Chris Bachelder - The Throwback Special

Charles said that he wanted to make sure that he understood clearly.

“I thought it might challenge her worldview,” Robert said. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to talk to someone about it. I wanted someone to tell me that it was normal for me to feel not glad, but you know, satisfied. Not satisfied.”

Charles turned away from the window and sat in a chair across from Robert. He cleared his throat, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Listen,” he said. “What I do know about children is that it’s important — some experts believe it is quite important — for children to negotiate risk and danger on their own, or else they might later be — or so it is thought — inordinately risk-averse and timid, too reliant upon parental intervention. Are you saying, Robert, that you felt satisfied that your daughter was negotiating risk in a developmentally healthy way?”

“Not exactly.”

“Aren’t you saying that, Robert? Isn’t that the fairly normal thing you’re saying?”

Robert said that it wasn’t.

“Yes, it is,” Charles said. “You’re saying that, for your child’s sake, for her own happiness and success, you would like her sense of reality to correspond more accurately to—”

“It was a different kind of twinge, Charles. It was like a twinge of justice. It was nearly the same feeling you get when you see very powerful people get indicted for corruption. When you see them duck into the backseat of a police car with handcuffs on. With the officer’s hand on their head?”

Charles stood again, and returned to the window. He saw one of the Michaels — Fat Michael — get out of his car and stretch. The hem of his shirt slid up, exposing an inch of his toned and hairless abdomen. Fat Michael was in fact remarkably lean and muscular and well proportioned. His nickname was a typical masculine joke, a crude homemade weapon that indiscriminately sprayed hostility and insecurity in a 360-degree radius, targeting everyone within hearing range, including the speaker. Charles had shared the linebackers’ hotel room (the “Fracture Compound”) with Fat Michael two years ago, and he remembered that body with admiration and repulsion. Fat Michael’s level of fitness made Fat Michael a walking rebuke of everyone else’s lifestyle choices. He had those veins in his arms, and the kind of torso that tapers from chest to waist. He was a beautiful affront. He had engineered himself, his physical being, in his forties, to make others feel rotten, and what kind of person would do that? Without knowing it, Charles pinched the fat above his belt buckle. In the parking lot, Vince jogged over to Fat Michael — Charles thought Vince’s strides seemed exaggerated — and the two men shook hands, then stared at the ground, talking, scuffing their shoes. Charles envied their inane pleasantries in the cold.

“Robert,” he said, without turning around. Like certain zoo animals, the adolescents he worked with often did not want to be looked at directly. “When your daughter fell to the ground and then began crying in an authentic way, what did you do?” Charles knew this line of questioning was a substantial risk, but in his professional opinion it was justified. Also, he wanted this conversation to be finished.

Robert said that he got down on the ground with his daughter and brushed the wood chips out of her sweaty hair.

“I see,” Charles said. “And did you hesitate?”

No, he did not hesitate. He tried to calm her down. He told her everything would be fine.

“And then what did you do?”

Robert said he asked his daughter if she could walk to the car, and she nodded. He said he told her she was a brave kid. He picked up the curtain sash that the child uses as her long imaginary braid. It had fallen off of her head. He dusted it off and tied it back around her head. Charles knew the curtain sash to be a warning sign, but he let it slide. Robert said he walked with his daughter for a while, and she was holding her arm completely still. She was trying not to cry. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her lips were trembling. She was as white, Robert said, as a sheet . He said he carried her most of the way, as gently as he could. It was like carrying a horse. “You know,” he said, “a baby horse.”

“A foal, yes,” Charles said, nodding. “And then?”

Robert said he called a doctor to get advice about where to take the child. Then he took her to an emergency care facility, where she got X-rays and a sling. The next day he took her to an orthopedist to get the cast.

“Yes,” Charles said. “Right. Do you see? Do you hear yourself?” Charles said he saw nothing to worry about. Nothing whatsoever. He said, with a hot wave of self-reproach, that ultimately Robert was responsible for his actions, not his thoughts. Charles, though, had recently begun to suspect that people might not even be responsible for their actions.

“Thank you, Charles,” Robert said, sinking farther into his chair. “I appreciate that.”

But Robert had not gotten what he wanted. What had he wanted? How could it possibly be true that he was not responsible for his thoughts? If he wasn’t, then who was? He rubbed his thumb across the velvety interior of the chinstrap. The orthopedist, the nurses — they had looked at Robert as if he were abusive. He had taken a child to the playground without a net, without elbow pads. And the cast! It was pink and purple with glitter . The girl got to choose the colors and patterns, even the toppings. She had been scared before the orthopedic appointment, and Robert sat on the edge of her bed and talked to her soothingly about how it would be fine, even fun, to have a cast. Everyone could sign her cast and draw pictures on it. He told her they could put a bread bag on it so she could take a bath. Pretty neat, right? Then the next day she gets this pastel waterproof Disney arm accessory, and she swims and bathes and doesn’t let anyone else near the cast with a pen or marker. Girls on the street stare at her with that glazed envy that young girls stare at each other with. The cast glitter rains through the house, sparkling in nests of synthetic animal hair. Water flushes out the dead skin, so her arm doesn’t get itchy at all. She never once has to ram a fork or chopstick into the cast to try to reach the agonizing itch. And when they cut the cast off? It really tickled, a lot. The girl had laughed and laughed. Then she got some stickers. She got to keep the cast as a souvenir. It didn’t even smell bad. Robert took her out for ice cream with her curtain sash trailing down her back. She wanted to keep wearing the cast, so Robert taped the two pieces together with clear packing tape. Then he offered, for a reason he would never understand, to make a neat bedside lamp out of the cast. Would she like that? A lamp made from the cast? She answered affirmatively in a series of terrible, terrible baby noises.

Well, but at least he had not lied to her. He had told her the awful truth. He had said everything was going to be fine, and it was.

THE HOTEL PARKING LOT, in which there were no trees, was covered by a thick layer of leaves. The leaves had blown from afar to reach their final resting place. They decayed pungently in pulpy clumps the color of old pennies, impervious now to wind or leaf blower. Beneath this wet stratum of decomposing vegetative matter were the faded arrows, directing traffic flow circularly toward the check-in portico, primarily a nonfunctional architectural gesture of welcome, and only rarely utilized by Old World Europeans and those of very advanced age. The lot was divided by berms, mounded and sparsely coated with bark mulch and cigarette butts. Lights on poles defined the perimeter. Power lines transected the airspace above the lot. There were few cars in the large lot, and all seemed to have been parked to maximize the distance between them.