Actually, I didn’t know how to play Candy Land. I’d never played games like this when I was a kid, so the rules, the way to move from square to square, eluded me. There were no dice or one of those arrows you spin. I could sense Paul in his lump of covers on the bed but I didn’t try to wake him. Without thinking, I pulled a card from the stack. I moved Paul’s blue Gingerbread Man toward the yellow square the card matched. Then Leo’s red man. Blue, then red. With a sinking heart, it came to me that I didn’t need to know how to play. It was obvious. It was a race. Gingerbread Leo plodded past the Crooked Old Peanut Brittle House. Gingerbread Paul took a shortcut through the Gumdrop Mountains. After only a few turns, I felt the deep drudgery of having played this game too many times before. I slid the pieces steadily along the pastel track. Leo wound through the Lollipop Woods, and Paul got stuck on a licorice space. Just when Leo’s man was closing in on the Molasses Swamp, just when the outcome started to seem inevitable, though still a long way off, I happened to look up. “Paul?” He was watching me from his bed. His breathing deepened, then paused. Half his face was smashed against the pillow, but one eye looked out. Unblinking, blue as anything. “Paul?” I asked.
His pillowcase darkened with spittle as he started breathing again.
I cheated then: I set Gingerbread Paul on the final space.
The eye tracked over my shoulder and past my head.
I scrambled to my feet.
In the hallway, I ran into Leo, whose hands were dripping from the bathroom. “Umm?” he asked, still buckling his belt, leaving huge wet handprints on his blue cotton shirt.
I didn’t know what to say. “He won” is what came out, and I felt my voice hack through a crust of panic to say it.
“He did?” Leo looked truly relieved to hear me say it—as if winning Candy Land were an achievement, as if watching someone else move your piece around a board counted now as victory. “That’s a lucky break. He’s got to be happy about that. He’s got to be. He’ll be back to his old self before we know it. It won’t take much. He’ll be ready for kindergarten in a few weeks.”
“He’s only four!” It felt like a protest to put it like that.
Leo took that in, then rejected it. “But he’s got his head on straight. You know him. He’s very, very advanced for his age. He’ll be fine. He’s going to be fine.”
I shook my head. “He’s still so—” Defenseless, I meant. “Such a little kid.” I tried to corral some evidence to back me up. “He doesn’t even know how to read.”
Something about that, the fact that Paul couldn’t even sound out “train” in his very favorite book, made tears spring to my eyes.
Leo didn’t seem to see them. He put his wet hands on his hips, settled into the argument. He looked more comfortable now, back in terrain where he knew he could triumph. “Well now, that’s not strictly true, Linda. You know that. He can read a little. He can read ‘Paul.’ And ‘no.’”
“He’s memorized those words!” I was veering far past the point.
“I’m sure that’s not fair. What do you do when you read? Do you sound it out? What?”
I shook my head, bewildered. “Listen, Leo—”
“Now, Linda—” He reached out and cupped my hands in his wet palms. He was pressing them now, squeezing my fingers. His voice grew musical, the way it had with Patra. He’d gotten my hands wet, like his. He insisted, “You’ve been an enormous help. Now I’m just going to pop back in? See what he might be up for next? Excuse me a moment. All right?”
I left Leo and went into the main room, where the dishes from breakfast were still on the table. Drops of maple syrup had congealed to amber beads on the plates. Pancake crumbs were scattered in wide constellations across the wood table, the bamboo placemats, the maple floorboards.
Patra, still in her T-shirt, was cleaning the litter box. She was on her knees in the kitchen. With a blue plastic shovel in one hand and a white garbage bag in the other, she looked like a little kid playing in the sand. She glanced up at me, pushing hair from her eyes as I came around the kitchen island.
There must have been something in my face she didn’t like, because she took one look at me and started scooting back on her knees across the tile.
“Patra,” I said, coming forward.
She stood up, kitty litter embedded in her knees, pressed into her red skin in a gray mosaic. I took a step toward her, but she put the island between us. She held onto the white laminate counter.
I came around the island toward her, and she circled the same direction, moving away from me.
“Patra,” I said again.
“It’s okay?” she asked, pleading. As if I could do that for her, as if I could spare her.
“I think maybe—”
“Maybe?”
“He needs something. Like, from the drugstore, or—”
“Don’t tell Leo,” she interrupted.
I retreated from what I might have said. “Like Tylenol or something?”
“Leo says, control your thoughts. Think of Paul as a new day.”
“I can go to the drugstore for you, okay?”
“And who can stop a new day from coming?”
“I should go get something I think.” I licked my dry lips. “Patra? Patra?”
I’d been creeping faster than she was moving away the whole time. Now I was just inches from her. There she stood, with her reeking morning breath and kitty-litter knees. I could tell by the look in her eye that she was riding just the surface of her brain, bobbing on that choppy surface of hope and worry, so on impulse I kissed her on the lips, hating her purely in that instant, wanting to do more than that, to hurt her, to slap her, to get something back. Her lips were cool and flat, unresponsive. They didn’t seem like lips.
“Just the Tylenol,” she said, stepping sideways. Not really taking me in—not really a mind at all, just a bobbing boat on a wave.
“This is fucked,” I said softly.
“What?” she said.
She was too miserable to hurt though. Her T-shirt barely covered her panties. She was, every bit of her, limbs—gangly and thin, almost naked. The scar on her lip seemed to pulse red, then white. I was that close. I was close enough to see that.