‘Mommy, I need to go potty.’
He has a bladder of steel, this boy. He almost never asks for the bathroom.
‘Can you go like a puppy dog?’ she whispers.
‘I don’t want to go like a puppy dog. It’s too dark.’
He’s right about the darkness. The sky is blue-black. She can see her hand in front of her face but only the outline of it.
‘You can see plenty,’ she says.
‘I want to go on the potty,’ he says, too loudly. ‘A real potty. With something to flush.’
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘The bad men are still out there. I need you to be very quiet so they don’t find us. After the policemen come, we’ll go home. But for now, you need to go like a puppy dog.’
He considers. When they were potty-training him, for months he would sit on the potty only if he was allowed to wear a bike helmet.
‘They might hear me going potty,’ he says. ‘They might shoot me.’
She feels her nose burn – a prelude to tears, and the thought panics her as much as anything else. He cannot see her cry.
‘They won’t hear you,’ she says. ‘I’ll be right here.’
And I can stop bullets, she wants to add. I will never let you be hurt, and I am stronger and faster and smarter than anything that could ever be out there. And the thing is that she does not even have to say it, because he believes it, and she wishes she believed it, too.
His lower lip is trembling, and she sees his shoulders begin to shake. For the first time, she sees the fear on his face.
‘Mommy,’ he says, stepping to her. ‘I want to snuggle you.’
He has not done this outside of the morning routine in a long while – it is his old password for nervousness, for walking into a crowded room where he doesn’t recognize the faces. She opens her arms, and he wraps himself around her, face in her neck. She can hear his breathing, and his mouth is damp against her skin. His hands twist in her hair. When he was a baby, he would twist his fingers in it while she fed him, and she stopped wearing ponytails altogether because of his small fingers clasping at the air, searching.
‘You’re my boy,’ she says.
She feels her own shoulders relax as she absorbs his weight. It is possible that this says something terrible about her, that his need for her comforts her. He rubs his nose against her jawline, breathing a little too hard. He pulls back slightly, and she can feel a string of snot stretch along her chin.
He rubs his wet nose against her collarbone.
She tugs at her collar, stretching the cotton, and wipes the snot from her skin. She is still sometimes surprised that she is not repulsed by it. Not when it is his.
This is such a different kind of intimacy than with, say, a lover. With a lover you might have a perfect comfort with each other’s body, a sense that his body belongs to you and yours to him, and you might have total unself-conscious freedom to put a hand on his thigh, to put your mouth on his in the way you know he likes best, for him to curl around you in bed, pelvis to pelvis – but the two of you are still, ultimately, two different bodies, and the pleasure comes from the difference.
With Lincoln, the line between their two selves is blurred. She bathes him and wipes off every bodily fluid, and he sticks his fingers in her mouth or catches his balance with a hand on the top of her head. He catalogues her freckles and moles as carefully as he keeps track of his own scrapes and bruises. He does not quite know that he is a being apart from her. Not yet. For now, her arm is as accessible as his arm – her limbs are equally his limbs.
They are interchangeable.
‘You still need to go potty?’ she asks, mouth against his temple.
‘I think I can hold it a little.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t know when we’ll be close to a bathroom. You should go ahead and go. It’ll be fine.’
He shakes his head.
‘I’ll be right next to you,’ she says. ‘You can go right here.’
‘Where we’re sitting?’ He sounds horrified.
‘No. Over there. See where there’s that big weed?’
She feels his head lift and turn.
‘I need to take my shoes off,’ he says, letting go of her, and she knows that she has convinced him.
‘Shhh. A little quieter. Don’t take your shoes off.’ It is so much more complicated if the shoes come off. ‘Otherwise you’ll be barefoot in the dirt.’
There are times when she cannot affect him in the least. But there are also times when he is like a room she knows so well that she can maneuver through it in the dark.
‘Dirt feels bad against my feet,’ he says.
‘I know.’
He walks to the exact weed she’s mentioned and begins pushing down his pants, not touching his shoes. Once he starts going, the sound of urine hitting the plant is never-ending, and she has a brief moment of wondering whether she was wrong about noise not being an issue. But finally he is done, and he is concerned that he has gotten a few drops on his shoes, and she tells him not to worry and hands him a wet wipe from her purse to clean himself off with.
‘Mommy?’
‘Mmm-hmm?’
‘I don’t want to stay here anymore.’
‘I know, sweet. But wipe your hands.’
Lincoln is staring down at the wet wipe, holding it between two fingers, unmoving.
She stares into the darkness, drawn to the few points of illumination – the glow from a nearby lamppost, a smaller gleam from a light on the other side of the trees, the moon. She glances down at her phone. The darkness has changed things: she knows this. She has always been concerned about the noise of the phone, but there is the light of it, too. Light is a rare, conspicuous thing now. But surely there must be some news? Surely at some point she is risking more by not looking at her phone? She cups her hands around it, shielding the screen, and when it turns on, the light is both too intense and sweetly familiar. The whole world is there in a small, neat rectangle.
She bends her body around the phone. When she checks www.wbta.com, though, the same two brief paragraphs stare back at her. She checks another local news site, and there is nothing at all. She checks CNN only as an afterthought, but there is a photo of the zoo entrance – a too-perfect PR shot. A ‘Breaking News’ banner is pasted in the corner of the photo, and below the caption reads, ‘Presumed active shooter situation at Belleville Zoo reportedly shifts to hostage situation.’
She feels the damp impact of a wet wipe against her calf.
‘I don’t want to wipe my hands,’ Lincoln announces.
‘Shhh. Whisper. Mommy’s reading something.’
‘I don’t want to wipe my hands!’ he shouts, so loud that she flinches.
‘Hush!’ she hisses, dropping her phone into her purse. ‘Too loud! They’ll hear you.’
He stares back at her, and she releases a long breath. She takes his unwiped hand and pulls him closer. When she speaks, she is calmer.
‘You know we have to be quiet,’ she whispers. ‘And we always clean hands after we go to the bathroom. Otherwise you’ll get sick.’
Even as she says it, she is not sure why she is arguing with him about hygiene.
A hostage situation.
Hostages.
‘I want to be sick,’ Lincoln says. ‘I like to be sick.’
She nods slowly. His volume is creeping up again. She reels in the threads of her thoughts and recasts her full focus at him. She cannot blame him for his contrariness. They are hiding from gunmen in the dirt. But also it is suppertime, and his mood is directly tied to blood sugar. There is an inevitable escalation to his hunger. If she does not feed him, there will be whining and crying and possibly screaming.
‘You like to be sick?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says defiantly.
Too loud too loud too loud. The terror flashes again, and she swallows it down.
‘Shhhh,’ she says lightly. Delicately. Like pouring an exact teaspoon of cough medicine or teasing a tangle from his hair – touch is everything. ‘You know, Superman can’t get sick.’
‘He can if there’s kryptonite,’ he answers, and she feels a surge of triumph something like she imagines Edmund Hillary felt when he reached the top of Everest.
‘Green kryptonite,’ he clarifies. ‘Like Doom in a Tube and Skrag the Earth Conqueror.’
‘I like the one with Skrag,’ she says.
She sees the shift in his face even before he lifts his chin and throws back his shoulders. Rebelliousness has overtaken him.
‘I don’t like that one,’ he says.
‘No? I thought it was one of your favorites.’
‘It’s my least favorite.’
She does not want to give him anything to push back against.
‘All right,’ she agrees.
‘It’s a terrible book.’
‘All right. Keep your voice down.’
‘It’s the worst book I’ve ever read.’
He will invent arguments if he is belligerent enough. She runs a hand over her face, and the stretch and pull of her skin is satisfying. She presses at her eyelids, her eyeballs firm under her fingertips, and when she finally moves her hand away and licks her dry lips, she tastes dirt and salt and it is not unpleasant.
‘Do you want to play with your guys?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says too quickly.
It does not count when his answer is so quick. She waits. Watches his thoughts play across his face.
‘Yes, please,’ he amends.
And the dark, demanding thing inside him is gone. Vanished as quickly as it appeared, which is how it always works. It will reappear just as quickly. But she will deal with that when it happens.
She opens her purse and makes a show of digging and searching, but with her other hand she reaches to sneak a look at her phone. She is nervous both of the light and of frustrating Lincoln with her split attention, but she thinks there were links to an actual story under the zoo photo and caption. It only takes a couple of brushes of her thumb to scan through the brief column of text.
– SWAT team currently at the scene.
– police department not releasing details.
– conflicting reports from witnesses.
It is still not a story at all. More gaps than substance.
‘Mommy? My guys?’ says Lincoln, his hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m getting them,’ she says, trying to make sense of it. Do the police still think they are only dealing with one man? And that the man has barricaded himself in a room? Do they believe that the danger is locked away and contained?
‘Mommy?’ Lincoln prompts again, more loudly. Annoyance in his tone.
She turns back to him, pulling a handful of plastic men from her purse finally. She hands them to him, not sure this is a wise choice – he is never quiet when he performs his stories; there are battles and arguments – but she cannot think of another choice.
If he makes noise, she will quieten him.
She thinks this as if it were always that easy. As if she can always quieten him whenever she likes.
‘I might make up a story,’ Lincoln says, trying to make the men stand up on the uneven ground. ‘Do I have the Predator?’
‘I think so,’ she says, reaching again, one-handed.
She lays her phone inside her purse: she is more likely to miss a text with it there, but the purse will hopefully block any light from the screen. She turns her head to study every inch of their view – the trees and bamboo and railroad track and open spaces – and she sees no movement in the shadows. She does hear a far-off sound, shrill, that could be a baby crying. It is not the first time she has heard it. She is not sure that it is real.
‘Mommy, did you find him?’ says Lincoln.
She skims her fingers along the bottom of her purse, which is an orgy of action figures. She feels her keys and several pens and some sort of gunk wedging itself under her fingernails but also solid little legs and arms and helmets. She pulls one out – no, it is Wonder Woman. She drops it and begins digging again.
Ah. The Predator. She pulls him into the open air and brushes an old raisin from his head.
‘Here,’ she says, handing it to Lincoln.
She bought the Predator because it was on sale for two dollars at Barnes & Noble and Lincoln was always looking for some figure to play an alien. Then one night they were flipping through channels and she saw the old Schwarzenegger movie, and it was an edited version – no language or gore, she thought – so she let Lincoln watch, only now on regular television they can say Don’t be a pussy and Damn you to hell all they want, so how are you supposed to let a four-year-old watch anything?
He did not find it frightening. He watched a man sliced wide open, hanging from a tree, and he said, Oh, do you think those were his intestines?
He appreciates body parts.
‘Do you think he can be a zombie?’ Lincoln asks, running his finger over the tiny alien’s head.
‘Sure,’ she says.
It is possible that there are hostages. It is possible that the men she heard banging their way through the primate house have now corralled a few helpless people and all the terror has been focused in one nightmarish room. Maybe the only mistake that the police – or CNN – have made is in miscounting the number of gunmen. Or maybe the police have gotten it entirely wrong.
Those people who were lying on the concrete, bleeding, some of them were alive, weren’t they? They need the paramedics, don’t they? They need the police as soon as possible. And if the gunmen are still wandering around the zoo, hunting, then there is no time to wait. No time for caution.
She could tell the police that. She could have Paul tell them.
But what if there are hostages? What if she is wrong and she tells them to barge in here and then more people die? What if the shooters have locked themselves in a room and she and Lincoln are completely safe right now?
What if the shooters are on the other side of this fence and a bullet flies through her head that she never even feels and she cannot do anything to protect him?
‘Zombies have green skin,’ says Lincoln.
‘Yes,’ she says.
The night they watched Predator, he was hyped up. Does the Predator go back to space? he asked, bouncing, two-footed, on the den carpet. What could I use for a spaceship?
Is the Predator a boy? is it the only one? does it have friends? does it go to the dentist? does it speak English? can it live on Earth? can it breathe air? is it real? is it in actual jungles? why does it laugh at the end? does it bleed like we do?
Will you be my mommy forever? he asked, too, not long after they had watched men skinned and arms ripped off and the sky lit by explosions.
Forever, she said.
When I’m a grown-up, will you still be my mommy?
I will be.
Can I still live with you when I’m a grown-up?
Hell, no, Paul whispered as he passed behind the sofa, breath warm against her ear, but she said, Of course.
Because I want to be around you always, Lincoln said then, and his small hand was on her arm, in the crease where bicep met forearm.
He won’t want that, of course. But it is a nice thought.
‘Mommy, let me tell you something,’ he says now, and the Predator – the zombie – seems to be digging in the dirt for something. ‘Not all zombies are bad.’
‘No?’
‘No. There are some zombies called policeman-zombies, and their job is to catch bad zombies and put them in a big hole. That is what zombies use for jails.’
‘Shhhh,’ she says, belatedly. ‘A little quieter.’
He keeps going, and she nods as she, for the thousandth – millionth – time, scans the trees and the darkness around them. Lincoln is surely maneuvering his figures more by feel than by sight, although there is a sliver of a moon and a light from the patio behind them puts out a faint glow. She can see the curves of her son’s head and the silhouettes of the trees and the rooftops of the buildings. Everything around her has a shape, barely. But she would have to walk carefully if she were trying to climb out of their enclosure – she cannot make out the holes or loose rocks that might be under every footstep.
What would the pathways of the zoo be like? Are the strings of lights still glowing? Are there more light poles, beaconing the way? If there are lights, of course, she would have to avoid them. If she were going anywhere.
If they were going anywhere.
It is not supposed to be like this. She has read about enough shootings – she feels confident she knows how they work. The shooter comes in and sprays everything with bullets and people fall to the ground, dead or wounded or pretending, and it is hellish, but it is also over within minutes, and then the police come and either the shooter kills himself or the police kill him. It is a terrible pattern. But it is a pattern. There is a predictability to it, and this has always struck her as the most terrible part. The killings are common enough to have a set sequence of rolling ticker headlines and then grim snapshots of the shooters and smiling vacation snapshots of the victims and Facebook quotations and connect-the-dots for how they got the guns and released statements from the victims’ families. She wants the predictability now. She wants the pattern.
This – this nothingness and silence, dead bodies still out there on the concrete, an hour later – this does not happen.
She needs to re-evaluate. Should they wait here? Hide no matter how long it takes? It is not the only option.
She knows there are boundaries around the perimeter of the zoo – ‘perimeter’, that’s a military kind of word – but she can’t bring up a picture of what the outer walls look like. Surely she has seen them in all the hours she’s spent here – surely she has walked within inches of them. What are they made of – chain-link fencing? Brick? How high are they, and is there barbed wire?
She thinks that if she were sitting here alone she would be making a plan involving those outer walls.
Paul hates flying. He always wants to hold her hand as they are taking off. He tries to estimate the number of planes taking off from their particular airport, and then he multiplies that number by how many airports there are in the entire country, and he makes up the figures and puts them together and computes some imaginary odds of the plane crashing. The math comforts him.
She wonders about the square footage of the zoo. She and Lincoln are occupying about three square feet of it now. And if the zoo is one square mile and a mile is 5,200 feet, something like that – do you square that number? Over 25,000 square feet, maybe, and if she carried Lincoln out of here, they would be occupying only a couple of square feet at a time, so the chances are one in 12,000 that the gunmen would be in the same space.
She knows her math cannot be anything close to right.
‘I used to have two feet,’ says Lincoln, in what she thinks is a zombie voice. ‘No one needs two, though. You only need one.’
Something is moving through the leaves and pine straw. She has a moment of panic – so many moments of panic, all strung together. But this time the fear fades quickly. Whatever it is, the thing is small. A bird or a lizard, maybe.
When she was small, she loved the night-time. The darkness outside was so wide open, and her mother’s house was so cramped, all the dark corners full of things she did not want to think about. But outside was different. She would go out on the small square of concrete that served as a patio, feet bare, and she would sit on the splintery lawn chair – her mother had never bothered replacing the cushion when it molded – and she would try to pick out the sounds. Frogs and crickets and sometimes a dog barking, and the sound of passing cars and the chains on the swing set clinking in the wind, and she was amazed, always, by the noises, once she bothered to notice them.
It is the same here. There is that same layer upon layer of sound. Only now it does not fill her with any sense of wonder. It leaves her struggling to breathe.
She hears the baby crying again.