One Small Thing (12 page)

The death of you
, Avery thought. There it was again, a mother who didn’t appreciate her child. For two years—really her whole life—Avery had wanted her own child. Just last week, she would have done anything to have a part of her and Dan brought forth into this life. How she would have cherished that child! How she would have loved it, whatever its sex, whatever its health. Of course, it wasn’t fair that there were mothers like this woman or like Randi. Sure, it wasn’t fair there were kids like Daniel. But Avery shouldn’t have to be the one to fix Daniel’s life, amend Randi’s, clean up the ugly mess she’d made. And Dan. His mess, too. She didn’t want a damaged kid, a scared, scrawny boy in a baseball cap; she didn’t want some low-life mom’s leftovers.

“Mr. and Mrs. Tacconi?” Avery started and almost cried out, standing up awkwardly as Dan walked over to a man and held out his hand. She looked down at her pumps, breathing in slowly, trying to cool her red face, trying to think of something that wasn’t judgmental. Karma. She still needed good karma.

“I’m Dan. This,” he said, looking back, “is my wife Avery.”

“How are you? I’m Vince Brasch. Let’s go to my office.” Vince adjusted his pants around his thick waist and pointed toward the hall with his thumb.

Dan reached for her hand, but Avery pretended not to see it, fiddling with her purse strap and clipping along behind Vince, who led them down a bright, white hallway, offices with glass doors on either side, each filled with someone behind a desk and one, two, three people on the other side, papers between them. As if it could all be that easy, life messes arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs, checks sent out, custody agreed upon, work arranged. All they had to do was sign and leave, and poof! Magic. Trouble gone.

Ha,
she wanted to blurt out.
Ha!
Do you know what happened to us? But she didn’t. She sat where Vince told her too, tucking her feet under her seat, waiting as he began to flip through a pile of folders and papers, the new story of their life.

Dan sat back and then leaned forward. “I don’t need a lawyer, do I?”

Vince looked up over his file. “A lawyer?”

“Yeah. I was thinking while we were waiting. I feel like there are legal things that are going to happen. Financial matters. Almost as if I need someone to advocate for me.”

“What do you mean?” Avery asked, cutting in. As she looked at Dan, the muscles in her back pulled tight. “Why on earth do you need someone advocating for you? You didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Whoa,” Vince said. “Let’s just start at the beginning. But first let me say that if this case proceeds as I think it will, yes, you will eventually need a lawyer.”

“Why? What are you saying?” Avery said.
Vince held up a thick hand. “For legal custody. For filing those papers. Formalities. Official documents. Custody. Support. Those kinds of things. But no, you don’t need an advocate. Not now.”

“Oh,” Avery whispered. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. Dan still leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, looking up at Vince, as if this heavy, overworked man could actually make sense of this tangled family. Family. Custody. She would have control of a child not her own. The work she would soon have again, her house, and her marriage would spin around a kid she had no investment in, except he was Dan’s. Or was probably Dan’s. But because he was Dan’s meant she
should
be invested, unless there was something so sick and twisted inside her that she should never have a kid at all.

“Did—was there a will or something? Midori mentioned there were documents,” Dan said.

“Yes. Not a notarized will or trust, drawn by a lawyer, but a written document—a letter—specifying who should be notified at her death, who should care for Daniel. That kind of thing. She wrote that you were the father and there was no one else to care for the boy.”

“What about grandparents?” Avery asked. “I mean, other than Dan’s. Or aunts or uncles.”

“Aves. Come on.”

“I just want to know. Even if he lives with us, we will want to know who his family is.”

Vince sat back in his chair and pushed away from his desk, crossing his legs, his nylon pants shushing and slipping as he moved. “Randi had no living parents. Or siblings.”

“Randi didn’t have brothers or sisters,” Dan said. “But what happened to her parents?”

“I know the grandmother is deceased. I’m not sure what happened to the grandfather. Ms. Nolan will have that information.”

“You’re telling me that if Dan isn’t the father, there is not one single living relative who would want to take care of this boy?” Avery leaned forward, feeling her purse cut into her stomach. She pressed harder, liking the feel of the stiff leather against her clothes and skin, the hard press of the metal clasp. “And if Dan is the father, we are the absolute only place he could go? There’s no where else?”

“Other than foster care. The state system. There’s adoption, of course, but for a ten-year-old boy with some concerns, there’s not much likelihood of that.”

“Adoption,” Dan whispered. “Concerns.”

Avery ignored him, leaning in closer. “What are these concerns? These issues? What’s wrong with him?”

“Avery?” Dan said, sharply, turning to her, his eyes dark. She swallowed and wished she could suck back the questions, but there they hung, mean-spirited in the air.

“Let’s see.” Vince ran a hand through his thin blond hair. In a year, he’d be sporting pink scalp, Avery saw, his male-pattern baldness only covered by a thin layer of light hair. All the strange talks he must have with people like us, she thought, brought it on early.

“School-wise, he’s tested below grade every year,” Vince said. “He’s going into the fifth grade, and last year, he tested third grade in reading and spelling. Math was a little better. His teacher recommended testing for learning disabilities—dyslexia—but that wasn’t done. I don’t know if you know the term—IEP. Individual Education Program. The teacher and the special education teacher and the school administration get together and determine the best course of action for the child. Curriculum, goals, support. Maybe psychological support at the school, tutors, that kind of thing. When he starts school here—“ Vince paused and glanced at Avery. “When he starts a new school, that will have to be done. Right away.”

“Does that take long?”

Vince rubbed his nose and shrugged. “A couple of weeks. A month. The child is taken out for testing during school time. Then everyone meets and decides what the best plan is.”

Dan nodded. “We have a good friend, a neighbor, who’s a teacher. My friend Luis. He can give us some ideas. My brother’s a teacher, too. He’ll know about all this.” He looked at Avery and then added, “I mean, if Daniel’s mine.”

Avery wasn’t listening, remembering the class at the end of the hall at Pine Hollow Elementary, the room full of kids with braces and padded head gear, the kids who were dropped off in the special, smaller bus. The ones no one wanted to talk to or play with. Benny Roticelli, who sat on the bench and wished he could run with the other kids, but he had a huge dent in the side of his head and dragged one foot behind him. All the kids whispered that he was supposed to die really soon, and sometimes, Avery and her friends would watch him sit, as if expecting him to keel over right there during morning recess.

“And he’s had a real trauma,” Vince continued. “Ms. Nolan told you about how they found him.”

“In the trailer. After Randi died,” Dan offered. “Alone.”

“Yeah. But imagine this: he’s alone for almost a week, finding what he can in the fridge, putting himself to bed, getting himself dressed in the morning. After a couple of days, he got hysterical. Confused. By the time the police found him, he was weeping in the corner of the trailer and wouldn’t come out. Basically, he’s not adjusting well. At first, he was silent, but now he’s fighting with the other children at the foster home.”

Dan dropped his head into his hands, and Avery looked out into the hall. In the office across from them, the mother and the son from the waiting room were sitting silently while a woman in a blue suit held up a piece of paper and pointed. Avery read her lips, “And item four says
blah, blah, blah
. . . and then there is this, item five. Very
blah, blah, blah
.”

“Is he okay now? I mean, from the trauma?” Dan asked.

“No.” Vince scooted his chair closer to his desk. His eyes were circled in white, and Avery could almost see the sunglasses he wore on the weekend. To do what? She looked at the photos on his desk, a boy, a girl, a wife. Swim meets. Picnics. A normal family.

“To be honest, no. He’ll need therapy or counseling. It’s not just Ms. Gold’s death that’s upsetting him. Apparently—apparently the home life degenerated in the last few years. The drugs. The people in and out. He hasn’t had it easy. This department can provide some of the counseling, but if you have the wherewithal, I’d recommend a private psychologist. If you can afford it, he’d also benefit from activities that put him in proximity of other children. Maybe martial arts. It’s social and develops hand-eye coordination. That kind of thing. It’s going to take a lot of time.”

That’s all everything takes
, Avery thought, watching the mother across the hall stand up and yank her son with her. Time. Time for her father to die. Time for her mother to recover from grief. Time for Avery to begin to forget her father’s eyes as she left the hospital room. Time for her uterus and vagina and fallopian tubes and ovaries to be tested and scrutinized and observed. Time for her to not get pregnant over and over again. Time for Randi to get hepatitis C and for her son to be totally screwed up.

All Vince and Dan were asking from her now was her time, and she sat back in her chair. Waiting felt like lying in the middle of the street with her arms spread wide, knowing that a truck was coming. Waiting was like a cold hand on her spine, squeezing. Waiting was her egg floating in the red darkness of her body, sperm nowhere near it. Waiting was a cold hospital room, her father somewhere down the hall dying. Avery had waited and waited, and as they went over details about the visit with Daniel, Avery didn’t know if she could wait again.

After a silent ride home, Dan went into their room, changed his clothes, and went out to the back yard. In a few minutes, Avery heard the lawn mower start up and then smelled the heavy green of fresh cut grass. Every since she quit her job, he’d decided they should economize, and instead of Ramon and his crew coming every week to mow and trim and prune, Dan did the work on the weekends.

Avery decided she would go work out at Oakmont, but before she changed into her workout clothes, she wondered if she should call her mother. She didn’t want to, fearing Isabel’s judgment, either against her or Dan. Or maybe it was simply Isabel’s words, the incessant flow of support and sympathy that Avery knew she wouldn’t believe, couldn’t feel, didn’t know how to take in. Or maybe it was that Avery knew Isabel might side with Dan, understanding how things needed to be hidden, just like grief under blankets.

But during the ride home, she wanted her mother against her skin, the way she remembered the comfort of her soft neck, forearms, palms, the softness of her blouse against her cheek, the way her mother would stroke her shoulder, and say, “It’s fine. Oh, sweetie, it’s just fine.” How long had it been since she’d let her mother say those comforting words? Since before her father died? When she was little and was hurt, Avery would unconsciously call out, “Mommy. I want my ma-me,” holding tight her bruised, skinned knee, her fractured arm, hurt feelings when Bonnie Randall or Megan O’Reilly teased her or when Mara threw her Disco Barbie into the street and Mr. Baumgartner ran over it with his Chevy Rambler.

But that was before. Now, when there was good news, the first person she called was Isabel, but with the bad, the dark, the wrong, she kept the words inside, talking to Valerie or maybe Loren, protecting Isabel from fights with Dan, arguments with Brody Chovanes, trouble with refinancing the house. The images of her mother in her room weeping were still too fresh, even fifteen years later, to imagine sending her back to bed with the words she had now: “Drugs. Eight-year relationship. Baby. Boy. Daniel. Ours. No more IUI. No baby now.”

Standing by the window now dressed in her tight, black workout pants, sports bra, and T-shirt, Avery held the phone to her chest. She watched Dan unplug the lawn mower from the power cord and then walk into the garage, returning to the yard with the hedger. He would be out there for the rest of the day, the shrubs whittled to bone, the lawn nude, all the perennials dead-headed to stems. She watched his arms, still as smooth, dark, and strong as they had been the first time she’d rubbed her hands over them, surprised by his muscles. “Do you work out?” she’d asked, and he’d laughed, flexing his biceps.

“I’m a he-man,” he’d said, pulling her close.

He still said that, all these years later. A he-man. Was that what Randi had thought? Did she love his arms and shoulders and chest and thighs and penis like Avery did? Did she love his soft, kind eyes and curly black hair? Did she love his voice in the bedroom night, telling stories about work and friends and the future, their future, the future where he would always be the same, strong and true, coming home from work every night? And yet, both she and Randi had been betrayed. He’d left Randi standing in the doorway of their shared apartment, pregnant. He’d left her to her drugs and her hidden responsibility. And Dan hadn’t told Avery about Randi, a woman he’d known for eight years. A woman he’d had to force himself to run away from. Randi had been that magnetic, that important. He’d loved her that much.