JANET DESAULNIERS (1954–) is an Associate Professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her collection of stories, What You’ve Been Missing, won the 2004 John Simmons Award. Her short fiction has been awarded prizes from Glimmer Train and Ploughshares magazines; included in the Pushcart Prize anthology; published in The New Yorker, Other Voices, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Millay Colony, and the Michener/Copernicus Society.
Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall.
“What’s the deal, Kid Cody?”
When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if he were beyond surprise. “I have a stomachache,” he said.
“Yeah?” Ellie sat down beside him and stroked his bare arm. “That’s the message I got.”
“It’s a nervous stomachache, Mom. It’s right in the middle.” He pointed to his belt buckle, a nicked metal casting of a race car. “It’s right where Mrs. Schumacher said my nerves are.”
Cody was in kindergarten, and he did not like school. He told anyone who would listen that he did not like school. Yesterday, from just inside their back door, Ellie overheard him telling their next-door neighbor Mrs. Schumacher that school gave him a bad feeling behind his stomach, “the kind of feeling,” he said, “that you get before something happens.” Ellie stood still in the doorway and watched as Mrs. Schumacher looked up from grooming one of her half dozen cats. Mrs. Schumacher was a stringy wild-haired widow—dirt poor, bone thin and half-crazy with loneliness and neglect.
Sometimes when Cody and Ellie would haul trash back to the cans in the alley, she’d wave and call out her kitchen window to Ellie, “You pull those shoulders back, girl. Divorce is no sin.” Yesterday she picked cat hair out of a long metal comb and told Cody, “There are two kinds of stomachaches, you know. Now a sick one just swirls through your gut like a bad wind, but a nervous one sits real still.” She pressed one gnarled hand to Cody’s belly. “Almost like you’ve swallowed a baseball,” she said. “And it glows.”
“That’s the one I get at school,” Cody told her. “That’s the one.” After he said it, Ellie pressed her head against the cool storm door and felt sorry for herself, sorry she lived in the only run-down pocket of this suburb on probably the only street for miles where a woman could put her hands on her child and tell him such things. The school nurse, a young red-haired woman strangely overdressed in a carnation-pink suit, came from behind her desk to the couch.
Ellie leaned back as the nurse ran her hand over Cody’s forehead. “He doesn’t have a fever as far as I can tell. But he won’t take the thermometer in his mouth. He says he wants it under the arm.”
“Axillary,” Ellie said. “That’s how we do it at home.”
Cody lay still under the nurse’s hand. “I told her that,” he said.
“Well, at school we do it by mouth,” the nurse said. “You need to try doing it that way at home so it won’t be new at school.” Cody and Ellie both looked at the nurse, then Cody looked back at the ceiling.
“It’s a nervous stomachache, Mom,” he said softly. “I can tell.”
“Let’s sit up, Cody,” Ellie said. “You look sicker than you are like that, and lying down is not what you need. A break is what you need. Put your shoes on now.”
Ellie stood up and took the nurse’s elbow, led her to a window that looked out over an empty play yard. “He gets nervous,” she said quietly. “It seems to happen most often when too many people treat him like a child.” The nurse looked at her. “I mean when too many people try to tell him what to do,” Ellie said. “See, he’s an only child, and he lives half his time with his dad in their house and half his time with me in ours. So he’s accustomed to partnership, you know, to being a partner in his own management. I mean, you live alone with a child, and there’s none of that usual ‘us versus him’ kind of thing. You live alone with a child, and he’s part of the us.”
“Oh,” the nurse said. She took a step back. People often did that when they learned how Cody lived. A social worker, new to their city from California, had concocted the scheme during the divorce. To Ellie and her ex-husband it had sounded humane, but Ellie and her ex-husband did not live in California. They lived in an old and mostly refined Midwestern suburb, a place where tall trees and wide driveways led back behind big houses to double and triple garages. “I’m wondering,” the nurse said, “if I have the correct home phone number for you. A man took the message when I called.” She looked Ellie in the eye, insinuating now. “I think I woke him up.”
“That’s my brother. He’s been staying with us to help out.” Disappointed in herself for revealing more of their life than was necessary to this woman, Ellie added, “I’m sure you did wake him up. He’s ill today.”
Cody looked up from struggling with his shoelaces. “Uncle Frank is a night person,” he said. “When I’m asleep, he’s awake. He does life the opposite.” Ellie smiled at him and looked back at the nurse. “Frank works nights, is what he means.” The nurse’s face said that even this fact made her suspicious.
“Look, I think Cody just needs extra time is all,” Ellie said. “This is his first year of school. He didn’t go the play group and preschool route. His father and I kept him home so he could get wise to both of us still being there for him, even though it was in different houses. He’s fine about that, but he’s no wise guy when it comes to school. Are you, Cody?”
Cody stood up and smiled. “I get stomachaches,” he said. Both his shoes tied, he was ready to go now. Ellie saw that he believed the hard part of this day was behind him. Next to her, the nurse narrowed her eyes at his sudden good humor, and Ellie felt her hesitate, weighing for a moment whether Cody was a liar or only a new and distinct form of damaged child. Then she looked at Ellie, and Ellie saw that what the nurse had decided was that Cody was an odd child, that he was an ill-equipped child—a child with a strange and probably damaged life—and probably, Ellie understood the nurse was thinking, probably it was Ellie’s fault. They stared at each other a moment. Then Ellie went to Cody and took his hand.
“I’ll just take him now. We’ll just be on our way. We’ll try school again tomorrow, right, Cody?”
“Okay,” he said.
“You have to sign him out.” The nurse pointed to a binder on her desk. “For our records.”
“Right,” Ellie said. “No problem.” They drove away slowly from the school. Cody rolled the window down and rested his head on the door frame so that the wind lifted his hair off his forehead. Ellie didn’t know if he was pensive or only relieved. Maybe he had sensed what the nurse thought of her. Or of him. She turned the radio on low.
“Do you want to drive by the lake?” she said. “It’s warm today. We could climb down the rocks to the beach.” The beach was where Cody told Ellie things, where he confided in her. The wide expanse of sand and water loosened something in him. It was there, digging a hole one day last spring with a new miniature folding spade, that he had looked up and said, “Do you want to hear something secret?”
“Sure,” Ellie told him, and then he recited, nearly word for word, an ugly desperate argument she and her ex-husband had had just before they gave it all up. He recited it so precisely that the night came back to Ellie. She’d made a formal dinner in the middle of the week—cornish hens stuffed with herbs and rice. A friendly Greek man at the liquor store had helped her choose a nice wine which she served in their wedding crystal. She’d left the bottle on the table, tucked in a hammered silver ice bucket, while she and her ex-husband said horrible, hurtful things they’d never said before or since.
On the beach that day, Cody recited it all. He paused in his digging and looked up at her. “I was under the table,” he said. “You just didn’t see me there.” For a moment, Ellie believed him. Then she remembered another moment, carrying their salad plates to the kitchen, when she’d been so ashamed she’d gone back to Cody’s room to check on him. He lay sideways in his youth bed, one foot wedged between the bars. From the doorway she listened to his breathing before she went to his bed and straightened him, sliding his foot from the bars, folding his quilt up over his shoulders. On the beach, she felt the same relief she’d felt at his door. He’d been asleep. He’d slept through it. She watched him dig the hole, throwing sand over his shoulder, hunkering down to his work, and suddenly she was shaken again.
“Daddy didn’t tell you those things, did he? Did Daddy tell you those things?”
“No.” He looked up from his digging, a little wary of her.
“Oh.”
“Daddy says I probably dreamed it.”
They were both quiet then. He finished his hole and sat back on his heels to admire it. It was deep, the deepest he’d dug, and he fingered his new shovel lightly. Then he crawled into the hole, tucking his legs up to his chest and folding his arms around them. “Cover me up, Mom,” he said, smiling then. She slid the warm sand over him as he watched her. When the sand covered the tops of his knees, she smoothed it around his chest. He looked up at her. “I did see it,” he said.
She took her hands away from him and sat back. “I know,” she said. “I know you did.” Now, in the car, she looked at him. “How about it?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I don’t feel like the beach.”
“We could try the library.”
“No,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Well, I need a milk shake. I’m going to pull into that hot dog stand under the train tracks and have a chocolate shake.” He didn’t answer, but Ellie pulled in anyway and settled him outside under a striped umbrella, where she brought his milk shake out to him. He drank it quickly, tipping his head back, while Ellie looked up at the train platform where a few late commuters stood next to their briefcases. She was glad now she and Cody were not going anywhere, glad she had taken the rest of the day off when she got the call at the office, glad they could sit here half the morning and then stop at the park if they felt like it. The gift of her child was that in his presence life lengthened and uncoiled. Though it was nearly eleven o’clock, this day spread out before them as sweetly as at dawn.
“I like ice cream in the morning,” Cody said. “This is the first time I’ve had ice cream this early.”
“It’s a quiet pleasure,” Ellie said. “That and the weather. This is the warmest January we’ve ever had, I think.”
“I remembered it was your day,” Cody said. “So I told her to call you and not Dad.”
Ellie touched his wrist. “You were right. Exactly right. You’re getting very good at this. You’re becoming a big boy.”
Cody looked out over the parking lot. The umbrellas rippled in the breeze like sails, and above them late commuters swayed lightly like distant buoys. “I would kick a bad guy in the stomach if he came near our table.”
“That would do it,” Ellie said.
“I’d karate kick him in the stomach and then in the knee.”
“He’d go limping off to the other side of the world,” Ellie said. This was something new for them that had started with school—this imagined violence, her child’s sense of himself as a warrior and her quiet affirmation. School had forced Ellie to see how divorce had changed her—that she had become a cautious person, a person who lived as if she were allowed only one mistake in life and had already made it—and school had forced her to see that she was sending her son off into the world with the rigid moral sense of a saint.
He’d see a child steal another child’s hat in the play yard, and he’d suffer it all day. When he came home, he’d tell her the story of the theft and then lie on the rug, exhausted, looking up at her to say, “That was a terrible thing, don’t you think, Mom? Don’t you think that was an awful thing to do?”—as if he’d witnessed a murder. So now she let Cody talk this way, imagining his own power, and lately she had begun to surprise him with figures from a set of fierce dinosaurs and cavemen as a way of making up for all the early years she’d encouraged a pristine sensibility.
“Cody, did anything happen today, I mean before you went to the nurse with a stomachache?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, the playground lady made me take a time-out.”
“Why was that?”
“I was swinging on my belly.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And that’s all.” He rolled the edge of his cup around one finger. “There’s a rule against swinging on your belly.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t know that either, but the lady said that now I would know and now I would remember.”
“Oh. Well, I guess she’s the boss.”
“She is.”
Ellie ran her hand along the rough close-cropped hair at the nape of his neck. He looked away from her when she did it. “So then what happened?”
“I had to sit on the ground by her feet for a while and then I had to say I was sorry.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“Then she called me Cory and told me I could go.”
“She called you by the wrong name.”
“Uh-huh. Yes.”
“Did you tell her?”
“No.” He leaned against her then and tilted his head back to look into her face. “I didn’t want her to know me by my right name, Mom.”
She put one arm lightly around his shoulders and rested her chin on the top of his head. “What should we do now?” she said softly.
“Go home.”
At home, Frank was on the couch, an afghan pulled over his legs, watching the noon news.
“You’re awake early,” Cody said.
Frank looked up. “You’re home early.”
Cody quieted when he said it. He dropped his knapsack under the hat rack, pulled out his box of dinosaurs and cavemen and began to arrange them delicately, as though he were being watched. Frank raised his eyebrows at Ellie. She shook her head.
“I guess I’ll make soup or something,” she said.
A few minutes later, Frank joined her in the kitchen. He moved stiffly to the sink, leaned there a moment, then drew a glass of water from the tap and sat down at the table.
“It’s vegetable soup.” Ellie turned from the pot on the stove. “Can you tolerate it?”
“Not today.” He raised his glass. “Today I’m drinking water.” Frank suffered from colitis—at least that’s what he said it was. He’d been a medic in the army and learned just enough about medicine to believe he could treat himself. Last week, though, he’d been so sick that Ellie had convinced him to let her drive him to the VA hospital for some tests. Nudged into a pocket of darkness between two high-rise office buildings, the hospital was a spooky place—cavernous and forbidding and full of old and middle-aged men shuffling the hallways in paper slippers.
“This is awful,” Ellie whispered to Frank as they stood in some line. “Why don’t you get real health insurance?”
“Forget it,” Frank said. “I spent three years of my life defending the Golden Gate Bridge to earn this.” She noticed as he walked away from her that day, and again this morning as he came into the kitchen, that he had begun to look like those men at the VA. He’d begun to look like a damaged man. Though he was tall and thick with muscle, he carried himself lightly, his arms held away from his body, as though he were hollow. Today his rumpled hair stood up from his head. Under each eye was a white translucent spot of pain.
“You look pale, Frank.”
“I feel pale.”
“Did you call on your test results?”
“They said they’d call me.”
“You should check.”
“They said they would call, Ellie.”
She turned back to the stove and then called, “Soup in twenty minutes, Cody.”
“And biscuits, please,” he called back.
“Okay, and biscuits.” She peered into the refrigerator, looking for the plastic container of dough.
“That is not a sick child,” Frank said.
“He was nervous. Something happened on the playground.”
Ellie went about her work quietly, spreading flour on the countertop, rolling out the dough, but she felt like Cody had looked a moment ago in the other room. She felt like she was being watched. Frank sat at the table, the glass of water between his broad hands. Her brother was an odd man. There was such power to him, in his hands and legs and the set of his jaw, but around other people—even Ellie and Cody—he was always quiet and watchful, slightly ill at ease. Ellie believed that life—real life, life in society, whatever it was she was living—was a confusion to Frank. She couldn’t settle on why. Sometimes she blamed the army. Frank had been one of the last men drafted into Vietnam. Though the war ended not long after he finished basic, the army changed him—perhaps in ways worse than a year fighting in the jungle might have changed him. She didn’t know. She wasn’t even sure exactly what he’d done during those years or what had been done to him. Occasionally, he’d written to Ellie of demotions, restrictions, extra duty, a few short stays in the brig. She had tried to imagine what circumstances could have landed her brother in a military jail, in a cage. As a boy he had been cocksure and strong-willed, and sometimes he’d had a smart mouth, but all boys had seemed like that to Ellie back then.
When the war ended Frank wrote to say that he was glad, but for an odd reason. If he’d gone to war, he’d written, his resistance might have become inflated even in his own mind into some kind of grand refusal. He might have gone the rest of his life thinking that what he had learned was that he could not kill anyone or that a big country should keep its nose out of a little country’s affairs. Then he would have missed what he said was the only real lesson of the army, which was that people who tell you what to do—no matter what reasons they claim—are performing an act of aggression. You’re in their way, is what Frank had written to her; they’d just as soon you die.
When he was discharged, he roamed the world—Ellie imagined he roamed it with that credo—crewing sailboats to New Zealand, working illegal shrimp boats out of Key West, leading tourists across the Yucatán Peninsula. For fifteen years he lived like that, never settling long enough for anyone or anything to impose itself upon him. That he came when she needed him had surprised her—though both their parents had died and there was no one else to help her. Frank spotted her first at the airport, and when she recognized him it was by the easy certain smile she remembered. When she came close, though, he stepped lightly away from her. He shook her hand first and then he shook Cody’s. The nature of his support was also a surprise. He said very little, never entered into the acrimony of her divorce, never said more to her son than a benevolent stranger might say. He simply sat nearby while she found a job, a place to live, a car, while she went about the business of solving her life, and each Saturday morning, on the hall stand outside her bedroom door, he left two one-hundred-dollar bills folded under an old candy dish of their mother’s.
Only once, just after he arrived, while they sat next to each other on a commuter train bringing them back from the courtroom where she had been ordered to sell her home, had he spoken up.
“You’re getting screwed,” he told her.
“I know.”
“You’re just standing there letting it happen.”
“It’s worse if you make a fuss. I tried that once and even my own attorney yelled at me. You’re just supposed to stand there and take it. It’s all a glorified trip to the principal’s office.” She looked out the window when she said it.
“You’re nuts. You’re only seeing what’s in front of you.” When she didn’t turn around, he leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “For what you’ll end up paying that lawyer we could buy a little guest camp I once stayed at in Bali. It’s real popular with the Australians, but far enough away that you’d never be found. Cody could grow up knowing how to catch his own dinner.”
Still looking out the window, she considered it. She could take a few books, a bag of mementos, and her son, and disappear into a tropical life of light, loose clothing, modest shelter, balmy breezes. She turned to Frank. Perhaps this was how he had solved his life—not so much by running away from danger as by following closely the slender path of peace.
“It’s against the law,” she said.
He shook his head. “If you’re not careful, that’s the law you’re going to leave your kid. You have a choice, you know.” Ellie looked out the window again. Maybe she had never known she had a choice. She was a woman, a divorced mother of a young child. For a long time, her life had been one of necessity and ultimatum, not choice. But Frank was different, and she realized that his time in the army most likely marked the beginning of a deal he’d struck with himself, because since those years ended she could not name one thing he had done that he had not chosen to do. She turned to face him again.
“I can’t do it, Frank.”
He looked at her then with the same expression she had seen flash over him in the courtroom earlier that day. His face became quizzical as an aborigine’s. As he settled back into his seat and looked past her at the city dimming into twilight she saw something else, too. She saw his resignation. Never would they live together in a tropical guest camp. She had slipped, somehow, away from him. She felt that loss carve out a hole next to the loss of her marriage, her home, the life she had believed would be hers and her son’s, and she felt the nature of Frank’s love for her, and of hers for him, change from hope to regret. Moved suddenly at this memory, she sat down with him at the kitchen table. She felt tears behind her eyes and pressed the palms of her hands against them.
“What?” Frank said.
“Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe I should talk with his dad. We could put him in a different school, I guess.”
“All schools are the same.” Frank placed his thick hands flat on the table and looked at them. “They’re the same man in a different hat.”
“Maybe he’ll get used to it. Maybe it just takes time.”
Frank took a small sip of water and then glanced to the pot of soup, which was boiling too fast on the stove. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you go back to work? I’ll watch him. You can work late and make up the hours. He and I’ll walk up to the chicken place for dinner and then I’ll get him to bed.”
She looked at him, suddenly tired, but acquiescent, too.
“Go on,” he said.
She worked until past nine that night, leaving for home when lightning from a sudden thunderstorm flickered the lamp at her desk. On the drive home, the rain turned to a fraudulent snow—huge wet flakes out of a sentimental movie. She could still hear thunder out over the lake, though, rumbling distantly like doom, and she leaned over the steering wheel, anxious to be home. More and more lately, the thought came to her that in all the world, she had only two blood relatives. In the company of that fact she felt skittish and threatened, as if two blood relatives might be too slender a tie to bind her to the world.
The front of the house was dark except for the flicker of the TV in the living room. Frank was asleep on the couch, his breathing ragged and shallow. She stopped to turn off the TV and then saw the slant of light from Cody’s doorway down the hall.
“Hey,” she said.
He was sitting up in bed with a big book open in his lap. “Uncle Frank felt sick so I’m reading my own night story.”
She came to sit beside him. “That was good of you. But it’s late. Lights out.”
“We went to Chicken in a Basket and I got a Coke. A large. That’s why I’m so awake.”
“Still.” She closed his book and slid him down so that his head settled on his pillow.
“I saw the snow. Is that why you’re late?”
“I worked extra so I could take you to story hour at the library tomorrow.”
“Oh,” he said, already drifting off. Then he opened his eyes. “After dinner, we watched the freak feature on TV. It was about giant ants that hide in the sewer. Have you seen that one?”
“I think so. It’s a scary one. Don’t tell about it now. You’ll have bad dreams. Tell me about it in the morning.”
He closed his eyes again and rolled on his side to sleep. She stroked his hair off his forehead, and he took her hand and tucked it under his chin. Without opening his eyes, he said, “I’m going to tell Daddy, too, when I see him, and I’m going to find out if they have that giant ant movie at the movie store so he can watch it, too.”
“You’re full of plans,” she said, leaning down to kiss him. Before she had sat up again, he was asleep, and he had let go of her hand. In the kitchen she gathered their paper cups and the boxes of chicken bones. At the trash can she stopped, holding the lid open with one hand, and stared at four empty beer cans. Drinking was something Frank had chosen not to do in her home. He never used the word alcoholism, but he had asked her when he moved in not to keep liquor in the house. “It distracts me,” he told her. For the first month or so of his time with them, he drank a lot of everything else—water, soft drinks, iced tea—and he slept a lot.
Occasionally, too, he took long hushed phone calls from men Ellie believed must belong to AA or some support group—extremely polite, low-voiced men, men she thought of as veterans of another kind. She closed the lid of the trash can and moved to stand by the sink, still holding the chicken boxes and paper cups.
Frank came in then from the living room. “What’s up?” he said when he saw her face. “Is Cody okay?”
She set the trash back on the kitchen table. “You drank.”
“I know.”
“Well, why? I mean, what am I supposed to do now, Frank? Am I supposed to kick you out?”
“You’re not supposed to kick me out. Jesus, Ellie. You’re supposed to drive me downtown to detox or something.” She sat down at the table, the vision of those men in paper slippers at the VA clanging around in her head. Frank filled a tall glass with water from the tap and sat down across from her. When she looked at him, he straightened his spine and set his shoulders, but his eyes drifted unsteadily. He lowered his head.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“The VA called.”
“What is it? Is it colitis?”
“A long time ago it was probably colitis.” He looked at her. “Now it’s cancer, Ellie.” She put her hand on his. He leaned back in his chair and she felt his privacy, his strict isolation. His hand was still on the table beneath hers. It did not seem fair that he be forced to suffer more isolation. “I’m sorry,” she said, and took her hand away.
He shook his head. “It gets worse,” he said, smiling lightly. “They went ahead and scheduled me for more tests and then this clerk called back and told me I don’t qualify for treatment. ‘This is not a service-related ailment,’ he told me. ‘The VA treats only the indigent and service-related ailments.’ ”
“You didn’t know that?” she said softly.
He rubbed his temples with both hands and pushed his hair roughly away from his face. “No.”
“So what this means,” she began slowly.
“What this means is I have cancer and no health insurance.”
She sat back in her chair, stunned by the precision of this cruelty. Her brother had stepped off a plane just over a year ago tanned and strong, his only weakness that he would not keep track of rules. He had balked even when she suggested he get a driver’s license. She closed her eyes at the memory. She was the reason he’d come back to this place where his weakness could turn on him so cruelly.
“We’ll figure it out, Frank. We’ll figure something out.”
“No. No. I’ve already done that. I just hate to leave you in a bind. I’ve got a little money I was saving to go back to Negril this spring. I’ll leave you some of it and still make out pretty well there myself.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m going to Negril.” He looked sad for her when he said it, as if he believed she were the one with the greater loss. “I’ll leave in a couple days.”
“Frank, my God. You have to take care of this. You can’t just walk away from it.”
“I’m not walking away, Ellie. There are doctors in Negril. I’m not saying I won’t take care of it. I’m just saying I can’t take care of it here.” He was lying, she thought. He had decided somehow that to die whole on ground he understood would be better than struggling here. She sat rigidly across from him, her mind wildly in search of hope, of a kindly Jamaican doctor down there who would take Frank in and cure him for no more reward than the satisfaction of having preserved such a man. But she had never met a doctor like that. She wasn’t sure the world was a large and varied enough place to hold even one doctor like that.
“How can I stop you,” she said, “from doing this?”
“You can’t.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m tired, Ellie. I’m going to go to bed now.” He didn’t go to bed. For hours she heard his silence as he moved through rooms. She wondered if perhaps he was saying good-bye to the house, to its small comforts, but then she understood that he no longer saw her home as a safe place. She was frightened for herself, knowing that. He stood in the kitchen a long time, the house so quiet around him she felt she could hear his resolve building. Then he went into Cody’s room. She sat up in bed and put one foot on the floor, listening until he came out again. When she opened her eyes next, Cody stood at her bedside.
“Is it morning?” he asked.
She looked to the window. Outside the snow was gone and the sun shone brightly.
“Yes.”
“I had a bad dream. I had a dream someone got into our house.”
“Uncle Frank was up late last night. You probably heard Uncle Frank.”
“I dreamed it was someone else.”
“It wasn’t,” she said. “It was Uncle Frank.”
They washed and dressed hurriedly, though it was still early. Ellie let Cody watch cartoons as he ate, grateful for the noise and distraction. As they were leaving, she lingered in the quiet front room, looking down the hallway to Frank’s closed door. Cody stood in his coat and hat, watching her.
“Let’s go now.” She took his hand. “Time to go.”
They were early to Cody’s school, and his teacher looked up surprised from a table in the back of the room, but she came to greet them in the hallway.
“A new day and a new start,” she said merrily.
Cody reached up to hold on to a corner of Ellie’s jacket.
“Today the Green Star group is going to spend the morning at the sand table,” his teacher said to him. “Why don’t you hang up your coat and get started?” She looked to Ellie. “Cody is in the Green Star group.”
Ellie nodded.
“I have to tell my mom something,” Cody said.
“Well, hurry along. We don’t want to make Mom late for work or whatever.”
“Okay,” Cody said, and then stood mute next to Ellie, still clutching her jacket. His teacher watched him for a moment and then went back into the classroom.
“Hurry along,” she called. “I’ll take the top off the sand table.”
Cody stiffened and began to cry as Ellie slipped his coat off his shoulders. She took his hands, warm with the moist heat of emotion and fear.
“What is it you want to tell me, Cody?”
He shook his head, his eyes a little desperate and lost.
“You don’t know what it is?”
He shook his head again.
She nodded and pulled him close. “I love you, child,” she said into his ear. Then she drew him away from her. “I think you can do this. I think it’s important that you do this.” He wouldn’t look at her when she said it.
Pulling up to the school that afternoon, she saw his face at the door, a bobbing pale moon in the glass that drew an ache up from her own stomach, but he ran down the slope to her car like the other children, trailing his knapsack behind him.
“Did it go okay?”
“Yeah.” He closed his door, locked it, and drew the seat belt around him. “At the bad parts, I just pretended I was somewhere else. I pretended it wasn’t really happening.”
They were early to story hour and Cody hovered near the librarian at her desk, telling her the story of the giant ant movie he had seen. She was a kind older woman, wise in the ways of children, and she listened raptly to Cody’s story, then led him off to a far corner of the children’s room. Ellie sat with their coats in a small low chair and watched the other mothers and children arrive. A few minutes later, Cody came running back carrying some books the librarian had found for him. They were junior novelizations of old monster movies: The Mummy, Frankenstein and King Kong.
“Oh, these are too scary for you, Cody. These things even give me the willies.”
“Mom,” he said. “She gave them to me. I was going to show them to Uncle Frank.”
“Oh. Well, let me see.” She flipped the pages while he leaned against her shoulder. Mainly they were just a collection of black-and-white stills from the old movies.
“Maybe they give you the willies because the monsters are always after a lady.” Cody pointed to a picture of the Mummy carrying a woman into a dark wood.
“Maybe,” she said, closing the book. “I don’t know.”
“Could I show them to Uncle Frank? They won’t scare him, I bet.”
“Sure,” she said. “I guess.”
He crawled into her lap then, and Ellie watched the preparations for story hour while Cody paged through his books.
“I read the sign,” Ellie said. “Today is a special puppet show for Martin Luther King’s birthday.”
“Our teacher told us about him in school.”
“I’m glad. He was a good brave man.”
“Once nothing was fair for brown-skinned people.”
“Martin Luther King changed some of that, though.”
Cody turned around and looked at her. “He got killed,” he said.
“I know. I was a girl. It was very sad.”
Cody leaned back against her then and fingered his monster books. His body grew slack against hers, and she thought he must be tired, but then she felt heat move out of him, the same heat she had felt in his hands that morning. She turned him around in her lap.
“What’s wrong, Cody?” He shook his head and she remembered this morning, how he had wanted to tell her something he didn’t know.
“What is it?”
“Don’t tell Daddy,” he said.
He had never spoken those words to her before. Perhaps because of the way he lived or perhaps because of his own good nature, Cody had always been unstintingly fair in his attachments to each of his parents.
“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Why not Daddy?”
“It’s not a man’s secret.”
“It’s a woman’s secret?”
“Uh-huh. I think so.”
“What is it?”
“I’m afraid about dying. Do you just fall down one day and then it hurts forever?” After he said it, she pulled him close. Children did this, she had read somewhere, picked up the unspoken cues and terror in their homes.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she told him. “It stops all the hurt.”
She drew her hand across his forehead.
“It feels like this,” she said.
She knew when she said it that something was terribly wrong with her. To portray death to her own child as more dignified and easeful than life was some sort of abomination larger than she could fathom. But she did not take it back. She rocked Cody gently as the librarian rang a small bell and called for the children to gather around the puppet theater. She sat blankly, Cody curled against her, as the show began with a cardboard cut-out of a strictly segregated bus—a cluster of white circles at the front, a cluster of black circles at the back. Before Rosa Parks, the caption under the bus read. Then the librarian explained to the children that Rosa Parks was tired and believed she had as much right to sit down and rest as anyone else.
It’s a woman’s secret, Ellie thought. This was what her son believed. How he must have wondered to find a woman’s secret in his own mind, to understand that to the teeming power and circumstance of the world he would lose many things—one day even his life. Cody’s head lolled against her shoulder. She realized he was asleep in her arms. The monster books slid out of his hands and she held them a moment, looking into the shy pain on King Kong’s face. She shook Cody lightly.
“We have to go,” she said. “We have to hurry.”
At home, Frank was on the couch in front of the news. He smiled briefly when they came in, then looked back at the television. Cody ran to him with the monster books. He wanted Frank to read them to him.
“In one minute,” Frank said. “When the news is over, I’ll read all three.”
While Ellie hung up their coats, Cody eased himself onto the couch next to Frank and sat stiffly next to him, thumping his feet against the cushion. Frank lay one hand on his knee to quiet him. An old newsreel of Martin Luther King’s last speech was playing on the TV.
“I saw him at the library,” Cody said. “A picture of him. It’s his birthday.”
“Monday,” Frank said.
“My friend Bennie’s dad is off work Monday, and Bennie doesn’t have school, but I do.”
“How come you have school? I thought everyone was off,” Frank said. “It’s a holiday.” Cody was quiet then, and Ellie saw that he was a little teary, blinking and looking away from Frank to the TV.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just do.”
Frank shook Cody’s knee gently. “Well, that stinks,” he said, smiling. “That’s not fair.” He shook his knee more roughly until Cody began to smile, too, and then he leaned close to him.
“Just don’t go,” Frank said. “Stay home.”
Cody looked at him. Ellie could see that Cody had not considered that an option before, that he had never completely understood he had an option, and next she knew he was going to look to her. She turned away quickly to the front window, afraid to watch the idea of freedom dawn in her son’s face, but outside in the evening sky growing up at the end of her block, she saw it anyway—the sudden knowledge loose in his mind, spreading like the shadows that spilled from under stoops, crawled across lawns and bloomed up from the dark center of even her own scraggly hedgerow. Her son was free. Behind her, music signaled the end of the news. It was late. She knew she should turn around, start dinner, but she stood a moment longer, staring out at the dark, and felt rising in her own mind the strangest and most fearsome comfort.