Then I felt bad because I really loved Robin and my two little zipadees. I could still make it right. If I had to break Amy’s other arm, I’d get the bracelet back. My kids were the whole show. Without them I was lost. Without Robin my life was garbage. In the mornings I dropped Kaya off at preschool and she ran, skipping, waving, jumping in the air, blowing kisses. Beanie bounced up and down in my arms, yelling nonsense. I wanted to squeeze them both and chew on their little craniums. I couldn’t sit here another second. After all this hocus-pocus, I just wanted to go home.
Then he stopped, and in the strobing grayscale on the screen you could see the ends met. The bones lined up.
I’d fallen asleep in the waiting room, under a plastic fish, a bluefin tuna, waiting for her paperwork, and woke up with stinging eyes, my head pounding, in a terrible mood. The thing in my pocket buzzed and jangled. It was Robin, asking if I had a moment to speak to my daughter. She sounded oddly at ease. In some bizarre anomaly across the waves of electromagnetic particles, the phone call came through in a clear connection. I could hear Kaya whimpering in the background, and Beanie too, though he sounded more indignant, like a weary traveler upset with his hotel bill.
Some issue required my immediate intervention. The endlessness of it, the detail work, the centrality of children, the sudden refusals, inexplicable urges, stunning meltdowns, the marital pieces spinning around that core, flung with force in every direction—in one day I’d forgotten it all, and I’d probably forget it again as soon as this problem resolved itself or the connection died, but I remembered it now. The late-night interludes of drunken oneness, the smooth articulations of the umbrella stroller, the tiny bite marks in their hand-cooked leftovers, the fantastic expense of our babysitter, regardless of my father-in-law’s help. So exhausted at dawn that the sight of the neighbor’s softly mown grass brought tears to my eyes for the beauty of this world.
“Is everything okay?”
“Kaya rode her tricycle into the pit behind Elizabeth’s house.”
I held the phone sweatily, feeling the floor of the waiting room sway beneath me.
Our kitchen windows looked out on that scene. Blue tarpaulins hung off the back of their three-story renovation, flapping day and night like a sailboat. Curtis and Elizabeth’s yard had been excavated and was now occupied by their new foundation, but the permit for the dumpster was late, so the rest of the hole had been filled with demolished house, scraps of lumber, metal framing, shredded aluminum siding, and broken glass. In the alley between our two houses, Kaya and a girl named Julia liked to ride down the slight incline with their feet off the pedals, a straight shot into what used to be a patch of grass. During the week, the workmen with their funny nicknames parked their trucks there to block it off. When the girls were in the alley, someone was supposed to stand at the bottom.
“And while Kaya was bleeding all over the bathroom floor, Beanie sucked the propeller out of that clown whistle and almost choked to death.” Robin sounded more than calm—loose, almost thrilled. “I had to hold him by his feet and smack him to get him to cough it up.” It sounded like she’d been drinking. “He didn’t cry, but I cried, and Kaya cried, although she was already crying.”
“Please start at the beginning.”
“Okay.”
“Where were you?”
“Inside getting Beanie.”
“You had the monitor outside and you heard him wake up?”
“Yes, idiot, I had the monitor outside.”
On one level I understood that somehow Robin had orchestrated these events, possibly in their entirety, out of frustration or temporary insanity from lack of sleep, spun them into something shocking and only loosely based on fact, to punish me, that maybe none of it had happened and my real son and daughter were lying on the carpet having Elmo juice, watching Fairytopia, but on another level I wasn’t so sure.
“Brett said she screamed the whole way down. She was still holding the handlebars when he got there.” I pictured Kaya hanging on to her tricycle like some X Games hot dog. Robin calmly listed the injuries: “A skinned shoulder blade, a deep cut on her hip, a cut on the back of her head, a worse cut on her hand, and two skinned elbows.”
The nurse emerged from the hallway and beckoned me. I waved her away. Brett had been in his own yard, ten feet over. I imagined him stepping down that narrow plank the workmen used to enter the pit, an old two-by-twelve that never broke but bent and flexed when they rolled wheelbarrows up and down it. Maybe she’d asked him to watch when she went inside. He was probably the last person you’d want out there looking after your kid. He had a sure-handed nonchalance, a passive negligence, a malicious inattention. He made no move to intervene when a kid fell from a tree or left half her face on the sidewalk; he seemed merely curious, vaguely affirmed, as though their injuries verified or satisfied something. He had three boys. The force of so many sons vying for their mother, wishing him dead, had taken its toll.
“She’s shivering now and won’t stop crying and says she’s hungry but won’t eat.”
Kaya took the phone, and I heard that familiar modulation of my own voice as it rose and softened, telling her how sorry I was that a bad thing had happened. It was strange to hear myself, that part of me, in the clinic waiting room.
“Dat’s okay,” she said, showing a maturity and compassion that sometimes shocked me, and then she said something about a boo-boo, I couldn’t understand what, and then the call died. I called back. Again the nurse waved at me to follow her down the hall. I called several times, and pictured myself standing over Brett, bringing down the baseball bat, over and over. I tried Robin’s cell and got her voicemail. Amy walked toward me, unsteadily, with her splinted arm in front of her, the other hand supporting it. The nurse came up from behind her and handed me a plastic bag with some forms and Amy’s wallet and sunglasses and said, “The local wears off in an hour.”
“What does that mean?”
“Then it’ll hurt.”
The pedicab took a right off Main Street and turned in at the campus gate. I paid him fifteen bucks to drive half a mile and caught her when she stumbled down from the cab, then led her slowly up the stairs of her dorm and found the room key in her pocket. Threw her clothes on the floor to clear the bed, then barred the door when she tried to pack up and drive home. After she promised not to leave, I made her lie down and helped her with the pillows, and hid her car keys, and went back into town to get her prescription filled. When I got to the room, she was resting. I went out a second time, to buy ice.