by Greta Nelsen
There is a visceral rush that accompanies the administration of justice, an emotional high to which I am not immune. The sight of Eric Blair contorted on the pavement, his broken leg angled in such a way as to induce pain in the onlooker, pleases me. “Like I said,” I spit, as his eyes beg me for help, “leave me the fuck alone.”
* * *
Tim’s parents were married at the Episcopalian church they’d attended since childhood, the reception held at the local VFW. And this is where I stand fifty years hence, shivering in wait at the service entrance, clutching a sackful of party favors to my chest for warmth as the wiry old coot who runs the place struggles to force the door open from the inside. Finally, it budges, nearly spilling him at my feet.
“Phew,” he puffs, stumbling a few steps before catching his balance. He stares at the door hinges and reminds himself, “Better get those things oiled.” To me, he says, “Come on in, little lady.”
I shuffle over the battered threshold and drop the first bag on the empty counter, then retreat for the second and third. When I return, I find Tim’s sister, Emily, making the old coot’s day with a charming smile and a lilting laugh at his best, oft-told joke. I can’t help smiling too, but for a different reason: Emily’s decency reminds me of Tim—and Ally. I imagine that someday my daughter will mature into a glorious amalgamation of Tim, Emily and me.
Emily darts over and plucks a bag from my arm, saving me the trouble of hefting them both to the counter simultaneously. “Let me…”
The coot slips out of the kitchen, leaving us to it. “Thanks,” I say with a slight eye roll. “I should have brought Ally to help.”
There is softness in Emily’s expression that reflects her love of my daughter, a kindness for which I am desperately grateful. “How is my little jellybean?” she asks.
“Bigger by the day,” I say. “Owen too.”
It’s too soon for her to have formed such an attachment to the baby, but in time I know it will come. She remarks, “I bet Tim’s in heaven.”
Truer words have yet to be spoken. “You bet.” I glance around uncertainly. “Where are the girls?”
“Morgan’s boyfriend has a track meet today, so I let her take my car. Kyra dropped me off in the Jeep, but she had to go back for Reggie.”
“Oh.” I just now realize what Tim and I are in for. Because of our reproductive issues, we were late breeders. Almost everyone we know has a ten-year head start.
Emily studies the clock. “Wanna get started?”
* * *
The party is in full swing when Tim pulls me into the coat closet. “Hey, gorgeous,” he murmurs, the scent of imported beer on his breath.
I think of Owen but quickly realize he’s in no danger, the center of attention and the newest apple of his grandparents’ eyes. “Hey.”
“Have I told you how hot you are?”
I giggle. “Not really.”
The novelty of this interaction fascinates and excites me, transports me to a smoke-filled dorm room where a baby-faced, nineteen eighty-five version of Tim lays his naked body to mine. “Well, you are,” he repeats.
I want to maul him right here but know I can’t. Instead, I settle for a tantalizing tonguing of his ear, followed by a momentary brush of my thumb across his nipple. “I love you,” I say, meaning it fully, “but we should get back.”
It’s dark enough in this closet that I can’t read his facial expression, but from the way he squeezes, it’s clear he disagrees. “I want you.”
I wriggle away, crack the door open and promise, “Later.”
* * *
For an event largely populated by the seventy-plus crowd, this place hops with energy. I join a cluster of women throwing their best moves at the DJ’s sonic-speed version of the Macarena and whip out some talent of my own. In the fray, I bump up against Ally. “Having fun?” I ask.
She nods, grins.
I notice Tim slipping over to the makeshift bar, which is adorned with plastic hula dolls, flowery leis, and a pair of sun-yellow tiki torches—a tropical theme I pulled from nowhere to lend a little heat to this dead-of-winter soiree.
Once Tim gets his hand around another bottle of Stella Artois, he moseys to the head table, where the guests of honor dote on our baby son—and I follow.
“He’s the spitting image of Tim at that age,” Tim’s mother, Ellen, says, beaming at Owen.
Tim’s Aunt Ruth brushes the wispy bits of sandy-blond hair from Owen’s forehead. “A Fowler man, through and through.”
This exchange would tickle me if I didn’t know the truth; instead, it suffocates. “Mommy’s here,” I chirp, snatching the baby from Ellen’s arms and nuzzling him to my neck. I rub gentle circles around his back. “Good boy.”
“Gettin’ any sleep?” Tim’s dad, James, an age-progressed copy of my husband, asks him. There is tension between these men, Tim’s father none too keen on Tim’s decision to play Mr. Mom.
Tim steals the baby from me as I have stolen him from Ellen, flaunts his fatherly bond with Owen. Without a word, he tells his dad, I will be here for my son in ways you never were.
I feel sorry for Tim on this point: His father is the gold-standard of his generation, the aloof manly prototype. The lack of affection between them—as painful as it may be—conforms precisely to expectations.
I am sadder still for the fact that Tim may not be able to right this wrong with Owen, a child connected to him solely through the quirks of assumption and imagination. But at least there is Ally.
Tim’s half-drunk beer warms on the edge of a banquet table, while I escape to the ladies’ room. When I return, I find that my husband has trotted out his newest baby game: peek-a-boo.
Intently, I watch as he cradles Owen in the crescent of his lap, covers his face and waits. With glee, he flaps his hands aside and booms, “Peek-a-boo!”
Owen is not old enough to be an equal partner in this game, yet the delight he feels is evident in the sparkle of his eyes and his open-mouthed, baby-bird smile.
Tim plays on, attracting a throng of gooey-centered, middle-aged women who either pine for the good old days or wrestle with the thought of giving motherhood one last shot. Don’t, I want to scream at them, warn them off the idea before it sticks. Don’t do it.
I think this not because of Eric Blair but because of Owen, what he’s just now done, what he continues to do. His little baby arm, once soft and squishy as a Campfire marshmallow, has snapped rigid in a way that hurtles me back to Ricky’s bedside, nineteen seventy-three. It’s a myoclonic jerk, the harbinger of Dukate Disease. Owen’s death knell.
Chapter 8
The six weeks Eric Blair has been laid up nursing the leg I had a hand in breaking have slipped away from me, fallen victim to my knotted mind.
It seems as if I think hard enough, ignore facts that cast doubt, ferret out the right research—or create it whole cloth—I should be able to undo what has been done to my precious Owen. Yet every road I embark upon dead-ends in the same intractable conclusion: God has cursed me and all the souls unlucky enough to orbit my sphere.
“I’m leaving early,” I tell my assistant, Laurie, without explanation. “Forward anything important to my cell.”
She should be used to my erratic behavior by now, its frequency increasing by the day. But each time I break stride, she balks too. “What should I tell legal,” she asks uncertainly, “if they call about the Harper case?”
That damn sexual harassment lawsuit has clawed its way back from the dead, three potential settlements having fallen apart at the eleventh hour. “I only accept good news,” I say in my best deadpan. “How about that?”
The smile I can tell she is suppressing breaks through. “You’re the boss.”
The truth is, I may not be in charge of much before long, including the tying of my shoes or my very sanity.
* * *
Tim is getting suspicious, and if I don’t do something soon to appease him, I fear he will act without me, bring this house of car
ds tumbling down.
The myoclonic jerk I witnessed nearly two months ago was not an aberration, some freak coincidence I could rationalize and sublimate. There have been more, and they are worsening. Even Tim knows something is wrong.
I want to tell the truth, drag the whole ugly mess kicking and screaming into the light. But at what cost? I cannot fix Owen; nobody can. Dukate is fatal and swiftly so. Ricky was lucky to have made it to age nine—or perhaps not so lucky, depending on one’s point of view.
As for Eric Blair, nothing would please me more than feeding his mangled carcass to a pack of wild dogs—except, of course, a cure for Dukate. But I can’t make Tim and Ally casualties of this vendetta or this disease. Too many lives have already fallen.
* * *
I creep into the cemetery, my foot clamped to the brake pedal, my gaze searching. The eternal resting place of Charlotte Rosemarie Ross lies on a sun-drenched hill in Oak Grove Memorial, my father’s final gift to the woman he once loved: a sliver of peace and tranquility.
I know the location of the plot based solely on fuzzy recollections of trips to Ricky’s graveside that seem as if they belong to someone else, visits that ground the last bit of fight out of our mother before she broke for good.
As I inch along, these ancient images bleed into one another, construct a coherent whole. A few yards short of the spot, I stop and park, shut the car down.
But I cannot yet move. Is this where we will bury Owen? I wonder. How soon?
I ease the door open and slip out, leaving the contents of my purse scattered about the seat behind me. The enormity of what I aim to do turns the atmosphere to molasses, forces my muscles to earn every step. But eventually I arrive, darken the threshold of fate.
First, I go to my knees, then my stomach. The ground is wet and cold. I embrace the earth, wish to return to it like Charlotte and Ricky, their slabs looming like prison guards.
“Why?” I ask the worms and the grass. “Why Owen?” Then to my mother, “Do you regret it?”
I know not to which question I seek the answer: Does she regret aborting a child who could have lived or extending the life of a child who should have died?
I know what Ricky would say, because he said it to me. It was nineteen seventy-five, and we’d been in the carriage house just over a year—a kindness afforded us by the Whitneys, friends of our father who’d saved the property from foreclosure during his downward spiral—when a rabid dog lurched its way into our consciousness.
Ricky spotted the thing first from that upstairs window seat, wanted me to drag it inside for a bath and a treat. He was five then, still had the bulk of his eyesight, but not for long.
Our mother told Ricky that the dog was sick, too sick to come inside and play. I suppose she should have known better than to paint the dilemma out this way, frame it in terms of illness: Ricky’s language. Long ago we’d whitewashed our vocabularies of phrases like next year and in the future, but talk of sickness persisted to the end—an end that came swiftly for the dog, which was shot dead by the Whitneys’ eldest son as Ricky and I looked on.
A good twenty minutes passed before Ricky whispered, “Why? Why did he…?”
“He had to,” I said. “To protect us. And to help the dog.”
The notion of putting a creature out of its misery required no explanation in Ricky’s world. “Is he better now?”
I nodded, fought back tears.
“I want to be better.”
“Don’t say that,” I told him, even though I had no right. “Not that way.”
Twice more that summer, Ricky raised the idea, begged me to set him free. And I could have done it. Easily. But I declined. Because of me, my brother got three more years, years he spent bedridden, demented, and nearly blind. Time I will relive with Owen—and soon.
The damp earth soaks through my bra and underwear, having made easy work of my soft cardigan and lightweight trousers. And somehow this comforts me, reminds me that, however great my troubles, I remain as superfluous as a birch in the path of an F5 tornado.
I push myself up, kneel kitty-corner to Ricky’s grave as if I aim to pray. But even God lacks the power to grant what I ask. Instead, I broach Ricky for permission.
“How are you?” I say, hoping I will recognize his voice if I hear it all these years later.
And I think I do. Not a human voice, but the melodic flutter of the wings of an angel, or the wind whispering through the trees. These reverberations tell me, Death is peace and Ricky is home.
I feel as if my stomach has flipped inside out, my lungs emptied of air. “If I send him,” I ask, “will you watch over? Be his guide?”
The answer comes with both melancholy and jubilation. Owen is loved, I hear in my bones. He will be safe with us.
The questions I have posed to my mother drift to the forefront, and there is no mistaking her words: To keep him is selfish, the refuge of a cowardly heart.
I recognize this as true, yet doubt my capacity to do what Owen needs. “Thank you,” I say to the breeze, because although I may not succeed, at least now I know I must try.
* * *
On the first day of spring, Muffin ran away. It was the culmination of months of disturbed behavior that began with the destruction of the fertility idol. Looking back, it seems as if he may have been trying to tell me something, shout a warning loudly enough for me to hear.
“We’re going to find him,” I assure Ally as she palms a missing-dog flier to a telephone pole and I wield a staple gun. I squeeze the trigger, pinching my skin as the gun kicks back. “Ow.”
Ally doesn’t bother consoling me, too distracted by Muffin’s absence to care. “I thought we microchipped him,” she says with an undertone of complaint. “Didn’t we…?”
“It’s not a GPS,” I say, “but if someone turns him in, we’ll get a call.”
This is not good enough for her. “Can’t we…?”
We move on to another pole, as if the chance of locating Muffin correlates with the number of times his face confronts a stranger’s. “We’re doing everything we can,” I say. “I’ve called all the vets, put an ad in the paper, personally knocked on every neighbor’s door…and the fliers.”
She mumbles, “I guess.” Perhaps now that Muffin is gone, his disquiet has transferred to her. She shifts gears. “Owen’s been crying a lot lately.”
I spike a new flier to a pole and say nothing more than, “I know.” If I encourage her interest in Owen’s irritability, I may lose my grip, let the secret spill.
From nowhere, there is a jab at my ribs. Ally’s finger. “What…?” I begin, but soon I see. Leaning against the next pole, bathed in the dusky glow of a streetlamp, is Eric Blair.
I stiff-arm Ally to the background, act as her shield. When Eric’s eyes catch mine, he smirks, uncrosses his legs and starts at us.
I consider turning on my heel and spiriting Ally away, but there are things that demand saying. “Go home,” I grunt at her instead, my double-barreled gaze set to trigger. To emphasize the point, I give her a little backwards shove.
Although I can’t relax my defenses enough to check, I’m sure I feel Ally slip off. Two and a half blocks and she’ll be safely tucked inside the cocoon of cul-de-sacs that ring our property.
“What do you want?” I ask Eric, before he gets within ten feet of me.
“Is that any kind of greeting? And after you did this?” he says, pointing at the leg I now notice hitches with every step.
“That was your fault,” I propose. “And you deserve a lot worse.”
He stops only inches off my shoulder, leans in as if he has a secret to share. “I’m bionic now,” he tells me gleefully. “Titanium. Eighteen screws; three metal plates. The fucking Million Dollar Man.”
I take a step back, regain control. “That’s nice. Now if you don’t mind…”
For a moment I think he is set to disappear, which gives me pause; there is one thing left for me to say.
But I’m wrong. Instead of m
elting into the night, he winds his tentacle-fingers around my arm and draws me closer. “You did one thing right, you know,” he hisses. “The boy. Owen.”
I want to rake a cactus over his tongue for having the gall to utter my baby’s name. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My skin withers under his touch. “He’s sick. He’s going to die.”
His hand flinches, but his eyes never do. He shakes his head. “You’re crafty, Claire-bear. I’ve underestimated you.”
“This isn’t a game, asshole. Owen’s dying. He has Dukate Disease.” I yank my arm away, think hard about whether I owe this paramecium anything more. “And you’re a carrier,” I inform him, if only for the sake of the innocent souls he has the power to destroy.
These words have the strangest effect, settle a mask of humanity over Eric Blair’s sterile face. “I’m sorry.”
“The hell you are.”
“What can I do?” he asks, sounding pained.
It hits me that the narcissistic center of this man loves my child, because it is a part of him. “Nothing,” I say. “Dukate is fatal; there’s no cure. Just let Owen go in peace.”
He nods gently, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth, then simply slinks away.
* * *
No one believes me when I say this, but Tim and I have never had a fight—at least not one of the name-calling, vase-smashing, duke-it-out sessions my parents were famous for, even before the stress of Ricky.
The lowest we have sunk is raised voices, audible huffs, the occasional cold shoulder or short-lived silent treatment. And it takes a lot to get us there. But this is changing. “I’m taking him in tomorrow,” Tim tells me, his voice rising and quaking at the same time.
I watch Owen stiffen in his arms and think, You’re right; we owe it to him. Yet I say, “Don’t you think you’re overreacting? He’s just a little jumpy. He’ll grow out of it.”