by Lisa Unger
Even though I didn’t want to, I made the snack and brought it upstairs with a bottle of water, then placed it on the floor outside the door and departed with a little knock. Once I was down, I heard the door open and close. I could hear the sound of whatever video game he was playing, gunshots and screeching tires. Bad choice for a problem kid, I thought. If anyone shouldn’t be playing games like that, it was a boy with emotional issues. But what did I know?
In the kitchen, I opened my textbook and pulled out my notebook. I made myself a cup of tea and sat at the table, and tried to focus on my reading. I wasn’t going to touch anything else unbidden. It was just before four in the afternoon.
The sun had nearly set, and the kitchen was dark except for the light I had on over the table, when I heard the door upstairs open, then Luke on the stairs. He appeared in the doorway with his empty plate and spent bottle of water. I looked up at him and he paused for a minute, then went to the sink and washed his plate. He tossed his bottle into the recycle bin under the sink, put the dish in the rack.
I watched him for a minute and then went back to my reading. I felt him come over and stand behind me; the hairs went up on the back of my neck.
“You’ll probably find my picture in there,” he said.
I was reading my abnormal psychology text.
“Do you consider yourself abnormal?” I asked him. He walked around and sat across from me. He offered a shrug. In the light, he looked like exactly what he was—a boy, troubled maybe, but just a kid. I felt an unwanted tug of empathy.
“Everyone else does,” he said. He pulled a sad face, which didn’t seem quite sincere.
“Through no fault of your own, I’m sure.” Was he old enough to detect sarcasm?
A bright smile crossed his face, and his eyes glittered. He was truly beautiful, and I found myself mesmerized by the almond-shaped pools of his eyes, the milk of his skin, his perfect Cupid’s bow mouth, even the spate of freckles across his nose.
“Maybe,” he said, drawing out the word, “we got off on the wrong foot.”
“Maybe we did,” I said. I closed my reading and notes and put them in my bag. “I’m sorry I touched your books. I was just trying to help.”
He gave me a princely nod. “You did a pretty good job, actually.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
“You’re not like other grown-ups,” he said. He was tracing a finger on the wood of the table, back and forth slowly. “There’s something really different about you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him that I didn’t feel quite grown up, yet. That a big part of me still felt like a kid most of the time, which was why it was so easy for me to sink to his level when he called me a tattletale. Or had he already intuited that, and now he was sinking to mine? It was something I wouldn’t consider until much later.
“You didn’t lock the door,” he said. He leveled that challenging gaze, which I knew I had to hold.
“Why would I?” I asked. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Again, he issued that spritely laugh. It managed to sound innocent and vaguely menacing all at once.
“Want to play chess?” he asked. It sounded like a dare, one I was happy to take.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m warning you, though. I’m really good at it. I hope you’re not a sore loser.” I strongly suspected that he was a terribly sore loser, and I was already planning to throw the game.
He bolted upstairs and returned with a chess set in a wooden case, which he unpacked and assembled with unsettling speed and dexterity. He then proceeded to destroy me, game after game, until his mother came home and found us there, heads bent over the board. She let us be as she prepared dinner. And we all shared a lovely meal of grocery-store rotisserie chicken, salad, and macaroni and cheese.
“Lana’s a terrible chess player,” Luke told his mother. His eyes glittered, watching carefully to see if it bugged me. It did. Could I hide it from him?
“It’s not that I’m bad,” I said. “It’s just that Luke’s so good. Who taught you to play like that?”
He was too young and too spoiled to be gracious in accepting the compliment, too arrogant to then make some kind of concession that I wasn’t that bad after all.
“I taught myself,” he said. He pulled back his shoulders, gave me a heavily lidded look. “Who taught you? A monkey?”
“Luke,” said Rachel. She put her fork down heavily. “That’s not nice. Apologize.”
“Actually,” I said, “my father taught me.”
Luke’s face went suddenly pale, and his posture grew rigid. The father button, I knew it well. The absence of a male presence in the home was notable by the fact that no one had mentioned it. I took a small, dark victory inside for hitting him where it hurt. Mature, I know.
“Well, he must have been a shitty player,” said Luke. Rachel had gone very still, too, I noticed, and bowed her head. She was bracing herself for I don’t know what kind of emotional storm. A stronger mother would have punished him and sent him from the table, would have done so long ago. But I found I couldn’t judge her. I felt sorry for her more than anything.
I offered a little laugh to soften the energy, and they both looked at me. “He really wasn’t very good, to tell the truth. He was awful.”
There was a moment, a held breath. Then everybody laughed, and any tension disappeared like mist.
“Who wants ice cream?” asked Rachel, giddy, it seemed, with relief.
We both did.
4
Dear Diary,
I am not much of a journal keeper. I’ve never felt the need to record my thoughts. In spite of some early hardships, I have always been a happy person, free from angst. And I used to pity the poor souls who needed to record their pain on the page—the misfits, the outcasts, the wallflowers. The pretty one, the cheerleader, the prom queen didn’t need to do that, did she? She had no secret pain to share with a Moleskine. I have been the girl cruising in a convertible along the beach drive, my golden hair flowing. I am the one who is envied, who is desired. I am not sure when that changed. But it has changed.
If, a year ago, you had told me where I’d be today, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since then, a gray and gauzy film has settled over my life. My limbs ache with fatigue; I can barely pull myself from bed. When I look in the mirror, my golden hair has gone mousy, my eyes sunken, my skin gray. My hands shake from a constant throb of anxiety. And my days and nights are filled with the incessant crying of my newborn child. The keening, inconsolable wailing fills every nook and cranny of my consciousness. It’s possible that each of us sleeps a few hours a day. But I still hear his misery in my brief and troubled dreams.
I am being punished. I know that. There is no other explanation. Somewhere during a past life, I must have done something horrible. Maybe I suffocated my baby, or perpetrated a mass shooting, or stabbed a homeless person in a dark alley. Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.
And if you think I’m being overly dramatic, consider this: sleep deprivation is a sanctioned form of torture, as is piping into a closed room the sound of a baby wailing. In its pitch, every human recognizes the notes of accusation and judgment—it is the very sound of failure, a veritable siren of misery.
Right now, as my son screams, I am sitting in my walk-in closet, with classical music blaring outside in the bedroom. But I can still hear it, a single ugly note that never ceases. In case you think I am a depraved and mentally ill mother, which maybe I am, it is my mother’s turn to walk and walk and walk him. We take shifts—my mother, my husband, and I. We walk and walk and walk and walk, and soothe and croon and shush and rock and rock and rock. We never stop moving; we have crossed miles, oceans, and traveled into space walking our boy.
Colic, the pediatrician says. Whatever the hell that means. It should stop at eigh
t weeks. The digestive system should mature by then.
The Baby Whisperer. The Happiest Baby on the Block. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Touchstones. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. Ferber. Attachment parenting. Nurse on demand. Set a routine. Baby slings. Baby swings. Vacuum cleaner. Car rides into eternity. There is no book, no expert, no contraption we have not tried. And still, he cries.
When there is a blessed time of silence, we all sit waiting, holding our breaths, keeping our bodies very still. Once he slept for three hours. And me, my husband, and mother whispered giddily to each other in the kitchen. What was it? I had given up wheat, dairy, broccoli, coffee, and citrus—any one of those things might have been passing to him through my breast milk and causing him an allergy. Maybe that was it, finally, after a week of eating nothing but (gluten-free) chicken soup? Was it the new Sleep Sheep, which issued soothing white noise? Was it the swaddling, the classical music, the new pink lightbulbs? But then it started again.
Tomorrow, my husband has to go back to work. And soon my mother will have to return to her own life. Only I will remain with the boy who I want more than anything to love but who screams every time I touch him. I have never cried so much; I didn’t even know I had so many tears.
I hear my husband knocking softly on the door. But I don’t want him to come in, so I don’t answer. He will leave me alone; he knows I need the silence. I can feel him linger, waiting. But I feel dark inside, mean and selfish. There is almost nothing left of me, and I need to hold to every cell.
I am angry. I have been robbed. There is a fantasy we are sold. I can see it even now, the nestling mom and newborn. The blissed-out hours of just lying and looking, sucking on little toes, eliciting smiles, dangling colorful toys. The cooing, fat, pink baby in adorable onesies, lying beneath soft blankies and cuddling plush ducks. I didn’t get any of that.
My baby cut a bloody swath through me. Labor and delivery was a grueling, twenty-six-hour ordeal that ended in an emergency C-section necessary to save both our lives. I remember, though I was addled and racked with pain, wondering why my child was trying to kill me. I could feel that something was wrong. The pain, the consciousness-altering waves of agony that rolled through my body, did not feel productive. There was a darkness to it, the pull of death. Had he been born in the Middle Ages, certainly we would not have survived, neither of us. It was that bad.
But luckily, it’s the modern first world, where white-coated, scalpel-wielding, trained professionals zip us into sterile rooms and save the day. In my darkest moments, I wonder if it was a cheat, an escape from that cosmic yawning. Maybe there is an angry god somewhere, raging. He wanted us, almost had us. We were nearly washed to him on a rushing river of my blood, pulled back just as he closed his hands around our hearts. Maybe in my baby’s incessant crying, this god is making himself known.
My husband, my beautiful, kind, loving husband, is still out there. I can feel him hovering, wondering whether to knock again or drift away. Since the hospital, he treats me so gently, as though he is afraid that I might shatter into a million little pieces and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put me together again.
I want to lean on him, to cry to him, to let him hold and comfort me. But it’s as if I can’t access the person inside me who wants that. I can’t wrap my arms around him and weep into his chest. I want to comfort him because I know he is suffering, too. But I am as stiff and cold as a corpse, limp in his embrace.
We used to have heat, so much heat. But we are a lifetime away from the hot, humid, stormy summer night in Key West when we first met. I had come down for a long weekend with my girlfriends. God, we were young, my girlfriends and I. We were all just out of college, all working seemingly glamorous but poorly paid jobs in New York City. We were all edgy, hungry. We wanted big things, and had no reason to believe we wouldn’t get them. We were privileged, well educated—we didn’t know anything about the world yet and how it conspired against you and your dreams.
When I saw him, standing on the edge of the dance floor, I watched. He was dressed in black in a sea of colorfully patterned dresses and shirts. He was cool and composed, while everyone was rowdy and writhing around him. The music was terrible, deafening and discordant. People were wasted, living it up. It was a messy, ugly scene that everyone seemed to be enjoying except for him and me.
I saw him watching, as I was. I am not one to always participate. More often than not, I stand on the sidelines observing, taking in details. I don’t want to be inside the crowd, being carried along in its current. I don’t do well at parties, though you’d never know it to look at me. I blend—laughing, dancing, chitchatting. But inside, I hold myself apart. He knew that about me intuitively, knew it right away. There was pain there, he said. I saw it right away. Something about it made him feel tender, he said. He wanted to care for me, protect me from whatever it was that made me so sad.
“It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” he asked. Actually, he yelled this at me because it was the only way I could hear him over the music.
“It really is,” I said. And I couldn’t help but smile. Because he had dark pools for eyes, and a long, full mouth. He had a jaw of stubble, and close-cropped brown hair. His shoulders were wide and defined, pressing against the black of his T-shirt. I found myself thinking that he would have been gorgeous even if he were a woman.
Maybe it was the full moon, he always says when he tells our story, or the booze. (He always gets laughs for that one.) But I leaned in and kissed her, he’ll say. When she didn’t slap me, I knew it was love. He makes light, but it’s true. From that night onward, we were never really apart again. Until now, when we are worlds away. The floor of my life has turned to quicksand, and I am sinking, sinking, sinking down. He is reaching out his hand to me, trying to pull me back. But I don’t even have the strength to help myself be saved.
Sweetie, my mom crooned when my head was in her lap this morning. It will get better, I promise. One day, he’ll just stop. And he’ll be the beautiful little boy that he is inside. And you’ll all be fine. This will be a distant memory.
I didn’t believe her. It doesn’t seem possible that our lives won’t be lived under the incessant siren of my son’s unhappiness. But I pray that she’s right. And I pray for silence.
5
“He sounds like a nightmare,” said Rebecca (or Beck, as we called her). She peered at me over her notebook. She was the only one I knew who didn’t type her notes into a laptop. “Don’t you just want to work at Starbucks or something? Less baggage. Free lattes for your best friend, maybe?”
She also didn’t text, e-mailed only when absolutely necessary, and would rather “lose two fingers on her left hand” than create a Fakebook page. She could sometimes be convinced to watch a movie, if it was suitably obscure. But as soon as the television went on in the common room, Beck left. I’m an artist. Garbage in, garbage out. We are what we watch. I am not sure what she considered herself an artist of, precisely. She neither painted nor wrote. I am an artist of living. Okay. Whatever.
Twice already, the librarian had reprimanded us for laughing, and now we had our heads pressed close over the table as we whispered.
“I think I want to help them,” I said.
“Not this again.” She clicked the piercing in her tongue against her teeth, which was such an unsettling habit she had. “You can’t help anyone yet. You’re still a kid.”
“I can help them,” I said. I was a little surprised at the rush of defensiveness I felt. I softened my voice. “They need it.”
She lifted her eyebrow (also pierced) and her palms (lotus flower tattooed on the right hand). “Hey, you want to babysit for the bad seed? Go for it.”
A lash of anger heated the skin on my cheeks, but I quashed it. I’m good at that, hiding my feelings. I bury them deep and you wouldn’t want them to start clawing their way up through the dirt. People were so quick to judge, referencing their own prejudice to prove themselves right
. That idea of the “bad seed” is something that pervades our culture like any other of the myriad acceptable bigotries. The idea that a person might be born bad, be a lost cause, better off dead—it was something that I railed against for all sorts of reasons.
“Don’t go quiet on me,” she said. She was peering at me over her book again, looking sheepish. “I’m just teasing you.”
I issued a little laugh. “I know,” I said. I wrinkled up my face to show her that I was in on the joke. But I couldn’t soften the prickle I had inside.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She fingered a little gold star that she wore around her neck. I’d given it to her before Christmas break. On the back there was a carved inscription in impossibly small print: Stars are like good friends. You can’t always see them, but you know they’re always there. “For real. I’m sure he’s great.”
I went back to my reading and so did she. We had these little dustups, Beck and I, always had since freshman year. There was an essential difference between us. She was very loudly and fearlessly herself. She held back nothing—not her political or religious views, not her laughter or her tears, not her sneezes or farts. She was a hurricane of emotions, ideas, brazen sexuality.
“So, how’s it going with Long Dong?” she asked. She shot me a mischievous grin, which I did not return. She was baiting me, wanted a reaction. She thought I had a crush, a serious soul-destroying case of lovesickness over Langdon. (See how clever she is? Langdon, Long Dong, get it?) She’d never accepted that the only personal element to my relationship with Langdon was friendship. Above all else, he was my mentor, my professor and adviser; that was all it was or ever will be.
“I heard he has a boyfriend in the city,” she said. “Goes to see him on the weekends.”
She had a pen in her mouth. She was alternately chewing it and clicking it with her tongue piercing. I wanted to knock it out of her glossy, pouty, cherry-red lips.
