“Shit, I’m sorry,” he says. “She might not be like that about this. I know she really likes you. She told me as soon as she met you she thought you could be friends. I’m just dumping my own crap on you again. I don’t know why I keep doing that.” He shakes his head. Then, to her enormous surprise, he starts to cry.
Her first instinct is to touch him, but she represses that. Her second is to look around for the boys, thinking that to see Sebastian in tears might alarm Ben, if not Milo as well. But they’re still barely in sight and happily oblivious, on the other side of the playground. Sebastian’s turned even farther away from her now, with his hands on his face, and she can see that he’s trying to stop crying, that he’s trying to hide. God, sometimes she really does feel sorry for men. Manliness—a trap they build themselves, and then invite their sons to join them in. And little boys are so tender! Milo’s heart breaks much more often and more extravagantly than Zoe’s ever did.
She scoots a little closer. She hesitates, but it seems cruel to leave him sitting there in tears, untouched, so she puts one gentle hand on his shoulder. He tenses, trying to throw off her ministrations. He’s afraid to let go. Automatically she squeezes the shoulder a little, as she would in a massage, pushing back against the body’s resistance. She feels how knotted up he is, how deep the tension goes. “Oh,” she says. “You’re sad.”
He sniffs, scrubbing at his face. “Clearly,” he says in self-mockery.
“No, I mean, you’re really sad,” she says. “I can feel it in your body.” She works the knot a little more. “You’re really sad. Maybe more than you realize, even, it’s down that deep.”
He swallows. “Oh,” he says.
Her instinct tells her to keep touching him, because he needs the comfort. But it’s been too long since she touched a man, and it seems dangerous to her, her desire to keep doing it. She takes her hands away and stills them in her lap. If he were on her massage table, she could find the buzzing, knotted places in his body, separate the balled-up threads of pain and sorrow, and he could tell her whatever he wanted to tell, facedown toward the anonymous floor. He could cry. Sometimes people weep on her table. They find relief in that unburdening. This is one reason why her clients love her, why they call her again and again, why they are so grateful. That should be past tense, of course. Loved, called, found. Because then her daughter called the police and the clients never called again. She says, “People who seem angry—often what they really are is sad.”
“I love Megan,” Sebastian says, suddenly forceful.
“I know.”
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”
Jennifer says nothing. What is there to say? She can’t grant wishes. Sometimes I miss my husband, she thinks of telling him. Sometimes I’m glad he’s dead. I don’t have to wonder where he is, what he’s doing, or who. I don’t have to worry about all the ways he’ll scar my son. I don’t have to watch myself give in again and again, audience to my own relentless weakness. I thought if he were gone I wouldn’t hate myself so much, which isn’t true, as it turns out, but still his absence is as close as I can get to freedom. There’s a certain clearheadedness now, there’s a kind of lonely clarity— “Sebastian!” Megan calls. They both jump. Megan is visible at the place where the playground meets the parking lot, approaching.
Sebastian waves. Jennifer lifts her hand and drops it, trying not to look nervous, trying to smile. Sebastian looks at Jennifer with apprehension. “Do I look like I’ve been crying?”
“A little,” she says. “It could be allergies.”
“I don’t have them,” he says. “But I could maybe be getting a cold.”
They watch Megan’s approach in silence. Jennifer wonders if she should slide farther away from him on the bench, but Megan would see that, and it would look suspicious, in a way it’s possible her current proximity to him does not. She has a despairing sense that Megan will register a new intimacy between her and Sebastian and mistake it for something it isn’t.
“Hey,” Sebastian says.
“Hi.” Megan’s a little breathless. She looks around. “Where are the boys?”
Sebastian points. “On the other side of the jungle gym.”
“I don’t see them.”
“They’re there.”
Megan looks at Jennifer for the first time, flashes a tight little smile. She says to her husband, “When I got out of class I saw the school had called, so I went by there. They told me what happened.” Her eyes flick to Jennifer, then back to Sebastian. “I saw your car was still in the parking lot, so I thought maybe you were down here.”
“The boys wanted to play,” Sebastian says. “It was Ben’s idea.”
“Uh-huh,” Megan says. “Are they playing together well?”
“They’re fine,” Sebastian says.
“But how do you know, if you’re sitting here talking, and they’re over there?”
“Nobody’s screamed.”
“Uh-huh,” Megan says again.
If Jennifer weren’t here, would Megan unleash her fury? Would she yell? Would she say, Nobody’s screamed? What the fuck is wrong with you?