Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Yeah, Byron has better ideas right now—”

“Better ideas about what?” Eric’s tone was so sharp that Luke paused, his clear, glowing blue eyes clouding to a deeper, worried color.

“Forget it,” Luke said, and swung his arm in the air. “I have the power!”

“No, no,” Eric said, and got on one knee. “Say it again, I’m sorry, I was thinking — say it again.”

“When I’m older, I’ll have better ideas than Byron. When I get to be older than he is.”

“I’m sorry, Luke, I don’t understand.”

“Daddy!” Luke clenched his fists in frustration. “Okay,” he said with a manly sigh. “Byron is older than me, right?”

“Not really.”

Luke stood still. He stared into Eric’s eyes like a deer frozen in the lights, paralyzed by surprise.

“Byron is six weeks older than you, Luke. That’s nothing. We call that being the same age. A year, two years, that’s older. But six weeks is nothing. And another thing,” Eric said, a chill running down his spine as he realized what he was really saying and to whom he was saying it, “age has nothing to do with whether your ideas are good or not. Even if Byron was much older than you, it doesn’t mean his ideas are better.”

“Yeah,” Luke said slowly. “I don’t think his ideas are so good. But he said—”

“I don’t care what he said, Luke!”

“Okay.” Luke bowed his head, shamed. “I’m sorry.”

“No!” Eric picked him up so they were face-to-face. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. Byron is a liar!”

“What!” Nina had been peacefully reading on the couch. “Eric, what did you say?”

Ignore her. She doesn’t know. She thinks we’re going to survive just because we’re good people, because we love each other. Maybe we don’t. And maybe we’ll go under.

“What did Byron say to you?”

“Nothing.” Luke tried to look away. He squirmed in Eric’s hand.

“Come on, Luke.”

“He said because he’s older, his ideas are better.”

Nina laughed. “He’s not older than you, Luke.”

“He isn’t?”

“No,” Eric said. “He isn’t. And even if he is older, that doesn’t make his ideas better.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Luke smiled.

Eric put him down on the floor.

“I have the power,” Luke called. Eric watched him run, swinging his invisible sword.

Nina, her face soft, solicitous, said, “What was that about?”

“That Byron is a bully.”

“That’s what Pearl said today. He’s very bossy, but Luke loves him.”

“Maybe it isn’t love.”

“Oh, no,” Nina said. “He can’t wait to get to the park to play—”

“That might not be love.”

“Eric,” Nina said, frowning at him. “Byron is pushy, but Luke holds his own, and if he can’t, he has to learn to. There are plenty of bullies in the world.”

Luke was back. “Watch how fast I fly, Mommy.” He ran with his hands out in front. “I’m Superman! I’m Superman!” The little toddler, his legs still chubby, his head still a little too big for his body. “I’m Superman!”

I’m gonna go in there tomorrow and scream at Joe. How dare he tell me he’s going to take the Boston Beans away? That’s my fucking money to win or lose.

Lose.

Lose.

Lose.

“What did you say, Eric?” Nina asked.

He gasped. Can’t tell her. Would Tom call her?

“You were mumbling,” she said. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Eric answered, and lowered his head, ashamed.

DIANE HELD her mother’s hand as they walked into the hospital. The smell, a mixture of baked institutional food and cleansers, overwhelmed her mouth. She took a deep breath to suck in the despair and sickness all at once and be fast acclimated.

Lily squeezed Diane’s fingers at each sight of illness, gasping at each bit of news. Go in there. Undress. The doctor will do such and such. This is a tranquilizer. No, we can’t put you out. You get to watch your heart on a monitor.

Squeeze. Gasp.

“I don’t need to see that!” Lily said, and managed a laugh, although its sound was brief and pained.

“May I stay with her?” Diane asked Dr. Klein, the cardiologist, when he came in.

He looked astonished at the suggestion. “No. Hospital procedure wouldn’t allow that.”

“Can I read a book or something?” Lily said in an aggrieved tone. “Just lying there — I’ll be bored!”

Lily had come up with these inappropriate statements every few minutes since Diane had arrived in Philadelphia. She was obviously terrified, but she kept up a pretense, not a convincing one, that she was only bothered by the inconvenience and fuss.

Lily maintained this fiction, except for the night Diane arrived.

“They told me everything would be fine with your daddy,” Lily had said that night, her hands nervously rubbing the knot in her robe’s belt. The translucent skin, stretched across her bony knuckles, looked tired, as if it might peel off. When did that happen to her hands? “They said your daddy would recover from the heart attack if he watched his diet — and then the next morning he’s dead. So I don’t believe them. Not that they’re lying. They don’t know what they’re doing. And the worst thing is they think they know.”

Diane explained to Lily that fifteen years had gone by since then, that medicine had learned and developed a great deal in heart treatment. “It’s the most successful area of medicine there is,” Diane said.

“You’re smart,” Lily said. Her chin buckled under her upper lip. “You’re my smart girl,” she repeated.

Diane felt her heart expand, warm against all the years of silence, hot and red, glowing against the ice age that had formed between them. Diane took the bony fingers, cold with fright, in her palm. “Don’t worry, Ma. They do know what they’re doing.”

“If they make me into a horror,” Lily said, “just shoot me. I don’t want to lie someplace, drooling all over myself.” Lily laughed, a ghastly hysterical laugh, at this thought. “That’s all I need — to end up wearing diapers with some schwartzer to change them.”

“Will you please not call them that, Ma?”

Lily took offense. Loudly proclaimed she wasn’t a racist. Her proof: she paid her girl (a black woman of sixty) a dollar more an hour than the going rate for housecleaning.

My mother is dumb. How is that possible? Was Daddy so brilliant? He owned and managed three record stores and made a good living, but he was hardly Einstein. Where did I get my SAT scores from? There must be some intelligence in this woman; there had to be gold buried beneath the layers of conventional attitudes and dull gossip.

Maybe not. I was probably kidnapped from a roving band of intellectuals, hijacked away from a life of the mind and forced to live in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Diane called home while waiting for Lily to emerge from the catheterization. She had read in the release disclaimer there was a 1 percent chance that insertion of the catheter would provoke a heart attack. The document was pretty good legally, but nothing could protect the hospital from a clever lawyer.

“I’m a lawyer,” Diane had heard herself saying to Dr. Klein, just as stupidly as Lily had. Even dumber, Diane had lied, saying, “I’m an associate at Wilson, Pickering.” She had been so intent on scaring the doctor with this fact that she had forgotten to say her tentative farewell to Lily, her just-in-case good-bye. “Don’t worry, Ma,” she had planned to say. “I love you.”

After the doctor left, Diane had another opportunity, but Lily distracted her, throwing a temper tantrum about her legs being uncovered because her gown was too short. “I’m a small woman!” she began to shout. “This must be for a child!”