Hush Little Baby (27 page)

I pull it toward me. It’s very heavy. The wood’s like stone, and the chest weighs almost as much as Addie, which is about thirty pounds. When I lift it into the light, I gasp. It’s the unmistakable deep purple color of zitan, a wood so rare and valuable only the imperial household was allowed to use it.

I struggle awkwardly to my chair, wondering how a piece so beautiful and valuable could be kept hidden beneath a bed.

I lift the lid, and inside is a framed photo, a gun, and a box of bullets.

A shiver shudders my spine.

I look at Sherman and I feel his pain, but I can’t shoot him. I believe in euthanasia, we all have the right to call it quits when we decide we’re done, but I can’t be the one to do it.

“Jillian, the photo, put it on the table so I can see it,” he wheezes.

I lift the silver frame from the box.

The woman in the photo is attractive, but was never beautiful. Her face is wide, and her teeth are too large. She squats on a lawn in front of a modest house with a baby cradled in one arm. Her other arm extends toward a toddler who takes a teetering step away from her and toward a man bent at the waist ready to catch him in outstretched arms. Sherman’s young smile is as large as the woman’s, and there’s so much hope and promise in that moment that if I didn’t know how the story ends, it would make me smile. As it is, it makes me want to cry.

I shift the clutter of pills and needles and the blood pressure cuff to make room, then prop the photo on its easel and angle it so it’s in Sherman’s view.

“Thank you,” he mumbles.

I take his hand and together we stare at the past and imagine how different things could have been.

*  *  *

The shadows grow long, and Sherman sleeps.

The box is still on my lap, the lid open. The gun stares at me, and I stare back.

Gordon has pointed a gun similar to this at me many times. It’s a favorite game of his. He comes home stealthily from work like a night prowler, stands at the foot of our bed with it aimed at my head, and waits for me to wake up.

“Bang,” he says, then he laughs.

I don’t like guns. Even looking at this one lying beside its bullets with its safety on scares me. It shouldn’t be so easy to end a life.

The door to the bedroom opens, and I turn to see Greta.

“You okay?” she asks.

I close the lid, and the sound causes Sherman to stir. His eyes drift to the photo on the table, then to me and the chest.

“Keep it,” he says. “I want you to have it.”

I shake my head.

“Please. I don’t want it anymore.”

“Sherman, I can’t. It’s too valuable.”

“It’s worth nothing.” He coughs and his face changes shades, and I put my hand on his to calm him.

“Okay,” I say softly.

He nods, and his eyes close. “It was a gift for her.” I need to lean very close to hear him, my ear almost to his lips. “But I ruined it and she left before I could give it to her.”

“It’s okay, Sherman. We all make mistakes.”

A tear squeezes from his eye.

“I just want to pretend I did it right.”

I don’t know if he means he shouldn’t have screwed up, or he should have given her the box, or he should have used the gun.

“I always was a coward. Thank you, Jillian. I’ll rest better knowing it’s gone.” And he stills to an exhausted sleep.

With the hoodoo in my hand, I stand and brush a kiss against his forehead.

Across the room, Greta fusses with the curtains, her busyness a poor disguise for the heaviness of the moment. We both know the time has come to say good-bye.

60

I
return home to two pleasant surprises, my dad’s spaghetti and hope.

“Jill, guess who I ran into at the market today?” my mom says, a smile playing over her face. “That nice mom of Drew’s friend, the chubby little boy. She’s always at the baseball games. I think her name’s Michelle.”

My dad’s at the stove making his famous marinara, and my mom’s slathering butter onto a French roll to make garlic bread. She pauses mid-stroke to set down the knife and open a can of tomato paste that my dad then picks up as though some telepathy told her he needed it at that moment.

Since I’ve returned home, I marvel at their relationship. They still quibble and squabble and insult, but they also have an amazing synergy. Like cogs in a wheel, they move around each other and with each other like they are one.

“And?” I ask, my mom having forgotten she was telling me about Michelle. I pick up an onion from the counter and begin to slice it.

“Oh, that’s right. Michelle. What a beautiful girl. She has wonderful legs…”

“Mom?”

“Right. So Michelle says hello, then she tells me that Gordon asked her if she could watch Drew for him tomorrow and that she agreed, and that she’s planning on taking the boys to the Discovery Center. She said she was going to get there at around ten, in case you…” My mom looks up at me and tries to give me a wink, but instead it’s a lopsided blink. “…Maybe wanted to go to the Discovery Center that day also by coincidence.”

My hand stops slicing, and there are tears in my eyes, and it’s not from the onion.

Tomorrow I’m going to see Drew.

61

I
t’s five minutes past ten. I sit in my car, my eyes straining toward the entrance gate of the Discovery Center’s parking lot, praying the next car will be them. I’ve been here forty-five minutes.

The exhibit today is magnets, and dozens of early birds are already inside. I’m jealous of each mom who walks through the door—some look exhausted, others look like they’d rather be anywhere than where they are—and I’m so envious that the world is tinted red.

Finally, Michelle’s white Sienna pulls into the driveway. I watch her park, then anxiously wait for the exodus. Max and Drew run ahead of Michelle and immediately begin to leapfrog over the concrete sphere balustrades. For a moment, I’m paralyzed to move and just stare at my son, his long limbs, his goofy smile, the awkward way he has of hitching up his pants that he insists on buying two sizes too large.

When Michelle reaches them, I step from my car. Michelle looks around, and when she sees me, she waves and smiles, then says something to Drew that makes him turn.

His face lights up, and he runs at me and I kneel to hug him, but he stops short of my outstretched arms, his eyes skittering side to side. He’s in front of his friend, and a hug is uncool.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Hi, Mom.” His smile is so wide I think his cheeks must hurt.

“Mind if I hang out with you today?”

He grabs my hand and yanks me toward the door, but I pull him back before we take a step. “You can’t tell Dad,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I don’t talk to Dad.”

My face tilts.

“He won’t call me the right name. He still thinks I’m Drew, and my name is Hawk.”

I give a small grin of victory. “Well, then, Hawk, even if he does call you by your name, you still can’t tell him. It’s important. I’m working on fixing things, and until I do, he can’t know I’m breaking the rules to see you.”

“Okay. Can we go now?”

And I let him pull me the rest of the way, no longer the least bit jealous of anyone.

*  *  *

Beneath the Plexiglas top of the table, the iron shavings shift as you move the magnets either from above or below. Michelle makes a neat pattern of little mounds while I create an ocean scene. The boys stand at a gigantic magnetic wall with metal cylinders and ramps tacked catawampus all over it. The object is to connect the pieces so a marble can roll from piece to piece across the wall.

“How you holding up?” Michelle asks.

“Not great, but I suppose as good as can be expected, considering.”

Michelle’s gorgeous as always. She wears a kelly green, sleeveless blouse that ties at the neck, white linen slacks, and beige sandals. She’s entirely unaware of it, but she’s a woman who turns heads—men in admiration and women in envy.

I feel dumpy in my Target maternity blouse and elastic-waist shorts. My ankles and feet have swollen to elephant proportions, so the only shoes I can manage are flip-flops.

Michelle’s smart and funny, and I regret not becoming friends with her sooner. She’s Stanford educated with a degree in literature and had originally thought she wanted to be a teacher.

“…but turns out I don’t really like kids other than my own.” She laughs. “I’m also basically too narcissistic and lazy to work. I like my tennis, my yoga, my novels—I like the idea of having a career, just not the part of actually having to work.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a girlfriend, and at first, I’m awkward and a little shy. Since Gordon and I started dating, he’s wanted me to himself, and I allowed him to isolate me.

“Look,” Michelle says.

I follow her glance to where the boys are. A group surrounds them, and I stand to see over everyone’s heads. Drew steps onto a chair, and Max hands him a marble. On the magnetic wall in front of him is an amazing track of switchbacks ingeniously designed to catch, drop, and turn the marble until it reaches the opposite corner. If the design is too steep, the marble will miss, and if it’s too shallow, its momentum will stop. There must be a hundred pieces tacked together to reach the end. Michelle and I have been talking for almost an hour.

It’s the moment of truth.

Max says, “On your mark, get set, go,” and Drew drops the marble into the first channel.

Clickety clack it rolls smoothly through the first row, teetering at the last cylinder for a breath-stopping second before dropping cleanly onto the channel below.

It takes almost a minute for the marble to make its journey, and there are several moments of suspense followed by universal relief as the marble makes it past an obstacle. It reaches the end and plunks into a bucket, and the audience breaks into applause. Max takes a dramatic bow, then raises Drew’s arm like a prizefighter who just won the heavyweight title. Drew smiles shyly, and my heart bursts with pride.

The boys move on to another adventure, and Michelle and I retake our seats. “That was amazing. Drew’s a special kid, very bright.”

“Not at school.”

“Yeah. I volunteered in the classroom last year. School doesn’t suit him real well. It’s too bad because he’s so smart.”

And with the segue, I tell her about Washington and how well Drew did while we were there, how he thrived and what a different boy he was.

“You should send him to Anneliese’s.”

“The private school?”

Michelle nods. “They take more of a holistic approach to education. To teach chemistry, they bake a cake. To learn about photosynthesis, they grow a garden. The founder doesn’t believe in traditional testing. It’s not for everyone, but sounds like it might be perfect for Drew.”

And it does. But I’m not the one who will decide where Drew goes to school. I won’t even have any input. I stare at my son, who now pulls himself up on a chair using a pulley system. He stares at the mechanism, and I know he’s figuring it out, but if I gave him a written test on it, he’d write his name and leave the rest blank.

After lunch, the boys return to more adventure, and Michelle and I stay in the cafeteria.

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s been really tough not being able to see them.”

“I can’t imagine. I don’t know what I’d do if I were in your shoes. It would be hard to contain myself.”

There’s something more in her eyes.

“What?” I ask.

She tears a napkin into small pieces; paper confetti sprinkles the table in front of her. “I sometimes wonder,” she says, “what would have happened if my father hadn’t died. I was fifteen when it happened, and I was just at that point when I felt like I could do something about it. And sometimes I wonder if I would have.”

I swallow hard. We’re entering dangerous territory.

“Every night, I used to dream how I would kill him. Mostly I imagined that I would somehow get a gun and shoot him. Other times I thought I’d poison him or stab him while he was sleeping. Then he died, and it was no longer up to me. But I still wonder if eventually, I would have. It’s like that William Blake poem.”

 “‘Tyger, Tyger’?” It’s the only William Blake poem I’ve heard of.

“Yeah. It’s one of my favorites, and maybe it’s because the meaning’s so close to what I struggled with back then.”

I try to recall the poem but can only come up with the first line,
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright; In the forests of the night.

“‘What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’” Michelle recites. “I think God makes us good and evil, and that’s what I struggle with. If my dad had lived, I think I would have killed him.”

I shake my head. “You interpreted it wrong. The poem questions how a single God could have created both the lamb and the tiger. It’s about God creating good, and Satan creating evil.”

She laughs. I love her laugh; it’s a sweet, high giggle that almost rings. “Nope. I’m sticking with my interpretation because you, girl, need to become the tiger.”

62

S
ince the kids returned home, I can’t keep still, and there’s not enough to keep my mind from obsessing on what I can’t have and on spinning in circles trying to solve the riddle of how to declaw Gordon so I can get them back. So I’ve decided to plant a garden.

I miss the Flying Goat and working with Sissy and Isi pulling weeds, harvesting the fresh vegetables, and planting for the next season. Tuesdays and Thursdays were our days to work in the garden. Sometimes Goat joined us, mostly just to bark orders, but it was always my favorite time when she was there.

My parents have a large yard. The house was built in an era when quarter-acre parcels were standard, and my mom, excited I was showing gumption for anything and thrilled to have my dad occupied, eagerly agreed to the plan.

My dad’s overseeing the project. He has a sheath of printouts an inch thick that he gathered from the Internet on garden design, fertilizer, drainage, and plants.

He sits in a lawn chair beneath the giant magnolia sipping iced tea and snapping orders like a warden overseeing a chain gang, while I wield my pick and shovel and answer, “Yes, Boss.” “This where you want it, Boss?” “I’ll get right on that, Boss.”