In the Blood (5 page)

“Obviously,” he said. There was no trace of the shy, sweet boy I’d met the other day. He was icy, his face slack and eyes dead. He walked into the room and put his backpack down. He stood blocking the door, and looked at me with unmistakable menace. I found myself thinking of Rachel, and how skittish she was around him.

“I was helping your mother unpack the other day,” I said. I lifted
my chin and squared my shoulders to him, kept my voice low and easy. He wasn’t going to cow me as he had his mother; that was for sure. “So I thought I’d help you start shelving your books.”

“I don’t want your help,” he said. “Get out.”

Gut-punched by the quiet ugliness of his tone, I let the book drop from my hand to the floor with a thud, rather than move to put it on the shelf. I kept his gaze as I moved past him toward the door. I am not a large person. Always the smallest kid at school, as an adult I stood just over five foot four inches, with a slight build. He was only eleven but he did not seem that much smaller than I was. We were nearly the same height. My arm brushed his on the way out. My face must have been scarlet, as it always got when I was angry or embarrassed.

“My mother told you to make me a snack and then let me do what I wanted, right?”

“Uh,” I said. I turned to face him. I wasn’t going to let him talk to my back as if I were the help, which maybe I was. But fuck that. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Then do that,” he said. Again, we locked eyes.

He followed me as I exited the room and closed the door behind me. I turned around, considered knocking and apologizing, trying to get off on a better foot. But then I noticed that there was a lock on the outside of the door. Did she lock him in there sometimes? I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at the lock. It seemed so odd, so incongruous with the woman I met. It wasn’t reasonable, was it, under any circumstance to have a lock on the outside of your child’s door? A dead bolt? But, then again, maybe it was already there when they moved in. Maybe she hadn’t put it there at all.

I went downstairs and called Rachel, told her what happened.
She sighed heavily when I was done, and I felt like a failure. I could hear the sound of someone hammering in the background.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to help you out. Like the other day.”

She sighed again. I expected her to tell me that it was okay and not to worry. But she didn’t.

“Just make him a ham sandwich with apple slices,” she said. “And put it outside his door. He’ll get it after you’ve gone back downstairs. Just stay away from him. He might get over it and come down. If not, I’ll be home by six.”

“Okay,” I said. I thought I heard her disconnect the call, and I was about to hang up.

Then, “Lana?”

“Yes,” I said. I was childishly eager that she not be mad at me, that she would offer some words of support.

“You’re a tattletale.”

I realized that it was Luke, not Rachel. He’d obviously been listening in on the line upstairs, chiming in now that his mother was off the phone.

Embarrassment and a flash of anger got the better of me.

“Luke?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, mimicking me with annoying accuracy.

“You’re a brat.”

I heard him gasp, then start to laugh. He hung up the phone, but I still heard him laughing upstairs. I instantly regretted it and figured I would be fired on my very first day as a working adult. Fine, I thought. Whatever. He
was
a brat and someone needed to tell him that. He was obviously running the show around here and had been for a while.

Even though I didn’t want to, I made the snack and brought it
upstairs with a bottle of water, then placed it on the floor outside the door and departed with a little knock. Once I was down, I heard the door open and close. I could hear the sound of whatever video game he was playing, gunshots and screeching tires. Bad choice for a problem kid, I thought. If anyone shouldn’t be playing games like that, it was a boy with emotional issues. But what did I know?

In the kitchen, I opened my textbook and pulled out my notebook. I made myself a cup of tea and sat at the table, and tried to focus on my reading. I wasn’t going to touch anything else unbidden. It was just before four in the afternoon.

The sun had nearly set, and the kitchen was dark except for the light I had on over the table, when I heard the door upstairs open, then Luke on the stairs. He appeared in the doorway with his empty plate and spent bottle of water. I looked up at him and he paused for a minute, then went to the sink and washed his plate. He tossed his bottle into the recycle bin under the sink, put the dish in the rack.

I watched him for a minute and then went back to my reading. I felt him come over and stand behind me; the hairs went up on the back of my neck.

“You’ll probably find my picture in there,” he said.

I was reading my abnormal psychology text.

“Do you consider yourself abnormal?” I asked him. He walked around and sat across from me. He offered a shrug. In the light, he looked like exactly what he was—a boy, troubled maybe, but just a kid. I felt an unwanted tug of empathy.

“Everyone else does,” he said. He pulled a sad face, which didn’t seem quite sincere.

“Through no fault of your own, I’m sure.” Was he old enough to detect sarcasm?

A bright smile crossed his face, and his eyes glittered. He was truly beautiful, and I found myself mesmerized by the almond-shaped pools of his eyes, the milk of his skin, his perfect Cupid’s bow mouth, even the spate of freckles across his nose.

“Maybe,” he said, drawing out the word, “we got off on the wrong foot.”

“Maybe we did,” I said. I closed my reading and notes and put them in my bag. “I’m sorry I touched your books. I was just trying to help.”

He gave me a princely nod. “You did a pretty good job, actually.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

“You’re not like other grown-ups,” he said. He was tracing a finger on the wood of the table, back and forth slowly. “There’s something really different about you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him that I didn’t feel quite grown up, yet. That a big part of me still felt like a kid most of the time, which was why it was so easy for me to sink to his level when he called me a tattletale. Or had he already intuited that, and now he was sinking to mine? It was something I wouldn’t consider until much later.

“You didn’t lock the door,” he said. He leveled that challenging gaze, which I knew I had to hold.

“Why would I?” I asked. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Again, he issued that spritely laugh. It managed to sound innocent and vaguely menacing all at once.

“Want to play chess?” he asked. It sounded like a dare, one I was happy to take.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m warning you, though. I’m really good at it.
I hope you’re not a sore loser.” I strongly suspected that he was a terribly sore loser, and I was already planning to throw the game.

He bolted upstairs and returned with a chess set in a wooden case, which he unpacked and assembled with unsettling speed and dexterity. He then proceeded to destroy me, game after game, until his mother came home and found us there, heads bent over the board. She let us be as she prepared dinner. And we all shared a lovely meal of grocery-store rotisserie chicken, salad, and macaroni and cheese.

“Lana’s a terrible chess player,” Luke told his mother. His eyes glittered, watching carefully to see if it bugged me. It did. Could I hide it from him?

“It’s not that I’m bad,” I said. “It’s just that Luke’s so good. Who taught you to play like that?”

He was too young and too spoiled to be gracious in accepting the compliment, too arrogant to then make some kind of concession that I wasn’t that bad after all.

“I taught myself,” he said. He pulled back his shoulders, gave me a heavily lidded look. “Who taught you? A monkey?”

“Luke,” said Rachel. She put her fork down heavily. “That’s not nice. Apologize.”

“Actually,” I said, “my father taught me.”

Luke’s face went suddenly pale, and his posture grew rigid. The father button, I knew it well. The absence of a male presence in the home was notable by the fact that no one had mentioned it. I took a small, dark victory inside for hitting him where it hurt. Mature, I know.

“Well, he must have been a shitty player,” said Luke. Rachel had gone very still, too, I noticed, and bowed her head. She was bracing herself for I don’t know what kind of emotional storm. A stronger
mother would have punished him and sent him from the table, would have done so long ago. But I found I couldn’t judge her. I felt sorry for her more than anything.

I offered a little laugh to soften the energy, and they both looked at me. “He really wasn’t very good, to tell the truth. He was awful.”

There was a moment, a held breath. Then everybody laughed, and any tension disappeared like mist.

“Who wants ice cream?” asked Rachel, giddy, it seemed, with relief.

We both did.

Dear Diary,

I am not much of a journal keeper. I’ve never felt the need to record my thoughts. In spite of some early hardships, I have always been a happy person, free from angst. And I used to pity the poor souls who needed to record their pain on the page—the misfits, the outcasts, the wallflowers. The pretty one, the cheerleader, the prom queen didn’t need to do that, did she? She had no secret pain to share with a Moleskine. I have been the girl cruising in a convertible along the beach drive, my golden hair flowing. I am the one who is envied, who is desired. I am not sure when that changed. But it has changed.

If, a year ago, you had told me where I’d be today, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since then, a gray and gauzy film has settled over my life. My limbs ache with fatigue; I can barely pull myself from bed. When I look in the mirror, my golden hair has gone mousy, my eyes sunken, my skin gray. My hands shake from a constant throb of anxiety. And my days and nights are filled with the incessant crying of my newborn child. The keening, inconsolable wailing fills every nook and cranny of my
consciousness. It’s possible that each of us sleeps a few hours a day. But I still hear his misery in my brief and troubled dreams.

I am being punished. I know that. There is no other explanation. Somewhere during a past life, I must have done something horrible. Maybe I suffocated my baby, or perpetrated a mass shooting, or stabbed a homeless person in a dark alley. Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.

And if you think I’m being overly dramatic, consider this: sleep deprivation is a sanctioned form of torture, as is piping into a closed room the sound of a baby wailing. In its pitch, every human recognizes the notes of accusation and judgment—it is the very sound of failure, a veritable siren of misery.

Right now, as my son screams, I am sitting in my walk-in closet, with classical music blaring outside in the bedroom. But I can still hear it, a single ugly note that never ceases. In case you think I am a depraved and mentally ill mother, which maybe I am, it is my mother’s turn to walk and walk and walk him. We take shifts—my mother, my husband, and I. We walk and walk and walk and walk, and soothe and croon and shush and rock and rock and rock. We never stop moving; we have crossed miles, oceans, and traveled into space walking our boy.

Colic, the pediatrician says. Whatever the hell that means. It should stop at eight weeks. The digestive system should mature by then.

The Baby Whisperer. The Happiest Baby on the Block. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Touchstones.
T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. Ferber. Attachment parenting. Nurse on demand. Set a routine. Baby slings. Baby swings. Vacuum cleaner. Car rides
into eternity. There is no book, no expert, no contraption we have not tried. And still, he cries.

When there is a blessed time of silence, we all sit waiting, holding our breaths, keeping our bodies very still. Once he slept for three hours. And me, my husband, and mother whispered giddily to each other in the kitchen. What was it? I had given up wheat, dairy, broccoli, coffee, and citrus—any one of those things might have been passing to him through my breast milk and causing him an allergy. Maybe that was it, finally, after a week of eating nothing but (gluten-free) chicken soup? Was it the new Sleep Sheep, which issued soothing white noise? Was it the swaddling, the classical music, the new pink lightbulbs? But then it started again.

Tomorrow, my husband has to go back to work. And soon my mother will have to return to her own life. Only I will remain with the boy who I want more than anything to love but who screams every time I touch him. I have never cried so much; I didn’t even know I had so many tears.

I hear my husband knocking softly on the door. But I don’t want him to come in, so I don’t answer. He will leave me alone; he knows I need the silence. I can feel him linger, waiting. But I feel dark inside, mean and selfish. There is almost nothing left of me, and I need to hold to every cell.