FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021
HOWARD BEACH, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY
BETTY THE FROG is found by Liam on a Saturday afternoon. She’s in the kitchen, behind a radiator near the sink, completely dehydrated. She’s light as a feather, translucent, a sheet of tracing paper someone crumpled and crushed into a paper approximation of a frog, its thighs and webbed feet clearly distinguishable. She sure is dead, Liam tells his little sister, your Betty sure is dead, he thinks it’s really funny and starts dancing around with his arms in the air, Dead Betty, Dead Betty, and Sophia dissolves into tears.
Three weeks earlier Betty escaped from the terrarium, where she must have been bored out of her tiny mind, despite the pretty, damp mosses, the gleaming green plants, and the round, gray pebbles that Sophia chose for her, plus the half a coconut shell that acts as a swimming pool, but most of all the very-much-alive black flies Sophia fed her when she came home from school. Sophia had put the terrarium on a low table near her bed, and every evening she would get up, huddled in a blanket, and whisperingly describe her day to the frog, which sat motionless under the greenery. What Sophia wanted was for Betty to be safe, and happy too, but mostly safe, sheltered from predators, that’s a word she learned, and she really likes it, maybe precisely because it sounds a little disturbing. But the frog escaped in spite of everything. She must have hopped around all over the place in search of warmth and moisture before ending up there, on the floor below, against the lukewarm metal of the convection heater. She’d been hungry and thirsty and her skin had cracked like the dirt in the yard when it hasn’t rained for days, until—frozen in death—Betty had become an ectoplasm of a frog.
Sophia’s scared to touch her, and Liam is too, even though he’s showing off, squealing as he runs around the little corpse. Their mother says, Quiet, for goodness’ sake, quiet down a bit, you’ll wake Daddy, but their father’s already coming downstairs in his T-shirt and yelling, What’s this goddamn noise, April, can’t you keep your kids quiet, just while I’m on leave, and weren’t you supposed to go do the shopping? Lieutenant Clark Kleffman sees the really very dead Betty and his daughter, who’s still crying, and laughs as he says, Well, Sophia, that frog of yours…you know what? She looks like an old Chinese dumpling!
Clark picks the frog up by one foot between two fingers and dumps it dispassionately in a bowl.
The Kleffmans are collectively resigned to burying Betty, and even though they know nothing about her religion, April decides that she’s Baptist, like them; well, she didn’t have a believer’s proper, immersive baptism, but she spent most of her time in water. It simplifies things. The born-again frog will go to frog heaven. And in the end Clark will flush her down the toilet, that simplifies things too.
Betty was Sophia’s sixth-birthday present. Thanks to her, Sophia learned a lot about frogs. Like, for example, they’ve been around for three hundred million years, they lived alongside the dinosaurs, there are thousands of different species, and an ingredient of insecticides, atrazine, is threatening their survival because their skin is permeable: ironic in light of the fact that they’re “useful because they eat insects.” And they’re amphibians, like salamanders and toads. Besides, Betty is actually a toad, Anaxyrus debilis, Sophia carefully wrote out the name on a piece of card and stuck it to the terrarium, in fact, she may even be a male toad, the salesman wasn’t too sure—You know, miss, Andy sighed, at least it said Andy on his badge, I’m sorry but this toad is barely an inch long, I can’t make out the reproductive organs, maybe give it a name that works for both sexes like Morgan or Madison?—but Sophia called her Betty despite this advice. Betty always hid in her burrow or under her stone when Sophia came near the terrarium. She was terrified of the sound of the vacuum cleaner too. And the noise made by planes taking off from JFK airport and flying over Howard Beach. You could never see her because she was so scared of everything. She’s a broad all right, Clark sniggered. Don’t say stuff like that to Liam and Sophia, April sighed.
So, Clark Kleffman goes to take Betty from the soup bowl, and Sophia shrieks, “Betty moved, Mom. Betty moved!”
“What? Don’t be silly, Sophia, Dad just tilted the bowl.”
“But she moved. Look, it’s ’cause of the water in there. It woke her up! Mommy, Mommy, put more water in, please!”
April shrugs, but still takes a glass, fills it with water from the faucet, and pours it over Betty. The amphibian moves one foot, then another, it’s rising from the dead, absorbing all the water like a sponge, and now it’s moving about in the bottom of the bowl and its skin is even gradually reverting to its normal greenish color.
“That’s nuts,” says Clark, stunned.
“She did what salamanders do in a drought, Mommy, you remember, we saw those salamanders, well, she did the same thing, she went dormant and waited for the rainy season.”
“That’s nuts,” Clark says again. “I never saw anything like it, this dumb frog was one-hundred-percent dead from Deadsville, and now she’s bouncing around like a whore in heat. It’s nuts.”
“Clark, please don’t used words like that around the children,” April says.
“Jesus, I’m in my own house, I’ll talk how I like! What exactly am I to all of you, just a machine to pay the bills and go get itself killed in some country full of assholes, is that it? I fucking had it, April, I had it, do you get that?”
April looks at the floor, Sophia and Liam freeze. The air coagulates around Clark’s anger.
Clark balls his fists, withdraws into himself, it’s either that or he’ll break everything. Fuck, he nearly died ten times in Afghanistan, and this is all the thanks he gets. Ten times, easy, that’s right. Nobody ever gave a damn about them, they’re almost not even good enough to die, they’re not politicians’ sons like those little assholes who hid in the National Guard way back in Vietnam days. Okay so last year they did replace those coffin-on-wheels Humvees, the regiment got a hold of some Oshkosh trucks, huge things, real bad boys, so ugly they’re hot, and their armor’s meant to stop a 13 mm. But, hell no, with armor-piercing bombs around they were just made of cardboard painted to match the sand.
Two weeks before Betty the Frog’s resurrection, the Oshkosh was on the way to Kabul from the airbase in Bagram when it was hit by a barrage of Zastava fire, must have been, from the sound of it, they’re the Syrians’ entry-level semiautomatic. A bullet came through the window in the left rear door—indestructible glass, they’d been told—and it ended up in Thompson’s chest, giving him an opportunity to gauge just how perfectly bullets were designed for bodies, and he screamed like crazy. Thompson was a mercenary with the paramilitary firm Academi, the poor sap was more dumb than messed up, and he’d lost his crummy job with a subsidiary of General Motors when the factory hauled its ass to a country where some other poor sap made the same spark plugs for thirty cents an hour. All Thompson wanted was a cabin in Montana, and to achieve this dream, he offered close protection to the engineers of Albermarle Corp.: four months they’d been prospecting for lithium, never daring to stray from the Kabul Serena Hotel, four months they’d been trying to get the exploitation rights contract signed ahead of the Chinese guys at Ganfeng Lithium. But—tough luck, Thompson—Academi’s support vehicle had set out for Kabul without him and he’d had to hand over two hundred dollars for a ride on the Oshkosh, just for two hours of potholes, rubble, and corrugated iron in a godforsaken suburb ravaged by ten years of war.
While Sergeant Jack took care of Thompson, who was rolling the whites of his eyes and hiccuping up blood, Clark slipped into the rotating tower and started machine-gunning the area where he thought the shots were coming from, yelling every insult he’d ever known. His bullets, in their hundreds, winged their way to two dirt huts on a bare hillside, two pitiful homes that collapsed to dust in the onslaught.
The Oshkosh raced back to Bagram, where the operating theater was waiting for them. The infirmary was already crowded: the day before, one of the Afghan auxiliaries, a guy on the cleaning team, had blown himself up with a suicide belt when he was near the mess hall, screaming Allahu akbar—two dead, ten injured—because there was a rumor that some hooched-up soldiers had pissed out their Buds on copies of the Koran.
Maybe the story was true: slices of ham were definitely thrown into the cages at Guantanamo. The lowest trash always have the option of taking refuge in patriotism. They didn’t need to find a bed for Thompson anyway, he was dead on arrival, and the inside of the truck was slick with blood. And one thing’s for sure, they could always have tried pouring water over Thompson, but it wouldn’t have brought him back to life. So, real sorry, but Clark doesn’t give a damn, not a single damn, if he uses words like “broad” and “whore in heat” around the kids, sooner or later they need to learn what a shit world they live in.
“With all your bullshit, I’m exhausted,” Clark says, “go do the fucking shopping, April, and take Liam. You, Liam, stop playing your goddamn video game and go help your mother carry the groceries. Come on, Sophia, let’s put your frog back in her terrarium.”
Sophia looks at her mother, who silently takes the car keys, and reaches for a grumbling Liam’s hand; then she follows her father, who’s climbing upstairs with the now completely revived Betty in the bowl.
There’s a little Eiffel Tower stuck onto a stone in the terrarium, because the Kleffmans went to Paris for their wedding anniversary four months ago. They rented a one-bedroom apartment in Belleville, and the children slept on the convertible sofa in the living room. They visited Notre-Dame and the Arc de Triomphe, and explored Montmartre and the Champs-Elysées. And even with all that, Sophia insisted on going to see some amphibians. April gave in and took her to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, and that’s where the child first saw a salamander, the extraordinary creature that can regenerate a damaged eye or even part of its brain.
Then Sophia, Liam, and their mother traveled home to New York on a scheduled flight so bumpy that the children didn’t stop screaming for the last half hour. Clark did not return with them; he was given a new assignment that sent him from Paris to Warsaw, and then straight on from Warsaw to Baghdad, this time on board a C17, escorting two Abrams tanks and a bomb with a massive blast, the “mother of all bombs,” eleven tons, ten meters, a monster. Clark stayed there nine weeks and eventually flew home to Howard Beach, with the hot metallic smell of Thompson’s blood still on him.
Sophia’s intelligence is April’s pride, even though she’s angry with herself for being jealous of her own daughter, of her spark and curiosity. At Sophia’s age, April clung to her mother, coloring pictures of animals, mostly foals. When she and her sisters had to relocate their mother, who was losing her mind, she found hundreds of those pictures. It was absurd: scarlet foals and indigo foals, green foals and orange ones, every color of the rainbow got the treatment, but it was always, always, foals. She didn’t remember this. In fact, she didn’t remember anything from that time. She’d left her parents’ home very young to marry a tall, skinny, fair-haired boy, such a tender, attentive kid, he wrote her a pretty poem on a piece of paper torn from a notebook, and handed it to her in silence, embarrassed by his own audacity:
Swing the bells
Play hide-and-seek,
I kissed April on the cheek
Yes, in those days Clark was thoughtful. He didn’t have any qualifications, so he tried to become a realtor, then a driving instructor, but quickly lost his nerve with an indecisive client or a learner driver, and didn’t manage to hold down any job. The army gave him a framework, it restored his pride. Aged twenty-two, this kid who looked no more than eighteen had his head shaved, was given a black beret, and, most important, a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus. With this money and the guarantee of a regular salary, April managed to negotiate a loan, and right when real estate prices were at their lowest, to buy a discounted house in Howard Beach, its financially ruined owners having been evicted; in their rage they’d taken a hammer to everything they could when they left, breaking washbasins, the kitchen sink, the countertops, and even the wall to their bedroom. In a few years, when the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a huge ice cube two kilometers thick and the size of Florida, has calved and started to melt, the house will be paddling in the ocean. But she and Clark couldn’t really know this, and they straightened out the whole place, with April doing all the repainting by herself, despite her growing belly.
April tender, April shady,
O my sweet and cruel lady,
April blooming with pastel colors,
With the passing months Clark grew sure of himself, domineering even. She no longer recognized the sweet boy who wrote her poems. Military training had transformed him, muscled him up, hardened him. And when they made love, the reticent young man, so shy with his girlish young body, had become brutal and selfish. It was then that she started to be afraid of him. But when Clark finished his training and passed his final exam, Liam was already born, and Sophia was on the way.
April caught in the icy storm,
April soft, so sleepy warm,
And many years later, April tender, April shady happened to open a book lying around at her sister’s place and she sat there with her mouth gaping like a carp washed up on the riverbank. His poem, his beautiful poem written just for her, was “Fall for April” by an obscure English poet, and that scrap of paper that Clark had given her on their first date, a treasure she still kept, like an idiot, folded in her wallet, was from something he’d studied in high school and painstakingly copied out. She went home with the kids and spent that night crying with anger and pain at this ultimate torpedoing of an image from the past, the now-spoiled memory of Clark, with all the awkwardness of a teenager, handing her a page torn from a school exercise book.
April, I fall for you
CLARK LIFTS the mesh from the terrarium and tilts the bowl, the frog slips out, bounces on the moss, and dives straight into her coconut-shell pool.
“We need to feed Betty, Daddy. She must be hungry.” “Let her rest, honey, and you’re going to take a bath too, you can play in the tub like Betty.”
Sophia doesn’t say anything. She hears the door close downstairs, her mother’s and Liam’s receding footsteps, the car doors shutting, the engine starting up. Clark turns on the faucets, checks the water temperature, pours in some bubble bath and removes his shoes. Sophia hangs back. He frowns at her.
“Hurry up, Soph, in the water, quick, we don’t have as much time as in Pari—”
The doorbell rings, interrupting the father. It rings again, Sophia hears thumping on the door. Clark rolls his eyes.
“Mr. Kleffman?” comes a woman’s voice. “Mrs. Kleffman? Agent Chapman, FBI.”
“Okay, Soph, I’m going down. You get in the tub, stay in the bubbles, and stop the water running when it’s halfway full, you got that?”
Clark leaves the room, and Sophia can hear him downstairs raising his voice, then a man replies firmly, and then another. The argument is still going when someone knocks on the bathroom door.
“Can I come in, Sophia?” the woman’s voice asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” the child replies.
A lady comes in, she’s smiling, she’s black, her hair is smooth, it’s cut short like Mom’s, Sophia thinks, but she doesn’t look as tired as Mom does. The FBI officer kneels down, strokes her cheek, gently, professionally: neuroscience has demonstrated that touch is a crucial means of reassuring children and making them feel safe.
Then the agent hands her a towel.
“Hello, Sophia, I’m Heather. Officer Heather Chapman. Dry yourself quickly, get dressed, and I’ll wait for you outside, okay? Do you know where your mommy went?”
“She went to the store with Liam.”
The woman leaves the bathroom and takes out a cellphone.
“I’m with Sophia Kleffman. Find out where April Kleffman is, probably the nearest supermarket, a black Chevrolet Trax, you have the license plate. She’s with the boy, Liam.”
The little girl is dressed, the woman hears her on the landing, and reaches out a hand to her. The shouting downstairs has stopped, her father has left.
“Come, Sophia, we’re going to find Mommy and your brother Liam, and we’ll go for a car ride together.”
“Will we come back home after? Because we need to feed Betty.”
“Betty?”
“She’s my frog, ma’am. We thought she died, but she just dried out. Like a salamander.”
The woman already has her cellphone out, she puts it away again.
“Don’t worry about your frog. We’ll take care of her too. Everything’s gonna be fine. Call me Heather. Would you do that for me, Sophia?”
“Yes, ma’am.”