“I’m optimistic. I have to be. He’s my boy,” she said. There was a pause, Katie already on her feet, the cord, wreathed with dust, tangling up her legs.
“Katie, I bet we’re both sorry now about the other day.” Helen kept talking. “Mothers, you know. When they’re born, we grow a new set of teeth. What’s that line, ‘There ought to be a law against a mother like that’?”
“I have to go, Helen.”
“I guess I’m glad to know it wasn’t his girlfriend,” she said, taking a breath. “It was just some random monster.”
*
Stumbling into the bathroom, Katie ducked her head under the sink faucet, gulping hungrily.
Silver, gray, metallic, her head clunking and clanking from one image to the next, like coins jangling against each other.
Silver, gray, metallic, like coins. Melted coins.
Drew’s fever-streaked palm open before as they stood in the garage, and the three silver specks stippled in the center.
She stood in the garage, barefoot and wearing only Eric’s old BelStars Booster T-shirt, eyes on the greasy blot where his car was usually parked.
Kneeling, one hand holding back the bowing handle of the rusting lawn mower, its wheels turning, she used the light from her phone to look.
Down on her knees, now, fingers spreading, she searched. Even in the crease between the concrete and the garage wall.
There was nothing glinting.
The greasy blot, though—she crawled over to it. At night, it had looked like a pit. Now she could smell something. Motor oil, and something else.
“I saved them.”
“Show me,” she said.
He pointed to his window, to a piece of Scotch tape, a few inches long, sealed diagonally across the pane.
It was only when she walked right up to the sill that she could see them: three hard sparkles, one as large as a dime, the sun perforating the center.
Her arm stretched, she tore off the tape and crumpled it into her palm.
“It’s not safe,” she said. “There’s lead in it.”
He looked her.
“Like in the school basement?” he asked after a few seconds. “They used a big vacuum cleaner. They wore these white space suits and big masks.”
“Are you sure you didn’t dream that?” Katie said, rolling the tape tighter and tighter in her palm.
“You always think I dreamed things that were real. They came when we were at that meet after Halloween, the one far away. We didn’t get back in time to empty out my cubby. The Parthenon got ruined.”
“Oh, Drew, yes,” Katie said. “That was rotten.” Drew’s prizewinning sugar-cube Parthenon—the same kind she’d made when she was in fourth grade more than a quarter century ago. Like his sister, he did everything with precision, until his hands were hard with glue.
The entire drive home after the meet, she and Eric kept promising they’d make it back in time. We’ll rescue the Parthenon, kiddo! Eric said, pounding the gas.
But by the time they got home, the remediation workers had thrown it away, dumped it in a bin out behind the school.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said now. “We all felt really bad about it.”
Drew didn’t say anything, just looked back up at the window, the sticky streak where the tape had been.
“Drew,” she said, looking at his digital clock, “where’s Devon?”
“School,” he said. “Mrs. Chu came and got her. She said you needed to sleep and to let you.”
“Drew,” she said, rolling the tape in her hand until it was fine as wire, “go watch TV. Watch anything you want. Mom has to work.”
It was as if her body were moving on its own, pure muscle memory.
Later, she would wonder why she didn’t even hesitate.
Standing over the sink, she tore every bit of the tape off her fingers, where it stuck, glue-thick, to her nails. The sound of her own breaths like an animal.
The garbage disposal hummed and grinded and then she wondered if it would be enough. Would the tape, like potato peels, celery string, grip and line the pipes, stay there forever?
Devon, you ok?
Yes, she texted back.
Have u heard from yr dad?
Dont want to talk abt dad
I’m coming to get you
Mom, no. I want to be here.
Everything will be ok, D
Ok mom
It was all adrenaline, blood. Breathe in, breathe out.
Back downstairs, turning on her laptop, nearly shaking it to life.
Eric had taken the car to the shop—which day had that been? Was it a tune-up? A cranking sound, the alternator again? There were always car problems, both their Fords gasping past a hundred thousand miles, countless out-of-state meets, the daily sojourns to and from gym, school, booster meetings.
She couldn’t recall seeing his car the day they learned about Ryan. Katie had driven them all to practice in her old warhorse, Eric decamping to a nearby diner with his laptop.
All she could remember was his was in the shop the day of Ryan’s funeral, and when she came home after, she’d found Eric in the garage, his car returned.
And the garage—hadn’t it smelled of something? Solvent, or aerosol.
Or was it paint?