“He’s very into that thing,” the girl explained. “So, I’m Patra, the parent. He’s Paul, the kid. And so far, you’re Blank, the neighbor.”
The kid laughed. “Blank.”
Up close, she looked too young to be anyone’s mother. She didn’t seem to have eyebrows, and she was as skinny as I was—curveless—wearing tennis shoes, leggings, and long wool socks pulled up over the leggings to her knees. Her hair was the same wispy orange as the kid’s, but frizzy, held down with a blue plastic headband. When she smiled, the headband glided backward over her scalp. “I’m kidding. You’re—”
Mattie, I thought, as a breeze tugged the resins out of the trees. “Linda,” I said.
The boy in a crouch on the ground pulled on his mother’s sleeve. “I have something to tell her.”
“Just say it.”
“It’s a secret,” he whined.
“Then just go up and say it!” she urged him forward. I was on one side of the road and they were on the other. “Look before you cross. Though”—she spoke to me—”I haven’t seen a single car go past since we stopped. It’s marvelous. The locals here read in the middle of the highway.”
Did she wink then? Was she laughing at me? Was I supposed to laugh?
To the kid she said, “Right, left. There you go.”
At the trial they kept asking, when did you know for sure there was something wrong? And the answer probably was: right away. But that feeling faded as I got to know him. Paul’s breathy way of talking, the way he had to sit down when he got excited—these tendencies seemed to me, more and more, just the way he was. Paul was fussy and fragile, then whooping and manic. I got used to his moods. Though he was always getting mistaken for someone older, he was four the spring I knew him. He had droopy eyelids, big red hands. He had four-going-on-five-yearold plans: visit Mars, get shoes with ties. He was building a city out of stones and weeds on his deck. Almost every piece of clothing he owned had a train on it, Thomas the Tank Engine, or nineteenth-century cattle cars, or steam engines stamped across his chest. He’d never been on a real train in his life. All spring long, he rode buckled into the plastic seat on the back of his mother’s bike, to the grocery store and the post office. He carried around that old-man’s leather glove wherever he went, its fingertips worn to purple, palms green with rot.
He handed it to me once he crossed the road. He gave me the glove, then put his hands in a fist at his crotch. He made me bend down to hear him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered.
Oh please, I remember thinking. The sun, which had been gleaming, moved off the road into some other part of woods. What was I supposed to do about that? I looked at his mother, who was wiping her hands on her sweatshirt, righting the bike, calling the boy back to her. She walked the clicking bike across the road by the handlebars. A child’s helmet dangled by the chin strap from her wrist.
“I think he has to—” I began. But it seemed obvious. The kid was holding his crotch with two hands. It seemed unnecessary to say what he said, to use those little kid words out loud. And anyway, she was already lifting him up, wedging him in his seat, buckling him down.
He seemed about to cry out, so his mother kissed him on the forehead, brushed hair from his eyes. “No luck with the bike, kiddo, but I can push you as we walk and sing. How ‘bout that?” She eyed the glove in my hand, so I passed it to her, and she pressed it back into his arms. “There. What would you like to sing, hon?”
“‘Good King Wenceslas,’” he said, pouting.
“Is that okay with you, Linda? Want to walk with us back?” She smiled over his head, and I saw how quickly she shifted between faces, between soothing mother and conspiratorial adult. It pleased me for reasons I could not explain to be part of the latter allegiance. I nodded, surprising myself.
When we got to their house, the door was unlocked. Paul turned the handle with two hands. Inside, mother and child stomped on the mat. “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” he growled. “I smell the blood of an Englishman,” she responded. Then they both plopped on the floor, he in her lap. She took off his shoes while eating his neck.
This is a thing, I thought, as they played the ritual out. The cats watched warily from the windowsills. I stepped off the mat and into the room, and it was like wading into warm water—the heat was jacked up that high. I could feel all the layers of my clothes at once, all the weight I’d been lugging around, and then I could feel those layers sequentially, from the outside in: hunting jacket, sweater, flannel, T-shirt, no bra, sweat. Sweat dragged in a trickle from my left armpit. I shivered.