Mother May I(43)

“Yes,” he said, against his better judgment. “We’ll get him back.”





Part II

Sons





12




By the time we got to Gadsden, I had half a hundred texts from Anna-Claire, asking to come by the house. The very idea was a horror to me, and not only because she’d find it empty and realize something so much worse than stomach flu was happening. The place felt gutted, pitted, its newly hollow center filled with danger. I told her in no uncertain terms to stay away, as if I believed that she could catch something, as if terror were contagious. Even if I had been at home to smile and lie to her, I did not want her breathing the air.

She pushed me, relentless. She had a global-studies report due Monday. She needed her laptop, and her copy of I Am Malala, and the soft blue hoodie that helped her think. I told her no again, that this bug was very contagious. She insisted with the invincible certainty of a thirteen-year-old that she would not get sick.

Grandma and Peyton can wait in the car. I’ll bring Lysol and spray it in a cloud all around myself as I runrunrun up to my room. Mom. MOM. It will take one second!



“Dear God, this child,” I said to Marshall. Texting with her about these small, real troubles made me feel disoriented, almost dizzy. I remembered that I used to be a woman who cared deeply about her daughter’s book reports. I could not get there from here. I had no patience for her concerns, so far away and foolish.

Then she got my mother to text me, too. Honey? A-C is really worried. I have a surgical mask she can wear to run in. She needs her Malala. . . .

I told Mom to take them to Little Shop of Stories and buy another copy and any book that Peyton wanted. My treat. As for the laptop, Anna-Claire could go to Google Docs and work from Mom’s old Dell.

But the HOODIE!!!!! my daughter texted.

Okay, I finally texted back. Come get it. But bring your phone to hand me when you arrive because the second you set foot in this house, you’re grounded. Two weeks.

That, finally, ended it. She had always been this willful. Even as a newborn, she’d kept her days and nights reversed for weeks, beating every method for reorienting babies I could find in books or on the Internet.

I was the one who stayed up with her, because I had the breasts. I’d learned to nap when she did, lying on my side in our king-size bed with her in the center, one palm on her chest, feeling the rhythm of her small breaths even in my sleep. One afternoon when she was about two weeks old, I woke to find Trey stretched out on the other side of her, propped up on an elbow, watching us with an odd, small smile on his face.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, sleepy and happy to have him home early.

He smiled wider, as if I’d caught him out, but he answered.

“I was thinking how the shape of us has changed. In ways I didn’t see coming.” I gave him a puzzled look, and he went on. “It’s like she’s this little pink dot, and you’re wrapped around her in a yellow warning circle. Then I’m wrapped around you, red. And nothing can get to you, much less her, unless it comes through me.”

I laughed. “Well, that sounds like a lot of manly bullshit.”

“I know, I know!” He chuckled. “Maybe it’s a mammal thing. Or maybe it’s because she’s so new and you’re so tired. Look, I know you’re not weak. I saw you push her out—you’re a superhero. But I still have this crazy urge to go punch a bear to prove I can protect you. Maybe when she’s older, and when you are up and about, I won’t feel this way. But now? I look at that floppy little thing and your tired eyes, and the shape of us feels like a bull’s-eye. The baby at the center, you around her, then me around you.”

It was manly bullshit, but I also liked it. He could be outermost ring in his shape, I decided, as long as I was the outer ring in mine. I had to be willing to wrap all the way around him and our baby and protect them, just as fierce and true.

I had been willing. Then. Now Robert was gone from our safe concentric circles. We’d been cored.

Trey didn’t even know it yet. I dreaded telling him. There were so many things we could say to each other, shattering, awful things that we would never be able to unhear. I’d been stupid, and I’d gotten so much wrong. I was the one who’d looked away from Robert. I’d been too afraid to call Trey or the police. I’d obeyed, blindly, and my decisions had led to Spence’s death. I could not bear it if my husband came at me, using all these things I blamed myself for as weapons, and yet I had such an ugly, blame-soaked question aimed at him. It was sour as bile, bubbling in the back of my throat.

What did you do?

As we drove through spats of dark, gray rain, I prayed hard that the answer would be, Nothing. It was Spencer. It frightened me, how badly I wanted the Wilkersons to say, Spencer Shaw? Oh, yes. We go way back, and we helped him do awful things. Illegal things to slant a court case his way, and of course, his partner, Trey, knew nothing.

It wouldn’t absolve me of my part in Spence’s death, but it would make it a little easier to live with. More important, it killed the awful question that felt like a gun in my hand, aimed at my husband. If Trey’s worst sin were being ignorant or blind to Spencer’s doings, then I’d already forgiven him.

Ever since they’d gone their separate ways in law school, Spence had been more colleague than friend, but Trey couldn’t cut Spence out entirely. They were family. They worked together at a firm where over half the partners were relatives of both by birth or marriage.