My shift ended and Jenny still hadn’t called. I was tempted to hang around Eddie’s and wait to see if she would, but Darryl’s bad mood had only worsened. He yelled at another delivery driver, who changed the station on the boom box. “What the fuck, Stan? It was just about to reach the chorus.” I didn’t want to see what Darryl would shout at me. I avoided him until my shift ended and was out the door at 7:00 p.m. on the dot.
There’s nothing wrong with driving by her house, I told myself. I wouldn’t stay long or get out of my car, I just wanted to make sure she was okay. Her car wasn’t in the driveway, and my mind felt so tangled I was afraid what it would look like once I unraveled it, if the knots were even untie-able. I pictured her car at the bottom of a cliff, even though I didn’t know where she would find a cliff in this area. Men with vacant eyes and a dead-end alleyway. Tripping on a sidewalk crack, her head slamming open onto the pavement, red ribbons of her brain leaking out. Who would be at her hospital bedside?
I was seeing Jenny’s body floating in the Pacific Ocean when her car pulled into the driveway. The car had barely stopped when she opened her door and jumped out, ran to the passenger side, and dragged Adam out. They walked two steps together hand in hand before he stopped, pulled his hand from hers. He stomped his foot on the ground, yelled something I couldn’t hear. It was the most emotion I’d seen out of him. Jenny bent down and tried to take his hands back in hers and he ripped them away again, crossed his arms. She looked panicked, agitated, mostly scared. They both started to cry.
I was out of my car and moving quickly toward them before Jenny could wipe the tears from her face. I’d never been much of a runner, had moved even less since I got pregnant. The short sprint to them left me winded, a pounding in the space below my lungs, above my stomach. I stood panting within touching, tear-wiping distance of her before I fully realized the decision I had made, the choice to insert myself when I could’ve easily started up my car and pulled away, or even slumped down in my seat and watched quietly over my dashboard.
We all stood frozen, an awkward triangle. Jenny blinked twice, a tear dripped down her chin into her open mouth. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, which only succeeded in making her face wet and shiny, the moisture emphasizing every line on her forehead, cheeks, the dimple in her chin. She looked cartoonish, a drawing of a starving, cave-dwelling creature. Adam made no effort to stop crying or wipe his tears, just centered his big eyes on me and waited.
“You didn’t order a pizza,” I said. “I was worried something was wrong.”
Jenny stiffened. “Nothing’s wrong.” There was a sharpness, a tone I had never heard her use before. It hurt having it directed at me, the edges of those two words cutting, making it hard for me to swallow. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“Wait.” She grabbed my wrist before I could turn. “I’m sorry. I’m not mad at you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Words were funny like that. One moment they could wound you, turn into bricks that would sink to the bottom of your stomach. The next moment those bricks were transforming into butterflies, eagles, pterodactyls, Frisbees, various flying objects rising to your chest and nesting in the spaces between your ribs. I smiled at her, relieved that we were all good. Her fingers felt warm around my wrist.
“I could use your help, actually.” Her grip on my wrist tightened. She stopped and let go of me and I grabbed her wrist back, tried to send a message through eyes and touch: Ask me anything, I can help with anything. “Could you watch Adam for a bit? I won’t be gone long. I just need—”
“No.” Our gaze broke and we looked down low to see Adam with his arms crossed, shaking his head. “I won’t stay with her. You can’t leave again.”
Jenny crouched down to his level, pushed his hair back, and kissed his forehead. “I’m not leaving. I’ll just be gone for a little while.” She kissed his forehead twice more and it seemed almost like a routine, as if she knew every step she had to take in order to calm him down. I tried not to think about how many times she’d done this before, how many times she would do this again. Another forehead kiss. “You won’t even notice I’m gone.”
“I notice,” he said.
I put my hand on Adam’s shoulder, kept my eyes on Jenny. “I’ll watch him. Go, do whatever you have to do.”
My hand felt awkward on Adam’s shoulder as Jenny thanked me, handed me the house key, and told me just to let him watch TV, there was money for takeout in the left-most kitchen drawer, the one with all the batteries. She gave him one last forehead kiss before she turned and got into her car, pulled out of the driveway without looking at us.
We watched her car disappear around the bend. I was thinking about how I didn’t have Jenny’s cell-phone number, didn’t know how Adam liked his sandwiches, crust on or off. “So,” he said, tugging on my sleeve until I looked away from the spot where Jenny’s car had been and at him. He was no longer crying. “What do we do now?”
* * *
—
ADAM HAD THREE stuffed animals he was on speaking terms with—Mr. Fuzzmister, King Cotton Candy, and Eric. I gestured to the rest of the stuffed animals that crowded his bed, were crammed on his shelves. “What about all these guys?” He shoved the chosen three into my arms. “They’re not important.”
He insisted on showing me every inch of the house. He gave anecdotes as he pointed out landmarks—“And this is the hallway where I tripped once. This is the wall I drew on and Mom yelled at me. I like the color green and I want to grow up and own a store that sells large plants in tiny pots.” He delivered all of these stories flatly, without looking at me. I carried the stuffed animals and nodded at everything he said and tried to ask good questions: “What shade of green and what type of plants?”
We ended the tour sitting on the living-room carpet. He made me smell a section of the carpet, didn’t tell me until my nose was buried deep in the fibers that he’d peed there once because his friend Stevie double-doggy-dared him. I jerked my head up and fell onto my back, and he laughed. I thought that maybe we were friends now, that I would become one of the stories he told as he showed new people around the house, someone he told Stevie about, would beg Jenny to let me come over and watch him. This is why Jenny trusted me to watch him, I thought. She knew that Adam and I would get along, that if we were birds we’d be flying in the same flock. I started laughing along with him, and then he stopped, stood up, and said, “Okay, I want to be alone now.”
He walked out a sliding door that led to the backyard, closing it a little more than halfway, just open enough to let a light breeze in. I stayed lying down, turned my face toward the sliding door so the breeze hit my face. I felt something that looked and tasted like rejection, but was deeper, more acidic, and I wondered if this was the feeling that parents got when their children slipped from their grasp, their gaze, and went somewhere they could not, a place where their voices became static and their hands lay stupidly at their sides—what do you do when you know you can do nothing?