Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Twenty-five minutes of this. Lorraine could watch until the end of time.

She could get just as lost inside the eight minutes of Newell working to stand up on his own, walking unsteadily, teetering with each ridiculously adorable step, almost losing his balance and going faster, reaching and then hugging the base of a tree in their front yard. An unbearably cute little boy, this pudgy person in miniature: hair the orange of carrots curls in loopy directions; his face is plump as pie, soft and white as powder. He is bundled up in a puffy blue jacket whose obscene price Lorraine, each time she watches, recalls. She remembers the joy of shopping for each piece of that little outfit.

With time she and Lincoln had become sloppy; one taped memory would move beyond the crux of the moment they'd intended to capture; then the static would be jarring, the image would change, red numbers in the bottom right-hand corner documenting different times and dates. (Lincoln had spent an afternoon wrapped in the unfolded pages of the manual, learning the camera's functions, and he never failed to make sure the date was on there, as if to prove he had mastered the machine.)

September 19; 3:54 P.M.; eight years old; an adult T-shirt that fits him like a dress, hanging down over his elbows and to the middle of his legs. He is wearing shorts with all sorts of pockets. Black pads swell his elbows and knees, and his head is protected by a shining fiberglass helmet designed in the style of a comic book hero. He stands out in front of the driveway, where Lincoln's beloved old truck is parked, during a phase when her husband refused to get a new one. Newell shouts, MOM, and starts rolling on his skateboard, gathering speed for a trick. ARE YOU LOOKING?

March 4; 7:52; the camera peers through an open sliver into his bedroom, a clandestine segment, Lorraine joining Lincoln as silent voyeurs, watching the child — he is stretched out on the carpet, on his stomach, his school books ignored next to him in a pile while he maneuvers different action figures through a complicated sequence of events. Lorraine watched a presentation Newell made for third-grade science class that involved sugar and the prolonged effects of light. She watched her son push his back straight against the pantry wall, discover the new pencil mark on the pantry showed him to be exactly the same height as the last time they'd checked, and have a minor tantrum. Lorraine watched a homemade rap video of him mugging and jumping around and ecstatically shouting rhymes. She watched her extended family, all seated around the antique table in the off room that was saved for special events. Everyone was dressed in their Thanksgiving best and anxious to eat, trying to survive to the end of Grandma's rambling thank-you to the Lord. Newell's eyes open. He scans the table. Noticing that his father is filming, the boy sticks his tongue out of his mouth. Lorraine watched this video and she watched one more and after that one she went to the kitchen cabinet and, just this last time, took the last cassette out of its white sleeve.

Inevitably, she would find herself in Newell's bedroom, on any pretext. Just walking in there was almost more than she could take, for the space was lifeless and barren in a way that a child's room never should be; it was a shrine, a mausoleum, a kingdom awaiting the return of its rightful monarch: the small single bed frame running lengthwise beneath a drawn picture window; the posters Scotch-taped on pale yellow walls; the marks and scuffs from where Newell had kicked and thrown objects. Lorraine would stretch out on her son's mattress and try to summon the remnants of his energy. She would open files on his hard drive. A half-finished school science project sat gathering dust in the room's far corner. A laundry bin was packed with state-of-the-art toys of interstellar destruction, none of which the boy had touched in months. Lorraine went through his dresser. She refolded undersize versions of designer jockey shorts, each of which cost as much as sweatshop workers made in a month. She coordinated and scoured through the contents of his closet — the housekeeper couldn't be trusted; who knew what she might steal or screw up. Lorraine searched his bookshelf and his school primers. She left the rows of comics untouched in their plastic wrappers, but every so often picked up one of the painted die-cast metal figurines that swarmed the middle shelf (positioned in a titanic last stand: eight or so druids, sorcerers, and knights defended themselves against a miasma of Hot Wheels miniatures, stretchable wrestling icons, and hand-painted revolutionary war soldiers). Lorraine would examine the honest, if clumsy, attempt her son had made at painting the druid's beard, the colored blop that substituted for a coat of arms on a warrior's shield.

It was not uncommon for her to find a stray sock and go to pieces. What was uncommon, though, was the afternoon she noticed a number of dimes and nickels loosely pooled on his dresser. She started to tremble, her body unable to handle the shock. Then she realized they were Lincoln's coins, and she was not the only one making pilgrimages.

Pulling out the drawer of Newell's desk, she found, amid the scattered suits of a loose and incomplete deck of playing cards, a manila envelope, large enough to contain a ring. Lorraine tried to come up with reasons for it to be there, places it might have come from. She jabbed a finger inside, and turned it over, and then saw the pencil sketch: a giant skull with a complicated set of braces across its bony teeth. Speeding down those braces was a miniature locomotive; rows of tiny arms waving in terror from its windows. The train's smokestack trail was shaped like billowy skulls, and leaning out of the front of the engine was this tiny wolf — he wore a conductor's hat, his eyes popping in cartoon terror.

“It has to be a clue,” she insisted.

“Yes, ma'am,” the case officer said.

“Don't you think? So many tiny hands, just waving like that?”

She followed up on her call, and kept calling — every afternoon, as many as three times on one particular day when her mind refused to let go of this supposed breakthrough, and she ranted into the speaker end of the phone, annotating each nuanced aspect of the drawing for the case officer, speculating on the possible significance of eyes popping in cartoon terror, the many interpretations of a train chugging toward the end of the world. She digressed into memories of the boy at five, as if this whole nightmare would be wrapped up once the case officer understood that Newell had a reddish birthmark on his right calf. The case officer's end of the phone always was filled with background clutter and police business, yet no matter how busy he seemed or how many times he'd heard a piece of information, he always seemed to listen, and thanked Lorraine for the call, saying he hoped this would help, and if there was any news, she would be the first to know. The case officer was a father himself, girls, six and eight. He was decent and understanding and Lorraine stopped calling.

For part of an afternoon, she pulled herself together. For three full consecutive days she stayed under control. Unexpectedly the phone rang.

This was it. This was her child.

“Hi. Can I please speak to Mr. or Miss… ah… Blewing?”

“You are speaking to Mrs. Ewing.”

“Hi. My name is Ron. I'm calling on behalf of public broadcasting. We're doing our annual pledge drive and—”

Her son had been trouble from the beginning: a breech birth; three weeks early; Lorraine had unexpectedly dilated and then the child had been reversed in her uterus, caught in his own umbilical cord; Lorraine had been cut open and the cord had been unwrapped from around his feet and the fetus had been physically removed from her body, and she had been all of twenty years old. That had been the end of her in a two-piece bathing suit, the end of any possibility at a swimsuit modeling career. ( They can airbrush, Lincoln had said, it's no big deal. ) She'd wanted to be a good mother, wanted a healthy baby, and she didn't want a boob job afterward, so goodbye to her life as a showgirl. Now her child did not call, did not let her know he was alive. Silence held the limitless depths of torture for Lorraine; silence was its own hell, its own purgatory, the definitive confirmation of Lorraine's shortcomings as a parent, the final result of every obnoxious trait she had ever let slide, the character deficiencies she had not been able to control. Had she been overprotective? Too permissive? Had she given the boy too much attention? Not enough?