Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

What? she kept saying to herself, as if she were deaf to whatever she was thinking. What? His son’s eyes were half open and on her, as expressionless as if he had just sentenced her to death. It made Eric himself seem like some sort of superman to know that on some level he’d forgotten that the boy was even there.

She put her end of the stroller gently on the floor and turned and walked away as fast as she could. Jonas and April were standing by the nearest turnstile with that look of infinite sarcastic indulgence kids always wore when they had to wait for you. Cynthia panicked for a moment, thinking that they would surely ask her what all that was about and knowing she was still too rattled to make up an answer; but they didn’t say a word, they couldn’t have cared less. They turned and ran their MetroCards through the slot and walked ahead of her down the steps to the express track.

Cynthia was neither offended nor flattered, really — mostly she just thought it was hilarious. She couldn’t wait to tell Adam about it. It did bother her a little bit to think that this kind of unsanctioned activity went on without her, that she was not a part of it, even though she had no desire to be part of it — married strangers hooking up in earshot of their kids. Who knew? Maybe this sort of decadence went on all the time. There was a time when she might have at least led the guy on a little bit just to shock herself, when anything that new to her would have presented itself in the form of a hypothetical dare.

“Earth to Mom,” Jonas said. A train was already there at the express platform, its doors just sliding open, and the kids had quickened their steps to catch it. She ushered them along in front of her, where she could see them; when the doors opened, they stepped inside, and then a voice from on board the train roared, “Hold the door!” She heard a ticking sound; it was the cane of a blind man, white-haired, wearing an old blue blazer, a baseball cap, and enormous wraparound sunglasses. He seemed angry about something, or at someone. “Hold the door!” he yelled again, though someone, not Cynthia, was already holding it. His cane swung incautiously at about ankle level, swatting the base of the seats, the pole at the center of the car, the door frame, and people’s legs. She couldn’t tell whether he was actually orienting himself this way or just panicking. She took another step back, to avoid the cane’s arc — not because she feared it would hurt, but because she didn’t want to send the man any kind of false information — and then it happened: the doors closed with their two-note chime, and she was on the platform and they were on the train, and as it pulled out she saw the look of terror on Jonas’s face, though he might well have been terrified mostly of her, banging her hands on the glass and screaming Wait .

Even before she’d reached the end of the platform the train was moving too fast for her, and there she was, watching the train lights shrinking away from her down the tunnel. She couldn’t turn away from it. She could feel that the strangers behind her had stopped moving too: nothing was moving anymore but that train. “You got kids on that train?” a voice said behind her, a young voice, a man’s voice. Misfortune made everyone familiar with you. “How old are they?”

Cynthia turned around and tried to answer but could not. She could actually see a black circle forming at the edges of her own vision.

“Go to the booth and ask for a transit cop,” the young man said — he was wearing a huge Knicks jersey. “You go,” someone else said to him contemptuously. “You’re going to send this woman up the stairs? You can’t see she’s about to pass out as it is?” Over their heads she heard a gathering roar, and she thought at first she was fainting but it was a real roar, there was another express train pulling in beside them. Two people were holding her gently by the elbows. The children had disappeared into a tunnel: it didn’t seem real. “What’s your name?” an older woman’s voice said.

Cynthia got on the first car of the train and groped her way to the locked front door that faced forward into the darkness. She understood it was a stupid idea but the logic of the situation was all dream logic now and she didn’t feel there was anything to discuss. The children’s fear filled every cell of her. She had to go find them. She had to put her face flat against the glass in order to see past her own reflection, even though there was nothing to see for a long time but the track and the steelwork that held open the tunnel and the ghostly local stations they sped through without stopping. Finally she felt the train slowing down beneath her feet and the lights of the platform at 59th Street floated toward her. She burst out onto the platform and only then did it occur to her that there was no real reason to think that the kids had gotten off here at all, maybe they were still crying on the train as it continued on its long loop beneath the city, but then she saw a cop farther down the platform and the cop had his hands on two children’s shoulders and the two children were April and Jonas.

“You’re here?” the cop said, not very sympathetically. “I just radioed 86th Street to look for you there. That wasn’t real smart, getting on another train.” The kids were staring at her with the blank expression of kids overhearing their parents fight. Even an hour later Cynthia couldn’t remember much about how she got them back up the stairs and into the bright street and into a cab and back home, but she didn’t recall any of them saying a word the entire way.

She made Adam sleep in the kids’ room that night, so they could both stay in the big bed with her. The next day she kept them both home from school. Adam was a little surprised but put it down to erring on the side of caution: they were quieter than usual, it was true, but it was hard to tell — even for April and Jonas themselves — how much of their anxiety was still their own and how much of it came from being treated so solicitously, as if something terrible had happened to them. He told them both how proud of them he was for being so brave and for being smart enough to ask for help from a police officer, just like they should have. He said that anytime they wanted to talk about yesterday, he was there for them; but that was not Cynthia’s approach. She sat the kids down together and asked them what questions they had, about what had happened yesterday, and about why Mommy hadn’t gotten on the train with them, and when they came up with nothing, she took that as evidence of how traumatized they were, how quickly you had to act before what was in them buried itself so deeply you were never going to get it out again. She let them return to school the next day but was so worried for them that she sat them down to talk again as soon as they got home, just to compensate in case she’d made a mistake. That night April woke up sobbing from a nightmare. Ten minutes later both kids were sleeping beside their mother and Adam was curled up in Jonas’s short bed watching the shadows, awake but too tired to get up and turn the nightlight off.

By the weekend, they seemed to have gotten past it; they were a little less clingy, and that uncharacteristic wide-eyed silence in which Adam or Cynthia would sometimes come upon them diminished and then was gone. They went to the Radio City Christmas show and packed for the trip to Costa Rica and ate at 3 Guys and it all seemed behind them.

But Cynthia was unconvinced. Every night she postponed Adam’s sleep demanding to know what more he thought they should do about it. He tried his best to say all the properly sympathetic things; he was pretty sure that the suffering she ascribed to them was really her own, but the great thing about Cynthia was that no matter how stressed she might get, she always returned to her own center, somehow, if you had the patience to just let it happen. But when she told him Wednesday night that she had called Dalton to ask if they could recommend a psychiatrist who specialized in treating children with PTSD — and that not only was there such a person but she had already made an appointment with him — Adam started to wonder whether the whole thing was getting out of hand.