The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  “Do you think they were hitting on us?”

  “Thom and Victoria?”

  “I told Sunny Bang about it and she thought maybe they were trying to swing with us or something.”

  Owen started to laugh. “Like the four of us all together in one big pile, or like tradesies?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lucy. “It’s just strange that they told us about it, that’s all, don’t you think?”

  “If we ever did something like that, rule number one would be we tell no one.”

  “Rule number two,” said Lucy, “would be no falling in love.”

  “I think we should write these down,” Owen joked. “Let me go get a pen.”

  Owen headed to the kitchen.

  “Rule number one: No one can ever know,” Lucy called to him.

  “No one!” Owen yelled. “I’m with you on that.”

  “There is no Fight Club!”

  “There is no Fight Club!”

  Owen came back into the living room carrying a legal pad and an orange Sharpie.

  “Rule number two: No falling in love,” said Lucy.

  “I’m writing it down,” said Owen.

  “And underline it.”

  “Rule number three: Condoms at all times,” said Owen.

  “We should buy a huge box of condoms at Sam’s Club, so many that they’re impossible to count so neither of us would know how much sex the other person was having.”

  “We’re not buying Sam’s Club condoms,” said Owen. “Their trash bags don’t even work.”

  “I know you hate it when I buy those bags, but they are practically free and you get a million of them.”

  “Just, sidebar, and for the millionth time, could you please stop buying those trash bags?”

  “Okay,” said Lucy. She sighed a big sigh. “It will be painful, but I’ll stop.”

  “Rule number four: No Sam’s Club trash bags or condoms,” Owen said.

  “Rule number five: Whoever breaks rule number one, two, three, or four wins full custody of Wyatt.”

  “That’s awful,” said Owen.

  “He’s been driving me nuts all afternoon.”

  As if on cue, Wyatt walked into the living room. He spotted the orange Sharpie in Owen’s hand and stated, “I want the pen.”

  “No pens, Wyatt,” said Lucy.

  “I want the pen.”

  “How about a crayon, bud?” Owen said. “Or a colored pencil?”

  “I want the pen!” Wyatt screamed.

  “Oh, just give him the pen,” Lucy said.

  “You sure?” said Owen.

  “No writing on the house, Wyatt,” said Lucy.

  “Okay,” said Wyatt.

  “Not on the walls and not on the furniture,” said Lucy.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Wyatt took the pen and headed upstairs to write on the walls or on the furniture.

  “We really shouldn’t do that,” said Owen.

  “I know,” said Lucy. “I just can’t face a two-hour meltdown over a Sharpie. Our house looks like crap anyway.”

  “I’ll get another pen,” said Owen. “Where were we?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Lucy. “I was looking at myself in the mirror this morning and thinking about what Victoria said. I think I’m nearing the end of my window.”

  “Your window?”

  “The window wherein people other than the man I’m married to will be willing to have sex with me without, I don’t know, being financially compensated in some way.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Which brings us to this: no prostitutes.”

  “Of course not,” said Owen.

  “Seriously. Write that down.”

  “No prostitutes.”

  “Because it’s skeevy and we can’t afford it.”

  “I’ve got a rule,” said Owen. “No sexting inside the house.”

  “I wouldn’t want to sext, period,” said Lucy. “Would I have to do that?”

  “I don’t know how things work these days,” said Owen. “But if you want to sext, you have to sit outside. That’s my rule.”

  “You know what would be brilliant?” said Lucy. “I think there should be a time limit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it should start and then it should stop. We both agree on an end date, and then when it’s over, it’s over. Boom.”

  “That’s sort of genius,” said Owen. “It’d be like a rumspringa.”

  “And we’d have to promise to actually end it. No more contact. Of any sort. With any of our, uh, our, uh—”

  “Sex partners?”

  “SPs for short.”

  “How long, do you think?”

  “Long enough that we can make something happen, but not so long that it becomes the new normal.”

  “Six months?”

  “Six months. And we can’t have sex with anyone we know,” said Lucy.

  “What do you mean?” said Owen. “We have to find complete strangers?”

  “No, I mean you can track down old girlfriends or whatever, or people in the city, but you can’t have sex with anyone in Beekman. Not with our crowd. I don’t want to be sitting at a dinner party and wondering if you’re sleeping with any of the women at the table.”

  “Okay, that’s fair,” said Owen.

  “What about talking about it? With each other, I mean.”

  “Would you want to talk about it?”

  Lucy thought for a moment. “No. I wouldn’t want to know anything.”

  Owen wrote down No talking about it.

  “I’d want to be completely in the dark,” said Lucy.

  “No asking about it, then.”

  “No looking too happy,” said Lucy. “No swanning around the house with a big smile on your face. No whistling while you get dressed in the morning.”

  “No snooping,” said Owen. “We accept that we each have a realm of privacy. Our computers, our cell phones, our credit card bills. So with no snooping there can be no hiding of things, and no lying.”

  “No leaving,” said Lucy.

  “No leaving,” Owen agreed. “And no falling in love.”

  “You already wrote that down.”

  “I’m writing it down again,” said Owen. “We’re joking about this, right?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy. She laughed. “Yes, we’re joking. We’re not insane.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Wyatt picked that moment to walk into the living room. He had orange Sharpie scribbled all over his face.

  “I’m a largemouth bass,” Wyatt announced, and then he strode purposefully into the playroom.

  * * *

  Downtown Beekman was pretty Norman Rockwell–y, really, with its sidewalks a stone’s throw from front porches, and houses separated by thirty feet of driveway or grass. Main Street itself was both quaint and a bit pathetic. Beekman had never really caught on as a Hudson Valley tourist destination. It was missing the artsy tone of Beacon, the hippie flavor of Woodstock, the crunchy rock-climbing vibe of New Paltz, the ritzy country flair of Rhinebeck. Still, it had its charms.

  Owen wandered into a quirky store on Main Street, looking for something to send to his mother for her birthday. Owen’s mother wouldn’t stand for something Amazoned to her with a click of a button. She wanted something that was purchased and wrapped and mailed to her with as much hassle as humanly possible.

  The store was small, with an industrial/artisanal feeling, bars of brown soap stacked on old metal shelving, a soy fig candle burning, various odds and ends encased in muslin.

  “It’s truffled honey,” a voice said. “Taste it.”

  Owen looked over and saw an attractive blond woman who had just come out of the back. She was wearing a peasant blouse and jeans.

  “It’s nice,” said Owen. It was weird-tasting honey.

  “It’s amazing. The truffles are flown in from Italy and
the honey is hyper-local. If you live in Beekman, you have seen the bees that make this honey. We sell out of this the minute we get it in the store. Smell it.” The woman waved the little jar of honey under his nose. It smelled like honey that had been filtered through a very clean person’s sweat sock.

  “What do you do with it?” Owen asked.

  She looked at him. “What do I do with it?” She laughed a hearty laugh. “This is a family store, my friend.”

  Is she coming on to me? Owen thought. I think she is. Who is she?

  “It will end your allergies forever,” she said. “And the truffles are an aphrodisiac.”

  “Sex without sneezing,” said Owen.

  She laughed like this was very funny.

  “This place is great,” he said.

  “Thank you. It’s my baby.”

  “It’s your store?”

  “It is. I am the proprietress.” She did a little curtsy, and he tried not to look at her boobs. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I’ve been in Beekman for five years, but I’ve never been in here before.”

  “You are not a good local shopper!” She hit him playfully on the arm. “That’s what we do around here. We shop local!”

  “You’re right, I’m not a good…local shopper. I’ll do better.”

  “You promise? Because it’s not just me. We’re not going to have a thriving Main Street if the rich weekenders don’t buy things once in a while.”

  “I’m not rich. And I’m not a weekender anymore,” said Owen. “I live here full-time.”

  “That’s how we get you,” she said. “You buy a weekend house and two years later you’re living in it. You either lost your job or had a baby. I’ve seen it a million times. I’m Izzy, by the way.”

  “I’m Owen.”

  “Izzy and Owen,” she said. She got a faraway look on her face. “That would be a great title for a children’s book.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It should be about the unlikely friendship between a mouse and a, uh, crocodile.”

  “A penguin and a hippo,” he said.

  “A mouse and a hippo!” she said.

  “Yes, that sounds about right,” he said.

  “We should write it together!”

  “Yeah. That’s a great idea,” Owen said, thinking, No, it’s not a great idea.

  “It is a great idea. This is how things happen. The universe likes to make things happen.”

  She had this kind of twitchy way of smiling and moving her shoulders, twitchy but in a good way, like a kitten or a stripper. Her bare shoulders and her long neck kept on moving, moving the entire time she was talking to him, and it took Owen a while to realize she was dancing to the music that was thrumming softly through the store. She also had a half smile that, when you looked into her eyes, you could have sworn was a full smile. Her eyes were bright blue.

  “So,” he said. “I’ll, uh, take the honey.”

  “Fabulous!” she said. “It’ll be thirty-eight dollars. Cash’ll save you the sales tax,” she said. And she winked.

  * * *

  “No spitting, Wyatt. You know that.”

  Wyatt was angry at Lucy, but she had no idea why. Sometimes it was clear why he was mad: You didn’t let him have a second helping of ice cream. You took away the iPad. But then there were days like this one, days where everything was fine, and nothing unusual had happened, when, on a dime, Wyatt turned on his mother.

  Wyatt spit at her.

  “That’s one,” said Lucy.

  He spit at her again.

  “No spitting, Wyatt. If I make it to three, you’re getting a time-out.”

  He spit in her direction, ineffectively, and the spit dribbled off his chin and landed on his shirt.

  “Okay, that’s two. Let’s go find something to do”—Redirect, the therapists loved to say, although it felt like giving him a reward for bad behavior, especially when she was already at two. “Do you want to play a game with Mama? Let’s see what’s in the playroom.”

  Wyatt narrowed his eyes, and a look of what seemed to Lucy to be pure hate crossed over his face, a look so primitive and raw it always took Lucy’s breath away.

  He stepped toward her, looked her in the eyes, and spit again, this time in her face.

  “That’s it, Wyatt. That’s three. Upstairs. Time-out.”

  Wyatt took off like a shot.

  “Do not run away from me, Wyatt! Time-out!”

  Wyatt darted into the playroom. The layout of the downstairs was such that you could run in a circle, a big circle, from the kitchen through the playroom and the foyer, through the living room, and back to the kitchen again. Catching Wyatt when he settled on this path was nearly impossible. You had to outwit him. You had to hide in a nook or behind a door and then pop out and grab him when he passed by, all of which he found unbearably exciting.

  Lucy did just that. She hid behind an old wingback chair and then grabbed Wyatt’s arm when he ran past her.

  “Walk!”

  Wyatt went noodle-y. Lucy was afraid she was going to pull his arm out of its socket, like one of those awful nannies you were always hearing about in the city.

  “Feet on the floor, Wyatt. Walk!”

  Lucy did a hold one of his therapists had taught her, kind of one hand dug into his armpit and the other on his upper arm, and he slowly got to his feet. His other arm was completely free, though, and he used it to scratch her as they walked up the stairs.

  “I hate you.”

  “That hurts my feelings, Wyatt.”

  “I’m going to kill you, Mama. I hate you. I’m going to kill you!”

  Wyatt’s time-outs used to be in a chair like normal time-outs. But Wyatt would not stay in the chair. No matter what Lucy and Owen said or did, Wyatt would not stay put in the chair. So the only answer Lucy could come up with was to hold him in the chair, grab his wrists, and sit behind him, basically making herself into a human straitjacket. And he would struggle and bite and yell and sob and spit and pinch and scream, driving himself into deeper and deeper hysterics. Lucy had had bruises up and down her arms and scratches all over her hands ever since he was old enough to walk.

  How do you discipline a child like this? It felt impossible. It was impossible.

  “I can’t wait for you to die, Mama,” Wyatt yelled through the closed door once she got him into his bedroom.

  “I’ll be sad when I die,” said Lucy calmly. “Dying is a very sad thing.”

  “I can’t wait for you to die, Mama.”

  “That hurts my feelings, Wyatt.”

  “I can’t wait for you to die. And when it’s your funeral, I’m going to have a big party, and I’m going to make a cake, and it’s gonna say Ding-dong, the witch is dead. And I hope that hurts your feelings!”

  That’s actually pretty creative, Lucy thought. That’s an interesting and original use of language.

  “You’re in a time-out, Wyatt. And the timer doesn’t start until you’re calm.”

  “I’m calm! I hate you, Mama! I can’t wait for you to be dead! Dead as a doornail!”

  Lucy slumped down on the floor in the hallway, her left hand on the doorknob to keep Wyatt from getting out.

  Behavior is communication. That was one of the first things the therapists had told them about Wyatt. Over the years, Owen and Lucy had repeated that phrase to each other hundreds of times—when Wyatt was arching his back and spitting, when he poured water onto her computer keyboard, when he shattered the fake Tiffany lampshade at that Applebee’s. It means he’s having trouble with this transition. It means he’s overstimulated by the noise in the restaurant. It means he’s frustrated because he can’t catch the ball. It means he feels out of control around other children. It means his brain doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does. It means he’s tired. It means he’s hungry. It means he’s scared or confused or excited or worried or anxious or angry or sad.

  Lucy’s arms were scratched and bloody. Wyatt was pulling on the doorknob wit
h all of his might. She closed her eyes and held on.

  From age two until just about age four, Wyatt did not sleep. It wasn’t a question of not sleeping through the night—he flat-out didn’t sleep. He napped a little, in fits and starts, on the bus to and from his special preschool, sometimes falling asleep on the couch when he got home or in his car seat on his way to one of his therapies, but at night, he did not sleep. He couldn’t sleep. It was as if sleep were beyond him, and sleep had no connection to tiredness.

  Lucy and Owen took turns staying up with him, sometimes alternating nights, sometimes splitting them in half. They felt like they’d aged fifteen years in just under three. They both nearly lost their minds.

  Just when they thought things were starting to get better, when Wyatt had finally found some sort of rhythm, he woke up in the middle of the night and, for the first time in his life, he did not cry or bang his head or scream bloody murder. Instead, he figured out how to climb out of his crib. He made his way down the stairs, unlocked the front door, and walked down the long stone driveway to the mailbox. He was obsessed with the mailbox at the time, something to do with Blue’s Clues, and he enjoyed putting the red flag up and then down and then up and then down, flapping his hands each time he put it up again like a penguin trying to fly.

  Around two a.m., a middle-aged man coming home from a bar drove by and saw this: a little boy, barefoot, in Spider-Man pajamas, standing on a large flat rock next to a black mailbox. The man was drunk, and he had done a fair amount of cocaine. He was afraid to call the police. He was afraid to be seen drunk and high with a little boy in Spider-Man pajamas on a dark road in the middle of the night. He kept driving. When he finally called the police, he couldn’t remember the name of the street or the number of the house, just that it was a black mailbox and the house was set far back from the road.

  What do you do? Years without sleep? Years of waking up in a blind panic with each creak of the house? Four years of crying every day? And watching yourself and your spouse slowly fall apart before your eyes. And that’s after the regular-new-parent no sleep, regular-new-parent nights with midnight feedings and diaper changes and fevers and coughs and croup. Maybe they were better now, but still, sometimes Lucy worried.

  A volunteer firefighter had driven by and found Wyatt, shivering, still playing with the mailbox. He’d brought him home. It was a close call.