Thursday afternoon, she put away early her pen, her pad of notes, the draft-in-progress of the novel. She was averaging about fifty-five pages a day, reading it through and marking it up. At this rate, it would take her all of the following week too before she was ready to start writing again.
She looked at the long supermarket list and missed Fancy, and wondered if she had made a mistake in not hiring another nanny. She had been spoiled by Fancy, often not seeing the inside of a supermarket for weeks at a time. It was all up to her now, and Martin was coming home the next day from China and the fridge was mostly empty, and the weekend weather forecast said it would be nice, and Martin would want to grill both evenings. Daniel would take himself to the glen and read while his father was basting and flipping the meat, calling out, “Rare, medium rare, medium, well done,” in a kind of singing rhyme, and Eric would stand next to his father, his ready helper, the extra set of tongs in his hand, waiting for a chance to show Martin he knew what he was doing.
She tossed into the grocery cart breakfast and school lunch staples, along with meats for grilling, gallons of ice cream, and in the pharmacy aisle, a box of baby aspirin. It was September after all, school was back in session, and it never took any time before one or both of the boys had the sniffles, a sore throat, a slight fever, and in Eric’s case, the dramatic moans of a child who wanted to stay home from school.
The boys were on the sidewalk when she pulled up to the school. Eric was jumping from square to square and Daniel had a book raised to his eyes. She honked and they piled in and were off, Eric jabbering about his day, about the boys he played with at recess, the math teacher he liked, and that everyone in his class had to take a test on Monday.
“The Q test,” he said, and Joan glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Do you mean an IQ test?” He nodded.
“I took that test,” Daniel said. “Was I in second grade like Eric when I took it, Mom?”
She nodded and said, “I think you were.”
She had missed the notice the school must have sent. She carried in the mail each day from their mailbox, but had not opened a single piece, just sat down at the kitchen table and went back to work. She would have to search the pile for the notice, see if there were special instructions about it. She couldn’t remember if there had been any when Daniel took that test.
They pulled into the garage, and Joan said, “I’ll pay you both two bucks to unload the groceries and put them away.”
Daniel snorted, and Eric, looking up at his big brother, snorted too.
“Five,” Daniel said, and Eric said, “Five,” and Joan laughed and said, “Fine.”
*
Joan woke Friday morning to Daniel yelling, “Mom, Mom, MOM, MOM!” and she threw off the light duvet, yanked the door open, and ran out, and there was Daniel showing her the empty bottle he found behind the living-room couch.
The kitchen clock read 6:30 and Daniel was crying. Eric was on the couch kicking his feet.
She had left the boxed and sealed bottle of baby aspirin bought at the market the previous day on the kitchen counter. She had forgotten to put it away.
“Goddammit,” she yelled, ignoring Daniel’s shock that she was swearing, thinking of all the crap Eric used to put in his mouth, that conversation Martin had with him when Joan feared he was suffering from pica, and now Eric, seven and old enough to know better, had torn open the box, peeled off the plastic safety wrap, opened the childproof bottle, stabbed through the silver shield, and eaten all two-hundred and fifty peach-colored baby aspirin tablets.
“What the hell were you doing?” Joan yelled at Eric, but it was Daniel who answered, still crying, saying, “Mom, I’m so, so sorry.” Eric looked at her calmly and said, “I was watching cartoons.” As if that answered the question, made sense.
“Daniel, call Trevor, ask if his mother can pick you up. Tell her you’ll be outside at eight forty. Watch your brother until I throw on some clothes. Make sure you eat breakfast when we’re gone. Make yourself lunch.”
Gastric lavage, that’s what Eric endured, a flexible tube inserted into his mouth, down his esophagus, coming to rest in his stomach. Saline flowed through the tube, then up it all came, hundreds of dissolved aspirins, regurgitated, the cornflakes, milk, and sugar he’d also consumed at dawn, the process repeated twice until nothing was left inside.
His big brown eyes gleamed black when he said, “Mom, what’s the big deal? They tasted like candy. Plus, I got out of going to school today.”
*
Martin did not experience the fear, or the panic, or the guilt Joan felt. And after the fact, the way Eric told the story, it was almost funny, showing his father Friday night, just home from China, how he had munched the aspirin as if they were SweetTarts, how long the tube had been that went down his throat.
This, she thought, is what I’ve been worrying about all week, the arc of tragedy I was waiting for.
She had spent all summer encouraging both children to heed their own paths, to not blindly follow another child’s wrongdoing, to not jump off a figurative cliff just because one of their friends did, and, well, Eric apparently was following his own path, a child who did not think ahead, who was immune to consequences. He did not have pica, there was no definitional phagia for the mass consumption of baby aspirin, but listening to Eric bragging to his father about his bravery, that the gastric lavage had not scared him at all, that he had not cried even a little, Joan shuddered and she felt a chill, and wished he suffered from pica, at least then there would be a logic to it.
That sense of recollection and déjà vu she felt after their first day of school, it wasn’t about Daniel and his questions that came out of nowhere about her life as a writer, but how she had felt when Eric refused to nurse, squirmed in her arms, chose no as his first word, refused books, then diapers. From his entry into the world, Eric dictated the progression of his life. Punching against parental boundaries and limits was to be expected, in teenagers, but a seven-year-old evincing so early a predilection for risky behavior? Was she reading Eric accurately—that he was thrilled by the events he created?