“Correction,” he said, “I’ll never say two friendly words to you again.”
“I feel sick,” Lucy said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Lucy ran to the bathroom and threw up.
The next several days were among the strangest of Lucy’s life. It was a long weekend, thanks to teachers’ conferences, and the dailiness of her world took hold again, almost imperceptibly. She shopped for groceries, she took Wyatt to Blake’s Ninja Turtles birthday party, she dropped off the dry cleaning and then picked it up again. She texted Ben, and she called him every chance she got, but she didn’t go into the city to see him, and things between her and Owen seemed to settle down. It almost felt like nothing was going to happen.
But then, late on an otherwise ordinary night, Lucy was straightening up the kitchen when Owen walked down the stairs and asked her, “What’s his name?”
“What’s whose name?”
“The guy,” said Owen. “Your guy.”
Lucy ran water over a sponge and squeezed it.
“Ben.”
“Ben? What kind of a name is that?”
“It’s a name, Owen. Ben is a name.”
“Is he a Benjamin? A Bennet? What?”
“I don’t know what it’s short for.”
“You don’t know what it’s short for? This man you’re in love with? You don’t even know his name?”
“I guess we haven’t spent a ton of time talking.”
“Nice,” said Owen. “Thank you for that.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.”
“You don’t think it’s weird that you don’t know this man’s actual name?” asked Owen. “Has it occurred to you that you might be just a little less important to him than you think?”
Lucy reached for her phone, which was charging next to the coffeemaker. She was angry. She fired off a text.
“His first name is Benjamin,” she said, reading her phone. “His middle name is Walter.”
“Good to know,” said Owen.
Lucy put the phone down. She started to wipe down the kitchen counters.
“So what is this, exactly?” Owen asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What is the scope of your relationship with this Benjamin Walter Somebody person as it pertains to our family? Why don’t you ask him that? Send him a text and ask him that.”
“He already told me.”
“Oh yeah?” said Owen. “What did he say?”
“He said he wants to marry me.”
Owen was motionless except for the fact that he was breathing fast and hard. Lucy could see his every breath.
“Get out,” he finally said. “Get out of this house. I want you out now, Lucy.”
*
Owen went upstairs and climbed into bed with Wyatt, who had woken up and was jabbering away to himself, softly, rerunning things through his head, repeating sentences that had imprinted themselves on his brain. (“During a lockout we hide in the library behind a bookshelf, and if we can’t get to the library we hide behind the yellow line, so the bad guy can’t see us. We hide behind the yellow line, very, very quietly, so he’ll move on to the next classroom.” My God, Owen thought, what the hell are they telling these kids in school?) Wyatt was talking in loops and fluttering his fingers in the air like butterflies. It was one of his ways of soothing himself, of making sense of his world, and the fact was, it worked pretty well.
Owen did not know how to soothe himself and could not make sense of his world, and so he’d crawled into bed with his son. His warm little body never failed to comfort. Someday, he would be too old for this. Someday, Wyatt would lose interest in snuggling his dad, he would balk, straight-arm him, or just say, “Dad.” It was one of those truths about raising a child that was almost impossible to imagine. The fact that these things would disappear, the body-to-body connection that began that first day in the hospital would one day come to an end.
Wyatt’s comforter felt like a lead blanket, probably because that’s what it was. It was weighted—not with lead, presumably—designed to calm kids with sensory issues, with spectrum-y problems of every sort. It was a variation on Temple Grandin’s squeeze machine.
It felt good, being under the blanket, like a full-body hug. Maybe I should get one of these for the master bedroom, Owen thought. He wondered if they made them in a California king, without the superhero design. Probably not.
“Dada, can I have your phone?”
Owen handed over his phone without resistance.
“Siri, show me videos of the Hindenburg,” said Wyatt.
“Okay, Owen, here are directions to Linden Road.”
“Siri, you’re stupid.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way about me, Owen.”
“Siri, show me videos. Of. The. Hindenburg.”
“Here are some videos of the Hindenburg I found for you online.”
How did we end up at the Hindenburg? Owen wondered.
Well, you watch enough YouTube videos about the Titanic, pretty soon an algorithm kicked in and started suggesting Hindenburg videos. It’s one of those natural progressions. What came after the Hindenburg? The Challenger explosion? The Twin Towers falling? Those South American soccer players who ate each other after their plane crashed in the Andes?
His wife was in love with somebody else. No, not “his wife”—Lucy. Lucy was in love with somebody else. Somehow that made it even worse. She loved him still, but she was “in love” with this other guy, this Ben character.
Falling in love was against the rules! He kept coming back to that. He felt as powerless as a kid on a school playground. No falling in love! No leaving! No falling in love and then leaving!
The Hindenburg was finally exploding. It had traveled from Frankfurt all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and exploded in New Jersey. How come I never knew any of this? Owen wondered. Like everyone, he’d heard about the Hindenburg, and as a kid he’d seen that black-and-white video with the news guy crying, “Oh, the humanity,” but he never knew the whole story.
People were fleeing, jumping, screaming, dying. Owen felt the weight of Wyatt’s special blanket, which failed to squeeze the terror from his chest, and tried to close his eyes. His last thought before sleep took him was that he was surprised only thirty-six people had died. It had felt like so many more, in that old video, as the flames engulfed the screen and the newsman cried.
Fifteen Months Later
Owen and Wyatt were heading up from the mailbox, sharing a big black umbrella. They were making plans to build a fire, and Wyatt was jumping in every puddle he could find. Owen flipped through the mail and saw an interesting envelope with unfamiliar handwriting. He read it while they walked.