Rebecca Coleman: The Kingdom of Childhood

“Speaking of the workshop,” said Dan, “he’s in there working right now. Perhaps you can drop in and say hello before you leave.”

“Of course.” I shouldered my purse and gave my classroom a final glance. “I’ll head over right now.”

“Thanks so much. I’m sure this will be a wonderful experience for him.” Vivienne turned her head and smiled at me. “Have you met my son? Zach Patterson?”

It dawned on me suddenly. The black hair and eyes. The faded, peachy tan. Barring the pregnant belly, the slender and neatly toned frame. I suppressed a groan.

“I have, as a matter of fact,” I said, impressed by my own composure. “He and my son are in the madrigal choir together. I brought him home the other day.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “He didn’t tell one of his Lewinsky jokes, did he?”

“He did.”

A sigh of disgust escaped her lips. “I apologize for that. If it’s the joke I think it is, he’s been telling it to his father’s employees, his uncles and even his grandfather. Quite the comedian, that one. He’s probably getting revenge on us for listening to too much NPR.”

“Maybe he finds it upsetting,” I suggested. “Losing faith in one’s leaders and all that. Maybe it’s his way of relieving the stress.”

She smirked and responded with a snorting little laugh. “You don’t know my son. He doesn’t have stress. He just wants to use dirty words in front of adults. It gives him a thrill.”

Beside me Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well,” I quickly added, “I’m pretty experienced with teenagers. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep him in line.”

I said goodbye to Dan and Vivienne and headed out in the direction of the workshop, taking the long route to avoid walking past Bobbie’s history classroom, now occupied by a young teacher who bore no resemblance to Bobbie in either looks or spirit. On the first day of school I had made the foolish decision to drop by and peek in. The sight of all those teenagers chatting and working and laughing, going on as though she had never been there, sent me into a spiral of depression so confounding that I spent all afternoon emptying dropperfuls of Bach’s homeopathic Rescue Remedy into my coffee. Since then I employed the methods of avoidance and repression to deal with my grief, and while I knew the conventional wisdom declared that this was a poor idea, it had always worked fine for me.

The bedraggled workshop building sat behind the school, an oversize shed in need of some serious love and exterior latex paint. Amish craftsmen had been contracted to build it ten years before; it had been trimmed and painted by the school’s juniors and seniors, and left unheated except for a wood stove they fed with scraps from student projects. That much I knew, because the underwriters had canceled the insurance on that building three years before unless we agreed to put in a heating system that complied with building code. The funds didn’t exist, and so the building survived on vigilance and hope.

I heard Zach Patterson before I saw him, crouched on the floor of the workshop beside a very loud saw. With safety glasses over his eyes and his shaggy black hair shielding his face, I would not have been certain it was him were it not for the backpack lying on the table, the initials ZXP drawn in big bold letters on the front pocket with a black marker. I wondered what the X stood for.

“Hi, Zach,” I yelled over the din of the saw, trying to start the partnership on a friendly note.

He looked up at me through a haze of sawdust and shut off the power. When he stood, he pushed the glasses onto his forehead, offering me a first good look beneath that mop of hair: unruly skin and inexpertly tended facial hair, rounded out by eyes a bit too large in proportion to the lean angles of his cheeks and jaw. What mothers call “the awkward stage” was slow in letting go of Zachary Patterson.

He extended his hand. “Thanks for the ride the other day, Mrs. McFarland.”

“You’re welcome. Your mother just dropped by to tell me I’ll be working with you on the bazaar. I didn’t make the connection between the two of you until our conversation was almost over.”

“That’s because she looks more Chinese than I do,” he said bluntly. “It throws everybody off.”

“I think it was the last name that threw me. I’ve seen your name on the Madrigals roster, so when she said she was a Heath, I didn’t put together that you were hers.”

He nodded. “It gets more confusing when you meet my dad. He’s blond and really tall, so nobody ever thinks I’m his kid, even though I’ve got his last name. Then they expect my mom to have a Chinese-sounding name and think my dad must be the Heath. It happens all the time.”

I smiled politely. “That’s the modern family for you, I guess.”

He returned my smile with a grin of his own. “Yep. The obscuring of ancient wisdom.”

“What do you mean?”

I had taken the bait. “Steiner said the mixing of the races obscures the ancient wisdom. You can blame my parents for that.”

I closed my eyes for a long moment. “Steiner never said that.”

“He did, but it’s okay. He was a product of his time. And so am I.” Pulling his glasses back down, he rearranged the plank of wood in his hands and asked, “Did you need me for something?”

“I just wanted to discuss the expectations for your service hour credits. I’m not sure if you’ll fill all thirty hours, but I can find as much work for the bazaar as you’re willing to do. Painting, assembling booths, pricing crafts, you name it.”

“Got it,” he said. He sank back to his haunches and aligned the board in front of the sawblade. “Whore myself out until the school says I’m done. I can handle it.”

I glowered at his back. He was like a mouthier, less easily punished version of Scott. I hitched my purse onto my shoulder and said, “Well, I’ll be away for the weekend, but let me know if you need any assistance.”

“Where are you going?”

The personal question took me aback. “To the Blue Ridge Mountains with my husband for our anniversary.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like the mountains. It’s weird to live in a place that doesn’t have them. When you look outside it’s like your eyes don’t know where to rest. There’s no anchor. It’s just emptiness. It sucks.”

He was right. Maybe that explained why I felt the way I did. Lately the sense nagged at me that a nascent dark thing was coming, and that, as my midwife had once said, there was no way out of this thing but through it. But perhaps it was simpler than all that. A matter of finding an easy place to rest one’s eyes, and with them, one’s thoughts.

I smiled at him, and, in an abashed, close-lipped way, he smiled back.

In his earliest memory, Zach is nestled snug in bed with his mother, back to breast, skin to skin. His father is there as well, his back broad and winter-pale, his spine curled in sleep. It must have been February, because Zach is secretly sucking a pink strawberry candy of the type sent by Grandma Moo, his Chinese grandmother, every Chinese New Year. Most likely, this being New Hampshire, there would have been snow on the ground as tall as himself. And yet there he is, warm beneath the featherbed and his parents’ indigo batik quilt, nursing his hoarded candy. Sucking slowly, so she won’t notice. This is what he remembers—the drowsy heat, the angled sunlight, the solid sweetness in the middle of his tongue; and the way his heart palpitated when his mother suddenly asked, “Zach, is that candy I smell?”

That was all. Some of the details, in retrospect, stood to reason: for example, his mother had slept shirtless for years, having slipped into the habit during the several years in which she nursed him. And Grandma Moo—so called because she was his mother’s mother, her mu —had sent those pink candies in their crinkly strawberry wrappers every year of his life. Gung hey fat choi, the red greeting card always read; and his mother often murmured “emphasis on the fat” as she unpacked the small boxes of white chocolate pretzels, spongecake petits fours, popcorn balls and sugared almonds. Forbidden like poison, they were the sorts of foods she tolerated only once a year and only for a taste, before dumping the boxes into the trash and force-feeding Zach a quart of vanilla kefir as an antidote.