Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“Look, buddy, there are going to be plenty of people who will say mean things about me. That’s what it is to be a leader. People need someone to ridicule, and it’s always the person who steps up. Understand?” I ask. He nods, though his expression borders on vacant, like I’ve awakened him from a deep sleep. “Tell me that you understand.”

“I understand,” he says, the split in his lip bobbing as he speaks. Maybe I’ll have one of my buddies in the IRS run an audit on Simmons Tractor and Freight. Maybe I’ll reroute the new highway in my district so it runs right through the Simmons’ family home.

“When I get home, I’m going to teach you how to fight, okay? I’m going to teach you how to throw a punch and mean it.”

“I did mean it,” he replies. A baby bird, I think. Or maybe a baby mouse. It makes me a little angry, that he doesn’t have the sense to know he’s too damn small to be picking fights.

“You don’t have to fight my battles for me, understand? I can do that myself. I don’t need a little kid to stand up for me,” I say, and watch him deflate in front of me. Shit. This is not what it means to be a better father. “I just don’t want you getting hurt on my account, buddy. It’s not worth you getting hurt, all right?” He nods, but he doesn’t look at me. “All right. Are you surviving grandma’s cooking?”

“She made me eat goat cheese.”

“Did you like it?” I ask.

“No, it was gross,” he says.

“Well, listen, Mom is going to be back with you in a few weeks, and then it’ll be just a few more months until I’m home too. And hey, I’ll take you to a Brewers game, how about that? We can get those seats behind the dugout again, would you like that?” I ask, painfully aware that I’m pandering to my son, giving him whatever he wants so he won’t be so damn sad anymore. I’m just as bad as Beth, I think. Every time I try to toughen him up a little, I end up coddling him.

“Yeah, sure, Dad,” he says.

“You keep your chin up okay?”

He nods, and we sign off. I sit back in my chair, my fingers at my temples, trying to resolve the mix of pity and guilt and shameful disdain that always curls through me when I speak to my son. The unqualified optimism I felt that first day in the hospital room feels like a shrunken, petrified memory now. A better man, I think. Yeah, I’m fucking father of the year.

It’s the same house. That’s all I can think when I follow Tom inside. He didn’t sell it after all, which I know had been a consideration when money started getting tight after my accident. I’m grateful that it’s still here, this house on Hinman Street in Evanston, because it is so achingly familiar even though it’s been eight years since I’ve run my hand over the smooth wood of its banisters or felt the floors echo under my feet.

Jack and Katie stand at the foot of the stairs when we enter, Katie with her hands behind her back while Jack stands on the bottom step, twisting himself back and forth from the end of the banister. They both look a little frightened of me. In truth, I’m a little frightened of them.

“Mom’s home,” Tom says, with an almost sing-song exuberance to his voice, then moves to pay the babysitter, a wisp of a girl who doesn’t look much older than Katie, and usher her out. She looks like she might prefer to hang around and watch the family drama that’s about to unfold, but she finally ducks out the front door when Tom thanks her for the third time. The door shuts behind her with the firm insistence of the lid of a pressure-cooker. There is nothing left to do now but to meet my children.

Jack moves first, with a grin that is all pink gums and empty spaces, launching himself at me and gripping me around the waist with such force that I nearly topple. “Mommy!” he says into my side, and I’m sure if I were a real mother I would know exactly how to match this display of emotional hunger. If I were not a woman living inside herself, if I had not been separated from my children so viciously and for so long, I would know what to do. But my hands do not seem to work. I cannot quite figure out how to hold this small creature who has attached himself to me, so all I manage is to pat the black silk of his hair. Tom lets the moment go on for longer than I would prefer, before he rubs the boy’s back, taking him by the arm and releasing his grip on me.

“Okay, Jack,” he says. “Okay.” Jack is still grinning as Tom gathers him up with an arm around his shoulders, kissing him on the top of the head. I think maybe I haven’t done so badly after all, but then Katie bursts into tears, clapping both hands over her face, and runs up the stairs. I can hear a door slam at the end of the hall. “Shit,” Tom mutters.

“Daddy,” Jack chides, his tongue a pink protrusion between the gap in his front teeth.

“I know, buddy,” Tom says, glancing up at me with more than a little naked frustration. It reminds me of the look he started giving me in college when I got pregnant, a look that says, Couldn’t you have done better? I give him a little shrug, and that seems to make things worse. “How about you go upstairs and check on your sister, okay?” Tom says, nudging a reluctant Jack toward the stairs.

“Fine,” Jack says, his footfalls landing on the steps with a little more force than necessary. I take a breath once he’s out of sight. It never used to be difficult to breathe around my children, but this new body is proving more difficult to navigate than the old one was.

Tom watches me openly as I take in the house. It’s as if he still thinks I can’t see him when he’s doing it, after all those years when he watched me from just beyond the periphery of my vision. I walk from room to room, biding my time before I go upstairs to the one room I want to see. I have to pretend that I care about it all, the kitchen and the bathroom and the dining room and the den, instead of just wanting to see my little room at the top of the stairs. I take the steps slowly, remembering just how they creak under my weight.

I hold my breath as I open the door, expecting to see my bed with its armchair drawn close, the TV on the dresser across from it. Instead, it’s an office. I don’t want to let out my held breath, as if this room is a mirage that may still shimmer away and transform itself into what I remember. But no, it remains. Bookshelves, a desk with a computer on it. A calendar tacked to the wall. A heavy shade over the window. My memory stirs, shaking forth a familiar image. This room was Tom’s office before the accident. Of course he would revert it back to its former use once I was safely moved into a nursing home. Of course, it’s only logical. But it seems Tom’s logic has served no purpose but to hurt me in these past eight years.

I take a few steps in, standing where I used to lie, listening to the sounds of my house, remembering the melodic tones of Cora’s voice, watching clouds and blue sky and birds from the window. This room, which had been my whole world for a while, looks like I’ve never been here at all.

Tom follows me into our bedroom, a room I haven’t entered in eight years, and it’s a different color from the one we picked together when we moved in. I wonder if he still sleeps on the same side of the bed, but when I glance at the side tables there’s an equal amount of clutter on each. Books, mostly. How long has it been since I read a book?

The curtains on the windows are different, and that strikes me as probably the oddest thing of all, because what the hell does Tom know about curtains? He’d lived alone in an apartment before we moved in together, and when I first saw his place I’d been appalled to see that he’d stapled a sheet over his window to keep the sunlight at bay. But these curtains are mounted on ornate, heavy rods. They’re cut perfectly to the size of the window. The fabric looks expensive. I’m baffled, absolutely baffled, at how these curtains came to pass without my orchestration. I wander into the bathroom.