We Are Not Ourselves(39)

She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.

“Can you stay here and read?”

So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.

Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.

“Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.

Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”

“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”

“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”

“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”

“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”

“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”

He looked at her. “Really choking?”

“It was in his windpipe.”

“What was?”

“A cherry tomato.”

“You got it out?”

“Donny did.”

He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”

“Donny came down,” Connell said.

“To eat with us?”

Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.

“I’ll explain later,” she said.

“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.

“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”

Connell nodded.

“Good.”

And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.

The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.

“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”

“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.

Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.

“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.

“Yes, but they’re in New York.”

“They have to win two.”

“They’ll do it.”

“It’s Roger Clemens.”

“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.

“?‘Ya gotta believe,’?” Connell answered.

“Well, then.”

It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.