Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Chase looked at her and put on his thinking face. His eyes rolled up, and his lips pursed as he cupped his chin in one hand. “Don’t know.”

“You let me know when you make your decision,” she said.

“Why?” Chase asked, giving her the gift where he looked into her eyes, even searching them. Yes, Tenzin thought, this boy will be good. Even without his mommy.

“Tenzin wants to be the same kind of dinosaur,” she said. “So we can swim together. Or fly together. Forever after.”

He wrinkled his nose in a shy smile, and said, “Tenzin,” as if he were calling her a silly old thing. But it was a silly old thing he loved, she was sure of that.

“Okay,” she announced, “Before we get in the car for long drive home, we do our calming-down exercise. Okay?”

She rearranged the boy’s skinny legs so they were crossed.

“Crisscross applesauce,” she sang, also just as the boy’s therapists had taught her.

She crossed her own legs and began.

“Smell the flowers,” she said, followed by a deep and slow inhale. “Come now, Chase. Do it with Tenzin. Smell the flowers.”

Chase shook his head, as if there were flowers being pressed into his face.

“Just three times,” Tenzin said. “Okeydokey?”

Together, while the other children raced cars, sorted shells, and flipped through the wrinkled pages of books, Tenzin and Chase sat crisscross applesauce and breathed in (smell the flowers) and exhaled out (blow out the candles). Until, Tenzin thought, they were like two monks on a mountaintop.

“Sweetie,” Leigh called to Chase, “don’t chew on Sophie the giraffe’s head. ’Kay?”

Sophie was Charlotte’s toy giraffe, the twenty-two-dollar organic rubber chew toy that Leigh loved to mock, joking that no infant in Brooklyn could teethe without a Sophie! Still, Leigh thought, hadn’t she been foolish enough to buy a Sophie in the first place, and even replace it when it had been lost?

“Chase,” Leigh said, and had to call him three more times before he turned to her. “No mouthing,” she said firmly, but he turned away, the giraffe’s head still lodged in his mouth. A short squeak escaping with every gnaw.

Leigh remembered their last visit to her parents’ house, when her mother, tipsy from her afternoon whiskey sours, had said, “For goodness sake, Leigh, darling. The boy puts everything in his mouth. He’s going to turn out to be a chain-smoker.”

Leigh smoothed her eyebrow and plucked a little hair.

Just one.

Dark clouds moved in over the water, blotting the sun. Maybe a morning thunderstorm, Leigh thought. A perfect end to the weekend. She thought of the ugly threat she’d whispered into Tiffany’s ear last night:

Your precious little Harper will never set foot in St. Ann’s.

Just the act of repeating the threat in her mind, the memory of Tiffany’s scent the night before, the sour, alcohol-tinged sweat that rose from the woman’s glistening neck, was enough to make Leigh sit a bit taller, to feel a new strength. For the time had come, she knew, to take stock of what was about to happen. To her. To her children. To the unblemished name of the Lambert dynasty. She could already see her father, his eyes runny with Scotch and old age and contempt, as he stared at her through the shatterproof glass of a prison visiting room.

She was going to jail.

Charlotte would have no memory of her. And Chase’s memory would be one tainted with shame, blurred by tears. Images of his mother’s harried thin face on the cover of the local Brooklyn paper would brand his mind.

YUPPIE MOM PRESCHOOL THIEF IN SLAMMER.

TRUST FUND MOMMY STEALS FOR IN VITRO.

A week ago, she had found the courage to google “mother steals from school” and the search had produced story after story. Mothers in Miami, Long Island, Austin, and Atlanta had stolen from PTA funds, preschool fundraising accounts, and high-school charity events.

The finite details — the women’s names, the sums they had stolen — had been a brief comfort. But that was before she had calculated the lawyer fees and accepted the possibility that her ruined reputation would eliminate the rare consulting work Brad found, and how would they ever be able to afford the cost of hiring Tenzin full time?

Tenzin would have to move into the house, Leigh thought, knowing that if there was one thing she’d make sure of, it would be this. Tenzin would be mother to her children when she was gone. They would sell the brownstone, cash in their stocks, hock her great-grandmother’s diamonds to ensure Tenzin was there. Leigh would give Tenzin anything, pay her any salary she wanted. Chase was not safe with Brad. Brad could barely help Chase put on his shoes without losing his patience and flinging a sneaker against the wall.

She watched Chase and Levi run around the room, Raaaaargh, we’re dinosaurs! We going to eat you up!

Chase was screeching now. I a T. rex! Grawr! Graaawr!

“Too loud, Chase,” Leigh said.

She imagined Tenzin and Chase and Charlotte living in the brownstone. Tenzin’s husband Lobsang, and their children, even Tenzin’s mother, a child-sized woman Leigh had seen only in photos. All living in the house Leigh had worked so hard to make beautiful. They were in the garden, lush and overgrown in the way Leigh liked it best, at the end of summer, the hydrangea in full bloom, the roses fragrant, bumblebees buzzing over the lavender. Tenzin had decorated the garden with stone Buddhas, and they peeked out from behind the ivy and the lilac trees, their eyes squinting with joy and their big bellies a promise of contentment. Charlotte had blond banana curls, and Chase was tall and handsome, his hair combed back to show the elegant slope of his forehead.

Tenzin told stories to the children. Your mommy, my good employer. She talked of Leigh’s good heart, of her kind and gentle ways, as she had many times when comforting Leigh after she had lost her temper with Chase, after she had yelled at him, pushed him into a corner for a time-out, flung a toy at him in frustration, retreating to her room afterward, to her special leather chaise to weep alone. Tenzin found her every time and reunited her with her children, told her that all was good. That there was always a second chance. A do-over.

Then Tiffany was there, standing so close that Leigh knew she could reach out and touch Tiffany’s tanned and sculpted leg.

“When’re you guys heading back to the city?” Tiffany asked as she hovered over Leigh like a shadow, blocking her view of the rest of the room. “Should we do the aquarium tomorrow? Or the children’s museum?”

As if nothing had happened. As if the return trip to Brooklyn would act as some reverse time machine, erasing the past three days.

“I’m not sure,” Leigh started, prepared to make as believable a performance as possible. All she had to do was get back home, where she’d be safe. At least safe from Tiffany.

Tenzin appeared with a fussing Charlotte. Her Tibetan Mary Poppins, Leigh thought, her heroine.

“Baby Charlie wants some milky-milky!”

Tiffany sighed and said, the sadness clear in her voice, “I love you, Tenzin.”

She linked her long fingers in Tenzin’s short thick ones.

Leigh wanted to tear their hands apart.

Tiffany continued, “Every day I think about how I wish you could be with your family.”

“Soon,” Tenzin said, “but for now, I have my friends.” She looked from Leigh to Tiffany and back to Leigh. “As the great Dalai Lama says, ‘If I am only happy for myself, many fewer chances for happiness. If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy!’”