He was afraid to move at first. He hadn’t heard angry shouting like this since the day he sang his first words. He lay still until the banging started. There was a pause between each high metallic report, as if someone was winding up between each tinny crash.
“Let me go! Let me go!” That was Anna.
Jaimie leaped from his bed and ran to the top of the stairs, peering down into the well of light in the front hallway. His mother stood behind Anna, pinning her arms behind her back and pulling her toward the kitchen. He came down a few more steps, trying to understand what he saw.
“Stop! Stop it now!” His father’s silhouette was framed in the open front door. The screen door was closed, but the thin metal square at its bottom had been mostly kicked in. Someone Jaimie could not see stood on the front step.
Bang!
“Stop it. This is already over. You just don’t know it.” His father’s voice was even, but Jaimie could see his secret. He sounded like Beth, the woman on the television. Red streams of bright anger ran down his arms and out of his fingers, but a yellow ribbon of fear wrapped tight around his heart.
Jaimie crept down a few more stairs so he could see who was kicking the screen door. It was Trent Howser.
“Anna wants to be with me! You don’t have the right to stop her!”
“She’s my daughter and if you care for her the way you say you do, you’ll leave,” Dad said.
Bang! A hinge popped loose on the screen. Trent was eighteen, strong and on the wrestling team. If he had thought to grab the door and yank it, it would have flown into the front hedge. Instead, he kicked it again.
“I’ve already called the police, Trent!” Jack yelled. “You’d better go before they get here!” That was the third lie Jaimie had heard his mother tell, and so close on the heels of the last one.
Bang!
The bottom hinge floated out and free of the door frame and the flimsy screen’s lock popped useless.
Trent caught the door before it fell and propped it against the porch wall. Then he stepped forward and delivered another vicious kick higher up the door, shattering the glass and ripping the screen. He could easily have charged in, but he seemed intent on destroying the door.
It came to Jaimie that this was a demonstration. Trent wasn’t trying to break in. He was trying to convince Theo and Jack to let Anna out.
The boy walked unnoticed behind his mother and sister. The wooden block that held the big knives sat by the sink.
When Jaimie was three, he pulled a dining-room chair into the kitchen and climbed up on the counter by the sink. His mother was in the basement doing laundry. When she came to the top of the stairs and stepped into the kitchen, she found the little boy standing on the counter. He had pulled out all three paring knives and placed them in a row on the counter for counting. Jaimie knew the word counter. He thought counting must be what counters were for.
He pulled the long bread knife from the block and carefully placed it beside the paring knives. His mother stood in the middle of the kitchen, frozen and staring, still holding a basket of clean clothes in her arms. She told Theo later that it seemed to be happening in slow motion. She would never forget how Jaimie slowly drew out the meat cleaver from its wooden sheath and eyed the blade with naked curiosity.
“He hadn’t noticed me and I didn’t want to shout or jump forward at him,” she said. “I was afraid that if I did, I’d startle him and he’d fall right to the floor and impale himself somehow.”
She was shaking when she gently pulled her child from the counter. She held him tight in her arms. The boy liked the softness of her hair and tried to put his cheek against it. Instead, Jack took his chin and tried to force him to look in her eyes. The boy did not like that but, unable to resist, the three-year-old fixed his gaze on the little plane of skin separating her eyes. G is for glabella.
When he learned to read, the boy thought it odd that there is a name for the space between human eyes, but in English there isn’t a single word for the place behind the knee.
“Promise me!” Jack had said. “Promise me you will never touch the knives again. Never!”
She moved her head close and side to side, trying to force the child to look in her eyes but Jaimie held his gaze on her glabella.
“He was looking at me with this crazy cross-eyed look,” she told Theo that night. “I was crying and then I started laughing and then I couldn’t stop so I took him to the living room and held him in the recliner and rocked him for a long time, like he was my quiet little baby again. He played with my hair the whole time. Though…you know…I wish to God he’d look me in the eyes, Theo.” Then she cried some more.
Jaimie never forgot the promise his mother tried so desperately to extract. Still, he saw the solution to the violent man on his front porch. Trent had given them a demonstration of force. The family needed to give Anna’s boyfriend a demonstration, too. Jaimie pulled the meat cleaver from the wooden block and walked back to the front hall.
“Ears! Get out of here!” Anna yelled.
“Jaimie!” Jack would have run to her son, but she was still struggling with Anna as the girl tried to twist out of her mother’s grip.
Jaimie stood beside his father, looked at Trent and watched his aura change as he slipped the wooden handle to the cold, heavy steel into Theo’s palm.
Trent’s jaw went slack.
Theo looked at Jaimie in surprise but when he turned back to Trent his face was grim.
“Go cool off, Trent. Don’t come back.”
Trent backed away and hurried down the front steps.
Theo ignored the broken screen door and closed the front door, turning the deadbolt and sliding the chain in its slot. When he turned from the door, he looked at the cleaver like it was some new unfamiliar thing. He handed it back to Jaimie. “Thanks, son. Please put that back where it belongs.”
Anna stopped struggling and her mother let go, reminding Jaimie of Chinese finger puzzles. She ran to the door to get a glimpse of Trent but he was gone. Anna did not cross the threshold. She leaned out, looked at the broken screen door and sighed heavily. “Trent, one; door, zero. Advantage: boyfriend.”
“Okay, let’s talk,” Theo said.
“Ears, go upstairs,” Anna said as he walked back from the kitchen empty-handed. The boy walked upstairs, but lay on his belly in the upstairs hall so he could listen.
“We’re going to talk this out calmly,” Theo said. “I thought your boyfriend was going to give me a heart attack.’
“What were you going to do with that meat cleaver?” Anna’s voice climbed up, on the edge of hysteria. She began to sob.
“Jaimie just handed it to me. I had no idea what I would do, but I knew I wasn’t letting Trent in here. What the hell is this all about? He’s only been around for a few weeks. He took you to a movie and you talk to him on the phone all the time. Doesn’t he know what’s going on?”
“It’s you who doesn’t know what’s going on. People die on TV and who knows when the flu will come here?”
“Under the circumstances, it’s not too much to ask that you not see your boyfriend.”
There was a pause Jaimie couldn’t decipher. Then Jack said, “I didn’t catch her trying to sneak out, Theo. I caught her trying to sneak back in.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Mom! Dad! You don’t understand! Trent loves me and I love him.”
Jaimie inched down the stairs a little, still on his belly, and peered around a banister post till he could see his family. They stood in the living room. His mother hugged herself. His father’s hands were on his hips. Anna planted her legs wide and stiff, her upper lip was curled back in a snarl.
“Hormones,” Jack said.
“We had them, too. I remember.” Theo studied his daughter, searching for words that would not come.
“Don’t do that!” Anna said. “I’m almost eighteen and I’ll be out of this house next year, or dead tomorrow. Who knows? The point is, I
need out of your cage! I’ve gotta live now because maybe I won’t later. I don’t want to die without seeing my friends!”
“Or your boyfriend of two weeks.”
“We’ve been together longer than that, Dad,” she said.
“Okay, so about a month.”
“Dad!”
Jack flopped on the couch. “Two weeks, a month. That’s when love fever runs highest.”
Theo shrugged. “My dad used to say, ‘Are you in love or are you in heat?’”
“Dad!”
“Jesus save us!” Jack ran her hands through her hair. Here and there she made fists and pulled on her scalp, as she did every time she felt a headache coming. “Anna, you make me wish I still smoked. You’re not getting it. This isn’t just about you and teen angst. Social distancing is necessary. It’s not some elaborate plot to keep you from getting herpes from the local football hero.”
“He on the wrestling team.”
“I’ll bet!”
“You’re treating me like a dog!” Anna said through broken sobs.
“Honey,” Theo said, “after the display of poor judgment Trent gave us tonight, I can’t say I’m on puppy love’s side. Your mom’s right. This isn’t about you and Trent. By going out with him tonight, you didn’t just put yourself at risk. You risked me and your Mom and your brother.”
Anna looked up and her mouth dropped open. “You think things are as bad as I do, don’t you?”
“We all listen to the same radio and watch the same TV. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on between all the media hype and government understatement.”
Jack started to cry in big blue and gray sobs. Jaimie slithered down the stairs another step, watching the trails of light. His stomach didn’t feel right as he watched his mother weep.
Anna softened and went to the couch to hug her mother. “I’m sorry, but nobody’s sick in Trent’s family.”
Theo moved to pat Anna on the back. “They think the virus has an incubation period that may last from a few hours to a few days. It’s tricky. It’s working away in its own little microscopic world, invading human cells, reproducing, unaware of all the hosts it kills. It’s our job to contain any contagion, real or imagined, and stay away from people.” He bent and kissed Anna on the top of her head. “In that spirit, go to your room. You’re even more grounded. Goodnight.”
Anna ran to the stairs. She spotted her little brother before he could retreat. “Ears! Go to your room!” she screamed, and threw her fist into his door as she passed.
Jaimie heard his father burble, “Don’t worry! He won’t tell anyone!” His parents shared a short burst of laughter before Jack shushed her husband.
Jaimie hadn’t seen Anna like that before but he recognized the colors of a tantrum — a bad boy at school turned over desks in his classroom one day. He displayed a similar color pattern. Jaimie overheard one of the teachers say he was an “angry young man” but she said it like it was all one word. Another teacher replied he didn’t know why the boy was incensed.
Jaimie took the word “incensed” literally. He had noticed that when people were very angry, sulphur and the smell of old leather shoes escaped their pores. A bitter taste he could not identify prickled his tongue.
The dictionary defined “incense” for Jaimie, but he didn’t truly understand it. He’d never had any emotion that approached that state.
One afternoon, soon after the incident at school, Jaimie turned over the desk in his classroom to see if he could reproduce the same colors and tastes he’d witnessed. It didn’t work. Some of his drawings fell to the floor and Jaimie became distracted putting them back in the order in which he’d drawn them.
Jaimie listened to Anna in the her room. She was, he was sure, screaming into a pillow and pounding her mattress with her fists. The boy went to his desk and sketched the cricket he’d seen in pencil, quickly and with precision. It was late, but he opened a drawer and retrieved a yellow crayon for the insect’s eyes. Before he went back to bed, he planned to slip the drawing under Anna’s door to make her feel better.
The previous summer, Anna took her brother on a bus downtown on a rainy afternoon. She bought the boy an ice cream and watched him eat it. Then she took him to a store that had a funny smell. She called the store “funky”, or perhaps she was referring to the smell. Jaimie wasn’t sure.
The boy had been content to watch people while Anna wandered the shop. Then he saw the word “incense”. There were a dozen fat jars with sticks poking out of them. They didn’t smell like angry people at all. Instead, they were mostly sickly sweet. One jar was labeled pine, which was pretty close to how pine trees smelled, only much stronger.
When they got home, Jaimie looked up incense again and realized he had breezed past another entry which explained the little sticks, which were for burning. He was unclear why people would do that.
Homonyms annoyed the boy. Why not have distinct words for everything instead of words that sound and look the same but mean different things? Jaimie would have known about the different definitions but he wandered around the dictionary the same way Anna shopped: aimlessly. When he picked up a dictionary, he wandered, touched words of interest here and there to understand their texture, and wandered on.
Before he had completed his drawing, the boy heard his sister clumping around her bedroom. A moment later, he recognized the sound of each shoe dropping to the hardwood floor, empty. A drawer opened and closed and he knew she was getting ready for bed.
Jaimie slipped out of his room and listened. His parents were still in the living room, on the couch.
“…if it’s here, we’ll deal with it,” his father said, his voice low.
“What if we both get sick?”
“If we get sick, Anna will take care of Jaimie. Despite tonight, you know she can rise to the occasion.”
“And if we all get sick and Jaimie doesn’t?”
“What are the odds of that?” he said.
“The real world doesn’t seem to affect him, Theo. It’s like he’s protected in his own world.”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“Am I?” she said. “When’s the last time Jaimie got sick? He’s never missed a day of school.”
“I don’t know, Jack. That says to me that either he’s got a great immune system and won’t get sick…or he’s got a crappy immune system because it hasn’t had any test runs. It’s probably because he doesn’t interact with other kids. Kids are all petri dishes and he’s — ”
“Bubble boy. He’s just in a bubble we can’t see.”
“Well, yeah. Unless he takes after his sister and suddenly develops an interest in chasing the opposite sex. He’ll have to get over holding my hand whenever we go out in public first, I’m guessing.”
“I’m serious, Theo. What if it’s you, me and Anna who get it?”
“Even if we all got it, it’s not like it kills everybody. People get over this thing, too. They get it like any other flu. They stay home and get miserable and feel sorry for themselves. They take a pill and watch too much TV and go through a box of tissues. Then they get over it and go back to work so they can’t have as many sick days to play hooky when it’s a sunny Friday afternoon in the summer.”
“After Glass and Jones died, you can’t con me with that. You saw how it can be. We all saw how fast it can happen.”
“What’s the value in hypotheticals?”
“Don’t give me a politician’s answer, Theo. I’m asking, what if?”
A long silence followed. The boy was about to get up when he heard his father mutter, “If it comes to that, we’ll turn on the gas.”
Jaimie didn’t understand what his father meant. When he looked up each word, he still didn’t understand.
Mourning what we had
Things were quiet between Jaimie’s parents and Anna for the next few days. Jack went out to gather supplies, staying away longer each time. No seeds were available in t
he city.
Theo paced, anxious for his wife’s return. He forgot to make dinner so Anna heated some pasta noodles for herself and for her brother. Still angry, she made nothing for her father. When Jack finally came through the front door, it was dark.
Jaimie looked up from his seat on the recliner, his finger marking a passage in the Latin dictionary which read major e longinquo reverentia or no man is a hero to his valet. His mother had told him something similar from her Bible study. “No prophet has honor in his own country.”
It seemed distance or absence made people love and respect each other more. This puzzled Jaimie. If he could will himself to speak, he would have asked about love first.
His mother’s absence for the day seemed to increase his father’s love for her. As she returned, he embraced her so roughly Jack dropped her bags. He pulled her surgical mask down and kissed her on the lips.
“I kept my phone off to preserve the battery in case I really needed it,” she said.
When she took in his frown, Jack smiled, bent and retrieved one of the grocery bags. Through the white plastic, Jaimie could see the word seeds in big block letters.
“Everyone on the street is wearing a mask,” she said.
“I was told masks don’t work.”
“Not so!” she said. “The radio said bank robberies are up seventy per cent. I guess they’re good for something! What’s the television say?”
“I’ve been watching the driveway,” Theo said.
She looked to Anna, who sat on the living room floor. “I watched it earlier but I turned it off when they kept repeating the same things.”
“Really no news at all about progress on a vaccine?”
“Elevated tensions in the Middle East,” Anna mumbled around a red licorice stick.
“Still or again?”
“The news doesn’t make any sense. First they said Sutr started in India. Now the CDC is saying it started in Pakistan and was a weaponized alteration of something that only sheep used to get. Then they say to stay away from bats, as if anyone was running to bats for love and comfort. Oh, and something’s happened in England. Violent riots. No real details, though.”
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