by Nina Darnton
“That’s delicious,” she said.
“I know. I’m trying to get rid of them before I eat them all.”
Julie finished and reached for a second.
“Were you ready for it?” she asked.
“Ready for what?”
“All this,” Julie said, gesturing to Griffin, who was asleep in the swing, and all the baby equipment and paraphernalia that had invaded the living room.
Marcia didn’t answer right away.
“Yeah. I was,” she said thoughtfully. “But not all of it.”
She could have handled Griffin’s first colicky months, difficult as they were. But the part she didn’t confide to Julie, though Julie knew the story, was the stress of everything else she had to deal with. She was trying to cope with the grief over losing her little girl, the guilt and sadness over losing Eve, and the silent, sullen presence of eleven-year-old Danny, filled with rage and confusion and pain and not knowing how or to whom to release it. When Jeff complained that no one ever told him how hard it would be, she told him it wasn’t the same for everyone. “Some people are luckier than others,” she’d said. “Some people have babies who eat and sleep and rarely cry at all. But I already knew that my life as a mother, our life as parents, wasn’t going to be lucky. I mean, look how it started. Our job is to change our luck, to make our own luck, not to count on fate because fate has kind of messed things up right from the beginning.”
She obsessed over how things might have been. Maybe if they had gone to a doctor who specialized in high-risk pregnancies. Maybe if Eve had gone to the hospital earlier. Maybe if she had checked Eve’s health records before engaging her. Maybe if Griffin had been an easier baby. Maybe if Jeff had been more flexible. Her mind stayed with that last thought. The worst problem she faced with Danny was the way he affected Jeff.
They had enrolled him in the Claremont School soon after they arrived back in New York. It was a small private school that specialized in children who had not “thrived” in their first schools. In practice this meant kids who had behavior problems or struggled to keep up with the work, who would benefit from more attention, smaller class size and specialized teaching. Danny had not been in the lower half of his class in his L.A. public school—he was an above-average student—but the tests he was given in New York put him behind others his age and it was clear he would need additional help. They had returned in June, and the school suggested he attend summer school to help his transition, which Marcia was grateful for. Jeff wanted him to join the local public school, which had a pretty good reputation, but Marcia felt that at least during the transition period he should get more individual attention. His academic deficits could be fixed, the teachers assured her, but she saw that his unhappiness was harder to repair.
The summer session was relaxed—part school, part summer camp—with only a few kids participating, and Danny didn’t seem to run into too many problems. Marcia was pretty taken up with being a new mother so she didn’t have much time to pay attention to his state of mind, and although Danny was still overwhelmed by the changes in his life, grieving and not interacting much, everyone seemed to understand and cut him a great deal of slack. By September, more was expected of him. When Marcia took him in on the first day of school, he barely looked up to acknowledge the teacher whose class he would be in. He stared at the floor but his manner appeared more sullen than shy and the teacher picked up on it right away. “There are three empty seats in the back, Danny,” she said. “Which one would you like to take?”
“None of them,” he said. She chose for him and Marcia left. She asked to speak to the guidance counselor, but no one was available without an appointment. When he came home from school on that first day, Marcia was waiting with brownies and hot chocolate to ask him how it went. But he went straight to his room and slammed the door. When Jeff came home and she called Danny for dinner, he said he had a stomachache and wasn’t hungry. She got up to go to him but he had locked the door.
“Danny, open the door. We don’t lock doors in this house.”
Danny didn’t answer. Marcia looked helplessly at Jeff, who joined her in front of Danny’s room.
“Open the door,” Jeff said in his most authoritative voice. There was no reply.
“Danny, we can’t allow you to keep this door locked. If you don’t open it, I will unscrew the doorknob and let myself in. And you will be in big trouble.”
They could hear the lock click open. When they entered, Danny was sitting on his bed. “I just don’t feel good. Can’t you just go away?”
Jeff went back to the table, but Marcia sat down on the chair near the bed. “I know you need some alone time, and that’s fine. We just want to be sure you’re all right. You can’t lock the door when you want to be alone, but if you just tell us you need some time, we won’t bother you, okay?”
He didn’t answer.
“Does your stomach still hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to give you some space now?”
“Yeah.”
She patted his knee and left the room.
A few days later, he came home with a black eye and a note from the principal that he had been in a fight on the playground. Danny wouldn’t tell her what had happened. When Jeff came home that night, she tried to engage him in finding a strategy to help Danny.
“I think he needs a firm hand. He’s never had discipline. He’s been left free to do whatever he wants, and in a crisis like this, regular rules that never vary and have to be followed might help,” he said.
“Eve didn’t ignore him, Jeff. She worked a lot to support him, but he knew what was expected of him. He’s had a huge loss. I think he needs comfort not strictness.”
“I think that kind of coddling will just make him worse.”
They agreed to disagree while they looked for a therapist who could advise them. Marcia believed that what would help Danny most would be if Jeff could be the father Danny never had. But Jeff’s understanding of this role was contrary to hers and opposite to the loving attention he showered on Griffin. He never really tried to reach Danny. He flinched at every example of Danny’s unhappiness, his poor adjustment, his fights at school. When they got called in a few weeks later because Danny was caught cheating on a test, Jeff came down hard on him, taking away his weekend movie (a treat Marcia had instituted) and sending him to his room after lecturing him not just about cheating but about his belligerence to the teachers and his sullenness at home. Marcia watched unhappily as Danny submitted, shifted uneasily and fought to control his tears. It seemed to Marcia that Jeff was always haranguing him, and the result, she thought, was making him more guarded, less reachable. She fretted, she complained, but she was helpless to change things. Jeff made strict rules and insisted Danny follow them: homework as soon as he came home, no television during the week.
The new regime didn’t seem to work, however. Although Danny was sent to his room to do his homework as soon as he came home, the teachers called and sent home notes to report that he rarely completed it. Marcia started insisting that he give it to her first, and she went over it with him to see if he needed help and signed, where the teacher indicated, to show she had checked it. Part of Jeff’s strategy included his insistence that Danny eat everything on his plate whether or not he liked it or was hungry. When Danny balked at a food he didn’t like—spinach, for example—Jeff made him stay at the table, even after he and Marcia left it, until he forced it down. He demanded that Danny go to his room to get ready for bed at seven-thirty—very early for an eleven year old boy who wasn’t at all tired at that time and was used to setting his own bedtime. Marcia told Jeff that it would be good to have some time to be together as a family, but he said he needed that time for himself, for them, without Danny around. “He can read in his room for an hour before he goes to sleep,” he said. “It will be good for him—improve his reading level.” When she tried to tell him it m
ade him feel rejected, he dismissed it as unreasonable. He seemed to think all Danny needed was structure and discipline.
But that wasn’t true. What Danny needed was love and Jeff just couldn’t love him.
12
Danny came home from school and slammed his backpack on the kitchen table, a gesture he’d been asked repeatedly not to do. He knew Jeff made a big deal over that kind of thing. He was supposed to put it on the bench near the door and hang his jacket on the rack. He paused briefly, thinking he’d better do what Jeff wanted so he didn’t get in trouble again, but instead he took off his jacket and let it drop on the floor near the table. He’d had a terrible day at school. It was almost six months since he’d moved to New York and his new school was as bad as he thought it would be. He still didn’t have any friends. The teacher was really lame and he couldn’t stand the other kids. No one, not one of them, had noticed him at first, no one said hello or asked him who he was or where he came from or anything. Not that he wanted them to. They were a bunch of idiots. At his school the kids were much cooler and he always sat with a group of his friends at lunch. He’d just get his food on a tray and go straight to the table and the kids would be there already or come later and they sat together every single day. If a new kid came in the teachers always brought him over to some new table and told the kids that was his place at lunch from then on, so he had somewhere to go. At lunch in this new school, he couldn’t find a place to sit. The kids took up all the tables and even if there was room at one, it felt weird to just barge in, and if they saw you walk in their direction, no one moved over or anything. Anyway, he couldn’t just go over and sit down next to someone he didn’t even know. He tried to go outside the first day and eat in the playground, but of course they wouldn’t let him. One of the older boys had made fun of him, said something about his mother not teaching him right, so he swung at him. He knew it was important to let them know right off he wasn’t afraid. But then the kid hit him back and the teacher pulled them apart and told Marcia and Jeff.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was at the beginning, when he first got there. Everyone was staring at him when he walked into the classroom and that dumb teacher introduced him. He couldn’t believe how bad that was. She said right then in front of everyone that his mother had died and everyone should be nice to him. That was so awful, but it still wasn’t the worst part. That was when he couldn’t stop himself from crying after she said it. He didn’t sob or anything stupid like that, but he knew his face was getting wet and he sniffled like a baby and couldn’t do anything to stop himself. Everyone looked at him. His face got hot even now as he pictured it. He didn’t want to think about it.
Then he remembered that he was wrong about no one talking to him, because one of the girls did. She was one of the pretty ones too. She had long brown hair and glasses. She came over afterward. He could see her eyes through the glasses and they were so big, he thought the glass must have made them look bigger than they were. He could tell they were all soft with pity and she said she was sorry about his mother. Like it was her fault. He figured he might cry again, so he just walked away and she didn’t talk to him again but he saw her talking to her friends and they all looked at him, whispering.
I hate her and all of them, he thought. I hate it here. Except for Griff. My mom gave birth to him so that makes him my brother, whatever they say. Whatever Jeff says, really. He’s the one who likes to say he isn’t really my brother. Whatever that means. Well, he’s the closest thing to a brother I have.
He walked into the kitchen to get a snack and found the brownies Marcia had baked on the kitchen counter with a note: Danny, we’re at the park. Come join us. Here’s a snack I made for you. Love, Marcia. Marcia was always trying to be nice but it made him uncomfortable. He fought liking her because if she hadn’t showed up, he would still have his mother. He knew that somehow this whole thing was Marcia’s fault. She’d be going back to work soon, he thought, and that would be better. He wouldn’t have to talk to her when he came home from school. Maybe she wouldn’t even know when he came home. But what good would that do? He didn’t know where to go and he didn’t have any friends to hang out with. If he could just go back to L.A. and live in his old place. He was almost twelve years old. He didn’t need to have people watching him. He could live at home and go to school and hang out with his friends. Manolo, who lived next door with his wife and baby girl, would look out for him if he needed him, he figured. They always helped his mother.
He stared at the brownies and at the note Marcia had left, then crumpled it in his fist and threw it away. He stood staring at the trash and then, hardly knowing what he was doing, he retrieved the note and tore it into tiny pieces, which he dropped on the floor. He took a bite of the brownie and then threw that down too, and stomped on it, grinding the pieces into the floor. He started to cry. He could feel the rage swelling in his chest. He heaved and sobbed but it didn’t provide relief. He looked around the kitchen wildly. He opened the food pantry and suddenly swept all the jars onto the floor. The glass crashed against the slate and splattered sticky honey and red jam and dill pickles at his feet. That felt a little better so he did it again; this time he threw down opened boxes of cereal, rice, sugar, flour, watching their contents spill out in piles and lumps and thin trickles. But he wasn’t done yet. He found a can of whipped cream and sprayed it everywhere he could, the cabinets, the floor, the refrigerator. For just a few seconds after that he felt some relief. He could feel his heart, which had been beating hard in his ears, slow down a little. Then he ran out of the apartment and turned west toward Riverside Park, far from the spot in Central Park where he knew Marcia would be. He felt bad about Marcia. Even though he couldn’t forgive her he could see how hard she tried. She’d have to clean it all up and she’d be real upset. She’d be mad. He ought to go back anyway, he thought. She’d be worried. Maybe he could try to clean it before she came back, but he knew there wouldn’t be enough time. No, it was finished, he thought. He could never go back there now. They’d probably be glad if they never saw him again.
He wanted his mom. He wanted her so bad he couldn’t stand it. Why did she have to do that anyway? She said she did it for the money, for him. He didn’t want the money. He wanted his mom. Didn’t she know she might die? How could she take a chance like that? How could she leave him? He felt the rage return, his chest swelled with it, his eyes smarted. He picked up a rock and threw it as far as he could. Then he picked up another and threw it even farther. He kept throwing rocks, one after another, until his arm hurt. For the first time he felt really mad at his mother. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t been so stupid. I hate her, he thought. He threw another rock. Then he sat down on the park bench and started to cry, heaving with sobs. He looked up, guilty, sure his mother had heard him, could hear him now. “I’m sorry, Ma,” he cried. “I didn’t mean it. I love you.”
13
When Marcia returned home she found the kitchen as Danny had left it. Her first reaction wasn’t anger or even confusion. It was fear. She looked at the kitchen clock over the oven. It was four-thirty. She had to clean this up before Jeff got home at six-thirty. He couldn’t know Danny had done this. First, she looked for the boy, walking from room to room, calling his name. When she didn’t find him, she figured he’d run out ashamed of himself and would come back when he cooled down. She didn’t like him wandering around the city alone—he’d never done that before—but she wasn’t really worried. Danny was used to taking care of himself, and she was pretty sure he’d be back in a few minutes. She put Griffin in the infant swing and wound it up. He laughed happily when it started to sway back and forth. This should entertain him for fifteen minutes, she thought, as she stared at the mess, trying to decide where to start. She picked up the shattered glass, used paper towels to absorb the spills, swept and washed the floor, sponged the cabinets and refrigerator. When she was half done, Griffin began to cry and she wound up the swing again, hoping for ano
ther fifteen minutes. Time was passing, he would need to be fed soon, and she had to finish cleaning first. She attacked the mess with new urgency. Griffin started to cry before she was done. She wound up the swing again, but it didn’t work this time; he was hungry. She let him cry for five more minutes while she continued cleaning and then took him in her arms and sat in the glider chair she had bought what seemed like years ago, when she was happily preparing for motherhood. He latched on to the bottle hungrily, he had begun lately to hold the bottle with his hands while she fed him, and she tried to relax. But more than an hour had passed and Danny still wasn’t home and she began to worry. What had happened? Why had he done this? He was obviously more deeply disturbed than she had realized and she had to do better figuring out how to help him. He’d been seeing a therapist twice a week. She wondered if he opened up to him. But most of all, where was he?
She changed Griffin’s diaper, put him on a blanket on the floor outside the kitchen, gave him some toys and returned to cleaning up. He’s over his colic now, thank God, she thought, and she smiled at how happy he seemed, beaming up at her while he shook his rattle and then tried to roll over. She kept looking at the clock, worried that Jeff would walk in before she was done. Jeff had very little patience with Danny, she thought wearily. He would use this as another argument for sending him away. She couldn’t let that happen.
By the time Jeff came home, the kitchen was clean and Marcia had just finished giving Griffin his bath. By now, she had stopped worrying about Jeff and was seriously worried about Danny. She imagined every frightening scenario that could befall an eleven-year-old boy alone in New York City as night fell. Jeff had gone straight to Griffin. He’d picked him up and played with him, barely saying hello to Marcia and not asking about Danny at all. She’d been too busy to make anything for dinner so when Jeff finally handed Griffin back to her and said how hungry he was, she answered that she hadn’t had time to prepare anything and suggested they order in.