Dead Letters Anthology (40 page)

Against the bark, my lower back begins to ache – an injury recalling itself. An old attachment.

To leave, she walks north through the grass. He is old enough to walk. He should be walking. Situations like this one grow only more and more untenable. He is three, it should be noted, despite the bottle. The talent for manipulation can manifest as early as eight months. Passivity, a strategy.

* * *

On the third day, they do not arrive at their usual time.

It is raining. I wander to Main Street for a poncho and a sandwich at Ipp’s, which I cannot eat. I return to find her struggling to push a stroller through muck at the far edge of the park. Her umbrella is fighting her. The wind keeps yanking the large red nylon off to the side. She is an aging matador, less bravado than pathos. The boy’s face is whipped with stinging spray, as mine almost certainly is, and his complaints cut across the field, clear as keys on glass. Why aren’t they home yet? Her apology is muffled, but it is an apology, and, to accomplish it, she hunches – her spine suddenly a dowager’s. Simultaneously, the umbrella springs upright as if sprouted from the earth. A battlefield poppy, wound-fed. As I have observed it, much of mothering involves contortion.

* * *

On the fourth day I am not there. I offer my initial report, which is incomplete.

* * *

When I see them again, something has shifted. She has had her hair cut, expensively. The boy – left longer than usual with sitter or Nana or friend – still seethes. The layering at the back is coquettish. Her neck, exposed. Someone convinced her to do this, probably citing ease. The boy requires time. Of course she should remove parts of herself to make room for that time: mothering is also truncation. How often does she shower? Whatever the frequency, it is more Victorian than her prior habit. The homes of small ones have ever received their taint from hidden food and sour female smells.

* * *

It has been a month. My tree is not as welcoming as it was at first, but I am not done with my watch. We are sentries, the tree and I. No thing must falter from the plan God has for all things. Sometimes, that means we are asked to steward one another. To cultivate, to prune. I climb up into its branches to oversee. A maple. Its red glow is buds. They are tight with their spring blood, jealously gripping it in a futile withholding of gush.

* * *

When they finally come back to the playground, the boy is in pain. He does not say so, but affects a slight limp. His left foot makes less viable connection with the balance beam than the right. She holds his hand, failing to register this new asymmetry. The boy’s gait is his first test for her and she fails. The mother clearly prides herself on attention to minutiae – so says the unnatural lift of her brow. The boy has a bruise on his heel, but it might be bone cancer. After the initial fever, polio can look like this, in other boys. In other times and countries.

Distraction is written all over. The blue sky scrawls with plane sign, and worms are fingering bottle caps and butts near the exposed roots at my feet, covered in boot. My book, soaked through days before, is illegible – each page polluted with the next, warped, stuck, tearing if turned. A buzz emanates from the mother’s purse. She checks it, smiles, and puts him down. She is no longer beside him. She is somewhere else.

* * *

The next week, she untethers the boy from her gaze. He is both upset and freed. Curious, drawn, he wanders close. He has faint freckles, a thing I did not see before. Has she applied protection? It is March, but he is truly fair and the atmosphere is not what it was. I try to detect either coconut or cocoa in the breeze that wafts past him, but cannot. The imitations smear together in a chemical blur.

“Gibb, don’t bother the nice lady.”

She has seen him seeing me. She has ascribed me a gender. She hurries towards us, to remove him from danger even as she attempts to paint me harmless.

The boy stares. It is the first time he has allowed himself this directness. They can retain some feeling of what we are, especially the ones we have been assigned.

“Give me that.”

That is the ruined book. He has spoken very clearly, and I feel compelled to reward his lack of fear. I hold it out, though not very far. She is close enough now to see my face, to see that it is not, in fact, nice.

She takes his hand as he reaches it towards me. He is still leaning out, listing towards the book with his small body, unsteady. She tugs. He makes an unpleasant but effective sound. She lets go immediately. Ashamed of her capacity for even this minor harm, she sweeps him up and away, cooing, acknowledging me no further. Except with her back.

I have ever wondered at the permutations of mothers – how they differ in discipline, training, expectation. Their samenesses are even more mystifying: the tensile strength of enveloping arms, the stamina it must take to toss the ache of a child from hip to hip, season upon season, and to love it.

The tedium.

I do not wear this body again.

* * *

She is giving birth. The boy is out in the hall with her mother, his grandmother. There are no fathers here. Not hers, not his, not his soon-sister’s. Only nurses. Even the doctor is a woman. The last time I saw the boy he was a beast – all small boys are beasts. Now he is a thief. He has taken a dollar and three quarters from his grandmother’s wallet. He is at the vending machine.

My voice comes from behind.

“What’s your poison?”

He turns to look up at me. I see a glimmer of recognition, but he shakes it off.

“Chocolate isn’t poison,” he says as he retrieves the M&Ms.

“That wasn’t your money.”

He isn’t seven yet. He flushes. He is good at sneaking but not at lying, not when he doesn’t know he’s going to have to.

“Nana always gives me money.”

“Nanas like pleases. They like thank yous. They like to be asked.”

Authority is a trigger, and mine is great. He shoots past me back through the hall to his grandmother in the waiting room. Its beige tile transforms everything that bounces off it into hollow clicks and whispers.

I sit down across from them and he pretends not to see me.

“Your grandson?” I ask her. She is smaller than her daughter, frail beneath jewellery designed for a more regal frame and bearing than she has. She must know this. Her eyes, not pointed this way, are sharp.

“It is.” She smiles through thin lips, unnaturally wet, and ruffles his hair absently, her focus on the double door.

The maternity ward. I come here, or to places like here, often. “A delivery?”

“My daughter’s second child. This one –” and she squeezes the boy’s arm with nails like polished talons “– is about to become a big brother.”

He does not look at me. Instead, Gibb shoves an M&M deep into the pocket of each cheek – first one and then the other. He takes grave time. He is sucking off the candy shell. The smell of American chocolate in the mouth of a child is similar to vomit.

I am allowed an occasional half-truth. “What a lucky sister you’re going to have.”

In discussions of the unborn, gender is often prematurely assumed. Nana’s eyes flicker this way. She decides my gaffe is innocent, or beneath mention.

The boy knows what is what. “I want a brother.”

“A girl will bring your mother more comfort,” I say and stand. This is known. Nana frowns. I am a man, overbearing and insensitive. Leaving.

As I pass, I brush her hand with my hand. I am able to do this quite tenderly. The old woman startles like a virgin. I can steal as well as anyone, although we don’t call it that. We call it calling home.

Nana is dead within two weeks’ time. The boy knows what is what. He does not want to envy me my power. He wants to hate me. He speaks to no one of this.

* * *

Lucy is two. Gibb, nine.

The mother is making preparations to marry Lucy’s father, a musician. All the preparations. He is younger, in most ways. The family is living in Nana’s brownstone. The mother has inherited everything. Gibb does not like Lucy’s father. Gibb does not like Lucy.

Gibb has begun to limp.

My post in the alley across is adjacent to a dumpster. My olfactory judgments are unbecoming, deemed worldly. Adjustments are underway.

This body both hurts and reeks. Its joints are beyond repair – I must stretch incessantly. The boy walks past with friends on the way to school. Lucy’s father has insisted. No coddling. Gibb’s hobble is more pronounced on the way home each afternoon. As is his hatred for the sack of flesh he has been told to call father.

The mother has moved from freelance to firm.

Lucy has a nanny. They spend hours at the park when Gibb is gone so Lucy’s father can sleep. It is hard to day-sleep. While waiting for the boy, I pretend unconsciousness, resisting assault on the senses. I curl among newspapers, eyes slitted. Quiet helps Lucy’s father. From the bags he tosses over me with a sound louder than clink and an odour its own brand of sour, I gather whiskey helps also.

My stay on the corner is brief. I kill another cat.

Such minor infractions are frowned upon but not verboten. We are presented with certain valves for our energies, which – to wield – take an intense will we are not free to wholly master. Beside my knobby spine, the slots of pain sear.

* * *

Lucy’s father leaves the mother a week before the wedding.

She told him to go. But in an endless string of abandonments, any loss is perceived as desertion. She tells herself she told him to go. She tells herself of course she did and she was right to. She wanted this, she tells herself – respect. The mother buries her face in Lucy’s belly. He left me.

During the next few months, she will take small but constant comfort in Lucy’s laughter, needs, squeals. The boy and I will not.

I am renting the third floor.

* * *

Gibb is not an able-bodied boy. It is difficult to see, but he is torqueing in upon himself. The crooked mile requires the crooked man: the rhyme misunderstands causality. One by one, friends have their parents refuse the mother’s invitations. Some game he played too rough. His loneliness is like a gun in the mother’s bedside table. He has been in there. There is no gun. He has asked me, the woman upstairs, do I carry.

* * *

The mother acts like a mother. She worries for me more than for Gibb. I do not eat with them though invited. I leave briefly every day, but she does not know where I go. If I work. She wants to ask. She has her job, but the nanny is expensive. Lucy’s father gambled so much of Nana’s egg.

My job is watching and, now, to listen. I appear, for once, as I would choose to. We don’t choose. I look genderless, although the mother thinks lesbian. The misapprehension allows me to stare at her, and the boy, unimpeded by decorum. Outsiders are given tremendous leeway, seen as they are as renouncers of all things the devout have secretly forsaken.

Lucy, a wet muffin, is heavier than bread should be. Yeasty. I do not volunteer to hold her but sometimes must. The mother and I are friends. This is a word women use when someone sits with them, more than once.

Disaster rots Gibb’s whole world, or he would pin his bad feeling on me, especially as he has attached to this body his first stirrings. He leers around corners. A pencil skirt I wear has lace that emerges below the hem like a mistake. I have watched him watching. For him – it is legs.

When Lucy’s father left, the boy thought things would be made right. This has not happened. His pain increases. He is my charge – it is up to me to reduce his extremity.

* * *

I go to him. We are advised to remain corporeal in these moments. The alternative can be devastating.

The mother and I share a bottle of wine she doesn’t notice that I do not share. I retire. After she goes down with her television on, I return to the second floor and enter Gibb’s room.

It is nightlit. A lava lamp. The walls swim in rose.

I wear the silken whites that have ever supported nocturnal visions.

I am an emissary. I lower myself onto the bed beside him. He is small in the bed.

“Do you know me?” I ask.

“Yes.” Remarkably clear, the boy’s elocution. Even in sleep.

“Would you like to feel better, Gibb? Because I can make you feel better.” I pause. “Even good.”

He is awake now, pretending not to be, squinting to peer between thick lashes, breathing shallowly. “Yes.”

This is a whisper.

The yes he has given me is a secret, as are the instructions I pass on. A deeper secret I have not told.

So close do I lean in that my lip grazes the red shell of his ear. I can feel his pulse there, and the words I expel, in whorl. I tell him what he will do. I give this information to him in fine detail. In smoke and filigree. He is barely breathing. His whole small body strains to listen. Were he like me, he might leave it there on the mattress. Behind him.

And then, as we do, I kiss him.

I lean over the boy. His eyes are wide. I kiss him on the mark so faint only the mother remembers it. It is at the very centre of his forehead. The birthbloom – the one I gave to him nine years before – trembles in kindling against my mouth.

“Sometimes we have to take back a thing that has been given,” I say to him. “Sometimes God asks us to undo God’s work, and we must ask for your help.”

Children find delegation deeply unfair. Why must they slave for those who know how and better? Nevertheless, they ache to be obedient. Especially the most awful ones long to be part of something greater, filled as they are inexplicably with awe.

It is this internal conflict that makes them such remarkable, friable pawns.

Gibb looks up at me. My request is too big. It is not actually a request, and I let this knowledge settle hotly upon his chest like a nesting alley cat. I knead my fingers into his ribcage to remind him of his Nana. Of what I did to her.

Of what I could yet do.

I see him thinking of her. The mother. It shocks me, his love. How it manifests even in this child. Even towards this mother. The softening at the jaw, the release of fisting muscles around the eyes. The intensity of Gibb’s love begins to darken the room.