Was SpongeBob over already? Didn’t they play those shows in an endless loop?
She padded to the room in black stockinged feet. All was as she’d left it, the bowl of baby carrots untouched on the leather coffee table, SpongeBob bellowing as he ambled on his weird bowlegs across the screen, but Noah was nowhere in sight. Something flashed in the pass-through to the kitchen. Was it the reflection of the flickering gas lamp?
“Hey, look at this!”
It wasn’t the flickering gas lamp.
As she rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of him, standing by the kitchen counter next to an open carton of organic omega-3-enhanced brown eggs, smashing one after the other over his springy blond head, she felt the night slipping away from her.
No; she wouldn’t let it. Anger rose from nowhere: her life, her life, her only life, and couldn’t she have a little bit of fun, just one night? Was that really too much to ask?
“See, Mommy?” he said, sweetly enough, but there was no mistaking the willfulness glowing on his face. “I’m making egg-Noah. Get it? Like eggnog?”
How did he even know what eggnog was? Why did he always know things that nobody had told him about?
“Watch.” He picked up another egg, swung his arm back, and hurled it at the center of the wall, whooping as it splattered. “Fastball!”
“What is wrong with you?” she said.
He flinched and dropped the egg in his other hand.
She tried to modulate her voice. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed a bit frightened.
She tried to calm herself. “You’re going to have to take a bath now. You know that, right?”
He shuddered at the word. Egg was rolling down his face, oozing into the hollow of his neck. “Don’t go,” he said, blue eyes nailing her to the wall with his need.
He was no fool. He had calculated that the thing he hated most in the world was worth tolerating in order to keep her home. He had wanted her there that much. Could Bob, who had never even met her, compete with that?
No, no, no; she would go! For god’s sake: it was enough! She wouldn’t succumb to this kind of blackmail, especially from a child! She was the adult, after all—wasn’t that what they always said in her single moms’ group? You make the rules. You need to hold firm, especially because you’re the only adult. You’re not doing them any favors by giving in.
She lifted him in her arms (he was light; he was only a baby, her boy, only four). She carried him into the bathroom and held his squirming body tightly in her arms as she turned on the water faucet and checked the temperature.
He was writhing and screeching like a trapped animal. She stepped to the edge of the bathtub and placed him on the bath mat (legs sliding, arms flailing), somehow managing to pull off his clothes and flip on the shower.
The scream could probably be heard all the way down Eighth Avenue. He fought as if his life depended on it, but she did it, she held him there under the water and squirted shampoo on his head, telling herself again and again that she wasn’t torturing anybody, she was only giving her son a very-much-needed washing.
When it was over (a matter of seconds, though it felt endless) he was lying in a heap on the floor of the bathtub, and she was bleeding. In the midst of the chaos, he had craned his neck and bitten her ear. She tried to wrap him in a towel, but he wrenched away from her, scrambling out of the tub and into his bedroom, skidding on the floor. She took some antibiotic from the medicine cabinet and applied it while she listened to the howls reverberating throughout the house, filling every cell in her body with woe.
She looked in the mirror.
Whatever she was, she was not a woman going out on a first date.
She walked to Noah’s room. He was on the floor, naked, rocking, with his knees clasped between his arms—a puddle of a boy, pale skin glimmering in the green light cast by the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d pasted on the ceiling to make the tiny room feel bigger than it was.
“Noey?”
He didn’t look at her. He was crying softly into his knees. “I want to go home.” It was something he said in times of distress since he was a toddler. It had been his first full sentence. She always answered in the same way: “You are home.”
“I want my mama.”
“I’m here, baby.”
He looked away from her. “Not you. I want my other mother.”
“I’m your mommy, honey.”
He turned. His doleful eyes locked onto hers. “No, you’re not.”
A chill ran through her. She was aware of herself as if from a distance, standing over this shivering boy under the eerie light of the fake stars. The wood floor was rough beneath her feet, its knots like holes a person could fall through, like falling out of time.
“Yep. Your one and only.”
“I want my other one. When is she coming?”