the infinite family project (year six)
Izzy woke to find Cap sitting on the floor by her bed. He was reading a book, taking bites of an apple, completely oblivious to her presence. Izzy leaned over the bed and rubbed his hair to get his attention. His hair, sandy blond and wild, hanging down over his face, hadn’t been cut in years. Izzy remembered when the children had experienced their first haircut at age two, driving them all to a hair salon in Murfreesboro. One by one, the children had climbed into the chair and watched, almost stricken with bewilderment, their own reflection in the mirror as the stylist clipped their hair into new shapes and styles. Each child was then given the clipped hair in a plastic bag for their memory boxes. Izzy remembered that Cap, on the way back home as he placed his hand inside the open plastic bag, rubbing the hair between his fingers, had forcefully declared that he did not want to experience a haircut ever again. And since the children were still being collectively raised, no single parent to decide that their own child needed a haircut, the decision had been left to the children. Some of the kids wanted monthly haircuts, while a few, Cap being one of them, opted to never have their hair cut again. As a result, Izzy had always loved watching Cap’s hair whip around when he played with the other children, the way he would frantically sweep his bangs out of his eyes as he chased after another kid. He looked slightly feral, but his calmness, his thoughtfulness, belied that wild look. Now, Izzy lifted his bangs so that she could make eye contact with him. Looking into his light brown eyes, she smiled, and he returned the expression.
“How long have you been there, buddy?” she asked him, and he thought for a moment and then flipped through the pages of his book. Holding the read pages between his thumb and index finger, he held up the book for her inspection. “This long,” he said.
In the first month after being reunited with Izzy, Cap had trouble sleeping on his own, which was a common problem for all the children, so used to sleeping in the communal bedroom with each other, and so he would often crawl into her bed at some point in the night. A therapist had worked with all the kids, using a Sleepeasy program involving books and night-lights and noise machines and “sleep zones,” but the children were used to the sound of ten bodies sleeping in unison, of waking to find their brothers and sisters surrounding them. As Dr. Grind emphasized, only the passage of time would alleviate the stress and, in time, it did. The first time Cap slept through the night in his own bed, Izzy was surprised by how saddened she was to not find him beside her, however necessary the development was.
Izzy lay on the bed, watching her son as he returned to his book. They had a little more than an hour before Izzy would take him to the main building to meet up with the other children, all of them now in kindergarten, for their lessons. “You want some breakfast?” she asked him. He nodded and then offered, “Fruity Pebbles?”
“When did you have them last?” she asked him.