’s strange collages, composed of construction paper and sparkles and scraps of cloth glued onto cardboard. They’d been displayed because he’d displayed them. He distinctly remembered using magnets to fasten his sister’s collages to the refrigerator, thinking they were grotesque but figuring that if he didn’t hang them up, his mother would never bother to do it. His sister used to beam when he hung her designs in the kitchen. She used to puff up and grin. She’d probably felt like a queen.

  “I want to talk about identity,” Molly said, sitting on one of the child-size seats. Given her petite build, she fit into the chair much better than any of her Daddy School students would. “Specifically, I want to talk about your children’s identity, and your identity, and where the line forms between the two.”

  He had no idea how such a discussion might help him—but then, he had no idea how the Daddy School could help him at all, now that he was no longer a part of Sharon’s world. Identity was an interesting issue, however, so he leaned forward, stretching his long legs so they wouldn’t cramp from his improvised seating.

  “How many of you have ever spent such a long stretch with your children that after a while you forget who you are?” she asked. Most of the men chuckled and nodded. Brett couldn’t relate at all. “It’s almost like—what do they call it in science fiction movies? A mind meld,” she went on. “You suddenly realize you haven’t had a lucid adult thought for the past ten minutes. Your mind is completely wrapped around whether your son is going to spill his milk, or whether your daughter is going to keep up
that awful whining. Nothing else exists in the world—or in your head. Your child has taken over your thought processes.” More nods and laughter.

  “Sometimes that lack of a boundary between you and your children is a good thing. It means you’re on your child’s wavelength. You can almost read his or her mind. But other times it’s almost scary. You think you’ve completely lost your mind; your brain has been replaced by your child’s brain. You’re not a teacher anymore, or an engineer, or an investment manager—” she glanced toward Brett “—but instead, all you are is this child-care machine. I know. I’m a mother. I feel that way, probably more often than most of you.”

  More nods. Without thinking, Brett bobbed his head up and down, too. That was how he’d felt with his siblings, years ago—and how he’d started to feel with Max last Saturday afternoon: as if he’d lost his sense of himself and his ability to think the kinds of thoughts that mattered to him. Max had been begging him, “Catch me! Catch me!” until the chant had overpowered Brett. If someone had asked him his name right then, he wouldn’t have known what to answer.

  “There’s another way a mind-meld can happen, which might not be so bad for fathers but is much worse for kids. This is when fathers are convinced they can make their children think like them, or act like them. The classic overbearing Little League dad would fall into this category—the kind of father who thinks, ‘I loved Little League as a boy. I was one of my team’s stars. I know my son is going to be a star, too.’ The father is imposing his thoughts on the child, just as in the earlier version the child seems to be imposing his thoughts on the father.”

  Brett settled back on the table. This aspect of the topic had nothing to do with him. He’d never played Little League. He hadn’t taken up tennis until he was eleven, and his stepfather hadn’t been particularly interested in his athletic ability. He couldn’t imagine trying to influence Max to think as he did when it came to sports. Max or any other kid, he silently amended.

  “Let’s talk about these boundary issues. When do you feel you’re losing your identity? What sorts of situations make you feel as if your kids have taken complete possession of your minds?”

  The fathers contributed examples from their own lives. Several of them alluded to periods of intense frenzy—when their kids were running wild, when they were late for an appointment, when the house was a mess. One fellow said reading children’s books over and over altered his vocabulary after a while. “I’ll suddenly start rhyming words, like I’m Dr. Seuss or something,” he said, prompting a round of laughter. Yet another father insisted his mind had vanished the day his daughter was born, and it had never really come back.

  Brett was glad Molly didn’t call on him. She knew he was just an auditor, not an official student. What would he have said if she’d forced him to contribute to the discussion?

  He’d lost his mind not from Max but from Sharon, when he’d lost his heart to her. He wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened but it had, and his brain had gone into a swoon right along with his heart. He’d been enchanted by her unshakable balance, her rootedness, her knowledge of what mattered in life. Her determination. Her morality. Her ability to look at a row of condominium roofs and discover something beautiful in them, and to capture that beauty with her camera.

  He’d lost his mind enough to pursue her, despite her son. And then Max had devoured another chunk of his brain. He’d pulled up his mental drawbridge on Saturday afternoon because he’d had to defend against invasion. Max had been storming Brett’s skull like a hostile army, threatening to declare Brett’s mind his own.

  Catch me! Catch me! Catch me!

  Max had been the one to catch Brett—and Brett’s response had been to try to escape.

  “It’s normal,” Molly was saying. “It’s perfectly normal to resent when this happens. But it’s going to happen anyway, so rather than give in to resentment, you can accept it, go with it, trust that your mind will return to you eventually.”

  Brett could confirm that. His mind had already come back to him, more or less. He’d read the newspaper uninterrupted every morning for the past week, perusing articles about food shortages in central Africa, feminism in Japan and bickering in the U.S. Senate. He’d savored his coffee while he’d checked the markets to see how his funds were doing compared to those of his competitors. He’d parried Janet and sat in his quiet office and worked with his managers, and then gone home and eaten something he’d have thrown together or brought home with him, a meal without food spilling off the plate or ketchup smeared on anyone’s nose. When he’d played tennis with Murphy, and the following night with a fellow member of his tennis club, his mind had been his own.

  No one else was rattling around in his head, imposing, demanding, forcing him to redraw those boundaries Molly was talking about. It had just been Brett and no one else.

  He was so lonely it hurt physically, like a hunger pang.

  That pain could go away if he let them in—not just Sharon but Max. He could cure himself of the pain if only he was willing to sacrifice his identity.

  As always, the class seemed to fly by. It ought to have dragged; it was irrelevant to his life—except that it actually wasn’t. He wasn’t learning about how to survive Max here. He was learning about how to survive himself.

  Noon arrived, along with the boisterous intrusion of the children from outside. Brett signaled his thanks to Molly above the heads of the tykes who swarmed around her, and he made a quick exit, reminding himself how fortunate it was that none of those noisy tykes was attached to him. But he suffered another pang, deep and sharp in his soul.

  He got into his car—his spacious, quiet, clean car with its lack of a child’s car seat in back—and steered out of the lot. A few cottony clouds drifted across the sky, and the electric hand-shaped sign in the window of the palm-reader’s parlor next door seemed to wave at him. He pointed his car in the direction of the Village Green Condominiums and pressed harder on the gas.

  He was going to have to face reality—the reality that he needed the Bartells, not the reality that he had to avoid them. If Sharon could possibly forgive him for his lapse with her son last week, he’d try harder. If Max could forgive him... Did Max know how much blame Brett deserved for his injuries? Did he know Brett’s irritation with him had put him in harm’s way?

  They probably both did. They probably didn’t want to see him again. But he’d try to get through to them, somehow. He’d plead his case. He’d beg.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that they might not be home. He rang the bell three times but heard no sound inside. Great. He’d finally built up his courage to the point where he could bare his hopes and fears to Sharon and implore her to give him a chance to be as good a man as she needed him to be—and she wasn’t home.

  A car cruised to a halt by the curb as he turned from her door. His hope that it might contain her and Max faded as soon as he saw the late-model sedan instead of Sharon’s clunky old Volvo. The car pulled up in front of his and the doors opened.

  He recognized Sharon’s neighbor and her young daughter as they emerged from the car, but not the man with them, a tall, dapper fellow, well-groomed and well-dressed. The woman—Deborah, Brett recalled—spotted him descending from Sharon’s front porch and strode across the grass toward him, her little girl skipping alongside her.

  “She’s not home,” Deborah said, her expression far from welcoming. He could blame her squint on the sun, but he interpreted it as a frown of disapproval.

  “I noticed.”

  Her little girl giggled and clasped her mother’s hand. Brett wondered if she remembered how he’d lain on the floor of Sharon’s studio and let her and Max toss a ball back and forth across his chest. “She won’t be back for a while,” Deborah added, as if afraid he was planning to camp out on the porch until Sharon returned.

  That wasn’t a bad idea, actually—unless she was really gone. How long was a while? Had she left town with Max?

  He shrugged away his panic. “Wh
ere did she go?” he asked in an impressively level voice.

  “The mall.”

  Thank God. She was still in the Arlington vicinity.

  “It’s a party,” the little girl chirped. “Max’s party.”

  Deborah glanced at her daughter and sighed. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Max is having a party,” the girl repeated happily.

  Deborah turned back to Brett. “They went shopping to get what they needed for Max’s birthday party,” she said, her voice as acidic as lemon juice. Maybe she wanted him to feel even guiltier for having brought on Max’s injury so close to his birthday.

  “When is his party?” Brett asked, trying not to wince at the thought of a three-year-old’s birthday party. A houseful of kids, cake and ice cream, games and toys and noise. A universe of noise.

  “Next Saturday.”

  “He’s turning three?”

  “I’m two,” the girl boasted, extending two of her fingers to illustrate her statement.

  “You’ll be three in a couple of months, sweetie,” her mother told her.

  “I go to Max’s party.”

  “Yes, you’ll be there.”

  Abruptly, she turned and let out a whoop. “Daddy!”

  The man had remained apart from them, but at his daughter’s acknowledgement he hunkered down and spread his arms wide. “You got some sugar for your daddy?” he asked.

  She scampered off, evidently bored with her mother’s conversation. Deborah seemed relieved, and Brett realized why as soon as she started to speak. “I don’t know what your game is,” she said, “but Sharon doesn’t need your kind of trouble in her life, okay?”

  “Trouble?”

  “You’re there, then you disappear. She’s already lost the man she loved once, and she doesn’t need to go through that again. And neither does her son.”