The Forgetting Time(11)

“What is wrong with you?” she said.

He flinched and dropped the egg in his other hand.

She tried to modulate her voice. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“I don’t know.” He seemed a bit frightened.

She tried to calm herself. “You’re going to have to take a bath now. You know that, right?”

He shuddered at the word. Egg was rolling down his face, oozing into the hollow of his neck. “Don’t go,” he said, blue eyes nailing her to the wall with his need.

He was no fool. He had calculated that the thing he hated most in the world was worth tolerating in order to keep her home. He had wanted her there that much. Could Bob, who had never even met her, compete with that?

No, no, no; she would go! For god’s sake: it was enough! She wouldn’t succumb to this kind of blackmail, especially from a child! She was the adult, after all—wasn’t that what they always said in her single moms’ group? You make the rules. You need to hold firm, especially because you’re the only adult. You’re not doing them any favors by giving in.

She lifted him in her arms (he was light; he was only a baby, her boy, only four). She carried him into the bathroom and held his squirming body tightly in her arms as she turned on the water faucet and checked the temperature.

He was writhing and screeching like a trapped animal. She stepped to the edge of the bathtub and placed him on the bath mat (legs sliding, arms flailing), somehow managing to pull off his clothes and flip on the shower.

The scream could probably be heard all the way down Eighth Avenue. He fought as if his life depended on it, but she did it, she held him there under the water and squirted shampoo on his head, telling herself again and again that she wasn’t torturing anybody, she was only giving her son a very-much-needed washing.

When it was over (a matter of seconds, though it felt endless) he was lying in a heap on the floor of the bathtub, and she was bleeding. In the midst of the chaos, he had craned his neck and bitten her ear. She tried to wrap him in a towel, but he wrenched away from her, scrambling out of the tub and into his bedroom, skidding on the floor. She took some antibiotic from the medicine cabinet and applied it while she listened to the howls reverberating throughout the house, filling every cell in her body with woe.

She looked in the mirror.

Whatever she was, she was not a woman going out on a first date.

She walked to Noah’s room. He was on the floor, naked, rocking, with his knees clasped between his arms—a puddle of a boy, pale skin glimmering in the green light cast by the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d pasted on the ceiling to make the tiny room feel bigger than it was.

“Noey?”

He didn’t look at her. He was crying softly into his knees. “I want to go home.” It was something he said in times of distress since he was a toddler. It had been his first full sentence. She always answered in the same way: “You are home.”

“I want my mama.”

“I’m here, baby.”

He looked away from her. “Not you. I want my other mother.”

“I’m your mommy, honey.”

He turned. His doleful eyes locked onto hers. “No, you’re not.”

A chill ran through her. She was aware of herself as if from a distance, standing over this shivering boy under the eerie light of the fake stars. The wood floor was rough beneath her feet, its knots like holes a person could fall through, like falling out of time.

“Yep. Your one and only.”

“I want my other one. When is she coming?”

She pulled herself together with an effort. Poor kid, she thought; I’m all you’ve got. We’re all we’ve got, the two of us. But we’ll make it work. I’ll do better. I promise. She squatted by his side. “I won’t go, okay?”

She’d send Bob an apologetic text, and that would be the end of that. For what could she say? Remember that adorable son I mentioned? Well, he’s a little unusual.… No, theirs was too fragile a connection to withstand those sorts of complications, and there was always another lonely New York woman waiting in the wings. She’d cancel the sitter and pay her anyway, because it was the last minute and she couldn’t afford to lose another one.

“I won’t go,” she said again. “I’ll cancel Annie. I’ll stay with you.” She was grateful, not for the first time, that no adult was there to witness this weak moment.

But who cared what other people thought? The color rose to Noah’s face, a blossoming of pink on clammy skin, and his lopsided grin knocked her sideways, blotted out the room. It was like looking at the sun. Maybe her mother was right after all, she thought. Maybe some forces were too strong to resist.

“C’mere, you goof.” She held out her arms, throwing all of it to the wind: the dress, the date, this thrilling night and perhaps all the thrilling nights left to her, a woman aging by the moment, squarely in the middle of her one and only life.

Here, in her arms, was what mattered. She kissed his sweet, damp head. He smelled nice, for once.

He lifted his face. “Is my other mother coming soon?”





Four

Anderson opened his eyes and looked around the room in a panic.

His pages. Where were they? What the hell had he done with them?

The room was dim, the air swirling with dust. Boxes half-packed with files flanked every wall, rising up around him as if he’d fallen six feet under instead of drifting off on the cot in his office again. The window was high and narrow, like a slit in a fortress; now it cast a spear of light on the wooden floor and the books piled here and there and the manuscript pages scattered where he’d tossed them angrily the night before. He got up quickly and gathered the pages one by one. When he was finished he sat down again, holding the manuscript in his lap: a bulky thing, like a cat. He straightened the edges with his hands, the ends tickling his palms. It didn’t seem like much, this bundle, and yet it contained the sum of his life’s work. He set aside the title page and looked at the dedication.