Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

“I love you,” she said.

  I said, “I love you, too.”

  She botched the hanging up on her end, so the line stayed open another minute or so. I could hear Mid’s house in the background, Alice and Carolyn talking, Maggie doing something that wasn’t quite screaming. Then we’ll try again, I heard myself saying. It was problem enough to be pregnant. That was plenty. But to have something go haywire—I stood there with the phone up against my ear, the beach running all the way to Miami in front of me, and then the skinny kid walked out of the dark with Roscoe. He had the dog leashed with an extension cord. “Hey,” he said to Delton. “Thanks for your help.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I lost you.”

  “No, I really mean it. That was cool of you to even try.”

  “Nice leash,” Mid said.

  “Some dude down the beach caught him. Roscoe ran straight up to him. He gave me the cord right out of his place.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, man,” the kid said. “You know what I like? How some people will just help your shit out when you need it.”

  Mid said, “I like that, too.”

  Delton never had a chance: Skinny kid, muscles, beach dog, extension-cord leash. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me to be in love with him. The kid stuck his hand out, the wrong hand, the one he wasn’t holding Roscoe with. He said, “I’m Nic. It’s short for Nicodemus.” Delton giggled and told him her name was Olivia. Mid took a couple of steps back, looked up at the sky. It was time for me to go home. I asked him if what looked like our place was in fact our place. He said it was. It was maybe a mile away. I told him I’d just walk it, and I told him about Alice, about the bleeding, asked if it would be a problem for me to take the morning. Of course not, he said. He said he’d call to find out how it went. Delton was down on one knee, patting the dog around the neck. The kid was asking her if she surfed. “You’re alright here?” I asked Mid.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “For now, you is who we worry about, OK? You and Alice.”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s got to be.”

  “Good luck,” he said. “You won’t need it, but tell her we’re thinking of you guys.”

  “I will,” I said, and I left him there with the dog, the kid, Delton, the party.

  I watched Aunt Sandy’s TV, all the higher channels fuzzy for a reason I couldn’t figure out. It got worse the further up you went. I could see them trying to sell onyx necklaces well enough, but I couldn’t find the ball in the Marlins game. I tried to watch a movie I was pretty sure was about cowboys. I couldn’t follow what was happening, though, couldn’t tell who to root for, so I gave up, turned the TV off, sat in the dark. I kept thinking of Alice, just Alice, no Florida, no kid, no nothing—just Alice on one of those blank blue screens they did the TV weather against. And I didn’t mean to, but I fell asleep.

  I woke up on the sofa, not sure where I was, morning light bombing in through the sliding glass doors, the sound of something being torn in another room. I wandered down the hall, the cool of the tile on my feet something I still wasn’t used to. That and the pervasive smell of Aunt Sandy in the rooms, the drawers, the closets. Powder. She was haunting us via powder. I found Alice in the front bedroom, and found the sound: She was tearing long sheets of aluminum foil off the roll and thumbtacking them to the window frames. She was running masking tape along the seams. “I tried not to wake you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I fell asleep,” I said. “I tried to wait.”

  “Don’t you want to ask me what I’m doing? Don’t you want to tease me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “No.”

  “Carolyn told me they did this for Maggie, to make it completely dark so she’d sleep. Last night she said they were thinking about putting it back up in her room. Here,” she said, and held out the box of foil. “Hold this.”

  I said, “But why are you doing it now?”

  “I’m getting a head start. I’m practicing. It’s good to be ready.”

  “This ready?”

  “Just let me do it,” she said.

  “The bleeding,” I said. “Are you still—”

  “Not this morning. A little more last night.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be getting rest? Or sitting down?”

  “They didn’t mention that on the hotline.”

  “I thought Maggie had some kind of nightlight,” I said, watching her tape edges. “I thought she didn’t like it dark.”

  “She hates her nightlight now. She hates everything except books. And chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs. Have you seen those?”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up when you got home?” I said.

  “You looked so peaceful, I just left you. I thought if you woke up, you’d come to bed, and if not, you were fine where you were.” She took the foil back. “How was your night?”

  I rubbed my face, trying to sift out what was dream and what was not, trying to account for what to tell her. I decided to go with everything all at once. “Mid might be going undercover,” I said. “And also broke. Delton beat up a pirate at the grocery store. A kid in her class tried to arrest us in the parking lot.”

  Alice stopped herself mid-motion. She did not turn around. Then she started again, pulled a new sheet off the roll. She put a couple of thumbtacks in her mouth. “Start over,” she said, quietly.

  “I kind of can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “That’s why. It’s a lot.”

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s go slowly. Undercover how?”

  “There are these cops,” I said. “I guess they want him to wear a wire. At Island. You can’t tell Carolyn.”

  “I think,” she said around the thumbtacks, “that I can tell Carolyn anything I like.”

  “He’s going to tell her.”

  “What cops?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “He wasn’t making a ton of sense,” I said. “It was hard to keep up.”

  She said, “Carolyn wants you to spy on him for her. That’s what she told me last night.”

  “Spy on him how?”

  “I don’t think she meant it like that. Or not exactly. It’s just, she doesn’t quite know what to believe from him right now, and she doesn’t think he’s telling her anything, which it turns out he’s not, and you’re around him all the time—Anyway, I told her yes.”

  I said, “You told her what?”

  “What I didn’t tell her was that I’m starting to think you should stay the hell away from him.”

  “How am I supposed to spy on him and stay away from him at the same time?”

  She put a thumbtack in the wall. “She’s my sister,” she said. “This is all so fucked up.” She turned around. “Should I be scared right now? Is that where we are?”

  I said, “I think we’re still OK.”

  “But what if there’s more? What if he gets you into something? Or us into something?”

  I said, “That’s not what’s going on.”

  She said, “Who goes undercover? What is this?”

  “Maybe it’ll all work itself out.”

  “And that’s the kind of thing Carolyn says he’s spouting off all the time.” She retaped a corner where the foil was pulling away. “I don’t want to have to be scared,” she said. “OK? It’s already hard enough.”

  “But you want me to watch him. You want me to report back. Like I’m some babysitter.”

  “Will you just explain everything, please? Will you start at the beginning?”

  I said, “I need some coffee.”

  She pulled another sheet of foil. “Come back when you’re ready,” she said.

  “You’re not bleeding,” I said, checking again. “You’re sure?”

  “Not right now.”

  I wanted—badly, even—to touch her, to reach out for her, but I couldn’t make myself walk across the room. I didn’t know
what I’d say when I got there. Instead I headed for the kitchen, for safety, for juice and coffee, and then for the balcony, to try to find five empty minutes. I needed to get my head clear. There was a fat paperback on the glass-topped table outside—Your Baby’s First Year. Alice must have brought it home from Carolyn’s. I thumbed through it. After every chapter it listed all the new ways your baby could concuss itself or suffocate, all the warning signs that meant your baby had feline leukemia or diptheria or lazy eye. Inside, I could hear Alice foiling the windows five months too soon. I worked back through the pieces of what Mid had told me, tried to see how that all strung together. I didn’t want to spy on him. I didn’t want any part of anything like that. I put the book back down on the table just as the parachutist came into view. I called for Alice. She came out and stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, and we watched him fly past, no flags, no windsocks, no banners, no extra anything. Just the green cage and the black sail. He did not wave or point. He never even looked over. Probably it was early for him, too.

  The kiosk, the glass, the polished wood, the technicians, the blood-pressure check, a scan for the heartbeat—still going—and then back into smiling Dr. Varden’s office. His teeth were whiter than before, his happy family in the picture on his desk happier than before. It was getting to where I could not fully understand where I might find the borders or boundaries of our life. Dr. Varden sat at his desk and beamed across at us. He said, “Well, Mom, we’re completely fine, OK? Let’s just let that right out of the gate. This is just baby checking in to be sure everybody’s paying attention. Nothing more. No big deal.”

  Alice said, “But what’s happening?”

  He held his hands up, palms at us. “You know, we don’t know. Could be a hematoma. Could be there was a twin way, way back at the beginning, and the body’s flushing itself. Could be some kind of small abrasion in there. Could be lots of things. But since all your numbers look like you’ve got a little president of the United States cooking away in there, I think it’s probably best not to do anything too invasive. Best just to let things move along on their own.”

  “A twin?” said Alice.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s utterly, perfectly normal. You’ll get a second fertilization that doesn’t take, a clump of cells that hangs out in there until the body says, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ and then sends it along. But it’s probably not even that. It’s probably some small scrape that’ll take care of itself.”

  Alice blinked. I thought, Cessna and Cessno.

  “What we could do,” he said, “to ease the mind a bit, is to set you up with a fetal Doppler.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “You’ve seen it. It’s what we use to quick-check the heartbeat. Some mothers—some parents—just want one at home for peace of mind. Might be good in a situation like yours, give you some rest if the bleeding starts again. Though we’d still want you to call in, of course.” He went rummaging through a stand-up file cabinet behind him. “Here’s the information. You folks can look it over and decide. If you want one, you don’t even have to come back in. You can order it through the desk, or off the website.” He gave us a brochure that had pictures of Dopplers. They looked like calculators with wands attached to them, salt-shaker-sized microphones with no holes.

  “Is it expensive?” Alice said.

  “It can be if you buy it. But we’ve got a rental program. Maybe thirty bucks a month, if I’m remembering right.”

  Alice said, “And we’d be using it—”

  “To check for heartbeat. That’s right.”

  “So if I had some spotting again—”

  “Then you could listen out for your little one, make sure everything’s humming along, not too fast, not too slow. Then, when all’s well,” he said, smiling harder than ever, “we’ve saved you a trip all the way up here. It’s mainly, like I was saying, for peace of mind. We don’t want Mom under stress. Or Dad.”

  “OK,” Alice said. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “Outstanding,” Dr. Varden said. “And remember: Anything at all, you call us, day or night.” He stood up, opened the door for us, shook Alice’s hand with both his hands. “Anything else?” he asked us.

  “Am I still OK to exercise?” she asked.

  “If you could do it before, you can do it now. But maybe let’s not add in anything new. Maybe no rock climbing, alright?”

  “Right,” Alice said.

  “And Dad?” he said. “Are we OK? Are we still on board with all of this?”

  He’d startled me. I’d forgotten I was part of the conversation. I was thinking about heartbeats. About twins. I didn’t know what to say right away, and they could both tell. Finally, I said, “Sure I am.”

  His smile came down a few watts. Alice took a half-step into the hall. Varden said, “Good, good, super,” but it was a different show now. I’d made him unhappy, and Dr. Varden was never unhappy. I could see him telling the story later that night around the dinner table, explaining to his happy kids and his happy wife about how he’d had one today, had somebody who didn’t know how blessed he was—they’d all shake their heads, smug in their enormous disappointment in me, and then go back to passing heaping bowls of food back and forth, chatting about extracurriculars and volunteering. Varden touched Alice on the shoulder, a funereal gesture. He sent us on our way. We paid. We walked back through the atrium. We sat in the car. Alice handed me the brochure, and I read the names of the makes and models. SweetBeats. Peaceful Beginnings. One of the photos had nearly naked Mom and Dad in bed, soft-focus and resplendent in their joy, Dad holding the Doppler wand like some kind of sex toy over Mom’s lower belly.

  Alice said, “What was that back there?”

  “I’m on board,” I said. “Dad’s on board.”

  “Except you’re not.”

  “Do you want one of these?” I said, refolding the brochure. “We can get one if you want.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said.

  “I get a little freaked out sometimes,” I said. “I’m on board. I just can’t quite fake not being freaked out.”

  “I’m not asking you to fake it. I’m asking you to get better at all this.”

  I pushed the door lock up and down. “How am I supposed to do that?” I said, thinking, for some reason, that it was possible she might actually tell me.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But we’re having this baby unless I manage to bleed it away, so figure it out. At least figure some of it out. I’m tired of doing this by myself.”

  “You’re not doing it by yourself. I’m right here, remember?”

  “You’re not. You’re out on the goddamn balcony, or you’re off somewhere with Mid. And I don’t want that. That can’t be us. I don’t want us to be Carolyn and Mid.”

  “I don’t want that, either.”

  “What do you want?”

  I wanted to go back to how it had been before she wanted a kid. I wanted to go back to having a job I half understood. I wanted my own car. “I want to be with you,” I said. “I want whatever it takes to be with you.”

  “You sound so resigned to it. Like you’re settling.”

  “That’s not how I mean to sound at all.”

  “It’s how you sound.”

  “I do get to feel like this,” I said. “I get to carry this flag. I’m sorry. I’m just not ready. That’s it.”

  She reached in behind her sunglasses, rubbed one eye. “I’m not ready, either,” she said. “That’s not what I’m asking you for.”

  “I know.”

  “But do you?”

  I did not. I had no idea what she was asking me for. Or: I knew I had such little chance of giving her, right there in the car, whatever it might be she wanted or needed, that I was willing just to let it go.

  “Walter,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  I think she’d said my name just to see how it felt. The muffler sounded like it was trying to achieve
a rattle. I was a miserable prom date, a disaster on all fronts. I wanted to fade away and disappear. A nurse came out the front door, looked at us a while, then went back in. After that, I drove us home.

  At the condo, Alice said she wanted a nap, went into the bedroom, shut the door. I stood in the hallway thinking of all the easy things I could say to make her feel better. At least to make her feel like I was somehow with her. Through the door, I said, “I love you.”

  She said, “I know that.”

  I felt like an asshole.

  The phone rang. I picked up in the kitchen. Mid said, “Twice-the-Ice, my man, Twice-the-Ice.”

  “What?”

  “They are here. They have arrived. I am watching one getting ready to come off the truck as we speak. You need to come see this shit. There’s a crane. How’s Alice?”

  “She’s good. She’s fine.” She came around the corner, made a face at me, a question. I mouthed Mid at her, and she frowned.

  “You all are all clear?”

  “It looks like it,” I said.

  “I told you, didn’t I? Great news. Great. So come out here and watch them do this with me. Then we can get some shrimp at Pomar’s. We’ll celebrate.” I wanted to ask him how he’d come up with the money to get them delivered. I wanted to ask how it had gone sleeping at the beach house, what he’d done about getting Delton home. I rearranged some fruit in a bowl on the counter. He said, “You still there, buddy?”

  “Right here,” I said.

  “You coming, or what?”

  “I have to see if Alice needs the car,” I said.

  She shook her head, whispered, “Go.”

  Mid said, “What we need to get you is your own transportation. Maybe the company can find something for you.”

  “You sound better,” I said. “I mean, today. You sound OK.”

  “Moved a few things around. Flowed up the cash flow, if you know what I mean.”

  I said, “Where are you? Which one?”

  “Anastasia Station,” he said. North, up past the grocery.

  I checked the clock on the stove. “I can be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “You want me to get them to wait?”

  “Sure,” I said.