“Would she come over and visit if they were here?”
I shrug. “I hope so!” I shrug again. “She’ll probably feel a little better next week. Or the week after. We’ll just have to see!” My voice cracks but I cough over it, then wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Stupid onion!”
Teddy is still looking at me like I’m telling him there is a Santa Claus: like he wants to believe but knows he shouldn’t.
“Is she gonna die, too?”
* * *
Long before the sling, during the fall before my mother got sick, when the universe of our tiny immediate family was still in perfect alignment and I was the sun of Teddy’s world, we got into a new routine: once a week or so, after school pickup, I’d take him to Costco for a snack: a churro or a slice of pizza or some ridiculous thing they called a chicken bake (chicken, cheese, bacon bits, all wrapped up in a cheese-covered crust). Costco was right off the highway that connected school to home, and it seemed as good a place as any to kill that strange and slightly sad gap in time between after-school and going-home, especially as the fall would wear on and it got colder and darker earlier and earlier.
We didn’t go to Costco every day: most pre-sling days I’d take the dog for a walk; some days Teddy would have a playdate or stay a few hours at the after-school program, building forts in the woods behind the school or shooting baskets in the all-purpose room that’s kind of a gym but isn’t really or playing made-up card games with the younger kids, imagining that they were all his siblings. Other days we’d just come home and he’d play outside if the kids on the street were there or he’d watch TV and I’d make him a snack—a little frozen pizza or some macaroni and cheese from a box or a bowl of ramen noodles, torn from the plastic package, the bowl on a saucer with a napkin underneath to catch the spills. But for a few months we’d gone to Costco on a pretty regular basis, and while it wasn’t something I bragged about on social media, since his churro or slice of pizza or chicken bake didn’t come with a side of organic broccoli or a soccer practice or a French horn lesson, it was something he liked to do—with me—and so, we’d do it.
I loved taking Teddy to Costco and sitting and eating and talking at a white indoor picnic bench with a red plastic umbrella under all that unnatural artificial turkey-neck-revealing fluorescent light. It was my guilty pleasure, what I looked forward to most every week. Because even then, years before it happened, I knew that there would come a time when I’d be begging him to do things like that. Being a child’s primary focus is temporary, fleeting; I knew that the aperture was closing, that the light on me would eventually dim and I’d be replaced with friends.
Once he’d decide what to order, I’d pay for it, then he’d find a table and get the napkins while I waited for the food and got the little cups for free water. Life is made up of tiny rituals, and those were ours, the ones I loved most, especially the part when I would find him and set the food on the table and sit down across from him. While I watched him eat, we’d talk about his day, my day, his friends, my friends; we’d talk about which we liked better, plain pizza or pepperoni, churros or fried dough, the Stones or the Beatles; and while the questions and answers would vary, the feel of our Costco trips was always the same: it was special time. Joy is joy, no matter where you find it or what you’re doing, and those afternoons at Costco, sitting together under all that harsh light, was our version of special time.
As my mother began dying that winter, we even made a friend there: a big white-haired old man who always wore an L.L.Bean field coat and wide-wale corduroys, and who would often appear in the snack area at the same time we did. He cut such an unusual figure and had such an otherworldly presence when we’d talk that I started to wonder if Virgilius—that was actually his name—was real or if he was instead some sort of apparition, a phantom, a ghost, sent to teach me something I didn’t know I needed to learn. Natural or supernatural, by early spring as my mother continued her decline, we stopped seeing Virgilius at the snack bar. The emptiness I felt at the unexplained absence of a virtual stranger made me almost wish we’d never met him. There was only so much loss I could brace for.
Teddy would finish his churro or his slice, or both, and then we’d do a fake-shop: I’d use my expired membership card to enter the warehouse area and walk around without buying anything. We were trying to save money, and not renewing our old membership seemed like a smart thing, as did walking up and down the aisles and looking at all the shiny stuff we knew we weren’t going to buy: flat-screen TVs and video game systems, keyboards and guitars, toaster ovens and vacuum cleaners, giant slabs of meat and huge boxes of cereal. Not even a weirdly packaged DVD of the first season of There’s a Bird on Your Head that Teddy once found and held up to his face until I took his picture with my old BlackBerry, back when he would still let me do things like that. After a complete circuit through the store we’d leave, slipping out through an empty register aisle, past the snack area where we’d started, toward the automatic sliding doors into the cold and out to the car, looking one last time for Virgilius.
Sometimes Teddy would ask me if I thought we didn’t see him anymore because he was sick and dying, too, and unlike some of the other questions he’d ask me then—What kind of cancer does Bubbie have? Why does she sleep all the time now? How come she isn’t fat anymore? Is she going to die?—I didn’t have an answer for him. All I knew was that his absence was proof that people stayed with you for the rest of your life no matter when you stopped seeing them or when their body disappeared from your world.
Just as we’d go through the sliding doors and my face would hit the rush of cold air, just when I’d feel myself slipping away into the familiar comfort of that dissociative state, away from remembering that my mother was dying, Teddy would take my hand on the way to the car, and bring me back. We were buddies on a field trip, going somewhere on the other side of the glass together.
The Secret Pooper
On the way to school the next morning, I plan on telling Grace that we want to be a People Puppets host family. I’m leaning out the window, staring at an addition to a house that seems to have sprouted up overnight, which is when Teddy pokes me on the arm.
“Someone’s been pooping at school.”
“Well, I should hope so,” I say, distracted by a monstrous three-story turret-like-silo jutting out of the left side of a blue-black Gorey-esque Victorian. “That’s what bathrooms are for. And it’s bad to hold it in every day, by the way, if that’s what you’re still doing. There’s no shame in doing your business at school if you have to. Everybody poops.” I wonder if I’ll ever pass up an opportunity to bore him with a teaching moment.
“No, Mom. They didn’t poop in the bathroom. They pooped in the hallway in front of the bathroom. Like on the floor.”
I turn to him. “On the floor?” He nods. I’m certain that I’ve missed something. “Start again.”
He does—and this time he describes, in a fair amount of detail, how the first incident started when Ms. Grace, as the students call her, ran into the classroom, wild-eyed and almost in tears and yelping in a high-pitched squeal to Mr. Noah: “Oh my God! There’s something you need to see right away!”