On-screen, a group of children played in a field. Wildflowers swayed in the breeze, birds sang, the children laughed and called each other dickheads. I could feel something bad was going to happen to them and I didn’t want to know what. I changed the station to one that showed handsome men and women running through obstacle courses in bathing suits. “There was one weird thing, though,” I said. “The old lady said he was holding something tight, with both hands. A little toy police car. I spent weeks thinking about that police car, wondering why he had it and what he was planning to do with it. At times, I stupidly thought he saw it lying on the sidewalk somewhere and picked it up for me. When I was younger, I loved toy cars, and he would drive me to this big hill by the park and we’d watch my Hot Wheels cruise down. He would run to the bottom and grab every one, run back up so I could do it again. Maybe he saw that toy car and remembered that time and was feeling sentimental.” I grabbed a piece of bread and swallowed it without chewing. “But then I remember who he was and I know he probably just saw a shiny thing on the sidewalk after he’d taken a swig and tripped, picked it up as an afterthought.”
It was quiet for a moment, just the sounds of cheers from the TV as a woman with a six-pack and thighs wide enough to have their own ZIP code swung from rope to rope over a pit of mud. I wondered if Jenny had beer in the fridge. “I remember one of the fish’s names,” Adam said. “It was a blue fish with a long face and a frowny mouth.”
“What was its name?”
“Joe.”
“Why Joe?”
“There’s a boy named Joe in my class who always flicks pencils at my back. Sometimes he spits in my pudding at lunch.”
“This fish reminded you of him?”
“No, I just wanted to have a Joe that I liked.”
The woman fell into the pit of mud and the crowd cheered even louder. “Do you want to keep flipping through channels?” I asked.
Adam took the remote from me. “Sure.”
* * *
—
MY FINGERS ran through his hair over and over.
Adam was rapidly flipping through channels when, suddenly, he stopped and I said, “Is this a good channel? Do you like eighties workout videos?” and he just mumbled a “No,” yawned, and lay down, rested his head in my lap.
I’d sat stiffly, unsure of what to do. I looked around, like there would be someone standing there to help me and move this child from my lap. For the first time, I wondered if Jenny was actually coming back soon or if I’d spend days, weeks here, throwing baseballs against walls and eating cold Chinese takeout and Twinkies.
Adam turned over so his face was toward me, and he looked so different when he was asleep—younger, more vulnerable—and it felt like the most natural thing in the world just to reach out and brush his hair off his forehead.
I kept brushing, as if my touch granted a layer of protection. He was so small, and this simple fact made me ache in a place deep enough inside me that I wasn’t sure how to claw it out without mangling other parts of me in the process. When the ache began to affect my breathing, I scooped him into my arms and carried him upstairs to his room. Each step, I marveled at how little he weighed. I’d carried bags of flour at Eddie’s that weighed more than him. I tucked Adam into his bed and arranged his stuffed animals in a line around him, bodyguards.
I walked out of his room and couldn’t help but turn to my left and stare at the closed door at the end of the hall. Jenny’s room. During Adam’s tour earlier, he had merely pointed to it, saying he wasn’t allowed in there, Mom spent a lot of time in there with the door closed. I hesitated for only a moment before I pushed it open.
The room was bare and I could see her clearly in there—lying on her bed, on top of the covers, hands crossed over her chest, eyes wide open and watching the shadows on the ceiling move. A laundry basket was in one corner and it was overflowing. I picked up one of the shirts poking out, a baggy long-sleeve she would be swimming in. I knew it was hers because of the tiny holes on the collar. The night I’d watched her, she chewed on the collar of her shirt while she rearranged the fridge. I brought the collar to my mouth and bit down. I chewed and sucked and tasted cloth and sweat, her sweat. It made me shiver, thinking about how her mouth had been in the same place as mine.
An engine’s rumble and a car door opening and closing. I dropped the shirt and went to the window. For a moment, I worried that the man from the photo was home, but then I saw Jenny’s ponytail swaying in the glow of the garage light. I took one more long suck and dropped the shirt back in the laundry basket.
* * *
—
I WAS WAITING right at the front door when she came in. She said, “Oh,” when she saw me, like she forgot I would be there.
“He’s in bed and we ate and watched TV,” I said. Images of Adam and the baseball. “He’s a good kid.”
She softened. “He really is.” There was a pause. “Do you drink whiskey?”
I thought at first she was calling me out and was relieved when she quickly laughed, shook her head. “That was stupid of me. You’re pregnant. Of course you don’t.”
I stared at a point just above her head. “Yeah.”
“Would you be okay watching me drink some?”
Back on Jenny’s couch, TV off this time. She drank straight from the bottle, a brand I’d only ever seen on the high shelves of the liquor store. Every time she lifted her arm to drink, her shoulder brushed against mine.
“You must think I’m the worst mom.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Well, I do.” She took a long pull. “Ask me where I was tonight.”
“Where were you tonight?”
“Drove around for a bit, wound up at the movies.”
I could feel her waiting for me to say something, waiting for me to judge her, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t angry. Picturing her in a dark air-conditioned room, popcorn on one side, Coke on the other, made anger bubble up inside me. I felt it stinging the back of my throat, thinking about her sitting comfortably while Adam and I sweated and threw. But then I looked at her next to me—the way she was gripping the bottle, how she stared down into it, like she was hoping if she stared long and hard enough the solution to her problems would appear in the honey-brown liquid—and the bubbling stopped and melted into a tenderness, hot and thick, and I mostly just wanted to be in that theater with her, hear her laugh at the funny parts. “What movie did you see?” I asked.
She choked on the drink she was taking, coughing whiskey all over her shirt. I watched a few drops dribble out the sides of her mouth. “That’s what you have to ask me? That’s what you gathered from that statement?”