Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  There they were, still making their slow, methodical rounds, eyes trained on the tiny wheels of their toy cars.

  “Oh my God. I fell asleep. Susanna asked me to watch them for ten fucking minutes, and I fell asleep.”

  “Well, NBs like us can’t really be trusted, can we?” He winked at her.

  “NB?”

  “Nonbiological parents,” Rip explained. “Sometimes we don’t get full credit, you know?”

  “Even you?” Allie said. “I would think Grace would constantly sing your praises. You’re such a great dad.”

  “You think so?” Rip asked, his voice hopeful.

  “Hell yeah,” she said, feeling the urge to amp it up. This guy needed a boost.

  She leaned toward him, close enough that she could see the silvery shadow of his stubble. “A lot of these mommies,” she whispered, glancing back at the house, “they’re just going through the motions. But you…” She paused. “You really mean it. You love the kids. You love the process.”

  Rip gathered Allie into a hug, nearly lifting her off her chair. His life jacket pressed up under her chin, and she smelled seaweed and mildew.

  “Okay.” She laughed, patting his back. “You’re suffocating me.”

  He released her and backed away. “Sorry. That was just a really nice thing to hear.”

  Michael walked onto the deck, in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, stripped of his usual hipster look.

  “Alrighty then,” Michael said. There was mischief in his smile. “If you two are done making out, Rip, we can go for that paddle now.”

  Rip chased after Michael, who had started the climb down the ten feet of rocks leading to the beach. Rip slung his legs over the seawall, then turned to Allie.

  “Hey,” he called. “Thanks.”

  He made a loud mwah sound and blew her a kiss.

  Allie pretended to catch it and winked.

  “No prob, my nonbio brother.”

  Rip disappeared behind the wall, then Levi’s singular high-pitched wail sliced through the air. The boys were a pile of flailing arms and legs rolling across the weathered floor of the deck.

  “Cut it out!” Allie ran over and peeled them apart, hoping it wasn’t too late. That Susanna hadn’t heard.

  Levi gripped a handful of Dash’s hair in one white-knuckled fist. Dash pounded on Levi’s back with the heel of his hand. Dash’s nostrils pulsated and then Levi’s head was thrown back, mouth open to the pink-tinged sky in a silent scream.

  She had to stop the scream, had to stuff it back into the boy.

  “Shhh,” she said, “Don’t cry. It’s okay.” Allie was almost whispering, and it reminded her of the fights she’d had with her younger brother as a kid. Her pleas to pacify him—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. You can hit me back!—after she’d walloped him, knowing that if he screamed, her father would come running with an open hand.

  “Dash said he was going to throw my car”—Levi paused, mustering steam before howling—“in the ocean!”

  The seagulls scattered to the far end of the beach, and Allie wished she had wings of her own.

  The boys sat a few feet apart, each singing his own pathetic song, the it was him, not me—he hit me, no I didn’t routine. Their cheeks were flecked with sand and snot and tears.

  When Susanna called, “Hey!” from the window upstairs, the boys fell silent.

  “Everything okay, babe?” Susanna asked. “Do you need me to come down there?”

  The boys stared at their matching orange water shoes. Why couldn’t Allie produce that kind of order in them? What was it about sweet-voiced, ready-to-burst, waddling Susanna that terrified them into gulping down tears?

  Allie waved to Susanna.

  “We’re fine,” Allie shouted. “Everything’s fine.”

  She crouched in front of the boys.

  “Come. Here,” she said, curling her index finger.

  The boys crawled forward on hands and knees.

  “Stop fighting right now,” Allie whispered fiercely. “Or else Mama is going to get really mad at Mommy. Is that what you want?”

  Levi shook his head no. Dash rubbed the top of his toy car.

  “Listen to me,” she said, shaking Dash’s scabbed knee. “If you don’t cut it out…” She felt her lips tighten. “You’re gonna be in big trouble.”

  “No, Mommy,” Levi whimpered, his lower lip trembling. “Don’t say that!”

  “No crying,” Allie snapped. She hated when her attempt at discipline backfired—Levi crying harder, Dash grudgingly silent.

  Levi clamped a hand over his mouth, but sobs slipped through his tan fingers.

  “If you don’t start being good,” Allie said, “there’ll be serious consequences.”

  “What is consequences?” Dash asked hesitantly, garbling the word, so it sounded more like con-sickness. Allie saw the promise of defiance in the lift of his chin.

  She stopped to think. Her answers to Dash’s questions never came out right.

  “It’s like when you do something bad, and so something bad happens to you in return.”

  “Something bad is going to happen to me?” Levi wailed, and stood, shouting toward the upstairs windows, “Mama! Mama!”

  Allie pulled Levi into her arms, shushing him, but his cries rose like a siren. Her hand flew to his grotesquely stretched mouth. He mustn’t disturb Susanna, she thought, as his wet lips blubbered under her fingers.

  “Nothing bad is going to happen,” she said.

  She pressed her lips to his cold, damp forehead and shushed him until he was quiet, his big eyes looking up at her, waiting.

  “Mommy,” Dash said, a sharp reprimand. He had his hands on his hips, his chin tucked to his chest. “You’re making my brother cry. You’re doing a bad thing.”

  She let her hand slip from Levi’s mouth. “Levi wasn’t listening. I asked him nicely to stop crying.” Her eyes scanned the back of the house, searching the windows for the disapproving faces of the mommies.

  Calm down, she told herself.

  “Boys,” she said, as placidly as she could, “nothing bad is going to happen. But you will have a time-out if you don’t start doing good listening. A big one. No Thomas trains.”

  Levi gasped.

  “No,” Dash whispered.

  For a moment, she admired the smug look on his face. It took balls to call her bluff.

  “Fine then. No iPad for a whole week.”

  A flicker of rage narrowed Dash’s eyes.

  “Okay, Mommy. Okay!” Levi cried. “We be good. We do good listening!”

  “Dash?” she asked.

  Behind them the waves whispered as they ran over the pebbles on the beach.

  Dash stared at his knees. He nodded, and mumbled, “Okay.”

  The screen door opened, and as soon as shuffling Susanna appeared, Levi flung himself into her arms, his head knocking into her belly. Her hair was wet, sleek, and dark, and she smelled like old-fashioned soap—something cheap, like Ivory—but in the moment it felt perfect and almost exotic, and Allie wished again that she and Susanna were alone. In bed. Their damp bodies tangling on crisp white linens. Curtains billowing into their Cape Cod ocean-view hotel room.

  “Be gentle with Mama,” Allie said. She tried to ignore Susanna’s questioning look: I leave you alone with them for ten minutes, and … Allie wanted to defend herself, to explain that it was the boys who were making her look bad.

  “Come on, Levi,” Susanna said, taking the sniffling boy by the hand. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You can go potty before Mommy and Mama leave.”

  “Oh,” Levi hiccuped. “’Kay.”

  The screen door thwacked shut, and Allie swiveled to face Dash. He had a metal car in each hand and stood with his legs apart, knees bent. As if ready to run.

  “Give me the cars.”

  He backed away until he was flat against the seawall.

  “Okay. Then give me Levi’s car.”

  She motioned toward his right hand, which hel
d the car Levi had named Hawk because a purple Mohawk-like fan rose from its hood all the way to its tail.

  “Now, Dash.”

  Hawk was gone. It happened so quickly she wasn’t certain it had happened at all, until she saw Dash’s empty hand. He ran from her and she caught him, peeling back his sweaty fingers. Nothing. She leaned over the wall. The tide was coming in, stray waves bumping into the boulders at the base of the wall, exploding into foamy spray.

  “Did you throw Levi’s car in there?”

  Dash looked at her blankly. That same fixed stare of rebellion. When had this happened? It was like looking at someone else’s child.

  “You did it now,” Allie mumbled as she swung one leg, then the other over the wall, possessed with the goal of retrieving Levi’s car. If not, there would be official proof that she couldn’t even handle part-time motherhood. Her back pocket snagged on the concrete and she felt it tear as she scrambled down the rocks. A wave slapped against a boulder, drenching her. Her eyes stung with saltwater.

  She called up to Dash, “Stay there! Don’t move!”

  The drumming of the waves, and the smack of the water into the wall, drowned out any response he might have made. The rocks were slick, and she gripped with her toes so not to slip. As the water tumbled back out to sea, she spotted something shining in the rolling pebbles a few feet out. She jumped onto the beach, underestimating the drop, and landed on a turned ankle.

  “Fuck, fuck,” she yelled as she hobbled forward. The water grew darker, colder, and deeper with each step. Something slick wriggled over the toes of her left foot. She held her breath, tears rising.

  No fucking way was she going to blubber. She could feel them behind her, the others; the mommies and daddies, and she wondered if this was some orchestrated practical joke. A let’s laugh at the geeky hipster moment. She knew they resented her for not carrying the baby herself. She could feel it when they stared at her when they thought she couldn’t tell, and in the way they spoke to Susanna. As if she was the playgroup charity case. Poor Susanna—married to such a selfish woman. Surely, they would jump at the chance to humiliate Allie. And would it really be surprising if Susanna was in on the joke?

  She slipped on what felt like a seaweed-covered rock, and her sole stung with what she knew was a gash, but she didn’t dare stop or look back. Motherfucker, motherfucker. When the next wave came, she waited until the water rolled back out, and reached down and grabbed the gold car before it was sucked out to sea.

  By the time Allie had climbed back up the rocks and practically thrown her body over the seawall, the water had risen to at least three feet, the waves slamming into the rocks, the spray jumping the seawall and splattering the paint-stripped picnic bench.

  The surge of relief, of triumph even, washed over Allie’s goose-pimpled skin despite her soaked clothes and the chill that arrived with the first hint of pink sky. She lifted her foot, and sure enough, there was an angry red cut in the white meat of her sole, watered-down blood seeping out.

  Dash was gone.

  She hobbled to the back door.

  “Hey,” she called through the screen, “is Dash in there?”

  Grace, Leigh, and Nicole sipped wine. The kids huddled around an iPad, watching an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba.

  “No,” Nicole said. “He hasn’t come this way.”

  Even through the screen, Allie could see Nicole’s eyebrows peaking with worry.

  Allie ran to the seawall and scanned the rocks below. Wet, black, and half-submerged, they looked ominous. Would she be able to see Dash if he was down there? If he was stuck in a crevice between two rocks? If he had fallen headfirst, his head was underwater, and … She couldn’t finish the thought. Should she call to the others for help? What if Susanna heard and came outside and freaked out and went into early fucking labor way out here in the middle of nowhere?

  She ran to the end of the deck that looked out on the length of beach, dotted by the occasional beach house, each with its own seawall-and-boulder barricade. No boy-sized figure running across the sand. She ran to the other end of the deck and saw movement by the wooded state-park entrance.

  That little shit. She ran along the side of the house to the front yard, jumping through the sun-ravaged cypress trees that stood guard along the path to the beach.

  “Dash,” she yelled, as branches scratched her arms and face.

  She slid down the dunes. Sand stuck to her wet clothes, slipping into the waist of her pants, into her underwear. She ran down the beach, shells jabbing her bare feet.

  Dash was sitting on a rock at the park entrance. Like one of Waterhouse’s painted sea nymphs. That same satisfied smile skipping across his lips. The woods behind him were shadowy and nightlike. Fairy-tale woods, she thought, as the green flares of fireflies flashed. Red Riding Hood woods. She thought of the mommies with their jewelry and highlights, their platform sandals and push-up bras. Yes, even she—butch Allie—was once a little girl who knew the names of the little girls who’d been lost in the woods.

  “You,” Allie said, leaning over, her hands on her knees, as she tried to catch her breath. “Look, kid. I’m only trying to keep you safe when I tell you not to do things. It’s not like I have a freaking agenda or something. I don’t even want to be here!” Her voice echoed against the trees that loomed tall and black behind Dash.

  Before she could say let’s go back, before she could reach for him, take his hand and lead him back to the house, he was off. Into the narrow path someone, long ago, had hacked into the woods.

  “Dash! You stop this right now!”

  She ran faster than she knew she could, into the claustrophobic confusion of so many branches overhead and on all sides.

  She was on him, grabbing him, whirling him around so he faced her.

  “You are being so bad, Dash!”

  “You’re bad,” he shouted, his voice small and weak after her roar. “Harper said so.”

  Her vision shuddered as the ethereal light of dusk settled.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re not our real mommy. Mama is.”

  He bowed his head and drove his upper teeth into the top of her hand. She howled and pulled away, trying to shake him off, but he wouldn’t let go. His teeth drove in harder, and she swung back and slapped him across one cheek. Hard enough to turn his head so he was looking at the ground. She saw the spot at the nape of his neck where hair never grew. His beauty mark, Susanna called it. She felt the wetness of his saliva on her palm as she drew her hand back, cradling it against her chest.

  There was only the sound of nature, and the silence—after so much noise all day—was a relief. The snapping of branches. The distant waves like a sleeping child’s heavy breathing. Dash looked up at her, his head shaking as if he were cold. His tiny nostrils were pulsating, in-out, in-out. No one had ever looked at her with such ferocity. Like he could devour her whole.

  “I just wanted to play a game,” he said, and his voice broke, the little boy returning. “Pirate treasure.”

  She waited for him to cry. She knew she had slapped him hard, as hard as she had once slapped her own brother when they were kids because their father only hit Allie when he lost his temper, when he drank, when he was worried about money, and she had wanted someone else to know how it felt.

  * * *

  Allie helped Susanna into the car, the long grocery list fluttering in Susanna’s hand.

  “We’ll be right back!” Allie said, and waved to the twins, who stood at the steps of the front door. Levi whimpered from the gentle prison of Nicole’s arms. Dash kicked at a rust-streaked sign staked into the earth by the withered azalea bushes. Refusing to even look in Allie’s direction since she’d slapped him.

  WELCOME TO EDEN the sign read in hand-painted letters.

  After she’d hit him, Dash hadn’t cried a tear. Only gone quiet, like a wounded lover, and walked stoically back to the house, where he resumed playing with his toy car on the deck.

 
As if it hadn’t happened.

  She would have a talk with him, Allie promised herself, the minute she and Susanna returned from shopping. She’d figure out just what to say.

  “Don’t worry about the boys,” Susanna said brightly once Allie was in the car. “They always cry for the first few minutes when I leave them. They’ll be happy again soon.”

  Allie thought of how some people who met them for the first time—at the park, at a family wedding—asked who the twins’ real mother was. Susanna reacted defensively, we both are. But Allie was speechless in those moments, desperate to avoid the attention. And her doubt.

  Dash was right, she thought as she pulled out of the sea-pebbled driveway and onto the sand-dusted road. That little conniver Harper was right. Allie was not a real mother. Not like Susanna.

  She decided the next time someone—a mom in music class, the receptionist at the pediatrician’s office, some kid’s grandma at the playground—asked them who the real mother was, she’d tell them to fuck off.

  don’t rock the boat

  Rip

  Rip sat in the kayak with the paddle resting on his knees and Michael’s broad muscled back facing him. They had lugged the two-seated kayak from the cobweb-filled shack at the side of the house, then searched for the paddles in the piles of Nicole’s father’s crap, everything from badminton racquets to moldy deck cushions.

  Now, finally, the beach house at their backs and the open sea stretching limitless in front of them, they waited to start their journey. As the cool breeze ruffled his hair, Rip felt almost at ease. If only the kayak didn’t feel as if it were sinking, then maybe he’d feel even better. He hadn’t realized the boat operated half-submerged. Water was already spilling into his seat and he was about to ask Michael if this was normal. Then he heard his name being called from the deck behind them, a punch of urgency in Grace’s voice.

  She was standing behind the seawall, Hank’s head peeping over the concrete. Rip saw, despite the distance, the red in Hank’s face, and knew his son was crying.

  “Fuck,” he groaned.

  “Daddy,” Hank wailed. “I waaant you!”