The radio is tuned in to some AM sports station, and they’re giving the play-by-play of the basketball game. It isn’t going so well. It’s all I can do not to scream.
I drive past the grocery store, the library, the post office, the elementary school and a public park. The highway turns residential, but I don’t slow down my pace. The streets become pockmarked but wide, lined with dozens of full-grown trees. In the distance I spy my house. I keep my eyes on the house the entire time. I hold my breath and dig down deep onto the accelerator. The speedometer surpasses forty-five miles per hour, reaches for fifty. I close in on my house. The finish line.
What I fail to see is little Teddy from across the street, scampering out from behind a tree. Two steps ahead of him bounces a red rubber playground ball, which Teddy trails blindly into the middle of the street. It happens so fast. I don’t have time to react.
First there’s nothing, and then there’s a boy, a four-foot, forty-pound figure standing in the middle of the street with eyes terrified, his mouth formed into a silent scream. Staring at me.
If I hadn’t had two drinks at the bar my response time might have been quicker; if I weren’t under so much stress I wouldn’t have been driving so fast. But as it is, I’m slow, my movements asthenic, and it takes time to react. Time to raise my foot off the accelerator and move it to the brake. To press down hard on the brake pedal. To divert the steering wheel from its course. The car slips past Teddy by mere inches, and as it does, I hear the boy finally scream.
I come to a stop on the lawn of a neighboring home, missing their mailbox by a hair. My hands are shaking, my legs like sludge as I thrust the gearshift into Park and open the car door, tumbling out onto the street below, my feet barely making contact with the road. “Teddy,” I say, lurching around the side of the car to find the boy lying on the concrete in the fetal position, embracing the ball. For a moment I think he’s hurt, maybe even dead. I’ve hit him, and I start running to his side, saying his name over and over and over again, “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” and I fall to my knees to shake him awake, to bring him back to life. I’m about to employ my resuscitation skills, but then I notice that Teddy is breathing, and there is no blood. He’s okay, he’s okay, I tell myself, and I feel a smile cross my lips, a relieved, thankful smile. Thank God he’s okay.
“Get your fucking hands off my son,” says a voice, and my head rises sharply to see Theo marching into the middle of the street toward me, arms already swinging. His fist connects with the side of my head, and before I can react the world spins. I stagger, and Theo comes at me again, connecting this time with my gut so that I bowl over in excruciating pain, clutching my stomach. I’m apologizing profusely, spouting a surfeit of confessions and excuses. “I’m sorry,” I say and, “I didn’t see him,” and then I place the blame on Teddy and claim, “He came out of nowhere.”
“I saw you,” barks Theo as he lifts Teddy from the concrete. “You were driving too fucking fast, and you know it,” he says, and then he steps closer to me, and I prepare for another beating, in the mouth this time or maybe the nose, as his fist forms and he leans in close to me. By now Theo’s wife, Emily, has stepped from their house, and Teddy leaves his father’s arms to run to his mother, who collects him in a maternal embrace. My car, ten feet away, still idles, keys in the ignition, engine running. My own house is quiet; Clara hasn’t seen a thing.
“If I ever see you speeding again,” he says, face pressed so closely to mine that I can see the pores of his skin, the way he salivates in anger. His eyes are more than just angry, but irrational and deranged, the very same way I’d be if someone ever messed with my kid. Emily calls to him, “Theo, enough,” but like a belligerent dog disobeying its owner, Theo doesn’t come.
“If I ever see you speeding again on this street or anywhere ever again,” he says, stepping somehow even closer now so that his spittle flies into my eye, “so long as you shall live,” as Emily encroaches on the conversation now, tugging desperately on Theo’s arm to try to bring him inside, “I will kill you. I will fucking kill you, Solberg,” he says, and Emily’s and my eyes grow wide, fully dilated, at exactly the same time.
I have no doubt in the world that he means it.
CLARA
My father calls. It’s midafternoon.
“Daddy?” begs Maisie at the sound of the phone ringing, but I say no, it isn’t Daddy.
“Boppy,” I say, and Maisie smiles gaily.
“Your mother has been asking for you,” my father says, “again,” though we both know this isn’t true. She isn’t asking for me so much as she’s asking for Maisie, for the four-year-old version she believes is still me. We feed into her delusion sometimes, letting her believe that Maisie is me because it’s far easier than telling her the truth.
My mother is not that old, and yet it’s hard to remember sometimes when her mind has stopped working and her body is quickly following suit. No one knows for certain how much time she has left on the ever-dwindling hourglass of her life. Some doctors say five years, others say seven, though one way or another she’s simply biding time as we all are, biding time until we die.
“You’ll come see your mother?” my father asks, and I say that I will.
*
I open the front door to step outside with Felix in my arms and Maisie on my heels, and, as luck would have it, a black sedan sweeps down the street, a chauffeured car that stops three houses away at the home of Jake and Amy Lawrence, a childless couple in their thirties. They’re business moguls, and one or the other of them always seems to be on the road. Amy leaves their house towing a rolling suitcase in a pair of sling-back heels. Today it’s her turn to go.
But none of that matters. What matters is that Maisie sees the blackness of the car as it drives slowly past, tortoise-like and deliberate, the driver’s eyes converging with hers, and now her eyes are locked on that car as it hovers down the street waiting for Amy, Maisie’s knees trembling, her eyes filling with tears. She says nothing, and yet her body language says it all, the distress and the agitation as she turns on her heels and begins to run. She’s fast, much faster than me, as I lug Felix in my arms and attempt to pursue her throughout the home. I call to her over and over again, Felix frightened by my screaming, and so he, too, begins to scream.