by David Hicks
“No,” Nathan said, fingering the button on his shirt. “Just sad sometimes, but I see you almost every day and Joey Vinnola says you’re better than his dad because his dad is always—”
I gathered his angular body to me. “It’s okay if you are,” I said. I was thinking of what my therapist would say about Nathan’s drawing. That one’s going to have issues when he grows up.
“Okay, but I’m not,” Nathan said. “You’re the best dad ever.”
I held him at arm’s length: his mushroom-cut hair, his spindly body, his wet mouth opened in an O, and the baby teeth inside making way for the grown-up teeth. You have no idea how amazing you are, I wanted to say. You’re already a better person than I am.
“I got it,” Nathan said, his eyes widening “I’ll just live here with you!” He rapidly patted my knee. “Jane can live with Mom and we could play catch in the back where all the grass is and you could read to me every night and we could watch Thomas the Tank Engine . . .”
I touched my finger to his lips, but he slapped away my hand. “Don’t you want me to live here? Why don’t you tell Mom you want me to live with you?”
I caught my breath. In a preliminary talk with a lawyer, I had proposed that very compromise: If I have “no chance whatsoever” at full custody, could I at least have custody of one of them? The lawyer had shaken his head. “They never split up the children,” he said.
I took both of Nathan’s hands and pulled him into me, breathing in the smell of his hair. If I pried open the top of his head, would an orange fire leap out and devour us both?
“Natty,” I choked out. “You’re the best boy. The very best boy. In the whole wide world.”
*
Two months after Nathan was born, I carried him to the couch with me at three in the morning, after the clangy radiator in his room had awakened him from a deep sleep. I shuffled into the kitchen, holding him in one arm while getting his bottle ready. With his cracked squawking in my ear, I plucked the bottle from the pot of hot water, squeezed a drop of Rachel’s breast milk onto my wrist, arranged my son in the crook of my arm, placed the nipple in his mouth, and made my way over to the couch. “Natty is the best boy,” I sang to him, “the very best boy in the whole wide world.” I found an old movie on television as he slurped the milk. When he fell asleep in the middle of it, waking up in time to belch into my face, spit up onto my shoulder, and drop into sleep again on my chest, his heart beating rapidly against mine, a wave of tenderness came over me, a rush of something I had never felt before, and with that the certainty that he and I had just sealed something, something permanent, something more natural and unbreakable than a wedding vow.
*
Near first base was a sign: Parents and Guardians, proceed to home plate. When we reached the base, Nathan, no need for directions, broke from me towards second, and as he ran in line with the other kids, I surveyed the adults, wondering which were parents and which were guardians, which were heroes and which were villains. Then I turned and noticed my dashing son.
At first he ran with his fists closed, legs windmilling, knees and elbows jutting out as he followed the children in front of him. The rest of the parents and guardians strolled to home plate, looking right and cheering encouragement, while I stood arrested at first base. For just before reaching second, as Nathan leaned forward and dashed past a taller boy in front of him, a strange thing happened: his body began to collect itself, began to come together in flight.
His chin rose, his shoulders relaxed, and his fists opened as he took the inside corner of the second-base bag with the side of his right foot (Where did he learn that?), passed two more dashers, then accelerated confidently past an entire line of jogging and laughing kids—tall kids and short, bad kids and good, kids of all colors, kids with stepdads or stepmoms, kids with single moms or single dads, kids with no parents at all, kids with parents who hated each other, kids with parents who loved each other. As he rounded third, the Mets third-base coach smacked him on the ass and he ran even faster, sprinting past four more children as he streaked towards home, and just then he lifted his arms, the gallant victor in the throes of his own grace, and smiled a smile of triumph, of freedom, of an escape from suffering. And when he alighted in the air above home plate, hovering like a butterfly and landing so lightly it would hardly count as a run, he didn’t seem to notice that his father wasn’t where he was supposed to be, that he was in fact still lingering at first base as parents and guardians streamed past him, a man who seemed to have popped up out of nowhere, neither hero nor villain, grinding some warning-track dirt in his fist and standing at a reasonable distance off to the side.
§
I could see they weren’t eating well—Pillsbury cinnamon rolls or Eggo waffles in the morning, mac-and-cheese or Pizza Hut at night—so whenever I “babysat” them at my former house, now their mother’s house, I tried to give them nutritious lunches and snacks. Janey, who wouldn’t knowingly eat vegetables if her life depended on it, could be tricked into eating them in soup as long as tortellini was involved. Nathan would eat soup too if I told him there was a dinosaur at the bottom of the bowl. He’d slurp and slurp, gazing into the murky broth, and halfway through I’d point to something outside or tell him there was a caterpillar on the floor, and as soon as he looked away, I’d take a tiny plastic dinosaur out my shirt pocket and drop it into the bowl. He was stunned and delighted each time he discovered it, no matter how many times I had done it before.
Sometimes I put chopped-up fruit in bowls and set them on the floor, so they could eat from the bowls like puppies. That’s how I got them to drink milk, too. I made smoothies and secretly mixed in broccoli or kale. Nathan would gladly eat veggies if hot dogs came with them, so I’d get the kosher all-beef kind, slice them up like miniature hockey pucks, and mix them in with beans and corn or carrots. Once, he abruptly stopped eating, his eyes wide. I smacked his back, then tried to give him a mini-Heimlich, but what finally worked was picking him up, flipping him upside down, holding him by the ankles and pounding his back until the pink chunk of meat popped out.
Two weeks later, while eating spaghetti mixed with fried spinach, Janey stopped chewing, eyes wide, mouth open, and I saw a strand of pasta sticking up from her throat, so I reached in and pulled it out like a magician yanking a ribbon from his assistant’s ear. Janey coughed and cried, and then laughed as I held up the noodle and scolded it for almost killing her.
Sometimes, while eating, I remind them of these incidents. I tell them to take their time, to chew their food. “Remember when you almost choked to death?” As if I want them to know: given the opportunity, I could still be their hero.
US AND MOM IN A FANCY-SCHMANCY RESTAURANT, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE THAT
As soon as Famous Author came on the scene, we knew there was going to be trouble. We met her when Flynnie asked us to pick her up at Laguardia, but then we didn’t see her again until months later, and that was at the fancy-schmancy restaurant. The total amount of time we spent together, like an hour when you add it all up, she never once asked us a single question. It was all “I this” and “I that,” every sentence out of her mouth started with I. “I, I, I.” No exaggeration.
We all had a pow-wow about it, after our warm and fuzzy family dinner. Talk about a mismatch! They’re like complete opposites. Flynnie’s more like “you, you, you.” He wants to make everyone happy. The rest of us, we can be a little gruff. That’s putting it mildly. But Flynnie, he was always the sweet one. Like when he was a kid, whenever one of us was sick, he would come into our room, kiss our forehead, get us a ginger ale, that kind of thing. When it snowed, he would go across the street and shovel Mrs. Leimus’s driveway. When Pop wanted a beer, Flynnie would jump up and get it for him. Pop used to call him his golden boy. (Me, he called Anna Banana. Not quite the same.) And after he grew up and got married, he was all about his kids. When Nathan was born, he quit his softball league, stopped going to t
he rec center, quit hanging out with his friends—they all bitched to me about it, like Where the hell’s yuh brothuh, what is he pussy-whipped or somethin?—but I was like what do you want me to do, he’s with his kid, shut your face! And my friend, the one that works at Fairfield, she says he’s like that with his students, too, he always makes time for them, he goes to their whatchamacallits, their music recitals, he stops by their baseball games, she said he won Professor of the Year once but he never said anything about it, at least not to us. When we were kids Pop used to always tell us about the martyr types, like that girl who died in Africa, down there helping the poor or something like that, maybe it was the Peace Corps, it was on the news and Pop was all over it, he said that we, meaning me and Flynnie, we should grow up to be just like that girl (there were, like, tears in his eyes) and I was like, “What, you mean dead?” but Flynn must have taken all that stuff seriously because he did end up like that girl and now look what’s happened, it’s like a whatchacallit, a backlash or something.
At his wake, at Pop’s wake, Flynnie was the one who held us all. He wrapped us up in his gangly arms and made us cry with him like in a football huddle. (Mom did that thing where she squeezes her eyes shut like she’s trying to force her tears back into their sockets.) He was, let me think, sixteen. I was in college, that was my sophomore year, so yep, he was sixteen. But, even then, even so young, he was the one we could count on for that kind of stuff. Not the practical stuff, and definitely not the financial stuff, but you know, the emotional stuff. And the family stuff too. Like no matter how busy he was, he always came over to Mom’s for Sunday dinner. With the kids, of course, and Rachel came too back then, but toward the end, like in the last year of their marriage, he came without her a lot, I mean with just the kids. Always in a good mood, too, no matter how bad things were. He’d give my Mari a hundred kisses, put his ear to my big belly to see if there was any action (this was when Robbie was in there), ask Mitch how many criminals he’s caught lately, and tell Mom dinner smelled good even though, let’s be honest, he knew damn well there was a slim-to-none chance it was actually good. She’s the absolute worst cook. She could burn boiling water. Last week she was over our house and we had just got one of those electric teapots and she decided she wanted some tea so she filled it with water, put it on the oven, turned on the gas, and burned the shit out of it. Melted plastic everywhere. The smell was terrible. But I digress.
The only time he wasn’t like that, like sweet and nice, was, you know, right after 9/11. Things got a little weird there for a while. Missed a lot of Sunday dinners. I mean he was living in the city at the time, which had to totally suck, not to mention the smell, and our cousin Jessica she died in Tower 2, she was on the 93rd floor, he said he kept imagining her jumping, he was sure she was one of those people that fell down the side of the building, remember that? Like the towers were crying or something. But after he married Rachel and they moved up here and Nathan was born, he got back to normal. That’s what saved him, Nathan’s birth. I’m convinced of this. Saved his life. He cheered up one hundred percent after that. Absolutely loved being a dad, from Day One. He worked at it, too, unlike my Mitch; he got up in the middle of the night to feed Nathan and he cooked all their meals and did all the grocery shopping and laundry and diaper-changing. Rachel said once it’s a good thing he didn’t have boobs or she would have nothing to do! (She’s a pisser, that one.) Last summer he was Nathan’s tee-ball coach, cutest thing you’ve ever seen. And with little Janey, my god, sweet as can be, he sings to her and kisses her toes and makes her giggle all the time, that girl is such a pumpkin. A few weeks ago I was in the car with the three of them, we were going to Mari’s school play, she was a cow in Charlotte’s Web—a cow! Like that’s not typecasting or nothing! Like, um, let’s see, who can we get to play the cow, oh hey what about the overweight retarded kid? Only Mari was so happy about it she never knew it was an insult so she was the best freakin’ cow you’ve ever seen. And so here’s the point, while me and Flynnie were talking he put his hand back and the kids grabbed onto it and he drove like that, his arm bent back while talking to me, like that’s how they always drive now, even when he needs to hit the blinker or turn down the radio, he keeps his right hand back there. Not exactly safe, but you know.
Oh, and can I tell you what they do at night sometimes? Nathan, he’s the one who told me. They all go over to the park, and they stand out there, the three of them, holding hands and looking up at the sky, and Flynnie tells them stories about the constellations. And when he says “Okay kids, time to go home,” Nathan says something like, “Wait, what about those, are those the seven sisters?” and Flynn stays out there, telling them stories, until they get so sleepy he has to carry them home. See, it’s like he became an even better father after he left Rachel. And her too; all of a sudden she’s like supermom. I know, right?
In other words, my point is, they were doing just fine before Famous Author showed up. Flynnie was starting to adjust, Rachel was starting to calm down after a year of being separated and she was letting him see the kids once in a while, though to be honest that was only when she went out with Mr. Blue-Eyed Garage Mechanic and needed a babysitter, and the kids, they seemed to be adapting to their new lifestyle. But my God, in the beginning? In the beginning it was terrible. He cried so much about them, that first month he stayed with us. He’d be in our guest room, door shut, but still, we could hear it. He ate with us sometimes, and he came out the room of course whenever we asked him to watch the kids. He’s like the ideal babysitter. He’s one of the few people who really “gets” Mari. We all have to tiptoe around her sometimes, she requires a lot of extra care and I’m not gonna lie, it’s stressful. I mean I’m raising her more or less by myself. Mitch is gone a lot because we need the overtime, oh I forgot to say he’s a cop in the Bronx, and she’s destroyed a few babysitters, my Mari has, just completely annihilated them, but Flynnie’s great with her, she just adores her Uncle Flynn. She was so worried about him when he was in there, in his room I mean, crying into his pillow. Is Uncle Flynn okay? Shouldn’t we go in there? No honey, we’d say, he just misses his kids, and she’d say, Well why doesn’t he just go back home? And we never knew what to say to that, because let’s face it, he should have. He should have just gone back home.
P.S. He was like this when he was a kid. Big crybaby. Don’t get me wrong, he was normal and all, always running around playing sports and riding his bike and reading his books, my God he was always reading books, but Jesus Christ what a cry-baby, forget about it. Even now, even as a grown-up—what is he, thirty-six, thirty-seven? Thirty-six—he was mostly crying about his kids at first, but then he was also moping about some woman, some woman at his college who had promised to go out with him back when he was thinking of leaving Rachel but dropped him like a hot potato as soon as he was actually available. But, Mitch and I talked about this, and let’s be honest, that makes sense, what she did, I mean Flynn was quite the mess. What woman in her right mind would jump into a relationship with someone who’s crying every day? Not a healthy woman. Not a woman who has her shit together. So that must be why she said uh sorry, no thanks, changed my mind.
To be perfectly honest it was hard to have him in the house. To be perfectly honest. You get used to your home being a certain way, and you already got a mentally handicapped kid, and you throw a depressed adult male into the mix, and it doesn’t matter if said depressed adult male is your baby brother, it throws everything out of whack. That’s all I have to say about that.
Anyway it got better once he moved into that little whatchamacallit, the carriage house, over in West Harrison. The first week, I went over with Mari to bring him some books he left at our house, and you could tell, he looked much better. He actually smiled and gave me a hug, or he tried to. I’m not very good with hugs. Mari, though, she’s like my surrogate hugger. She can kill a man, the way she hugs. I have to keep her away from my little Robbie or she’ll give him internal combustion.
She gets a little enthusiastic, is what I’m saying. She really likes having a little brother.
That’s how we used to be, me and Flynnie. When we were kids, we slept in the same room, we played in the little pool together, we took baths together when he was a baby. I know for a fact I saved him from drowning a few times even though Pop once said if he left us alone I would have drowned him! (Apparently I had issues about being the princess of the house and then having to share the spotlight after he was born, blah blah blah.) But I took care of my baby bro, I would never let anything happen to him. But then, according to Flynnie, I turned mean, back when he started to get stronger, back when he shot up and got as tall as me and then went through puberty and started stinking up the house. But I don’t see it as me being mean. All I was trying to do was keep him on the straight and narrow. Pop was gone a lot, Mom wasn’t exactly the most attentive parent, and then they were both really gone when Pop died, I mean like gone gone, and somebody had to see to it that Flynnie went to church, that he did his homework, that he came home right after baseball practice instead of hanging out with the troublemakers. He acts like this is the reason why he had a bad marriage and why he always went out with bitchy women, but that’s obviously his therapist talking. His therapist thinks he gets into relationships with quote-unquote emotionally unavailable women who remind him of quote-unquote the women in his family because he’s trying to quote-unquote resolve his issues. The only problem with this theory is that I am not a quote-unquote emotionally unavailable woman. My emotions are very available, I can tell you that! Yes I can be bossy, this will not be news to anyone, but I am not, like, coldhearted or mean or anything like that. What I am is well organized. What I am is a realist. What I am is the person in our family who does what needs to be done. Not cold. Practical. As for Mom, she can be a little stiff, I grant you that, but you should have seen her back before Pop died, she used to sing, play old records, dance with us around the living room, la di da. Not all that affectionate, that’s a given, not “emotionally available” perhaps, she had a tough childhood, not for nothing she and Pop had their problems in the sack, but that stays right here, okay? Still we all have our issues, and I wouldn’t go so far as to call her cold. Guarded, that’s it. Guarded. Appropriately, no necessarily, guarded. Anyway, I’ll just come out and say it, it hurt, it still hurts, to be portrayed in this manner. I’ve been his rock, his true defender, all his life. When he got his permit and he went out with his friends and came home drunk at four a.m. with a dent in the car, Mom freaked out, absolutely freaked out, but I was the one who told her to back off, he was just a stupid teenager, make him pay for the repair and that’s it, and all of this while he was sound asleep upstairs. That was just after Pop died. He was pulling all kinds of crap back then. One time he came home and shit the couch while he was passed out drunk. I know, right? Disgusting. And when he was nervous about marrying Rachel, saying he wasn’t sure if he loved her, I’m the one who told him, this was right outside the church for God’s sake, I’m the one who told him to man up, get in there, and do the right thing. And this year when he needed to hire a lawyer but didn’t have any money because he kept giving Rachel his entire paycheck even though they were freakin’ separated (see what I’m talking about?) I’m the one who loaned him a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars! And then he meets this Famous Author and he takes my hard-earned money, okay Mitch’s hard-earned money, and he flies way the hell out to Colorado with it! Comes back looking different, like he just saw the Purple-Mountain-Majesty-Above-the-Fruited-Plains with his own two eyes.