“How do we—okay. Right.”
“..….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….……..….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…”
“Oh, it’s cold!”
There’s no more speaking after that—but as I strain to hear what’s happening, I detect a kind of whisper—the sound of a pencil scratching on paper.
Drawing?
Is he drawing again?
I go downstairs, sit at the kitchen table, and wait.
Normally Quiet Time isn’t much more than an hour, but Teddy stays in his room twice as long. And when he finally comes down to the kitchen, he’s empty-handed.
I smile at him. “There he is!”
He climbs up onto a kitchen chair. “Hello.”
“No drawing today?”
“Can I have cheese and crackers?”
“Sure.”
I go over to the refrigerator and fix him a plate. “So what were you doing upstairs?”
“Can I have some milk?”
I pour him a small cup of milk, then carry everything over to the kitchen table. As he reaches for a cracker, I notice his palms and fingers are covered with black smudges. “Maybe you should wash your hands,” I suggest. “It looks like you’ve got pencil on them.”
He hurries over to the sink and washes his hands without comment. Then he returns to the table and starts eating the crackers. “Do you want to play LEGOs?”
* * *
And for the next few days, things are pretty normal. Teddy and I fill the hours with LEGOs and puppet shows, Play-Doh and Shrinky Dinks, coloring books and Tinkertoys and endless trips to the grocery store. He is a brave, adventurous eater and he loves to sample strange and exotic foods. Some days we’ll walk to Wegmans and buy jicama or a kumquat, just to see what they taste like.
He’s one of the most curious children I’ve ever met, and he loves to challenge me with imponderable questions: Why are there clouds? Who invented clothes? How do snails work? I am constantly reaching for my phone and checking Wikipedia. One afternoon in the swimming pool, Teddy points at my chest and asks why I have bumps poking through my swimsuit. I don’t make a big deal out of it. I just say they’re part of my body and the cold water makes them hard.
“You have them, too,” I tell him.
He laughs. “No, I don’t!”
“Sure you do! Everybody does.”
Later, when I’m rinsing off in the outdoor shower stall, I hear him knocking on the wooden door.
“Hey, Mallory?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you see your girl parts?”
“How do you mean?”
“If you look down? Can you see them?”
“It’s hard to explain, Teddy. Not really?”
There’s a long pause.
“Then how do you know they’re there?”
And I’m glad there’s a door between us, so he can’t see me laughing. “I just know, Teddy. They’re definitely there.”
That night I mention the incident to Caroline and instead of laughing she seems alarmed. The next day she comes home with a giant stack of picture books with titles like It’s Perfectly Normal! and Where Did I Come From? They’re way more explicit than the books I had growing up. There are detailed definitions of anal sex, cunnilingus, and genderqueer expression. With full-color drawings and everything. I mention that it all seems a bit much for a five-year-old, but Caroline disagrees. She says it’s essential human biology and she wants Teddy to learn the facts at an early age so he won’t get misinformation from his friends.
“I understand, but cunnilingus? He’s five.”
Caroline glances at the cross hanging from my neck, like somehow that’s the problem. “Next time he has questions, just send him to me. I want to answer them.”
I try to assure her that I am totally capable of answering Teddy’s questions but she makes it clear the conversation is over. She’s already opening kitchen cabinets and noisily gathering pots and pans to make dinner. It’s the first night in a while she doesn’t invite me to stay and eat with them.
* * *
Two-hour Quiet Times are getting more and more common, and I don’t know how Teddy passes the time. Sometimes I’ll lurk outside his door and I’ll hear him speaking to himself, weird nonsensical fragments of conversation. Or I’ll hear him sharpening pencils or ripping pages from his spiralbound sketch pad. Clearly, he’s still drawing—and somehow hiding his work from me and his parents.
So Friday afternoon I decide to do a little snooping. I wait until Teddy goes to make number two, because I know I’ll have a good ten or fifteen minutes (he sits on the toilet for a long time, flipping through a stack of picture books). As soon as I hear him lock the door, I hurry upstairs to the second floor.
Teddy has a bright sunny bedroom that always smells a little bit like urine. There are two big windows overlooking the backyard, and Caroline has instructed me to leave them open all day long, even if the central air is running, because I think this helps to diminish the smell. The walls are painted a cheerful sky-blue and adorned with posters of dinosaurs, sharks, and The LEGO Movie characters. Teddy’s furniture consists of a bed, a short bookshelf, and a dresser, so you might think a search wouldn’t take very long. But I know a thing or two about hiding stuff. During my first year on OxyContin I was still living at home and I had little stashes of pills and paraphernalia all over my bedroom, crammed into places my mother would never think to look.
I roll back his rug, I pull down all his picture books, I remove the dresser drawers and peer inside the empty cavities. I shake the curtains and stand on his bed to carefully inspect the valances. I sift through a mountain of stuffed animals piled high in a corner of his bedroom—a pink dolphin, a tattered gray donkey, a dozen Ty Beanie Babies. I tug the sheets off his mattress and reach beneath the mattress pad and finally I lift the entire mattress off the frame, turning it onto its side, so I have a clear view of the floor.
“Mallory?” Teddy is shouting through the door of the first-floor powder room. “Can you bring me toilet paper?”
“Just a second!”
I’m not finished yet. I still have to go through the closet. I sift through all the adorable outfits that we can never convince Teddy to wear—beautiful collared shirts, miniature khakis and designer blue jeans, tiny leather belts for his twenty-two-inch waist. I spy three board games on the top shelf of the closet—Clue, Mousetrap, and Sorry!—and I’m certain I’ve found my treasure trove. But then I open the boxes and shake out the boards and all I find are game pieces and playing cards. No drawings.
“Mallory? Did you hear me?”
I put the games back in the closet, close the door, and make sure the room is more or less as I found it.
Then I grab a roll of toilet paper from the laundry room and hurry downstairs to the first-floor bathroom. “Here you go,” I tell him. He opens the door a crack, just wide enough for me to pass the paper.
“Where were you?” he asks.
“Just tidying up.”
“All right.”
He pushes the door closed and I hear the button lock click.
* * *