EIGHTY-ONE…EIGHTY-TWO…
Kathy called from the cell phone around four, when Aaron was napping, and Todd was nearing the end of his third and final set of push-ups.
Eighty-three…
“Hi,” she said, the answering machine broadcasting her staticky voice throughout the downstairs. “How are my two favorite boys? Did you have fun at the pool?”
Eighty-five…
“Todd, I’m not going to be home until six-thirty. One of the POW interviews ran late, and I’ve been playing catch-up all afternoon. Sorry about that.”
He groaned, trying not to break rhythm…Eighty-seven…he’d been hoping to get a run in before dinner…Eighty-eight…leaning to the left…Eighty-nine…better straighten out…
“The hamburgers and Smart Dogs are in the fridge, you just need to make the salad and marinate the peppers and eggplant in some of the good olive oil. All right, I guess that’s it. Be a good boy for Daddy, Aaron. Mommy loves you. Bye.”
Ninety-two…his arms were shaking…Ninety-three…really wanted to go for that run…Ninety-four…fucking POWs…Ninety-five…Smart Dogs, what a stupid name…Ninety-six…gonna be hell to pay in a few years…Ninety-seven…when all these kids wake up and realize that they’ve been eating these crappy vegetarian hot dogs…Ninety-eight…two to go…Ninety-nine…all you, baby…One hundred…Yes!
He sprang from the floor, his body humming from the surge of bliss that three sets of a hundred push-ups each never failed to inspire. Sure, there were lots of things in the world that sucked. Kathy working late, for instance, screwing up his exercise plans. How she was always so tired when she got home, and guilty about being away from Aaron all day. And the way she acted like it was all Todd’s fault, which it was, to a certain extent, but what was the point of reminding him all the time?
On the other hand, lots of things didn’t suck. Long summer days with nothing to do but hang out. Afternoons at the pool, surrounded by young mothers in their bathing suits. And the way his body felt right now, the blood pumping into the muscles, the excellent soreness in his triceps. And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn’t afraid to say so.
“Hold on, little buddy,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”
Most mornings Aaron woke up bright-eyed and affectionate, bursting with puppyish energy for the new day. Afternoon naps, necessary as they were, tended to produce the opposite effect. He emerged from his bedroom dazed and sullen as a teenager, his jester’s cap flattened and comically askew, sodden diaper hanging halfway to his knees. Even the most innocent question—Would you like a snack?—could send him over the edge, into a screaming fit or bout of heart-broken sobbing. Months of trial and error had taught Todd not to say a word. He just set Mr. Crabby into a chair, handed him a sippy cup of milk and an Oreo, and cranked up Raffi in Concert on the boom box.
While Aaron zoned out at the table, Todd started his dinner preparations, drying the lettuce in a spinner and whipping up a fresh batch of balsamic vinaigrette. Then he got out the cutting board and set to work chopping the eggplant and peppers into grillable chunks.
“Tingalayo!” he absentmindedly sang. “Run, my little donkey, run!”
“Daaaddy.” Unlike Raffi, Aaron was bitterly opposed to singalongs. “You stop.”
“Sorry. I forgot.”
If someone had told him ten years earlier that he would one day be a full-time househusband grooving to children’s music while he fixed dinner, Todd wouldn’t have been able to recognize himself in the image. He was a frat boy jock back then, a big fan of Pearl Jam and Buffalo Tom. Raffi wasn’t even on his radar screen, and now the guy was the single biggest musical presence in Todd’s life. He and Aaron listened to the live album at least twice a day. It was the sound track of their summer, no less central than Nevermind had been for Todd and his Deke brothers during the spring semester of sophomore year. It had gotten to the point where he knew Raffi’s between-song patter word-for-word, and could recite it along with the CD.
“Boys and girls, do you know the song about the five little ducks?” Pause, while the audience roars its assent. Then a mischievous chuckle. “Well, this is a different one.”
Unlike a lot of parents he encountered, who claimed to despise the music their kids made them listen to, Todd wasn’t afraid to own up: He liked Raffi. The music was infectious, the guy himself gentle and unassuming. There was no posturing, none of the bullshit theatrics that made rock stars so wearying once you reached a certain point in your life. Raffi wasn’t going to get strung out on smack, abandon his wife and little daughter, then blow his brains out, just to make some sort of point about what a drag it was to be rich and famous.
“Daddy?” Aaron was holding his index finger in front of his nose and sniffing it with a dubious expression.
“Yeah?”
“Well…”
“What is it?”
“Somefing smells like poop.”
“Oh, Aaron. How many times have I told you—”
“I didn’t touch my diaper,” he said, shaking his head in fervent denial. “I really, really didn’t.”
Train Wreck was an activity perfectly suited to the mentality of a three-year-old boy. This brutally simple game, which Aaron had devised himself, required nothing more than pushing two engines (Gordon and Percy from Thomas the Tank Engine) in opposite directions around a circular track set up on the living room floor, and making happy chugging noises right up to the moment when they met in an inevitable head-on collision.
“Spdang!” Aaron shouted. This was the sound effect that always accompanied the crash. “Take that, Gordon.”
“Ouch,” Todd groaned, as his engine tipped onto its side. “That hurt, Percy.”
Aaron laughed uproariously at Todd’s aggrieved tone and half-assed British accent. If they’d staged a hundred train wrecks, he would have shouted Spdang! a hundred times and cracked up with undiminished glee at Gordon’s hundredth declaration of injury. (Todd was always Gordon, and Gordon was always the injured party.) That was one of the sweet, but slightly insane things about being three: Nothing ever got old. If it was good, it stayed good, at least until you turned four.
For whatever reason, Todd didn’t mind the brainless repetition of Train Wreck half as much as he minded reading certain books five or six times in a row, or playing multiple rounds of some stupid game like Candyland. Maybe it was a guy thing, but there was an undeniable satisfaction to be found in the spectacle of two solid objects smashing into one another.
Spdang!
Ouch.
The game ended abruptly with the sound of a key turning in the lock. Aaron let go of Percy and scrambled to his feet, staring at the opening front door as if something too wonderful for words were about to be revealed.
And Kathy was wonderful, of course, even at the end of a long workday, releasing a tired sigh as she dropped her overloaded tote bag onto the floor. She was the kind of woman who always surprised you with the realization that she was just as lovely as you remembered, though it hardly seemed possible in her absence.
“Mommy!” Aaron gasped, ripping off his jester’s cap and flinging it over his shoulder. “You’re back!”
“My little boy,” she said, dropping to one knee and holding her arms out wide, like a poster of Jesus Todd remembered seeing in a Sunday school classroom many years before. “I missed my sweetie so so so so much.”
Aaron sprinted across the floor into his mother’s arms, burying his face against her chest. She stroked his fine hair so tenderly that Todd had to look away. He found himself staring at the engine in his hand, as if there were a personal message for him in Gordon’s peevish expression.
That hurt, Percy.
“You got some color, didn’t you?” Kathy shook her head unhappily as she examined Aaron’s adoring face. “Did Daddy forget the sunscreen again?”
After dinner on weeknights, Todd studied for the bar exam at the municipal library. He could have easily done this at home—he and Kathy had set up a comfortable, relatively soundproof office in their small sunroom—but it had become a psychological necessity for him to get out of the house on his own for a couple hours a day. Walking briskly past the shops on Pleasant Street, Todd savored the sensation of being a free adult out and about on a warm summer evening, unencumbered by a stroller or the tyrannical demands of a three-year-old.
Besides, he had trouble concentrating in the home office. He was distracted by the knowledge that Aaron and Kathy were somewhere nearby, giggling or cuddling or whispering endearments to one another, not giving him a second thought. As touching as it was, there was also something alienating about the explosion of mother/son passion that lit up the apartment every night. It was as if Todd became a nobody once Kathy got home, just some stranger inexplicably taking up space in the house, rather than a loving parent who’d devoted his whole day—his whole life—to ensuring his son’s safety and happiness.
The thing that always killed him was the jester’s cap. All day long Aaron treated it like his prize possession—he ate, played, and napped in the cap, and would burst into tears if you so much as suggested he take it off to go in the pool—but the moment Kathy stepped into the house it came flying off like some worthless piece of trash. Todd was pretty sure it was Aaron’s way of announcing that the entire day up to that point—the Daddy part—had been nothing more than a stupid joke. Now that Mommy was back, the real day could begin, the precious few hours before bedtime when he didn’t feel the need to say a toddler’s version of Fuck You to the world by walking around in a jingling pink-and-purple hat.
Todd knew he shouldn’t take it so personally. It was ridiculous for a grown man to feel slighted by a little boy’s attachment to his mother. He’d studied psychology in college and was well versed in the nuances of the Oedipus complex and the concept of developmental stages. He knew that Aaron would outgrow his all-consuming attachment to his mother in a few years; by adolescence he might even pretend not to know Kathy if she passed him in the mall. But all that was in the future. In the present, Todd felt jealous and excluded and even a little bit angry, and the only cure for it was to get the hell out of the house.
The skateboarders were out in front of the library, and Todd stopped in his usual spot to see what they were up to. There were four of them tonight, boys between the ages of ten and thirteen, dressed in knee-length shorts, baggy T-shirts, and fashionably retro sneakers. They wore helmets, but left the chin straps unbuckled or loosely dangling, rendering them more or less useless as protective gear. A few days earlier, Todd had pointed this out to the king of the skateboarders, a scrawny, loose-limbed daredevil known to the others as G., but the kid had responded with one of those blank looks they specialized in; he hadn’t even bothered to shrug.
Graceful and fearless, G. was a natural athlete who seemed to possess an almost mystical connection with his board. He jumped stairs and curbs, surfed metal railings and retaining walls, and almost always landed on his feet. His more earthbound friends limited themselves to practicing the most basic maneuvers, though more often than not they ended up sprawled on the ground, moaning softly and rubbing their sore butts.
Todd wasn’t sure what kept him coming back here night after night, watching the same group of kids performing the same small repertoire of stunts over and over again. Part of it was genuine interest, a kind of remedial education in what had become an essential boyhood skill. He had never learned to skateboard himself—as a kid, he’d been more focused on organized, competitive sports—and wanted to be able to instruct Aaron when the time came, the way Todd had been taught by his own father to ride a two-wheeler. About a week ago, he’d gone into Jock Heaven, intent on buying a board for himself, but he’d chickened out at the approach of the salesman, as though it were somehow unseemly for a thirty-year-old man to be purchasing a skateboard for his own use.
If Kathy had seen him loitering here beneath the beech tree, one arm resting on top of a green mail storage box, studying the skateboarders like some sort of self-appointed Olympic judge, she would have offered a simpler explanation—i.e., that he was procrastinating, jeopardizing his own professional future and his family’s long-term financial prospects. And she would have had a point: The only thing worse than having to retake the bar exam was having to study for it again, like an actor memorizing lines he knew he’d forget the moment he stepped onstage. But if all Todd had wanted to do was waste time, there were a multitude of other ways to do it (he knew them all). He could read magazines in the library, surf the web, browse the stacks. He could buy an ice-cream cone and eat it with luxuriant slowness while sitting on a park bench, or feed a bagel to the bad-tempered ducks over at Greenview Pond. He could even wander over to the high school and watch the varsity cheerleaders practice their routines, which were a helluva lot sexier than they’d been back in Todd’s day. But he didn’t do any of that. He always just came here.
Todd had been watching G. and his friends for weeks, sometimes for as long as an hour at a stretch, but he’d never received the slightest acknowledgment from any of them, not the most grudging nod or muttered hello. They had a walled-off, wholly self-contained attitude toward the world, as if nothing of importance existed outside of their own severely limited circle of activity. They kept their eyes low and communicated in grunts and monosyllables, barely looking up when one of their number nailed a difficult landing or took a particularly nasty spill, or even when some cute girls their own age stopped to watch them for a while, whispering and giggling among themselves.
I must have been like this, Todd sometimes thought. I must have been one of them.
The afternoon his mother died, Todd and his friends had been throwing snowballs at cars. The roads were slick, and a station wagon that they ambushed skidded and jumped the curb across the street, plowing over some garbage cans and scattering trash all over the Andersons’ front lawn. Most of Todd’s buddies fled the scene, but he and Mark Tollan remained crouched behind some leafless bushes, snickering into their gloves as the middle-aged driver jumped out of his car and began shouting plaintively in the January twilight.
“Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?”
When he got home an hour or so later, chilled and exhilarated and starving—he was always starving in those days—the first odd thing Todd noticed was that the house didn’t smell like food. The second thing was the presence of his father, who usually returned from work later in the evening, sitting on the couch in a weirdly rigid posture, with what looked like an ominous expression on his face. Even before his father spoke, Todd knew for certain that he’d been busted, though he wasn’t sure how. Had the driver recognized him somehow? Had one of his friends confessed? Had some neighborhood adult witnessed everything?
“Sit down, son. I need to talk to you.”
“Is this about the car?” Todd asked.
His father was taken aback. “Did someone tell you?”
“No, I just had a feeling.” Todd braced himself for a scolding, but his father fell into a peculiar silence, as if he’d forgotten they were having a conversation. “It was my fault, Dad. I should have known better.”
“What are you talking about?” His father spoke softly, but there was tension in his voice, as if he were making an effort to remain calm. “It was an accident. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
The powerful sense of reprieve Todd experienced quickly turned to confusion. For some reason, his father began talking about his mother in an awkward, almost mechanical monotone. Driving home from Sears. Treacherous conditions. Lost control on an exit ramp. Broke through a guardrail. Wrapped the car around a tree trunk. This was the phrase that had lodged itself in his memory, though in retrospect he couldn’t believe that his father would have evoked such an awful image at that particular moment.
“I’m sorry, Todd. That’s what happened. I just got back from the hospital. The doctors did everything they could.”
“Does Janie know?”
“We’re gonna pick her up at the airport in an hour.”
We predicted it, Todd thought. Ever since he could remember, he and his sister Janie—she was seven years older, already a freshman in college—had been teasing their mother about what a bad driver she was. She was always checking her makeup while she drove, puckering her lips and appraising herself in the rearview mirror. She would take her eyes off the road for extended periods to rummage through her purse or change the station on the radio.
Look where you’re going, they used to tell her. You’re gonna kill somebody.
Probably just myself, their mother would say, in an oddly cheerful voice.
“What are we gonna do?” Todd asked.
His father seemed momentarily at a loss. He looked at his hand for a few seconds, as if hoping to find an answer scribbled on his palm, then softly patted Todd on the shoulder.
“We’re going to keep moving forward,” his father said, his voice regaining some of its normal authority. “Nothing’s going to change. I want you to keep living your life as if this never happened. It’s what your mother wants, too.”
Todd was so relieved to find out there was a plan that it never occurred to him to question its wisdom. Two days after his mother’s funeral he played in a youth league basketball playoff game and scored seventeen points. The day after that he was back in school. When a teacher asked how he was doing in that compassionate voice they used, Todd always said Fine so firmly and emphatically that no one ever pressed him to make sure if he was really okay, or maybe needed to talk to someone about what he was going through.
All through high school and college, Todd did exactly what his dead mother and quickly remarried father wanted from him, excelling in the classroom and on the playing field, impersonating a successful, well-adjusted kid who had somehow absorbed a terrible blow without missing a beat—starting quarterback, dean’s list, social chair, lots of girlfriends, accepted into three of the five law schools he’d applied to.
It was only later, after he was married and the father of a newborn son, that he began to suspect that there was something not quite right, something unresolved or defective at the core of his being. And it must have been this something—this flaw or lack or whatever the hell it was—that kept his arm glued to the mailbox while he watched the skateboarders every night, desperately hoping that they’d notice him for once and say something nice, maybe even invite him to step out from the shadows and take his rightful place among them.