Fated Desire

by Noah Harris

  Ernest and I used to call each other “Human” and just laugh. Now it makes me a little sad.

  “Strong can read,” I hear Rosemary say, with scorn, and Huck laughs.

  Bodhi is four, and cannot read, but he’s assured me of the same thing before. He also likes to say that he’s five, which he’s not. I’m five! I can read! He’s been yelling this since he was three. I’m from Alaska! Also untrue.

  “Strong write a letter to Santa,” Huck responds with a snicker, which Rosemary finds hilarious for some reason.

  I like to listen to them for as long as I can, before they sense I’m close. They come out in their pajamas when they’re good and ready, patting my thighs and kneecaps like I’m a horse that needs gentling, before taking my hands and pulling me into the kitchen.

  “Biddle wants blueberries,” Huckleberry assures me, and Rosemary squeezes my right hand in her tiny one, nodding. What they mean is, they want blueberries.

  For the twins there are two major food groups, fruit before noon, and chicken nuggets the rest of the day. They seem to view the latter primarily as a ketchup delivery device. The fruit is how you get them to eat anything else, as long as it’s more convenient than eating around it.

  Blueberry pancakes are a blueberry delivery device, but they’ll eat them. With their hands, yes, but still. Ripping into them with their little chompers, grinning like angels. Cornflakes with sliced strawberries, on the other hand, would just result in a bowl of soggy cornflakes with no strawberries in it.

  Life with the twins is a complex and evolving trade war. I come up with a way to keep them healthy and alive, and they develop countermeasures to my efforts. Frankly, I worry sometimes they might be smarter than me, which will clearly end in disaster. But generally, I can stay ahead of them, as long as I’ve had at least four hours sleep.

  In their pursuit of glorious destruction, they have allies.

  Their older brother Bodhi thinks everything they do is amazing, and he can be depended upon to challenge me no matter what I say or do. If I offered him blueberries, he’d demand strawberries. He’s as stubborn as his father was.

  I don’t approve or support this kind of relationship with children. We don’t make deals with terrorists. But Bodhi’s a very effective terrorist.

  And then there’s Poppy, the two-year-old, capricious in her loyalties. She’s just as likely to snitch as she is to stand lookout, and the twins never know which way she’ll fall. That’s very lucky for me, because it means I can generally get her to snitch if necessary. It also helps that I’m the only person she really likes with any active enthusiasm.

  “Creature wants to wear red today,” Huckleberry assures me. He likes dressing Poppy. Rosemary nods as if they were just discussing it with Poppy earlier over cocktails.

  “Is that right?” I say, spooning out silver dollar dollops of batter on the griddle and rinsing the blueberries with my free hand.

  “Creature wants to wear red every day,” Rosemary explains, which is simply untrue.

  I was worried for a while that they were liars, or nuts, or just swayed by Bodhi’s blurry relationship with facts. But Ernest read somewhere they were developing an understanding of themselves versus other people, and it can be a process.

  I know plenty of adults who’ve never quite made that jump. So two years in, their fantasies are full sentences, and I try to be patient. If I just pretend they’re saying “I wish” before every sentence, it makes the whole fantasy world easier to deal with.

  With Bodhi, too. I wish I were five. I wish I could read.

  Poppy chooses her words a lot more carefully. There are people in this town who still wouldn’t know she’s developed the capacity for speech, and others who think she never shuts up. She’s as observant as the twins and as stubborn as Bodhi. She knows what she wants, which is something I really envy, and she doesn’t like to wait for it. But since she’s a sweet kid, famously charming, it’s not too hard to keep her happy.

  “Let’s see if she still wants that,” I say lightly. “When she comes downstairs.”

  Poppy also likes to make an entrance.

  Bodhi, smelling even just the first hints of breakfast like a bloodhound, comes down the stairs at full tilt, eyes lit up and wide as if he’s been starved for weeks.

  “Strong hates blueberries,” Rosemary says from the table, one thin finger pointing at Bodhi like an accuser. Bodhi’s face screws up immediately with aggrieved rage.

  He’s hit a place, at four, where everything is judged in terms of fairness and truth. It’s not fair for Rosemary to say something untrue about him. He’s already turning red. The fact that I know it’s not true, and he knows that I know, doesn’t matter. It’s the principle of the thing.

  Honestly, I can identify. The fact that people can just stand there, look you in the eye, and lie is a disturbing revelation I still have almost daily. I much prefer the lies I tell myself.

  “Bodhi, buddy. Tell Rosie how much you love blueberries,” I say. Fight lies with the truth, instead of screaming about theoretical evils. It won’t affect her in any way, and you’ll probably just end up looking wild yourself. A life lesson I’m impatient to teach him.

  “I don’t love blueberries. But I sure don’t hate them,” Bodhi says, nonchalantly, as if it hadn’t just nearly ended the world a few seconds ago. He climbs up into a chair, taller every day, and folds his hands on the tabletop. A displeased little prince.

  “I like blueberries, Human,” he says, and the twins giggle. They love it when we use their words for things.

  But I always feel a little bit like they’re being indulgent, behind those smiles. Patronizing. Like it’s so cute that we’re trying to learn to speak correctly.

  “Creature fought a blueberry,” Rosemary informs Huckleberry, and he nods as if this is common knowledge.

  What does that look like in their minds? A toddling two-year-old almost as big as they are already, fists up like a boxer, facing off against a giant blueberry? Or on hands and knees, growling at a blueberry that’s growling right back at her with a mouthful of teeth?

  Everything they say is so mysterious. Especially before I’ve had my coffee.

  When Queen Poppy deigns to join us, last and most elegant of the party, she’s wearing a diaper, and Bodhi’s huge clomping shoes. To complete the look, she’s trailing a long red cape over one naked shoulder.

  She looks like a Greek statue of some kind of warrior, except for the shoes. Even with a thumb in her mouth there’s something regal about her posture. Elegance in the way she serves each of us with a direct look in the eyes before climbing down the last step and toddling over.

  The first time I saw her take the stairs wearing somebody else’s shoes, I nearly had a heart attack. But Rosemary put her hand on mine, and shushed me almost silently, and we all watched her do it a step at a time. For somebody so sure that she deserves exactly what she wants at all times, Poppy has a very analytical mind.

  The twins love her more than anything in the whole world, but I think that’s just because she won’t give them the time of day. It’s central to her mystique.

  “Happy dance,” Poppy explains as she enters, on her toes in those shoes like they’re high-heeled slingbacks.

  “Happy,” the twins respond. She nods and takes her place at the left of her high chair, serenely ready to be lifted into it. Ernest called this move “the infanta’s palanquin.”

  “Creature’s Little Riding Hood,” Rose exclaims, and I note that Poppy’s wearing red after all, just like they said. The twins are rarely wrong, especially about weird things like that.

  Of course, if she wore the clothes on her body, rather than draped around her shoulders like a heavy scarf, it might work better. But not before she’s eaten, or I’ll have to dress her twice.

  She may be a little princess, but she eats like a starving animal.

  Bodhi sits at the head of the table, a little man with a serious look on his face. I can tell he’s waiting for me to go get
myself ready.

  It was a lot harder to get everything timed properly when he wasn’t old enough to run breakfast. Even when there were two of us, it took a lot of negotiation and sleight of hand to get away for a shower. But Bodhi wants to step up.

  Really, he wants to be in charge of everything, because that’s who he is. A born alpha. But after his dad died, he really had a lot of anguish about contributing. Pitching in. We called him the man of the house as a cute joke, but he takes it very seriously. Which is why we still joke about it.

  Every morning, once the twins and Poppy are sorted out and digging into their breakfast, it’s Bodhi who presides over the table. I can rinse off my work out and get dressed in about ten minutes, and I’m within earshot. It’s really more about making him feel good than it is about keeping the other kids alive. That’s an added bonus.

  We never officially discussed it, and it’s not something we say out loud. I think it would cause mutiny if the twins knew I was entrusting him with any kind of authority. Poppy would probably teach herself the alphabet, just so she could write a formal letter of complaint. But not long after Ernest died, it just started happening, and now it’s part of the routine.

  I can hear him singing to them, a captive audience, even from the shower. The ghostly voice of the twins, and Poppy with her blaring baritone, join in soon after. I don’t recognize the song, but it’s clearly something they all know. Something about a garden.

  I should get back to gardening. It’s the first day of spring.

  Having four kids in three years already made us stick out among the other parents, although of course we would have stuck out a lot more if anyone knew I carried them myself. But still, they’d look at us strangely sometimes. I’m scrupulous with money and Ernest learned a million tricks for being cash-poor growing up. But I think it was always pretty clear we weren’t wealthy, so you’d see it in their eyes. Can they really afford so many?

  And now that he’s gone, and I’m a bereaved single dad, I’m every parent’s nightmare come to life. I’m happy to stay out of the picture as much as possible, just to keep them from getting uncomfortable or treating my kids any different for it.

  It sounds sad, but things are already sad. I take a certain grim pride in refusing to spread the misery further.

  It’s harder to do with the shifters, though. They know the whole story, they were there for all of it, and since we depend on each other so much in our community they go into full-on charity mode instantly. Which was hard for me after Ernest died and all I wanted was to be left alone.

  He always cursed my male pride, but maybe he was right.

  They wanted to bring food over, which made me angry because I could still cook, even if I cried sometimes while I was doing it.

  They wanted to take the kids off my hands. “Just for a day, just five minutes for yourself,” and eventually I just ran out of ways to explain the only thing keeping me sane and alive was my babies.

  They wanted to just drop by, just check in, just say hi. Just because they were nearby. Just because they were thinking of me. Eventually I just stopped answering the door or replying to their just-becauses, because I just couldn’t do it. Even the pack leader, Goodboy, the man I credit with saving my life, just loved me too much. I would crawl through fire to keep from hurting that man, and I think he knows it. Which means, hopefully, he’s just giving me space.

  Ernest was an alpha with a clean line of sight to becoming the pack’s leader one day, and he was still in his mid-twenties when he died. The pack takes his loss seriously, in a way that doesn’t really have much to do with me at all. It hurts to think his loss hurts us more than someone else’s might. If I’d died and he’d lived, he’d probably be the alpha right now.

  Instead, they got me. The shifter equivalent of an Easter-and-Christmas churchgoer. The alpha’s mate, who runs the full moon but otherwise keeps to himself. Sometimes I think about taking the kids and just running off somewhere. Just so I don’t have to see the other shifters looking at my kids with that appraising look, wondering if one of them could be alpha one day.

  Bodhi is four, he doesn’t need that pressure. I hated being evaluated like that when I was a kid, decisions being made about who you’ll be, how you’ll grow up. Who you’ll love. Shifters are such a small population they’re even more brazen about it. They have to be.

  The thing I loved most about Ernest was the way he made me feel like I could do anything. Limitless potential. He made me feel strong and capable, like a man. Even thirty-six weeks pregnant and crying over every little thing, we were always an equal team.

  Once he was gone, and the others started pushing in on me, trying to do everything, help, provide…it was like the whole pack was trying to be my alpha. But none of them were Ernest, so I hated them for it.

  I faded away. I didn’t realize any of this was happening, of course. I just knew I had better things to do, more and more of the time. I’d rather bundle up with my kids and stay in bed all day than worry about everybody else’s feelings. Soon enough, that was my life.

  Now that he’s gone, I don’t know what else to do. So I work out. Every morning at four thirty, I can feel close to him again. Maybe that’s what turns me on. Maybe it’s not the workout at all, maybe it’s just because my body remembers him best that way.

  “Christian Keller?”

  I shove back from the table, cursing myself for answering the phone, and shut myself in the garage.

  “Can I take a message?”

  “Sorry. Is Mr. Keller there?”

  “I am afraid he can’t come to the phone right now,” I lie unconvincingly. “May I take a message?”

  The debt collector on the other line is annoyed. I can hear it in his breathing. They always get so personal about it, it’s awful. But I guess it’s their job. I don’t know how else you could be great at it, get the results, except for being mean.

  I also know they lie, which is why I don’t feel bad about lying to them. I could never do that in another situation, it would be too embarrassing. But this feels more like a game of chess.

  “Sure. Please tell him we’re calling in reference to a balloon payment coming due in the next few months, and since he’s missed a couple of payments this year already, we thought he might want to refinance…”

  “Sounds good. Thank you so much!”

  I repeat the guy’s number back to him, pretending to write it down, and then hustle back to the kids, who are getting loud enough that I can assume they’re done with breakfast and getting ready for a riot.

  The guy probably thinks I’m a jerk, but I couldn’t care less. If I were really a jerk I’d set Poppy loose on him.

  They always told us the babies couldn’t sit in the front seat until they were teens, so the twins really threw us a curveball. Luckily, Bodhi prefers sitting in the very back, and Poppy likes being in the middle seat, so everybody’s within reach of everybody else. Very helpful when we’re on the go and Bodhi wants to prove how helpful he is by solving problems for the twins.

  “Buckle back in, my darling, and thank you for your help.”

  A sentence I say probably six times on any given car ride as he replaces pacifiers, refills sippy cups, opens snacks, whatever the others require. I can’t imagine life with a different kind of kid.

  Or maybe this is just how oldest kids act. Growing up, I didn’t really ever spend time with other families, just mine and Dominic’s, and we were both only children. The sibling game is new to me. It’s one of the things Ernest knew, he was from a huge shifter family. Raising kids was already second nature for him. I loved that. It made me feel so much more confident knowing he’d seen it all before.

  I try to picture myself, at Bodhi’s age, taking responsibility for anyone else and I can’t do it.

  Snacks? Mine. Spilled your sippy cup? Lame. Too bad. Was I possibly…horrible when I was four?

  My parents weren’t the most involved, so I wasn’t really familiar with caretaking. Maybe that’s what
it was. The hard-won self-reliance of the neglected, passionate child.

  I didn’t meet Dominic Tarrant until we were about six, so I wouldn’t really have cared about other kids until then. Before then, everything felt like it was happening to me. It was me against the world. But having a partner in crime changed everything.

  I wonder if that’s how the twins just naturally feel. I wonder how much kinder or stronger I would be if I’d been born right beside Dominic. If it didn’t take me six years to find him.

  And just seven more to ruin everything, I think, and shake my head.

  Somebody told me when you have a dark thought, you should breathe it out of you, and more importantly, smile. Look at yourself in the mirror and wish that guy well.

  I’m trying to be sweeter with myself, but it’s a hard climb. There are days when a broken taillight is just a broken taillight, and there are days where it’s a taillight and a spilled drink and an overdrawn checking account all at once. All one big black cloud crushing me, and not just a handful of distinct, separate problems to solve.

  Today is a good day. If I had a problem today, it wouldn’t feel like life coming at me at all. It would just be a change in routine, a new question to answer. But it would also be nice to get through the day without any hassles at all.

  Bodhi helps Huckleberry out of his seat as Rosemary’s dropping down by herself, and the three of them link hands and make their way toward the drop-off monitor. I send them to daycare with just one backpack for all three, which is a lifesaver. The monitor mom gives me a look that’s one-third sympathy, one-third curiosity, and one-third something I try not to think of as gratitude. Thanks to the universe that she’s not alone, widowed, drowning in it.

  Today is a good day.

  Or maybe what I really mean is, I wish today was a good day.

  Back home, finally, I ask Poppy what she wants to do today, and she beams brightly up at me with her little chompers.