Angus’s bedtime routine rarely, if ever, deviates from the following: a long, sudsy bath that involves me sitting at the edge of the tub for the first twenty minutes as he plays with his fleet of plastic tugboats, followed by the nonnegotiable three-minute warning, after which he will scream and wail as I wash his hair and pour small buckets of water over his head to rinse him clean. After his bath I clean his ears gently with three separate Q-tips, count aloud to sixty as he brushes his teeth, and tuck him into bed before reading his two favorite books: Curious George Goes to the Library and Imogen’s Antlers. Tonight, he reaches up as I close the second book and touches the edge of my face. “Mom?” he asks.
“Hmm?”
“Do you think Dopester is sad that we forgot to say hi to him this morning?”
I lean down, kiss him hard in the space between his ear and neck. “Maybe. But I think he gets a lot of hi’s in the morning. From all different people. Besides, we can make it up to him tomorrow.”
“How?”
“We’ll pull over and wave at him. And yell real loud so that we make sure he can hear us. Okay?”
Angus’s eyebrows are high on his forehead, his little fists tucked tightly under his chin. “Yeah. That’d be awesome.”
“Okay.” I smooth the lip of covers under his chin, kiss him once more. “Sweet dreams, baby.”
Afterward, I slip into my room and lay down on my bed. Usually once he goes to sleep, I’ll go downstairs and sit with Ma and watch TV for a while. She likes Dancing with the Stars, but she’ll sit with me through an episode of Law & Order, too. Tonight though, the possibility of another tense or unkind word between us feels like too much. I just want to be alone.
Except that as soon as I get into bed and pull up the covers, all I can think about is not being alone. I swore off men after everything happened with Angus, telling myself that it would just be a lot of heartache for a little bit of pleasure. (And sometimes, not even that.) It wasn’t that big of a deal for the first year, and maybe even for part of the second. Between taking care of Angus, working full-time, and then trying to get things straightened out with the probation office, there wasn’t any time to bemoan the fact that I wasn’t going out on any dates. Plus, if I did have any latent sexual desires lingering around, moving in with Ma definitely killed them off. Even if she was one of those progressive thinkers, Ma still wouldn’t be the kind of person you could sit around and talk about getting laid with. When we rent the occasional movie, she’ll jump up as soon as a woman starts unbuttoning her shirt in front of a man and disappear into the kitchen. Her aversion to anything remotely sexual both fascinates and infuriates me. It’s like watching a child walk by an enormous chocolate cake and not only denying herself a piece of it but also refusing to acknowledge its existence. Once, a few months after Angus and I had moved in, I asked her if she’d ever considered dating again after Dad died.
“Of course not,” she said, yanking at a piece of yellow yarn in her lap. She was knitting a sweater for Angus, yellow with blue trim around the neck.
“What do you mean, ‘of course not’?” I pressed. “You’re allowed to date, you know.”
She glanced over at me with a bemused expression. “I know very well what I’m allowed to, Bernadette. I’m just not interested.”
“But . . .” I looked away, picked at a piece of lint on my jeans. “Don’t you ever get lonely? Don’t you ever want to be with someone again?” I stopped myself before I said “that way,” or anything else that remotely hinted at a sex life, which I knew she would consider grossly disrespectful.
“Not particularly.” She shrugged. “I have my friends at Saint Augustine’s. We do a lot together.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking about someone special. You know, someone who—” I stopped talking as Ma began shaking her head. “What?”
“I had someone special.” She flicked her eyes over at the photograph of Dad on the mantelpiece. It was my favorite picture of him, dressed in a brown-striped, three-piece suit and straw hat. He was standing at the bottom of the front steps, his arm draped around Ma, who was bedecked in her Easter regalia: a light yellow dress with a lily corsage pinned just below her left shoulder, cream-colored pumps, and white wristlet gloves. They had only been married three years; it would be six more years before I came along, and they looked young and happy and confident with their place in the world. With each other. “He was all I needed.”
“But he’s gone, Ma. I’m talking about now. And all the years ahead.”
“He was all I needed,” she said, and just like that, I knew the conversation was over.
It was not that I ever looked for advice from Ma, but occasionally, as was the case just now, I was genuinely interested in trying to understand how she navigated the details of her own life. Not because I wanted to follow suit, but because I thought it might help me see her in a kinder, more appreciative light. But the information she did volunteer was so foreign to me that it just left me frustrated. Who in their right mind would willingly spend the next fifty years of their life celibate? And why?
Some nights—like right now—the thought of having to go another ten minutes without sex creates a physical desperation in me that is so intense I feel like I might cry out. The longing to be touched is so palpable that I can feel it in my groin.
Instead, I turn over in bed, reach for my earphones, and put them in. “Back in Black” blares so loud that I can feel my eardrums buzz. I stare up at the ceiling, as Angus Young starts screaming about how long it takes to get to the top, and lay there for a long time, listening to the whole album. In between songs, I close my eyes and fantasize about a man undressing me, one article of clothing at a time—shirt, bra, pants, underwear, socks—until I am completely naked. He sits on the edge of the bed, pulls me toward him. I am still standing as he leans forward, his lips moving over the outside of my ribs, his tongue circling my nipples, the outer rim of my belly button. His hands snake around the back of me, sliding up until they reach my shoulders and then settling in the small, hollow spaces of my collarbone. They drop lower, over my breasts, lingering, kneading, and then move down to the outside of my hips.
I can’t see his face, but it doesn’t bother me. He can remain faceless forever, as long as he keeps touching me, as long as his skin stays warm against mine, his arms around the small of my back, lifting me up.
Higher.
And then higher still.
“MOM!” I SIT up, startled, as Angus calls my name from down the hall. “Mommy! Please!”
I tear the covers off, race into his room. He’s sitting up in bed, tears streaming down his cheeks, his hands like outstretched stars. “Here I am, Boo,” I say, gathering him into me. “Here I am.” His little body is warm and trembling. “What’s wrong, baby? Are you sick?”
He shakes his head, pulls away from me. “I was calling you forever. But you wouldn’t come.”
“Oh, Angus, I didn’t hear you, honey. I was sleeping. Why didn’t you just come into my room?”
He looks down fearfully at the rug. “I was scared.”
Scared? Of what? The only thing Angus has ever been scared of was the pool last summer after he accidentally fell into the deep end. After that, he didn’t go near the water, not even when I bought him a life jacket. “What scared you?” I ask. “Did you have another bad dream?”
He shakes his head, embarrassed. “The dark,” he says. “It’s so . . . dark.”
I pull him in again, closer this time, stroke the sides of his hair, run my finger over the tip of his ear. “Okay, baby. It’s okay.”
Two parallel lines of pain in the back of my throat begin to ache as I hold him close. Is it possible to protect him against everything out there? From everything in here? His heart flutters beneath his thin pajama top, a tiny, trapped bird.
“Can I sleep with you tonight?” Angus asks, his mouth buried against the side of my shoulder. “Please? Even though I’m big, and Nanny gets mad, and . . .”
“Yes.” I slide my hand back inside his. “Come on. You absolutely can.”
Angus falls asleep immediately, but I lay there for a long time, just looking at him. The hair around his ears is a little shaggy and some of the curls in the front need to be thinned out. I’ll have to take him back to Kuts for Kids where he sits in the snail-shaped chair, and Randy the beautician gives him Tootsie Rolls afterward. There’s a scratch behind his ear that I haven’t seen before; it’s an angry red color, and deep, too. Where did that come from? Is someone being rough with him at school? Jeremy? I’ll kill him. I will. Or at least get Angus switched out of his classroom. No one’s going to screw with my kid.
Why has he started to be afraid of the dark? Could it be that the anxiousness he has been feeling about Jeremy is manifesting itself this way? Maybe he will start to wet the bed next. Or have those night terrors I heard about once. I sit up suddenly. It was James who told me about night terrors one day, after admitting that he’d had them as a kid. We were behind the Burger Barn again, in our usual place on the step, the sky awash with a thin, lemony light.
“What are they?” I’d asked. “Like nightmares?”
“Sort of.” He shrugged. “Except that nightmares happen during the real deep stage of sleep, where you dream. Night terrors actually happen while you’re moving from the light stage of sleep into the deep one. So technically, you’re still asleep, but awake, too.” He nodded toward the small book next to him. “At least, that’s what this book says.”
“If you were asleep,” I’d asked, “how do you know you had them?”
“My mom told me. She was really concerned about it. Plus, my pajamas would be soaking wet from all the sweating I did. She’d have to change me out of them, give me dry ones so that I could go back to sleep.”
“God,” I said. “That sounds really intense. What were you afraid of?”
He stared at something in the distance for a moment. “My dad, mostly. He was hard on my mom and me. Too hard. I was terrified of him, growing up. Which led to a lot of other fears, I guess.” He withdrew his cigarettes from his back pocket and snorted softly. “I’m still afraid of the dark.”
I almost laughed, and then caught myself. “Not really, though, right?”
He looked over at me with an expression that I could not read—disappointment, maybe? Sadness?—and bent over to light his cigarette. “Not like I used to be,” he said finally. “I don’t have to sleep with a light on or anything. And I can walk down a dark street, of course, or any alleyway. But nighttime in general still freaks me out a little. I think it’s because that’s when my father used to start in on us. He’d come home from the bar every night just as the sun was starting to set, and, like clockwork, all hell would break loose. He’d start yelling, screaming, throwing things.” James reached up and fingered the scar along his eyebrow. “Got this one night after he threw a chair at my mother. A piece of the leg splintered off and cut me in the face.” He shrugged, as if brushing off the memory. “I don’t know. Even now, when it gets dark, it feels sometimes like I’m still waiting for all that chaos to start up again.” He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, and this time, when he exhaled, I noticed that his lower lip trembled slightly. “It’s not rational, of course. I know that.” He shook his head. “The mind is a funny thing. The things it holds close, the things it chooses to forget. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, when you think about it.”
We sat there for a moment, the two of us, James smoking, me nibbling at the edge of my thumb. It occurred to me that he had just shared an incredibly intimate detail with me, an extraordinary gesture, really, when I thought about it, like a secret shared between best friends, or something a husband might tell a wife. It felt almost like a gift, and yet I had not even known I wanted it until this very moment. I wondered if I’d ever be brave enough to return the favor.
“You have a nice father?” he asked suddenly, looking at me out of the corner of one eye.
“Real nice.” I nodded. “Too nice.”
James smiled. “Too nice? How is that possible?”
“He’s dead,” I said flatly. “Dead people are always too nice.”
He turned and looked at me then, really looked at me, while bringing the cigarette to his lips again. I stared right back at him, wondering if his mother had taken him to the hospital after his head had been split open, or if it had had to heal on its own. Why couldn’t I bring myself to ask him? What was it that I didn’t want to know?
“You’re a really unusual girl,” he said finally.
I blushed and looked down again at my boots, fingering the dirt lodged alongside the heel. His words felt like a slap, something Ma might say to me, but wrapped in a compliment, too. Or maybe it was just the tone of voice he’d used—a mixture of curiosity and bemusement. We hadn’t kissed yet—that would happen the following week—but I could already feel myself being drawn to him in a magnetic, almost mysterious way.
“I don’t mean it as a bad thing,” James continued. “I think unusual is great actually. It sure beats being a conformist. And it’s a hell of a lot more interesting.”
“You can say that again.” I nodded.
“And it’s a hell of a lot more interesting,” James repeated.
We laughed at the same time and I realized as he opened his mouth and tipped his head back that it was the first time I had heard him do such a thing. Laugh, I mean. It was a beautiful sound, flush with feeling, and I carried it around with me for the rest of the day like a tiny stone in my pocket.
NEXT TO ME, Angus breathes deeply, his nostrils flaring slightly with the intake of each breath. I reach over, tuck a curl behind his ear, and then slide my hand under my pillow. “I’m going to go help someone tomorrow, Boo,” I whisper. “He’s trapped, and he’s afraid of the dark, and I’m going to go help him.”