“That sounds like a good plan,” she says. She spreads her palm flat against his sleep-warmed back.
She tries to talk him into the playground in the state park in Monteagle, which is as far as she can tell a ghost playground, only ever populated by the two of them. But he wants to go to the one at the far end of Sewanee, by the community center, because it has a fireman pole, and she acquiesces because she finds it difficult, these days, to deny him much. He careens around the house while she tries to get them both ready, popping out of his seat at the kitchen table between bites of Cheerios. This behavior annoys her less than it used to do, in her other life, when she had reasons for rules and hurry. In fact it hardly annoys her at all. What does it matter? What does anything matter, except that she love him as much as she can? “Sit down and eat, Milo,” she says, and repeats. They have, as is often the case, two different conversations. “We can’t go until you’ve had breakfast,” she says, and he answers, “The fireman pole is really cool, right, Mom?” Yes, she says. Yes, it is.
At the playground, he leaps from the car as soon as she unbuckles him from his car seat and runs toward the jungle gym, chortling with eagerness and excitement. She follows slowly. To her relief they have the place to themselves. Sometimes she can almost believe they are the only people who live on this mountain, alone among empty houses and empty woods and empty stores.
She reaches Milo, who has stopped by the jungle gym and stands there frozen. “Are you going to climb?” she asks. Then she sees how unhappy he looks.
“There’s no one to play with,” he says. He sits down hard on the steps. His eyes well with tears that slowly spill over. This is the worst kind of crying, the truly stricken kind. He can lie on the floor and scream all day and Jennifer can remain immovable. But this solemn, big-eyed sorrow, this trembling-lipped heartbreak—this she cannot withstand.
“Oh, honey,” she says, sitting beside him and tucking him close. “I didn’t know that’s what you were hoping.”
The tears fall and fall. “I’m all by myself,” he says.
“You’re not by yourself,” she says, hopelessly. “You’re with me.”
He doesn’t respond to this, and why should he? It was a fatuous remark. She knows exactly what he means. He has no friends. He hasn’t been to a birthday party in more than a year—so long she’s amazed he can still remember their pleasures. The cake, the bag of favors, the manic joy. Though his fifth birthday is still six months away, he asks frequently if there’s any place on the Mountain like the warehouse-sized palace of bouncy houses where his friend Sam rang in his third birthday. She hates that place, and all others like it—those windowless hells of whirring air pumps and screaming children. And yet she’d gladly take him to such a place, if there were one nearby, and let him bounce until the cows came home. She’s been wondering who would bounce along with him, but she hadn’t realized he’d been wondering that, too.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she says.
“I want someone to play with me,” he says.
She says, “I play with you,” but this doesn’t stop the tears.
“I want to go to school,” he says, giving the last word an angry emphasis.
“School?” she repeats, as if she’s never heard of it. School, like birthday parties, is a relic of his past. He went to preschool at three and stayed six months. She’d assumed that, like so many other things, he’d forgotten it.
“It’s not fair,” he says. “I want to go to school.”
“What’s not fair?” she asks, but for this he doesn’t have an answer.
Snoop