“Got it, thanks.” What she wouldn't give now to rewind the morning, stick to the routine, be satisfied with her homemade coffee, with the ospreys, with the parts of the world she could still move comfortably through.
Tyler pushed himself farther away from her, still screaming. When she got close enough, he grabbed her arm and bit her. He didn't break the skin, but Leah gasped, pulled her arm away so forcefully that Tyler fell backward, hitting his head on the tile with a loud crack. Leah was horrified, overwhelmed with guilt, and then Tyler began to repeat the motion, repeatedly banging his head against the floor. For God's sake.
“Jesus,” Elmer said.
Leah grabbed Tyler then, rougher than she was proud of. Cross-legged on the floor, she pulled him into her lap and tried to calm the anger and the fear and the rising helpless darkness these fits evoked in her heart, hoping that might, in turn, calm her boy. She took a breath for control, counted slowly to three, tried to listen to the soothing patter of rain on the dark windows.
When her voice could paint a veneer of calm over her anger, she said, “No biting, buddy. We don't bite people. It hurts.”
Tyler was flailing, trying to land his little fists on her neck, her face. She pulled him close to her, trying to mask the half-panic in her voice as she said, over and over, “I'm here with you, buddy. I love you. You can calm down.”
“He always like this?” This from Elmer. No mercy.
“Dad, he's just a little guy.” Bobby looked concerned, tense, on the verge of reaching toward her.
“We just need a minute,” Leah said. “He just needs to settle.”
Tyler threw his head backward into hers, catching her jaw, and Leah worked to loosen her shoulders, untense her muscles, breathe through the pain. When Tyler was like this, she felt she had to constrain him, to wrap herself around him, mother as shield, or mother as straitjacket, but she couldn't put herself between his rage and his heart, and she couldn't blame him either. Even as she tried to settle her boy, she knew she was holding him here in her anger at least as much as she held him in her love. She kept her head turned away from the baristas, away from Elmer and Bobby. Refusing to acknowledge them felt a tick closer to privacy. Leah wondered at this all the time—the amount of comfort you could manufacture for yourself even when there was no tangible change in your situation.
Finally, Tyler calmed, settled into her lap. Spent, he turned, wrapped his arms around her neck, snuggled his snot-slick nose against her skin. His head was heavy on her shoulder as she lifted him. She left her coffee on the table, nauseated by all the bitterness. She nodded a goodbye to Bobby. She dropped the newspaper in Elmer's lap.
“I'm not Andy,” she said. “You should know better.”
Her heart rattled from adrenaline, from an impulse to throw her own body on the floor, let her flailing limbs pound the tiles, let her screams terrify the community. But instead, she'd drop the boy at day care and go to work. The tantrums she faced there, thrown by grown-ass men, were less frequent and much more easily managed.
SHE DROPPED HER UNSETTLED boy at day care, drove away trying to parse the emotions contained in the wild look that had flashed into his eyes and disappeared. It was still early when she returned to Riverside, but Elmer was already on-site, waiting to complain, probably. Thinking up ways to make her job harder. He was unavoidable. She rolled down her window, cocked her head, and waited for him to say something.
“You still planting those aquatic seedlings today?” Elmer asked. He was wearing knee-high mud boots and a yellow rain slicker. He looked like an elderly Paddington Bear. The back of his truck was full of loose shovels, rakes, pitchforks with splintered wooden handles. Recently, Elmer had demanded weekly updates of construction plans and progress at Riverside, and someone above Leah's pay grade had agreed he should get them. Elmer had been the ditch rider since before she had started in the city planner's office, possibly since before she was born. The ponds at Riverside were fed by the irrigation ditches Elmer managed, snowmelt water from west of the Continental Divide pumped, against gravity, to the thirsty populations on the Front Range. Elmer could raise or lower the water levels in the ponds by opening or closing gates in a series of concrete weirs spread out over the site, weirs Leah was not allowed, legally, to mess with on her own.
Her crew, up against the deadline, would plant despite the rain, but she didn't want Elmer to feel high and mighty about knowing things. She shrugged. “When the site foreman gets here, you can ask him.”
Elmer felt it his duty, as a citizen and as the longtime ditch rider, to make his opinions known. At any given time, half the city council was pissed at Elmer and half loved him. Keeping track of who was on which side could have been a full-time job in itself. Then again, plenty of people were pissed at Leah these days—the women at Tyler's day care, clerks at the grocery store, a few people at work who had resented her success anyway, but the change in Elmer cut deep. Leah knew she hadn't done anything wrong, that it was all incredibly unfair, but, as her mother had always told her, such was life. You shouldn't expect fair.
“I wouldn't plant anything today if I were you,” Elmer said.
“How about you go do your job,” Leah said, “and leave me to do mine.” Elmer's face flushed red, and Leah felt satisfied. She'd known it would set him off.
“Lake Estes is near full. Likely they're going to start sending water down the river and into the ditch systems, relieve the pressure on the dam,” Elmer said. “You're going to want those gates open if the ditches start flooding.”
“We already negotiated the schedule, Elmer. I need those gates shut. If the water gets too deep, we'll have trouble getting those seedlings to take. New roots like that, they'll wash right out.”
“What's that you just said about whose job is whose? I been managing these ditches since you were in diapers. I saw the damage of the '76 flood. You ought to listen to me.”
“It's not personal, Elmer. It's just a deadline.”
“It's your mistake to make, I guess.”
Leah was exhausted. It wasn't her fault, she didn't think, that Tyler was so sensitive, or that Andy had falsified evidence in so many cases against people in town. She pictured her husband in an orange jumpsuit, wondered why it felt like so many people thought she should be wearing one too. It would be so much easier to do this alone, she thought, if it didn't feel like Andy was still around all the time.
Leah looked toward the river, toward the gates, caught the young ospreys jockeying for position in the nest—the firstborn, the biggest, always muscling the others away. She hadn't seen as much of the parents over the past few weeks—she assumed the birds were preparing for migration, weaning their chicks away from protection and provision. She wondered what it would be like to fly away herself, how hard she'd have to work to carry Tyler with her.
“What do you tell your boy? About his dad?”
Leah looked at Elmer. Her shock morphed into suspicion, but Elmer's face had softened into something closer to kindness, the Elmer she remembered from the before times.
“Not much. That Daddy had to go away.” Leah felt tears rising but forced them back down. Not in front of Elmer. Not now. “I figure I have some time before he needs to know everything.” Why she was trusting Elmer with even this small bit of information was unclear. She had so many questions and nobody to ask.
“He reminds me some of Bobby, when he was that age. Sensitive. Couldn't hardly keep up with him.” Elmer got in his truck, started the engine. The ospreys startled at the noise. Leah wondered for the rest of the day, as she watched her crew plant the seedlings, watched them trim the roof on the new bathrooms, whether this was some sort of peace offering from Elmer, whether she'd just misunderstood him all this time, or whether he was changing the way he saw things. Maybe just saying it out loud, I'm not Andy, which had felt so tremendously good, had made a difference. She watched the river churn, ominous, watched i
t swell with torrents of rain, and then it was time to pick Tyler up from day care. Leah felt breathless, untethered, her life suddenly too much for one adult and a preschooler to manage.
WATER FROM THE ROOF gutter downspout rolled toward the storm drains outside the day care, the deluge spreading across the asphalt of the parking lot in large fan shapes, disappearing into the rushing temporary stream along the curb. Leah stomped her muddy boots on the mat, rang the bell, and waved into the camera at the secured entrance. It had always felt strange, this idea that Tyler was locked away from her, that she needed someone else's approval to get inside, close to her son. The receptionist said, “I guess we need the moisture,” and though Leah didn't correct her, she knew that wasn't exactly true. The ground had reached saturation days ago.
Ms. Evers, the center director, stuck her head out of her office door. “Mrs. Tinker? Can we talk for a moment?”
Leah nodded. Was she being called to the principal's office? She felt an odd wave of shame, though she knew that was nonsense.
“Tyler doesn't nap,” Ms. Evers said.
Leah laughed. “Tell me about it. Doesn't sleep much at night, either.”
Ms. Evers raised an eyebrow. She did not return Leah's smile. “It's a rule here.”
“How can you make a rule about napping?”
“State regulations state that the children must lie on a mat quietly for at least twenty minutes daily,” Ms. Evers said.
“Sure, but that's different from napping. He hasn't napped since he was ten months old.”
“All the other threes sleep, some of them for more than two hours. The room has to be quiet during nap time.”
Leah caught the motion of the raindrops on the window, the way they landed in a tremble, suspended, stuck, before beginning their slow, meandering descent toward the sill.
“Isn't there somewhere else he could go while the other kids nap? An awake room?” Leah's mind conjured a picture of a panic room, thought maybe in this case the analogy held.
“Impossible.”
“Seems less impossible than making a three-year-old stay quiet for two hours.” Some things, Leah knew, simply could not be managed. Husbands who made criminal professional decisions. Children who were not tired in the afternoon. “I can't make him nap any more than you can.”
“If the situation doesn't improve, we may have to pursue disciplinary action. Perhaps a suspension.”
“You suspend preschoolers?” Leah struggled to square her vision of preschool—loving teachers singing repetitive songs, gently reminding the children that Play-Doh was not for eating, directing cleanup and story time—with the lack of compassion she felt these women had for her son. Would it be different if he napped? Were the tired children better loved?
“We reserve the right. It's policy.”
Leah lifted Tyler into the air when she got to him, felt his belly against her chest, his little legs hugging her sides. She held him longer than normal. If she loved Tyler more, loved him better, maybe she could counteract the way the world saw him—the way she worried the world would make him see himself.
“Mommy,” he said, his breath hot and vaguely sour on her neck, “it still waining?”
“Still raining, buddy. Let's go home.”
HER NEW APARTMENT COMPLEX was fancy, had a community clubhouse with a pool and a weight room, but the walls were flimsy, porous, leaking not just the sound of the Broncos game on her neighbors' TVs but the dank smells of root vegetable soups from their kitchens, the artificial shampoo fragrances from their showers. Leah measured two cups of flour into a bowl, two teaspoons baking powder, a shake of salt. She took a moment to feel the freedom of making pancakes for dinner without Andy's insistence that breakfast foods be served only before 10 a.m. “Like McDonald's,” he had said, back before McDonald's started serving breakfast all day. “They know what's up. Shut that shit down at ten.” Andy had a lot of strict rules like that. Andy would have sided with Ms. Evers. He believed that children only defied authority if you let them, had always been clear that any fault in their son was planted there by Leah's misguided loving permissiveness. Some of it, she thought, must have been Andy's fault. Andy worked the late shift, had been with Tyler all day while Leah worked. Questions of credit and blame had been heavy in their young marriage. It was a paradox of single motherhood—the freedom to make all the decisions, and the heaviness of the worry that she might make the wrong ones.
Tyler was belly to linoleum, rolling a replica Lightning McQueen car in long arcs around his body, making quiet engine noises with his lips. Leah stepped out the sliding door, stood at the very edge of the covered deck, felt the mist of fog condense on her forearms. A brief respite from the rain, the promise of more in the dark clouds to the west. The chill damp of the air made her grateful for the warmth as she stepped inside.
“Come on, buddy,” she said. “Dinnertime.”
“No thank you,” Tyler said.
Leah braced herself. “Wash your hands, dude. It's dinner. Not a choice.”
Tyler scrambled up and ran into the living room, crouching behind the couch. “No,” he said. “No dinner. Cars.”
“You can play after dinner,” she said. “Put the toy down and come eat now.”
Tyler screamed, “Nooooo!” and Leah put her hands in her hair, squeezed her temples with her palms. Outside, angry chattering finches scolded the aggressive squirrel that had displaced them from the common-area bird feeder.
“Okay, son,” Leah said. “You come out where I can see you, and you can keep playing.”
Andy would have grabbed the boy, forced him into a chair, made his voice deep and loud to terrify Tyler into obedience. He would have kept his voice in a deep growl and said, to her, “You're gonna have to start laying down the law, Lee. If he walks all over you now, you're going to have some real problems when he's a teenager.”
Leah couldn't handle another tantrum, did not want to manhandle her tiny boy again. She pictured Tyler ten years from now, newly teenaged, all his little boy emotions spreading awkwardly into a body sprouting hair, growing muscles. She pictured a body the size of Andy's looming, fragile, falling all to pieces. It was terrifying. She wanted to absolve herself of her son's intense behaviors, give in to the embarrassment, say to everyone, “He gets this from his father.” More than absolution, though, Leah wanted to scrub Andy out of Tyler completely, wanted the half of him that was hers to swallow the half that wasn't. Andy erased.
Tyler sat in Leah's lap and ate a pancake while she read Goodnight Moon. As she tucked him into bed, he placed both hands on her cheeks, looked intently into her eyes, and smiled. Leah wondered about the tangled, ragged pulsings of difficulty that seemed, somehow, to amplify love, the way that love, amplified, confused rational planning.
“You think you can try to take a nap at school tomorrow, son?” She rested her forehead against his.
“No,” he said, rubbing his nose against hers. “No nap.”
“Okay, buddy.” Leah wanted this moment to last, wanted to soak herself to dripping with her son's sweetness, store it up as a buffer against everything that was hard.
The nightly news showed pictures of Lake Estes swelling against the dam, the Adams Tunnel under Rocky Mountain National Park at capacity, the system able to work against nature for only so long. “If the rain keeps up the way it's supposed to,” the weatherman said, “I don't see that we get through tomorrow without some serious flooding in the Big Thompson Canyon.” Leah felt fear cap her heart like clouds obscuring the peaks on the Rockies. Elmer had tried to warn her. Riverside was right in the path of that flood, her vulnerable aquatic seedlings, her fledgling ospreys in their nest of twigs.
THE NEXT MORNING, LEAH dropped Tyler at day care early and went straight to Riverside. She would try to adjust the headgate, check the levels and flow measurements in the Parshall flume, manage the surge of water. Screw Elmer Jack
son, anyway, for being right. The police were already blocking access to the Big Thompson river bottom, monitoring the water. The rain raced in rivulets on top of the saturated soil.
The blockade officer let Leah through to the site. “Watch yourself. They opened the gates up in Estes Park an hour ago.” Leah felt panic rising, felt her shoulders lift, her belly tense. The river was cresting its banks, a churning, relentless press.
She couldn't get eyes on the osprey as she drove in, but there in the parking lot was Elmer Jackson's truck. She looked again at the river and deflated, hopeless. She took a minute to orient herself, squinting into the sheets of rain. She wanted to get eyes on Elmer, ask him what he thought he was doing out here all by himself, ask him why he thought it would make any difference at all. Was there any amount of effort, attention, love, that could protect a project, a human, a life from something like this?
She heard a shout then, turned to the south, caught what looked like a pitchfork spinning end over end before it dropped back behind the wall of pigweed and miner's candle that stood between her and the line of irrigation ditches. She clambered through the mud and weeds to see Elmer twisted awkwardly on top of the trash rack on the culvert that ran under the muddy road, his legs caught in different openings, his feet dangling just over the churn of high water.
“Jesus, Elmer,” she said, rushing toward him, “you all right?”
“Hell no, I'm not all right,” he said, gasping with effort and pain. He shook his head slowly. “Stupid.”
Leah couldn't tell whether Elmer thought she was stupid for asking or if he was stupid for falling in.
The ground at the top of the culvert was sloped and uneven. On both sides of the grate were tall piles of decomposing moss that had invaded the ditch since the nitrogen bloom of July. Today's moss slumped on top of the pile, an almost neon green slime.
“Careful now,” Elmer said. “The plants are wet and there's the mud. It's awful slippery, which is how I ended up here.”
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