Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

Peter sighted him, the pale man in the suit he had worried about. He saw the stranger walking away, outside the children’s area, holding Byron in his arms. The man walked casually, Byron quiet in his arms, approaching the arch, heading for the park’s perimeter.

Peter heard the thunder of his heart. Felt a sharp bang on his leg. Saw faces, startled, nervous, go by. “Byron!” he called into the thunder.

The world was moving. The stranger turned and glanced at Peter.

“Byron!” Peter shouted into the roar. His shoulder whacked against someone.

The stranger stopped and waited for Peter. The man was calm. He watched Peter approach.

Peter kept running, but he felt dread as he got near, awed that the stranger had stopped and was waiting for him, apparently unafraid.

“Put him down.” Peter meant this to be a command. It sounded tentative, almost a question. Peter stopped himself several feet off, frightened to go closer, although he kept telling himself: Byron belongs to you — take him!

“I’m his father,” the stranger said, and kissed the side of Byron’s head.

The sight made Peter sick. He felt his stomach bend in a hard place, somewhere that was supposed to be inflexible. His mind, too, was hurt — stalled by the stranger’s lie.

“No, you’re not,” Peter said, like a baffled child, unable to fight the lie.

“Yes, I am,” the stranger said.

“Get your hands off him!” Diane was screaming from somewhere, screaming with all the rage and assertion that Peter felt, but couldn’t get past the dam in his throat. “Police! Get your hands off him! Police!”

The stranger, rather gently, put Byron down, and broke into a run.

Byron held up his arms to Peter.

Diane rushed past, past Peter and Byron, and ran after the stranger.

“Da, Da,” Byron said to Peter.

Peter’s shoulders got heavy, made him collapse. He fell to his knees and put his arms out. Byron waddled into them, chuckling, gurgling laughter, delighted by his father’s reduction in size.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Peter heard himself mumble while he kissed the sweet soft cushions, the ice-cream smoothness of his baby’s cheeks.

People stood around, watching Peter, broken to his knees on the sidewalk, clutching Byron. Diane had returned, saying, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

“Da! Da!” Byron said to Peter, his thin brown eyebrows curved into a worried architecture above his eyes.

Peter was crying, felled on the pavement, embracing Byron, and crying. He got to his feet, Diane was saying lots of things, talking breathlessly, but Peter got to his feet, not listening, and kept his face, his wet face, pressed against Byron’s. Peter carried his son home, directly home, his arms a steel embrace, his heart panting with love and terror.

ERIC DECIDED to say nothing to his father-in-law, Tom, about me money. He wouldn’t have to anyway: Brandon had volunteered to remind Tom. But a week went by, a miserable seven days and nights, without Brandon saying a word, at least not in Eric’s presence.

Maybe Brandon had discussed it in private with Tom and been told to fuck off. Maybe Brandon was intimidated. Eric certainly was. Tom Winningham was a tall, elegant man, his undyed hair still mostly black, still distinguished by the waves and sheen of youth. His posture was like a column’s; it was a shock to see that he could bend over. His blue eyes were pale and lifeless. They hovered in his skull without purpose, rarely focusing on anything, and when they did briefly catch Eric’s eye, their boldness pushed Eric’s face aside, a gentle but tangible blow.

Eric had been alone with Tom only once that week. One night, Eric wandered into the living room at 3:00 A.M. after a session of rocking Luke back to sleep. He found Tom seated in the dark, looking out at the bay, his thin face silver from the moonlight. Tom moved his head slowly at the sound of Eric entering, like a movie ghost, with a gradual ominous turn. “Excuse me,” Eric blurted, horrified, and skulked out.

Meanwhile, Luke’s colic, even though he was almost three months old (supposedly the age when colic goes away), seemed to get worse. Maybe it was the presence of the others. Luke wailed if any of them touched him. He woke up every two hours at night, taking as much as forty-five minutes to fall back to sleep, as if he feared that Eric and Nina would leave him with these strangers.

The second morning after Joan arrived, she walked into the nursery ahead of Nina, thinking she could give Eric and Nina extra sleep. At the sight of Joan, Luke let out screams of horror that shot Eric from the lowest level of sleep to total consciousness with the G force of a rocket blast into space. “I scared him,” Joan confessed as Eric and Nina rushed past her into the nursery. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, and left them to clutch the trembling baby to their bosom.

The household was heavy from Luke’s rejections. Nina’s sisters arrived and got the same treatment. The family began to look at Eric strangely, he thought. They blame my genes, Eric believed. The little Jew in Luke, like a Satanic strain, was what made Luke hate them — Eric fancied he could see those thoughts in their eyes, their cold blue eyes.

But those eyes were in Luke’s head, those same evaluating terrible eyes. And Luke’s distance from them — was it any different from their own estrangements? These are your genes, Eric wanted to scream at the polite breakfasts and dinners. He’s yours! This unloving child comes from you!

Was he unloving? Not to Eric or Nina. Luke had taken to stroking his father’s chin while he sucked on his juice bottle, the hot fingertips dotting Eric’s face with tenderness and wonderment. When Eric got him from his crib, Luke’s body adhered to his, curving with the shape of Eric’s pectorals. He rested his heavy head on the shelf of Eric’s shoulder, sighing into his neck. And those eyes, those large blue eyes of Luke, they considered Eric, the huge guardian, at leisure, scanned the big face carefully, making sure nothing had been altered, that it wasn’t a phony, but the same patient giant of yesterday.

“Has he ever smiled?” asked Emily, Nina’s youngest sister. Emily the bitch, Eric called her.

“They don’t smile at this age,” Nina lied. “It’s just gas.”

“Oh, no,” Joan said. “They have real smiles.” And an argument — a disagreement, rather; no voices were raised — ensued. The real point of it was that Luke was an unhappy, miserable exception to the usual joyful cherubim that the rest of the world gave birth to. Nina was restrained for a while, chatting casually, as if the subject had nothing to do with her child. But finally she responded to the subtext — and blew up at her mother and sisters. Tears streamed down Nina’s face. She yelled that they were egomaniacs, people who only wanted to be loved and had no patience for loving others. That was exactly the conclusion Eric had come to about Nina’s behavior in New York, that her unreasonable fury at Luke was for not adoring her immediately.

Joan and her sisters at first stared through Nina’s tirade; then Emily got up and left the room, not in a huffy attitude — she walked past Nina like a pedestrian avoiding a madwoman. Joan began to clean. Luke made it all into an embarrassing farce by wailing in Nina’s arms. Nina, her charges unanswered, carried Luke into the nursery and began to rock him violently. Eric followed her in.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she said into her son’s melted face in a whisper of rage.

“Okay, okay, give him to me,” Eric said.

“Get out of here!” she snapped.

“Don’t talk—”

“Get out of here!”

“You’re upset.” He began, he thought, in a reasonable, reassuring tone.