Shatter My Rock

by Greta Nelsen

  This train of thought has helped me sway Tim for the last seven or eight weeks, but no more. “How do you know?” he demands, his words doused in acid. “Are you a doctor? Or a nurse? Do you have a medical degree? Do you even care, for fuck’s sake?”

  I am suddenly nauseous, Tim’s contempt the one thing I cannot withstand. “Why would you…?” I rip the baby from his arms, clutch him to my chest. “What time is the appointment?”

  “You’re going to take him?” he asks, sounding incredulous. “Why the big turnaround?”

  I don’t like this version of my husband, yet he is a monster of my making. “Yes, I am. You’ve got the fieldtrip, and Ally is counting on you.”

  It just now strikes me to check on our daughter, gauge whether she has overheard any of this nastiness, but I don’t bother.

  Tim shakes his head. “Whatever you say, Claire,” he reluctantly agrees as he turns his back on me. “Always.”

  * * *

  Tim and Ally leave for the Roger Williams Park Zoo without as much as a good-bye or a good luck. Tim’s frustration with me, I know, springs from his belief that I have morphed into a heartless dictator, a charge not so farfetched considering my behavior of late. Ally’s disdain I trace to Muffin’s continued absence, for which she somehow holds me culpable.

  But today is about Owen, my chance to give him all of me before he goes. I scoop him from his crib and murmur, “Good morning, baby boy.”

  He delights at my voice, wriggles as I scuff us down the hall to his swing. “Don’t you look spectacular today?” I say as I buckle him in.

  The stunted gurgle he lets out jags its way to my core; it’s the only verbal communication I can expect from him, the voice he might have had already lost to history. There will be no Mommys, or Daddys, or I love yous.

  Owen is eight months old now, rounder, sweeter, more alert with each passing hour, which makes what I must do of utmost urgency. My only solace is that, if I act soon, he may not understand, his baby brain ill-equipped to process the concepts of death and murder.

  I give the swing a push and he voices the kind of pure, giddy laugh only small children possess, their worlds limited strictly to the here and now. If such a place existed for me, I could release this burden, remain ignorant, let nature take its course. But this is not the way.

  There is an idea nagging at me that I cannot figure how to satisfy. I think of death row inmates, how even they are granted the satisfaction of a self-selected last meal. If Owen could speak, what would he request?

  “I know,” I say with a gentle tickle of his foot. There is one thing, a simple pleasure from which Owen is forbidden: ice cream.

  I dig through the freezer until I come upon Tim’s stash: a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. The flavor gives me pause, its appeal to Owen questionable and the walnuts a certain choking hazard. Vanilla would be better. Then again, the prospect of this innocuous treat taking the load off my shoulders, setting Owen free in a less deliberate, calculated fashion, appeals to my guilty conscience. If an accident stole him, my only charge would be to fail to intervene.

  I tug the container free and rest it on the counter to thaw, while I locate Owen’s baby spoon. What will I do with this and everything else of his, I wonder as I pinch the spoon between my fingers, when he’s gone?

  The ice cream sweats enough that I must wrap a rag around the container to protect my flannel pajamas before jimmying the lid free and sinking the spoon into the creamy abyss. Then I haul a chair from the table and position it to face my baby, where I sit and clamp the pint between my knees.

  It can only be my imagination, but I notice that Owen exudes tranquility, wisdom, vision; his soul sees. “I’m sorry,” I say as I skim the first nut-free bite for him to taste. When the spoon hits his mouth, he startles. Until now, everything we have given him has been room temperature or better. “Cold,” I say, emphasizing the word with a little shiver. There is no rational reason for me to keep teaching him, and yet I do.

  Our next lesson should center on sugar, the other foreign sensation to Owen’s tongue. “You like that,” I say as he smacks his lips, eggs me on with a bounce of the swing, “don’t you?”

  Again, I coat the spoon but leave the nuts behind. Choking seems a barbaric way to die. I deliver the second spoonful and then the third, each new taste increasing Owen’s eagerness. I think of peeling the rag from the container to check the nutrition information, in case I am in danger of overdosing his tiny pancreas. But this makes as little sense as donning a raincoat while a tidal wave breaks.

  Instead, I coast the next spoonful toward him. But before the treat can hit its mark, his pudgy hand sweeps through the air and snatches the spoon from my grip.

  At once I am struck with awe and dread. The hand-eye coordination required to accomplish such a feat is boldly impressive, yet the autonomy and self-awareness Owen exhibits rattle me.

  “Good boy,” I say as he clumsily gums the spoon clean, because there is nothing more.

  Chapter 9

  Owen’s appointment with Dr. Lasky is at twelve forty-five, during a fifteen-minute window at the end of the doctor’s lunch break. It was the only appointment Tim could extract from the receptionist, who first informed him politely—and then not so politely—that the doctor was fully booked.

  The fact that we will be given so little regard, reduced to mindless sheep, mellows my frayed nerves. There will simply be too little time for Dr. Lasky to catch on.

  “Owen Fowler; twelve forty-five,” I say to Deb, the receptionist, as I bounce Owen on my hip. I am the only parent brazen enough to intrude on this sacred hour, a transgression for which Deb chastises me silently.

  She hammers a few keys, hands me a clipboard and a precariously attached pen. “He’ll be right with you.”

  As I take a seat, Dr. Lasky whips into the office and hastily blows by me, a splash of coffee overspilling his cup as it sloshes. Briefly, I count myself victorious, prepare to relax. I will now be able to assure Tim that he is imagining things and Dr. Lasky agrees.

  But then Owen jerks, right there on my lap in the waiting room. A neon sign screaming: My baby is sick! Investigate! Investigate!

  My eyes dart to Deb’s glassed-in cubicle but find it empty. A window of escape. I bear down on the mass-produced pen, strangle the drug company logo, and, in place of our address, scratch the words: Sorry. Sick. Reschedule. Then I hustle Owen, who continues to twitch disconcertingly, to the intake desk, where I drop the clipboard and make a run for it.

  * * *

  Those Friday lunch-hour walks, as most things good for us do, have given way to something infinitely more pleasurable: Mexican food.

  Jenna and I settle at our usual table, just steps from the bar, and await our meal. We have become such regulars here that we have a standing order: enchiladas suizas and virgin strawberry daiquiris, which we clutch as we sit.

  “So I was thinking,” Jenna begins tentatively, “that you guys might want to join us next weekend for a little getaway.”

  “Maine?” I guess, figuring she has plans to visit her family’s beach house for Memorial Day.

  She nods, twirls her hair, stares out the window at nothing. “Yeah. I told Carson I’d help him open the place for the season. It’ll be fun.”

  I have met her brother, Carson, only twice—once at a charity event and once, of all places, at the drug store—and neither time was I impressed. I frown. “I don’t know. Owen’s been a little cranky lately, and with Muffin still missing…”

  “He hasn’t turned up yet?” she asks, sounding surprised and worried.

  “Uh-uh.”

  The waiter deftly slides a tray of tortilla chips and salsa across our table and disappears. I pluck a chip from the pile and start munching.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I shrug. “There’s really nothing else… I just don’t know what to tell Ally.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t say he’s in doggie heaven—or on a farm,” she insists. �
�Kids catch on to that shit fast, and they never trust you again.”

  I wonder where she has gotten this idea. “Don’t worry,” I say with a chuckle. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  She shifts back to her proposition. “So what do you think?”

  I’m sure I should refuse her, not just because of her smarmy brother, but because Tim and I are in a dark place. Then again, pine trees, salt water, and ocean air may be just the cure for our ills. “It sounds nice,” I relent, not at all certain I won’t regret doing so. “Let me run it by Tim.”

  She drops her shoulders in a way that tells me she’s satisfied, then digs into the chips with both hands. Before she can carve a dent equal to what I have devoured, though, the enchiladas arrive. "Anything else I can get you ladies?” Joe the waiter asks with a blatant wink.

  I defer to Jenna with a shake of my head. If anyone should respond to Joe’s cheeky flirting, it’s her. But instead of devising a clever request that would propel the interaction forward, she simply says, “No, thank you.”

  We make quick work of the enchiladas, gorge like women do when there are no men watching. I finish and dab my mouth with a red linen napkin, while Jenna abruptly halts mid-bite. “Oh, did you hear…?” She swallows and clears her throat, her features animated. “Did you hear about Eric Blair?”

  Automatically, I turn defensive. “No. Why would I?”

  She shakes her head. “He quit.”

  I would like to say I’m glad or that I even care, but Eric has left me alone since I broke the news about Owen. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted. “Bob must’ve freaked.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jenna confirms with an eager nod. “He’s in panic mode. Already has three temps bumping into each other trying to fill Eric’s size-nine Ferragamos.”

  I grin, wish I’d thought to say such a thing. “That figures.”

  She comes around to what she’s been itching to say. “Things at work should be a lot less stressful now, huh?”

  I squirm on the inside. “How do you mean?”

  “With Eric gone.”

  “I guess,” I say with a shrug. “He was a pain in the ass.”

  “And a dick. Everyone knows…”

  I am not keen to hear what my coworkers believe about Eric or about me. “What day are we leaving?” I interrupt to ask, hijacking the conversation. “Because I’ve got a lot to do before…”

  Jenna knows why I have steered us down this road, and she lets me. “A week from today. Nine a.m.”

  * * *

  The idea of a trip to Maine went over like the Hindenburg with Tim and the Goodyear Blimp with Ally. As Tim agitatedly pointed out, we still don’t know what’s wrong with Owen, since Dr. Lasky’s office refused to put us on the cancellation list after I ditched the last appointment. Now we must wait another week until Owen’s next scheduled checkup to be seen, a fact that Tim punishes me for daily.

  But Ally is over the moon picking out bathing suits and stocking up on bug repellent, which makes me suspect that she was switched at birth.

  “Did you get the stroller?” I ask Tim as he begrudgingly heaves a suitcase into the back of the van.

  He bristles. “Do you see a stroller?”

  “No.”

  “Two plus two, Claire.”

  The last few months have been revelatory, a side of Tim I had yet to glimpse in our twenty-five years together surfacing in Owen’s defense.

  I offer, “Want me to grab it?”

  “Whatever.”

  Something tells me to get a grip on my marriage before it slides too far into negative territory, dies a slow death from Owen’s disease. I step between Tim and the van, interrupt his luggage handling. “Hey,” I say. I stare him in the eyes close up. When he looks back, all I see is pain. Hurt I own. “I love you.”

  There is a tug-of-war raging inside my husband that I instinctively understand. “I love you too,” he says, unable to deny me, even though a part of him says he should.

  I begin to reach for him, prove through my touch that I remain worthy. But Ally intervenes. “Daddy,” she says as she pops up beside us, “where are the life jackets?”

  Simple things like this give me faith, assure me that, when the time comes, Ally will make her way in the world. “We don’t need them,” I tell her before Tim has the chance. “The beach house is fully stocked.”

  “Oh,” she says, slipping her furry green backpack, which mimics the shag carpeting of my first apartment, off her shoulder, “then I’m ready to go.”

  * * *

  The Dearborns’ cottage is in Genesis, Maine, barely a stone’s throw from Walker’s Point, the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport where two United States presidents have passed many a humid August afternoon. But today the weather forgets it’s Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kickoff of summer, and instead delivers a steady mist of drizzle to our windshield as we wind through the ocean side neighborhood in search of six sixty-nine Seafarer Way.

  “Pull over,” I implore Tim, my finger jabbing at the window. A pair of hearty New England souls, dressed in matching navy-blue rain slickers, stroll along the shoulder of the road. And we are lost.

  Tim coasts the van to a stop fifty feet beyond the walkers and powers my window down, so I can do the talking. “Excuse me!” I call out, craning my neck in the strangers’ direction. “Can you tell us how to get to Seafarer Way?”

  Under the pair’s cinched hoods, I discern the faces of an elderly couple. As they stride alongside us, the man pulls ahead of the woman, his gaze attracted to our Rhode Island license plate. He stops at my window and, with a broad smile, says, “What can I do you for?”

  “We’re lost,” I say flat-out, aware of how pathetic we must appear. There is something demoralizing about driving a vehicle this expensive, yet lacking the basic skills to navigate one’s way from point A to point B.

  This thought seems to have occurred to the man too, because there is a twinkle of delight in him at our predicament. “Seafarer Way?”

  “We’re visiting some friends for the weekend.”

  “Anyone I might know?”

  Suddenly the woman, who I assume is the man’s wife, winds up and clocks him in the shoulder. “Arthur!” she squeals. “Don’t be such a busybody!”

  The man sulks, quietly massages his shoulder and his ego, but obeys.

  The question was harmless enough, but I am glad not to answer it. “Six sixty-nine Seafarer Way,” I repeat, staring at the coffee-stained Post-it note stuck to my knee.

  The woman pushes closer, edges the man out of the way. “You missed it, dear,” she tells me with a furtive glance at Ally and Owen. “About three-quarters of a mile back. You should of took the fork in the road.”

  “Three-quarters of a mile back,” I tell Tim, in case he hasn’t heard. “Fork in the road.” Then to the woman, “Thank you.”

  With a little half-wave, she replies, “Any time.”

  Before I can buzz my window shut, the man throws in, “Good luck.” But the insincere way he says this convinces me he means otherwise.

  * * *

  I have seen the Dearborns’ beach house only in two-inch square cell phone video that does it little justice. Not only is the cottage impressive in a languid, unpretentious sort of way, but the inlet it anchors stuns. I marvel at the water and imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald, or perhaps his most famous creation, Jay Gatsby, mulling over a scotch on the moonlit beach.

  “Mommy,” Ally says, sounding flustered. “Here.”

  I am so lost to the magic of this place that I struggle to hear. “Huh?”

  “Take this.”

  I outstretch my hand but can’t yet focus past the hypnotic hum of the tide, even on a day like this. “What?”

  Ally sighs and loops the strap of a duffel bag over my arm, causing me to wobble in the sand. Just now it occurs to me that Owen is whimpering and Jenna has rushed outside to tend him, serve in my stead as Tim’s other set of hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can tak
e him.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She squeezes Owen tightly, presses her cheek to his, pulls back and plants a lip-smacking kiss on the top of his head.

  If my baby has a seizure in her arms, I know I will regret it. But her attention seems to comfort him in a way my touch no longer can. I hold the weathered screen door and Jenna floats through, Tim and Ally already having disappeared inside.

  * * *

  By four o’clock, the gloom that stalked us here subsides, leaving only an azure sky and brilliant sunshine.

  It’s not nearly warm enough outside to swim, but this doesn’t stop Ally. As Tim, Jenna and I ready the clambake, Owen crawls his way around a beach blanket and Ally plays chicken with the ocean, never getting more than her ankles wet before retreating with a shriek of glee.

  I am in the midst of shucking corn when Jenna’s brother, Carson, wheels up in a hotrod-style dune buggy, its fenders ablaze with garish red and orange flames. The paint job suits him, I think. Designed to impress, yet born to disappoint.

  Without an ounce of care, Carson spins the dune buggy to a splashy stop, spraying a waterfall of sand at my feet. He grins as if this is amusing and Tim and I are the sorry ones for not appreciating it as such, then hops out of the buggy and barks, “You did show.” As if they are old pals, he delivers a hearty thump to Tim’s back. “Thought it was gonna be just me and Sissy for the weekend.”

  Tim steps off, and Jenna shoots Carson an exasperated look that harkens back to their privileged, emotionally barren childhoods. Formative years not unlike my own.

  I want to like Carson, and I have tried for Jenna’s sake. She is a friend worth keeping. But her brother has a slick way about him—all flash and no substance—that sets off alarm bells in my psyche. A warning system that, had it the power to surmount a vicious migraine, may have prevented the tragedy of Owen from ever occurring.