Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  Without any further ideas on how to handle Sarah, I let her go back to the picture books without me while I started looking for something to read aloud to them, something simple but entertaining enough to bridge the age gap. Reading and study were the only places where I used to be able to lose myself as a child, to close a door against the ghosts of the burned who otherwise trailed behind me night and day. So, thinking through the books I re-read most as a child, I looked first for James and the Giant Peach, but when I opened it I realized I’d forgotten about the parents that were killed on the first page. Charlotte’s Web promised emotional reactions to Charlotte’s death. The Black Stallion came to mind next and was as quickly discarded for the shipwreck that kills everyone but the boy and the horse. Children, it seemed, were meant to be exposed to grief early.

  “Lookit this!” Sarah held a book out to me. My Mommy’s Pocket, with a picture of a cartoon kangaroo and its smiling baby waving from the safety of her pouch.

  Oh, hell no.

  In the distance behind her I could see Kevin slumped in a chair flipping through a car magazine. He wouldn’t last much longer.

  “That looks great, sweetie. I’ll hang on to it and you look for some more.”

  Sarah bounced away, waving to a librarian with great swooping wings of hair sprayed into place, pushing a cart toward me as she passed. The librarian smiled back at Sarah, then looked at me.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered. “Can you recommend something I can read to a first-grader and a sixth-grader where nobody dies?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, stopping the cart. “Bless your heart.” She turned away from me to scan the featured books displayed across the top shelf. “Let me … Oh. There.” She reached over a book with a dog on the cover to get another and held it out to me. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. “Take this,” she said. “They’ll love it.” Then she returned to the cart, but instead of taking hold of the handle, she scooped up a stack of picture books and pushed them into my arms. “And I got these for Sarah,” she added, lowering her voice. “I’m Mrs. McKee—Alice.” She tilted her head back toward Kevin in his chair and the tea-party table where Sarah had started flipping through something new. “I work at the school library, too. Look—can I just give you a quick piece of advice? Don’t make yourself crazy trying to protect them. There’s nothing but kids with mothers all around them. You can do a lot for them this summer by getting them used to talking about it, before they go back to school.”

  Then she winked at me and rumbled away before I could breathe out anything other than an automatic, “Thanks.”

  What she hadn’t accounted for was my discovery that morning that I was afraid of their feelings. My goal now was to sidestep through the summer and hope they’d deal with their grief after I was gone. The weak and ugly truth.

  From the library it was home to the laundry and the traps awaiting in the harmless-looking pile of clothes. Should socks be doubled over or balled? Underwear rolled or stacked? Shirts folded or hung? Eventually it was time for lunch. What did they expect? Did they like peanut butter or bologna? Grilled cheese? Would they eat fruit or vegetables? Should sandwiches be cut into rectangles or triangles?

  Over the course of just these few hours, a vision for the summer started to take shape. If I was going to stay, my objective was to pad everything they touched with the familiar and comfortable. They’d been subjected to nothing but other mothers’ food and other families’ routines for three months, and chances were their days at home hadn’t been much better. Everything about the house—from the chaos in the children’s rooms to the useless assortment of canned goods in the pantry to the sticky dust on the washing machine—suggested that their father was barely functioning.

  On a notepad in the kitchen, beside the phone, I started a list of questions to cover with their father when he called. How much TV were they allowed to watch? Did they have an afternoon snack? What kinds of chores were they supposed to do? Were they expected to finish their dinner, whether or not they liked what was on the plate? Were desserts allowed? Did they take baths or showers? For now, I had only them to ask, and every expectation that the answers would be based on whim rather than truth.

  Still, we moved smoothly enough through afternoon TV, macaroni and cheese, and toward bedtime until Sarah went into her room to get a stuffed animal after her bath and I heard, in a tone that accelerated upward like a fighter jet swinging into the sky, “Where’s my BUFFERS?”

  My hands dripping dishwater, I ran down the hallway.

  “What is it?”

  “Where’s my BUFFERS?” She stood facing her bed, hands on her nightgowned hips, bath towel in a heap at her feet. Her hair, wet and uncombed, straggled across half her face. She smelled of baby shampoo.

  “What’s your buffers?”

  “He’s my RABBIT!” She pointed at the stuffed animals on her bed, arranged against the corner of her room as if the wall had erupted and poured out a lava flow of multicolored fur.

  “Oh.” I felt my shoulders relax. I shook the water from my fingers. “I’m sure he’s in there. I washed your sheets, remember?”

  She thrust her upper body toward me with a look of hatred that shocked me. “He goes in the FRONT!”

  It was impossible. There was no way in heaven or earth that I could reassemble their broken world as it used to be. I could never be wise enough or quick enough to steer them around every heartbreak and disappointment and frustration. And I knew in my belly that if I let her treat me this way—even once, no matter the reason—the summer would be unendurable. I straightened myself as I could envision Tuah doing.

  “Stop this.”

  “He goes in the FRONT!”

  “Sit down. Right there. This instant.”

  “NOOO!” she shrieked, elbows bent, white-knuckled fists pulled close to her chest like a boxer about to lash out. Her cheeks had flushed, and a webwork of mottled pink spread down her neck. Forget flight or invisibility—refusal is the ultimate superpower. What was I supposed to do in the face of it?

  “I think I see his ear,” said Kevin, from the doorway. I had forgotten him and wondered how long he’d been there. I waved him quiet without looking. I had to find a way to get this girl in possession of her faculties again. Scrambling to give her the actual rabbit at this point would leave me worse off than before.

  “Sarah, no one will help you until you calm down. Sit on the floor. Right now.”

  “NOOO!” She threw herself on her bed and burrowed into the pile of animals. “Stop LOOKING at me!”

  I had no idea what to do. This was a full-scale tantrum. She screamed and wailed and sobbed, kicking her feet as she lay facedown on the bed, head lost in the pile of animals.

  “I think he’s right there,” said Kevin again. I could see his arm extended, pointing, from the corner of my eye.

  “Shhh.”

  Instinct. Nothing else remained. I squeezed my eyes shut, which did nothing to shut out the shrieking. I grasped through my mind like a secretary flinging files everywhere until I found something. A memory: babysitting. Me standing in a burnt-orange living room, ankle deep in shag carpet, reporting to a neighbor woman with a set curl that her little boy had thrown a tantrum about some candy she’d specifically told me not to give him. The woman had laughed, much to my irritation.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she’d said. “The thing that causes the tantrum is never what the tantrum’s about. If it happens again, start talking about something else. He was just tired.”

  I avoided babysitting whenever possible after that.

  I opened my eyes and looked around the room. The pictures in which all four family members had faces were clustered by the door. On a bookshelf nearby, a snapshot leaning against a jar of rocks showed the family in front of a Ferris wheel. The tumult on the bed made the jar rattle. I picked the picture up and studied it.

  “Where was this picture taken?” I asked Kevin.

  “At the fair. It was fall. We got to miss school.”
/>   “DON’T LOOK AT ME!”

  “For the whole day?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That must’ve been great.”

  Sarah’s crying rose to a high, thin wail, sharp as a spear.

  “Did you ride the Ferris wheel?”

  He nodded.

  She’d lost control of her breathing, her chest pulsing to the sobs.

  “Were you scared, being up so high?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head, clearly pleased to be able to tell the tale. “Not even Sarah. Not even when it stopped at the top.”

  “Wow.”

  She squirmed backward on her elbows to pull her head out of the pile, turned her face toward us, and pressed her cheek against the pillow. She sobbed now in shuddering moans with her fist against her mouth. She’d stopped kicking.

  “And that’s your mom?” I asked, pointing. In the picture she had her arm across his shoulders and had Sarah pulled tight against her hip. A beautiful woman with a generous mouth and a wide smile. She and the children wove together into a triangle. Paul stood just behind Kevin, and though one arm wasn’t fully visible, he didn’t appear to be touching any of the others.

  “Yeah.”

  How many times had I vacillated today between imagining myself a hero and seeing myself a coward? The bed shook beside my knee as I continued to gaze at the picture. There was something off, something ominous about the way the Ferris wheel loomed over them, the size and angle of their combined shadow resting on the pavement like a creature about to rise up and strike them. It looked a little like a book I’d read as a child, a boy with a staff, fighting a shadow on the cover. The boy was a wizard, and the shadow was a demon he’d accidentally conjured, made of his own darkness and fear. It grew in power as he grew, and in the final battle, with nowhere to turn, he turned and embraced it. In that instant, it dissolved. Maybe I should have tried to find that one at the library.

  I took a deep breath. Looked up. Yes, I was afraid of their pain. But avoidance had clearly already failed. “Sarah, do you remember when this picture was taken?”

  She nodded, unable to control her breathing enough to speak. She hitched her knee and twisted onto her side. I sat on the bed beside her, holding the picture. Kevin stood still as time in the doorway.

  “Do you think about your mommy a lot?”

  Huh-huh-huh-huh.

  I looked at Kevin. “You too?”

  He nodded. His eyes filled half his face. No, I wasn’t without resources when it came to lost mothers. The wanting to remember. The fear of it.

  “What kinds of things do you think about?”

  “Driving in the car, sometimes. I always sat in front. And bedtime.” He looked down.

  “Sarah, what do you think about?”

  She reached out for the picture and brought it close to her eyes.

  “Sarah, it would be okay with me if you wanted to tell me about your mommy sometimes.”

  “I-I-I’m forgetting my memories about her.”

  I looked up at the walls around me, blinking and swallowing. The crayon families looked back at me, Sarah and her mother in their triangle dresses, their wide-open hands with the stick fingers, their long hair colored yellow or brown, and all those empty, empty faces. I looked back at Kevin. No amount of blinking would clear the pool of liquid gathering at my lower lids, so I didn’t try to hide anything from him. I squeezed a smile and willed my throat to relax so I could speak evenly. He met my gaze and gave me the tiniest nod in return. Shared sorrow connected us.

  “You too, Kevin?”

  “Yeah.”

  The question nobody had ever asked me. I looked back at Sarah.

  “How does that feel, forgetting?”

  “Terrible.” As if she was spelling it out mentally, she formed her mouth around every letter.

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  “No, not at all.” She brought the photo closer to her face.

  “Sarah, if you could remember more things, and if you could talk more or see more pictures, do you think you’d feel better?”

  “Uh-huh.” She put the picture down on the blanket and rubbed her eyes with her fist.

  “Would you like that too, Kevin?” I asked.

  Standing motionless in the doorway, his hands hanging empty at his sides, he nodded twice.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” I said.

  *

  We started reading our book gathered on the floor of Sarah’s room, leaning our backs against the side of the bed. Sarah sat with her arms wrapped around Buffers the Rabbit, at peace now that the rest of the pile had been properly rearranged. She’d given Kevin a bear that he accepted as if doing her a favor but that remained in exactly the place she’d put it on his lap.

  I wished I had one of those other books now. I wished I had James and his miraculous peach, with his new friends who cared about him and gave him hope again after an undeserved awful fate had stripped everyone he loved out of his life. I wished I had Alec Ramsay and his stallion, needing each other and surviving together when everyone else on the ship had been lost. I wished I had wise Charlotte saving Wilbur’s life and teaching him how love itself equips you to carry on after the one you love is gone. Things I had never learned successfully on my own.

  “Chapter one,” I began. “‘The Big Winner.’”

  8

  The next two days passed in utter calm, as if nothing had ever happened. The children whined as morning chores were announced, but they did them without argument or tears. I knew what was going on: I was well versed in resistance meant only for show and the nominal dramatics didn’t trouble me. By the third day, in fact, as he herded Cheerios into his final spoonful, Kevin even asked what they had to do after breakfast.

  What proved far more difficult than managing the children was figuring out how to interpret and deal with the glimpses I got into the family’s private life. Things I was certain I needed to ask about seemed unimportant, but things I never would have thought to question had gravity I couldn’t understand. At the grocery store, the children fretted about having a list their father had not first approved. They lagged behind me and kept to the center of the aisle, as if afraid a hand would snatch at them from between the cereal boxes.

  When I selected individual items and asked whether they usually got this kind or that kind, they cast worried looks at each other and Kevin would say something like, “I think that one’s okay. But just one.” Trying to buy a jar of grape jam got me an alarmed look and then a firm, “No. We’re not buying any jam.” I pointed out that the jar I’d seen in the refrigerator was almost empty, but Kevin just said, “No. That’s enough.” Mystified but unwilling to probe, I elected not to argue.

  An elderly man at the foot of the road, who introduced himself as Mr. Fousek, made a point to wave me down and ask our destination every time we left the house. The first time he had been washing paintbrushes in his driveway, and I figured he was just the neighborhood busybody. But the next time he lurched out of his garage, waving with both arms as if afraid we’d pass without stopping. As we returned, he let another car go by with only the barest nod. Why was he so anxious to keep track of our movements and ours alone?

  My direct interactions with the kids were simpler. I learned Sarah drank from the plastic cups, and Kevin insisted on glass. Guns remained off limits, but Kevin had a surprisingly powerful slingshot, and teaching me how to aim and shoot it provided plenty of entertainment. Sarah loved to dress, arrange, and care for her stuffed animals, and she showed genuine awe when I showed her how to apply her new shoe-tying skills to making bows for their ears, arms, tails, and manes.

  Evening, though, was when they pulled the coverings off their wounds, washed them, let them weep under the little canopy of light from Sarah’s bedside lamp, and dressed them again before sleep. In just one dose, they discovered storytime as the balm that soothed them.

  Bless Mrs. McKee and the book she’d chosen for us.

  During dinner, t
he children would talk about what we might read that night, using their spoons or the backs of their hands to keep food in their mouths while they laughed. What would Fudge do next? What did they think Fudge would do if he was at their house? What would happen if Fudge met an elk or saw a beaver pond? As the mountain’s shadow spread across the valley and stretched its covers over the house, they’d abandon the TV without me saying anything and start to get ready for bed—Sarah’s bath first so I could comb her hair while Kevin showered. Then we would gather in Sarah’s room, where Kevin would sprawl on the bed and supposedly read his book while I read picture books on the floor to Sarah. But Kevin’s book lay open and ignored while he leaned over my shoulder to follow along with the children’s stories. At one point he even said “Read that one” as Sarah struggled to choose.

  After I finished reading a few of Sarah’s, the last pretense would drop and they’d take equal places at my sides, hair slicked and smelling of soap, Sarah pressed against my hip and Kevin leaning on my shoulder, while I read from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. We read probably longer than we should’ve each night. But what did it matter? They didn’t have school in the mornings, and the gash of need was so raw I couldn’t deny them. Besides, we had a lot of pages to get through. I didn’t want them to finish it without me over the weekend.

  On Thursday night, they started to talk about their mother. While we read Jack and the Beanstalk, Kevin said she’d packed magic beans in his lunch one day last year. I wasn’t clear on whether he was embarrassed or pleased. Perhaps both. Sarah said they’d talked about a princess party for her birthday at the end of the summer, where they’d have a real pony and build their own castles. They started interrupting each other in an effort to tell their stories, and before long I wondered how much was real and how much an effort to outdo one another in how wonderful, magical, and loving of a mother they each remembered.

  Their father did not fare as well in these stories. I tried to keep in mind the context, but I couldn’t help noticing that if he entered the narrative at all it was only as the rule-maker, the permission-denier, the authority. I felt some code-of-adults obligation to support him, to suggest good reasons why he might have said they couldn’t have a dog, couldn’t throw a party, mustn’t go to friends’ houses after school unless he was home and gave permission, but they didn’t seem to need them. They mentioned their father’s policies offhandedly, as a way of painting the background in a story meant to be about their mother, without complaint or judgment or any apparent wish for things to be any different.