by Edan Lepucki
I passed my mother the diaper bag and explained its contents. “And maybe he’ll nap in the stroller,” I said.
“I bought a crib.”
“You did? Last night?”
“Months ago.” She wouldn’t look at me, and I felt the guilt like a knife to the gut. But my mother was a master at this. If I let her she would use my guilt against me, at a later, unforeseen date. I couldn’t let that happen.
I kissed Seth goodbye. He cried a little, which felt like a victory. See, Mom, I wanted to say, I’m doing fine, I’ve bonded with my child. He loves me.
—
For a while, it seemed Marco’s plan would work. I could go to the Actress’s unencumbered, and Marco could look for work, and my mother could take care of Seth. Seth liked his grandmother. The first day, I retrieved him twenty minutes early, without warning. I found them in the backyard, gardening. Seth was wearing a tiny apron, and he was digging into her garden bed with a tiny shovel, his brow furrowed in concentration. My mother had changed into khakis and a men’s shirt.
“You look like Walt Whitman,” I said, rounding the pool, its bottom now lined with black gravel.
“Don’t you like his little getup? We bought it today at a consignment shop. I also got him a sweet little bonnet. But he threw it off.”
I laughed. “Sounds about right. Did he say anything?”
“Didn’t even babble.”
I cocked my head at this piece of news. “Really?”
Seth walked toward me and I was about to pick him up when my mother swooped in to wipe him down with a washcloth. There it was, the whole Cleansing Station behind her on the table: one bucket filled with clean water, one with soapy water, and one for rinsing. Beside all that, a neat pile of washcloths made of Turkish linen, which she special-ordered.
I didn’t say anything as she cleaned his hands and arms, wiping even under the sleeves of his onesie. My son didn’t wrest away from her; she had trained him so quickly.
Apart from that, things seemed all right. The Actress was thrilled that “Simone the Gorgeous” had stepped in to help; Marco knew someone who was hiring PAs on a film, and the pay was decent. His grief too had tapered, or at least the sobbing had. He told me he’d left a picture of Seth at his mom’s gravesite. I was surprised: not that he’d done it, but that he’d told me about it. Here, again, I thought, was his newfound tenderness. Seth had begun to sleep for four hours straight, and I was having more than fleeting, anxious dreams. I couldn’t remember details, only that they had happened. I recalled flares of color, stories I couldn’t catch.
It was going so well I didn’t think anything of my mother asking about Marco. What kind of work was he looking for, and how much had he hoped to sell the Chatsworth place for, and what was his schedule nowadays, and did he go out a lot at night. Her questions, collected like this, sound prying, but spaced apart over a week or two as they were made her seem interested and invested. She was not writing Marco off anymore; after all, her grandson looked just like this man, and perhaps was developing his same disposition: exuberant until moody. On the second or third day, she mentioned having us all over for brunch. I waited for her to bring it up again, but she didn’t.
“Marco’s doing a lot better,” I said one day. “About his mom’s death, I mean. And we’re getting along great.”
She waited a moment before she replied, “Have you ever noticed, Lady, how defensive you are about Marco?”
Inhale, exhale.
“Is it really worth it?” she said.
I dared to ask, “Worth what?”
She smiled at me, almost kindly. “Pretending he’s a good man. You don’t honestly believe this is going to work out, do you?”
—
The next night, I knew something was wrong as soon as I approached the apartment door. Seth knew it too, because he put his tongue to the doorknob, as if to taste the rot.
“Stop that,” I said.
He kept licking until I moved him out of the way to unlock the door. It was too quiet: desolate, depleted. But of what?
“Marco?” I called out, though it was obvious he wasn’t there.
I saw the empty card table. Marco’s computer was gone, as were his piles of papers, and the little graveyards of tangerine peels he never cleaned up. The record player was also missing, and the box of records.
With an intake of air, I turned on the TV for Seth and walked to the closet. Stay calm, I told myself.
I opened it. Marco’s clothes had been removed, as well as his duffel bag. He had left one pair of shoes, the brown Oxfords, but they pinched his toes and he had vowed to never wear them again. At least he could keep one promise. He had never promised me anything, ever. I shouldn’t have been surprised by his exit.
Barney the dinosaur, purple and benign, sang from the TV. Seth stood an inch from the screen. He was pretending not to notice the change, the loss, but he must have. His father had left us.
The note was on the fridge:
Lady,
I have to get my head right. Someday youll be happy I did this. Your better off without me. And sweat Seth is too. I’m sorry. –M.
I turned over the paper. He’d written it on the back of the library story time flyer. He couldn’t even be bothered to find a clean sheet of paper. With hands trembling, I turned on the stove and waited for the burst of blue flame.
I burned the note. I didn’t want my mother to see it, or a well-meaning friend, or Seth, when he became literate.
Sweat Seth?
I turned and vomited into the sink until there was nothing left to expel, my stomach acidic and clawing. Now I understood Marco’s impulse to purge his grief, to heave it out of the body all at once.
—
I told my mother the next day. I had to get it over with. If I hid the truth, and she discovered it, she’d never stop dwelling on my duplicity. “Stop gilding the dog shit,” she’d said in our previous argument. So I wouldn’t. Seth’s father was a piece of shit, and, yes, okay, she’d been right. Now she should have nothing else to say. Happy now, Mom?
I pulled her into the kitchen while Seth was playing in the living room with a toy phone she’d bought him. Quickly, her place was filling with toys, primary-colored and beeping.
“Marco’s left,” I said.
“That fast?”
“I don’t know where he went. He moved out while I was at work.”
“He’s a coward,” she said.
“He’s just insensitive.” Was that somehow better? And why was I defending him again?
“He’s a coward,” she repeated. “But I’m not.”
Here is the memory I keep coming back to, the moment I can’t let go of. It occurred only a few weeks after Seth spoke his first word, but it feels like decades separates these two memories. I’d gone from hopeful to hopeless in such a short span of time; at first I was ever vigilant for more language from Seth, and then it all went to hell, and it was like I’d plugged my ears with cotton. I wanted to keep the world out.
I’m standing against the kitchen counter, the yellow tiles that always remind me of pats of butter. The fridge hums and a dying fly flings himself desultorily against the window. My mother is wiping down the sink with a sponge. It’s pink. I can hear Seth’s new phone in the other room, the piercing ring, and then the mechanical rendition of “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” Then the piercing ring once more.
I don’t hear Seth, he is silent, as he’s been since my mom started watching him. Even after Marco’s abandonment, my ears remain open: at least for my son. In my head I list all the words he might say next: Mama, go, no, yes, truck, baby, milk, me, you.
“Who said you were a coward?” I ask.
“Remember the armoire I mentioned selling? Well, I called Marco and told him about it.”
“You did? When? Why?”
“Seth and I called him, a few days ago. To say hello. And to invite him over.”
“You what? He came over here?”
She nodded. “For
only a few minutes. Yesterday.”
It takes me two steps to cross the kitchen. I grab the sponge from her hand.
“What the fuck did you do?” I ask.
“Lower your voice, Lady.”
“Answer me.”
“I asked him how much he needed.”
“Needed for what?”
“I was curious about what he’d hoped to get from the sale of his mother’s house.” She sighs and takes back the sponge, runs it under the water for a moment. “I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t have an answer. It’s like he can’t imagine a sum beyond what you can fit into a piggy bank.”
She tosses the sponge into the sink. In my memory, I hear it land on the porcelain with a whisper. Then she turns off the water and faces me. “I gave him nine thousand dollars.”
“You what? Nine thousand dollars? Why?” I can’t breathe, I realize, and I stop to bend over. When I stand, I say, “He took that money and ran, Mom. He split.”
“From his visit, I got the sense that he resents you. For denigrating his grief. Oh, honey, I’m sure that’s not what you intended. He’s a child, that’s clear. But you shouldn’t have asked so much of him. He lost his mother. You don’t just get over that. Maybe not ever.”
“You’re changing the subject, Mom. Tell me about what you did. He took your money?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s gone, Mom. Should we press charges?” Even as I said it I knew it sounded absurd.
“Lady, you don’t understand me. I wouldn’t give him the money unless he left.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’d have given it to you, but you would have taken it and kept him on. He’s a leech. A magpie. Something larval and speck-brained. I had to lure him away.” She craned her neck over my shoulder. “Seth shouldn’t be around that.”
“Do you understand what you’ve done? Do you even have any idea?”
“I realize it sounds bad.”
“It doesn’t sound bad, Mom—it is bad. It’s evil. You lured a father away from his son—his baby son! I can’t even look at you!” I am yelling now, and my mom’s eyes grow wide, her face hardening into a mask of stony panic as it always does when I get upset. She can’t stand to see me angry even though she’s the cause. It’s as if she returns to plunder my rage, again and again, with the hope that one day it will run out for good.
“Look, he came to pick up the check and left. He only hugged Seth for a second before handing him back to me. Good riddance.”
My mother moves around me to open a cabinet. She’s pulling out the tea, and any minute now she’ll be filling the kettle. As if I could sit down and drink it with her.
“How could you do this to me?” I ask.
“The question you should ask, Lady, is how you could do this to yourself. Why you would have a child with a man who could be bought for nine thousand dollars. Children do not need their fathers.”
She slams the cabinet shut. We both flinch.
I was so eager to get away from my mother, I got in my car and headed to the Actress’s house as if it were any other day.
It wasn’t that I assumed Marco and I would be together forever. I simply didn’t think in those terms. Lately, things had been good between us; if they weren’t, I figured we’d work on it, as if our relationship were a sewer project. Love was arduous. Wasn’t it?
But now. Our demise had been designed by someone else and the powerlessness made me tremble. I was a dupe. I could accept that I was worth less than nine thousand dollars. But Seth? That hurt the most. The trauma was abrupt and blunt, and it belonged not just to me, but to my son as well. I had to get him away from my mother before she caused us any more harm.
That day, I began to make changes.
I looked for a new job right away, one with benefits. I was hired to be the office manager of a doctor’s practice, located on an unnoticeable stretch of Pico sandwiched between a Yeshiva and an auto-body shop. A week later I found a one-bedroom nearby, cheaper than the studio; the landlord, who was a new father and took pity on me and Seth, offered us a deal.
Seth’s day care was run by a Guatemalan woman named Alma who barely spoke English. She was warm and kind and hugged me the first time we met. She ran the operation illegally from her home; her prices were criminally low, and included a hot lunch for Seth.
The Actress cried when I gave my notice and as a parting gift wrote me a check for five hundred dollars. It smelled of baby powder and I cashed it immediately. Then I drove to my mother’s house and retrieved Seth. Without a word I packed up his stuff, and before leaving, said we would not be back.
“This is what you deserve,” I explained. “You went too far this time. He was Seth’s father, for God’s sake!”
For once, Simone looked scared. “I was only protecting you, Lady,” she said. “Please. You can’t do this!”
“I can and I am.”
That was the last time I saw my mother.
—
As the months and years wore on, and Seth still didn’t talk, not in English or Spanish (as I’d hoped, after three years with Alma), I kept returning to what my mother had said: He came to pick up the check and left. He only hugged Seth for a second.
My son had been present for this bribe, this dirty deal. He wasn’t even a year old and he was forced to witness it. To receive one stingy hug. I don’t care how young he was, he understood. He knew before I did that his father was leaving, that he had left. My mother forced Seth’s complicity, which is its own kind of trauma.
This is what I knew: Seth had started to talk before I brought him to my mother. Before she paid his father to leave. And then he stopped.
18.
I couldn’t kick that tree branch out of my mind. Seth had brushed his teeth with it. What kind of tree had it come from? Did it leave splinters?
After Lady repaired to her bedroom, I went into the Cottage and kept drinking. I wanted to black out, crash into the dark like my mom did whenever she didn’t have plans the next day. And I wanted to get drunk enough that I stopped thinking about Seth, so that I stopped thinking, period.
I drank until I barfed all over myself. I had to do a top-secret load of laundry just so that the Cottage didn’t smell like a corpse in a heat wave. Katherine Mary probably wouldn’t have bothered for another day or two, not until the vomit had turned to suede, but there’s only so much I can withstand. I’m not pretentious enough to call debauchery art.
By the time I was back with Devin on Monday morning, it was like the universe’s operating system had rebooted itself. I felt grateful and shaken. Sober felt good. I would have to ask my mom if she liked this as much as I did: the feeling of being wrung out, battered but whole. I’d drink hard again if it meant another chance to recover.
Devin and I swam for hours that day, the water so comforting it was practically amniotic. After lunch we made smoothies, adding experimental ingredients to the blender every few pulses: a sprig of lavender, a dash of salt, and even a single macaroni elbow. It was something my mom and I used to do; it’s how we discovered the versatility of barbecue sauce.
Seth walked into the living room while Devin and I were building a fort with bedsheets and couch cushions. I hadn’t seen him since Lady’s story. The way he appeared and disappeared felt like a magic act. That boy could cut me in half if he wanted to, I thought, and then shuddered. It was the kind of thing my mom would say, like, if an ad came on for a Vegas magician, the fake-sexy kind who wears rings and eyeliner and a leather vest. My mom is powerless to her bad taste. It’s a miracle my father wasn’t a creep who lives on a houseboat with his pet ferret.
Seth just stood in the doorway, phone in hand. He had on a plain white T-shirt, his chest hair a shadow beneath its fabric, and the same old ratty jeans. White athletic socks gone gray. I was pink from the sun, my hair crunchy from the pool, and I was wearing the most heinous khaki shorts. I smelled like sweat and chlorine.
Devin was too busy adjusting the couch cushions to
notice his big brother, and when I opened my mouth to say something, Seth put an index finger to his lips to stop me.
I mouthed the word hello with wide eyes, and he nodded. I realized he never mouthed words, or not to me at least. Did he even know how to? Katherine Mary perked up inside of me. Like a little kid, my mom was curious, unembarrassed. Had his disability left those muscles to atrophy? Could he kiss with his tongue? I thought of Seth taking that girl into the Cottage, pushing aside the dirty plates on his spare pillow. And then I thought of the tree branch again, its knuckled edge. Did he put toothpaste on it?
“Seff!” Devin cried out suddenly. “Come play with us!”
“We’re building a fort,” I explained.
Devin had his fists under his chin like a Christmas caroler singing “Silent Night.”
“We gonna do a show,” he explained.
“With flashlights,” I said. “We’ll shine them onto the ceiling of the fort.”
“Her daddy taught her!” Devin said, and I smiled.
Seth typed something on his phone and handed it to me.
Wheres my mom?
“She went writing this morning but then she had a hair appointment.”
I waited to see if Seth would type more, but he didn’t.
“She was kind of distracted after today’s session.” I didn’t want to say too much. Lady might be afraid that Seth would tell Karl, or worse: Kit.
But he seemed to be waiting for me to continue. Was he? I hated that I couldn’t tell, and I wondered if it was easy for Lady, and for Karl and Devin, to read him.
“She was on her phone a lot. I bet she was emailing her editor or something?”
Before Lady had left for the hair salon I’d asked how she thought the writing had gone. Without looking up from her phone she’d said, “Great! Also, terrible!”
Part of me, the Esther Shapiro part, wanted to ask her more about it, offer her advice or commiserate, swap stories about artistic process like I used to do with Everett as we sharpened his pencils. (I can’t believe I actually helped him shave his pencils down to sharp points.) But Katherine Mary wouldn’t give two fucks about Lady’s book, or at least not about her failure to write it, she’d just want to read the thing when it was done, and so I kept my lips zipped.