Dan Lawrence received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Graduate Fellow and Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal. After a career as a magazine editor with Time Inc. and Reed Elsevier, he recently returned to writing fiction. In the past couple of months, his stories have been published in Stories Through the Ages, littledeathlit, and by the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Writers’ Guild. An excerpt from his novel “Perfect Criminals” was a finalist in the Summer 2021 Novel Slices Contest, and his novel “The Quarry” was shortlisted for the 2020 James River Writers Best Unpublished Novel Contest. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and three sons.
MENDOCINO, CA, 1987 – The river cut through the sand all the way to where it met the Pacific, where the bluffs rose up to the town. Part way down the beach, a bridge spanned the river; an enormous concrete plank set between two ledges a hundred feet up.
Adrianne helped Paula with her shoes in the car in the parking area. Paula had mastered the secret of untying them and seemed to consider it a great accomplishment. “OK, now leave them like that,” said Adrianne once both shoes were tied with safety bows. “No going barefoot on the beach.” Not that it wasn’t warm enough to do so. Certainly the weather was a great improvement over the thin flurries of sleet they’d left behind in suburban Cleveland a week or so before, but she envisioned broken glass, nails, rusted can fragments, and God knows what else abandoned in the sand by endless waves of locals, transients, and tourists.
Adrianne zipped up Paula’s jacket and lifted her carefully out of the car. The jacket was too nice for the beach. It had been given to her by one of Gom’s friends. ‘Gom’ was the closest Paula could come to pronouncing ‘grandma,’ and the name had stuck. Her friends were always bringing the children gifts and acting like it was nothing. It made Adrianne feel like a refugee. The jacket was quilted, white, and hand-embroidered with a pastel bouquet.
Melvin was already at the river’s edge, beating the eddies with a stick he’d found along the way. It constantly astounded her how different he and Paula were and how different both of them were from her or Dale. The last time they’d visited, Gom’s friends had nearly gone hoarse exclaiming how much Melvin favored his father and Paula favored her. It wasn’t quite true, and of course they left Dale out of it now.
Paula was a quiet, mysterious child, absorbed in a realm to which her mother did not quite have access. As they strolled toward the bridge, hand in hand, Paula scanned the beach, pausing occasionally to point at something indiscernible in the sand or on the opposite bank of the river with her bottle before looking expectantly at her mother. “What do you see, Paula?” Adrianne would ask, or more often say, “Ooh, nice. Look at that,” and they would walk a bit further. Paula was most like her mother in looks. The wavy blonde hair, faultless complexion and regular features were adorable now and would become strikingly pretty as she grew older.
Melvin paralleled them at the river’s edge. Countless invisible foes charged him out of the mist, encountered his kung-fu sword, and floated silently away on the current. Adrianne worried that he might become cruel, the way she thought of Dale since Sheila had come on the scene. It was an effort to stop herself from reprimanding him for the violence of his play, for the flush of excitement it brought to his cheeks. She knew she was too vigilant for changes in them brought about by the separation. She took some consolation from the therapeutic anodyne that a child’s personality is formed by age three, though she didn’t really believe it.
They reached the bridge, which gave off a dull roar. Adrianne looked up and a bead of water shattered on her forehead. The dripping, roaring underbody of the bridge felt hazardous, so she lifted Paula in her arms. “Whee,” she said, bouncing playfully down the beach with her. Paula, cradled in her arms, stared up and back at the bridge, pointing at it with her bottle. She opened her mouth and left it open. “You like that bridge?” asked Adrianne, nuzzling her. “You like that big ugly bridge?” Paula kept staring at it with her mouth half open, then smiled slightly at her mother’s antics.
Melvin had run up and was tapping at his mother’s heels with his stick. “There’s a dead bird down there, Mom!” he exclaimed.
“I hope you didn’t touch it,” she said.
“Naw, but it floats!” He now beat the ground just in front of her feet as she walked.
“You’d better not hit me with that,” she warned. Melvin made a few particularly threatening slaps with the stick, flung it up the beach and ran back to the water.
The beach narrowed as they neared the bluffs. An enormous stump, bleached beige by salt and sun, sat upright above the seaweed line, its gnarled roots reaching up through the sand. It had been hacked at and carved into, and there were blackened areas at its base where fires had been lit, but the top was smooth and relatively flat. Adrianne placed Paula on it. The sun was obscured behind the bluffs. A plane of clouds, furrowed like a plowed field lay at an angle in the syrupy orange sky, and where the river opposed the sea waves washed over each other in an endless, vanishing progression.
Adrianne gazed out at the ocean and deflected the momentary impression that she was at the edge of a barren desert by focusing on Melvin, who crouched over something at the water’s edge. It made her uneasy. “Melvin!” she shouted. He turned his head and she waved him up. He made a few more motions over whatever it was that held his attention before running toward them, kicking up enormous sprays of sand. He ran past the stump as Paula, sucking on her bottle with a look of deep consternation, watched him go with her eyes.
The orange glow had turned nearly purple. If she waited much longer it would be dark by the time they got back to the car. Adrianne lifted Paula off the stump and took her hand. Melvin had found another stick and was poking around with it in the sand. They approached him, clothed in a silence as enveloping as the bruised light. Adrianne fought a hopeless feeling that she didn’t really know them any better than she had known Dale. The whoosh of the waves and of the occasional car seemed to be swallowed whole by the air. Melvin was tapping on a patch of something blue and shiny. Near it, what could have been some strands of kelp fanned out on the sand. “Look Mom,” he said, enlarging the patch of blue with his stick. “Somebody lost their coat.”
Adrianne reached down and plucked a stained and crumpled piece of paper with some writing on it from the sand. ‘Ears are perfect for ripping off somebody’s head,’ she read at the top, ‘even your own ears, like with that artist.’ The printing was simple but uneven, as if it had been written by a child on a train. The next entry read, ‘See Teenage Slut Girls, Pony Girls in Bondage.’ Adrianne dropped the paper in disgust. She felt that her hands were unclean. Melvin was working toward the edges of the coat with his stick. “Leave it there,” she admonished. “It’s time to go.”
#
Perched on the edge of the bluff, silhouetted against an enormous gullet of sky, the town looked fragile. Some lights were just coming on against an encroaching darkness so vast that to see the lights oppose it was touching. It was a quaint town. People there seemed bent to the common purpose of discovering the right way to live, which seemed quaint in itself. Gom had moved there several years before, soon after Adrianne’s father died. It had taken Adrianne by surprise. She’d thought Gom would settle further into her suburban life in the house where Adrianne had grown up, surrounded by the parents of Adrianne’s childhood friends. She and Dale had bought a house nearby soon after getting married. When Gom left, it had felt like a slap in the face, and the first time Adrianne had come to visit she’d resisted the place, the people, and her mother. Before long, though, she’d had to admit that her mother seemed more at home here, and the town itself was easy to love.
Adrianne pulled in front of the only grocery store and left Melvin in charge of Paula while she popped in. She was hungry, but her instructions were clear and she didn’t have the energy to deviate from them. Gom had requested a package of cream cheese, a kind of Indonesian cracker Adrianne was unfamiliar with, and a bunch of fresh dill, provisions for another pleasant gathering of Gom’s friends that evening, all freshly groomed and somewhat exotically attired. There would be sherry all around, a blazing fire, and a circle of warmth turned in against the darkened world. They would all be much older than Adrianne, but she enjoyed their company and the attention they gave Melvin and Paula.
On her way to the register, Adrianne spotted a tall, wrinkled man behind the meat counter and remembered her mother telling her about the party the town had thrown for him when he’d finally been able to return to work after a month-long drunk. She broke the ten Gom had pressed on her and put the change in an empty pocket of her jacket.
When she got back to the car, Paula was crying and Melvin looked sheepish. “That’s OK honey,” she cooed, wiping away Paula’s tears with her thumb and straightening her embroidered jacket, “We’re going back to Gom’s now.” She sat up and started the car. “What happened?” she asked Melvin.
“I don’t know,” said Melvin unconvincingly. “I was sitting here and she just started crying.”
#
“Hello!” shouted Adrianne as she walked in the front door.
“Hi!” replied Gom, who was clattering about in the kitchen, enveloped by steam.
“Gom!” barked Paula at Adrianne’s heels as Melvin skulked away.
Adrianne put the grocery bag on the kitchen counter and emptied the change from her pocket. Gom wore the conservative flower-print dress that Adrianne had given her years before. She had bought it at a store where everything cost $13.99 and had pointedly left the price tag on. At the time, Gom, still living in Cleveland, bought similar dresses from Talbots for a hundred dollars or more. It was not at all suited to her present life, nor to the party she was about to give, and seeing her wear it made Adrianne feel uneasy, both for the impulse that had motivated the gift, and that it meant enough to Gom that she remembered to wear it.
“Could you take out the ice before you get dressed?” asked Gom, opening a cupboard and then closing it again. “I seem to be running a little late.”
“Just relax,” said Adrianne. Gom always ran a little late. “No one will care if you’re not quite ready.” She took out the ice, pounded it and dumped it in the ice bucket. She left Gom making a second attempt on the cupboard.
Melvin was in the bathroom. Adrianne went to his room and laid out a fresh outfit on his bed, then took Paula to the room they shared and started to change her diaper. Opening the closet for the Pampers, she got sidetracked by the batiked cotton dress Gom had given her for Christmas the year before, the one she could never have worn in Cleveland. She would suppress her eye-roll reflex and wear it tonight.
Adrianne laid it on the bed next to Paula, who was right where she’d left her with her pants half off, her legs akimbo, one arm bent behind her back. She stared fixedly at the bedside table lamp as if it were the cosmic riddle laid bare. “You silly,” said Adrianne, coming out of herself. “What are you staring at?” She freed Paula’s arm and tickled her before attending to her diaper. She hoped Paula would outgrow her strangeness. Melvin had been inward too, to a lesser degree, and now he was about as extroverted as they come – until recently.
She couldn’t get used to changing for dinner alone. She resented Dale’s absence, and resented vesting him with that much power over her feelings. It didn’t help that, thanks in large part to her, he was much better off now than when they had met – more self-assured, more relaxed, more handsome and successful – whereas she was back to ground zero, faced with rebuilding her life as an aging single mother with no particular skills. Visiting Gom was a kind of buffer between the life they had left behind and the life they would return to. It was pleasant enough, but it felt a little like a fairy tale that you know ends badly.
A commotion erupted in the living room, a barrage of greetings. Adrianne dressed Paula hurriedly and made herself up in the mirror. As soon as they entered the living room Paula was surrounded by bending figures, and Adrianne found herself, sherry in hand, engaged in conversation with a local widower who had been a successful advertising executive in his former life. The town was full of successful men and women who had escaped from their success as from some unspeakable horror. This ex-executive was now an avid gardener with a passion for grafting cuttings from fruit trees too delicate for the region on to hardier strains.
Adrianne scanned the room as they talked. There was a small group in the kitchen and a larger one sitting around the fire, politely ravaging Gom’s dill hors d’oeuvres and handling Paula whenever she got restless. Adrianne did not see Melvin, whom she suspected of shirking his usual duty of taking the guests’ coats to the study, and soon excused herself to go find him. She found him sitting on his bed, scowling and putting on his shoes, his hair still uncombed. “You’re missing the snacks,” she said, taking his comb from the dresser and going to work on his part.
Melvin jerked his head away. “Go away,” he said and stared stonily at the wall.
“Melvin!” exclaimed Adrianne. She watched as his stony expression broke apart and he began to cry.
“How come you were so mean to me at the beach?” he asked in a high, thin, tremulous voice.
Adrianne rocked back involuntarily. “How was I mean to you?” Melvin was already drying his face on her dress, avoiding the lacquered driftwood pin that one of Gom’s friends had given her. “I’m sorry,” she said, recovering. “I know this is hard. It’s hard on everybody.” ‘Except for Dale,’ she thought, suddenly furious. Much as she loved the kids, they were an ineluctable conduit to her anger at him.
They reentered the party together. “Hello young man,” said the widower, bending officiously to shake Melvin’s hand.
A firm handshake while looking a grownup straight in the eye was one of Melvin’s favorite rituals, but tonight he shook the man’s hand lethargically, looking down at his shoes. “Mom,” he said loudly as the widower turned away to join the group in the kitchen. “How come that man’s hair is funny and his face is so long?”
Adrianne gave Melvin a disapproving look and pulled him back into the hallway. “It’s not nice to talk about people that way,” she admonished.
She watched several waves of anger and injustice play across his face before he blurted, “I don’t care! He looks stupid!” and stalked back into the party, his expression stubbornly set.
#
After Gom and the kids were asleep, Adrianne lay awake in bed. She’d had trouble sleeping since Dale left. She missed his snoring. She’d grown accustomed to poking him intermittently so that he’d shift positions. She remembered how once, after she’d poked him, he’d awakened long enough to threaten to smash her into the wall if she ever took his blankets again. He’d threatened in a gruff voice she didn’t recognize and then went promptly back to sleep, claiming to remember nothing of the incident in the morning. She told herself at the time that the need for sleep brought out the primitive urges.
Adrianne felt an unpleasant lightness in her stomach. Perhaps hers weren’t primitive enough. Even before Sheila, her habit of excusing herself soon after sex to go clean up had begun to annoy Dale. She enjoyed sex and considered herself competent at it, as at most things, but Sheila obviously had something she did not. She was younger, of course, and Adrianne, who refused to meet her, imagined her as dark-haired, almond-eyed and olive-skinned, the kind of woman who would bathe in Oil of Olay followed by a liberal dousing of My Sin.
#
It was still dark when Adrianne awoke. She felt muddled. It was cold and her bladder was full. She imagined the cold squeezing it. She thought about how milk reduces the tannin content of tea. The phrase ‘croak of dawn’ played in her head. She made her way to the bathroom, holding her hand in front of her like a saint parting the darkness. When she turned on the fluorescent mirror light, it rattled like brittle bones. She watched the inside of the bathroom window sweating and thought dimly to herself, ‘At least I’m not clammy.’
#
The next time Adrianne awoke, the curtains were filled with the voluptuous yellow light of late morning. The three-sided crib pushed up against her bed was empty, and she marveled at having slept through Paula’s removal. She sat up and dragged her hands down her face, pausing part way to rub her eyes, then opened them wide. To her surprise, everything looked right, bright, simple. She felt good, as though everything had settled into place inside of her. No residual or imminent headache, no dream phantoms. She was awake and the world lay before her, welcoming and whole. She washed and dressed and went to the kitchen to find her place set with a bowl of cereal, bread ready to toast, butter, homemade jam, juice, coffee on the stove. It was after ten, and she could catch glimpses of Gom and the kids through the side window, gardening: Gom bent over weeding, strands of white hair tickling her face; Melvin and Paula scraping ineffectually at the earth with tools they could barely lift. Adrianne felt grateful and happy.
She poured a cup of coffee and sat down with a sigh. She could tell that Gom had already been to town by the weekly paper that lay folded beside her cereal bowl. A photograph on the front page showed two men standing over the glistening creases of what looked like a plastic leaf bag. One of the men was standing at an angle that defied gravity with his eyes shut. The other was pointing over his shoulder to where a spiny halo of driftwood was silhouetted against the froth of surf, illuminated by a 3/4 moon. ‘Police Chief Rogers and reporter discuss body found last night on Big River beach,’ read the caption. The toast popped up and Adrianne buttered it and spread it sparingly with the homemade raspberry jam. The article below the photograph began, ‘Last night at 7:30 p.m., the body of an unidentified woman was unearthed on Big River Beach by a group of high-school students.’ She skimmed the rest of the article. They had no information about the woman yet except that she was probably in her twenties, had long brown hair, and wore blue jeans, a plaid wool shirt and a blue parka. She had been strangled.
Adrianne took a too-big bite of toast that abraded the roof of her mouth. A second later Gom and the two kids charged in the back door.
“Look Mom, we got carrots!” shouted Melvin, holding them out to her. All three fit in the palm of his hand. “Gom says we can eat them for lunch.” Paula stumbled toward the front of the house, bottle in hand, without stopping to visit.
“How did you sleep?” asked Gom. “I thought you’d need to sleep in after that awful party.”
“I thought it was a fine party,” said Adrianne, her voice pitched a little too high. “The party was fine.” She swallowed some coffee and burned her throat.
Gom pulled the stool over to the sink and covered Melvin’s hands with her own as she helped him wash the carrots in the sink. “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but when that …” here she shook her head in place of words, “… Allen Reed started in about what a big improvement Reagan is over Carter, I had to bite my tongue. You were admirably restrained.”
“Ma!” demanded Paula. She stood in the kitchen doorway, trying to point behind herself to where the neighbor’s kitten had perched on the outside windowsill.
“Look, a kitten!” exclaimed Gom. “Why don’t you and Melvin go out and play with her?”
“I hate cats,” said Melvin with heartfelt disgust, already halfway to the door with Paula tottering behind him.
Adrianne’s head was spinning as she tried to process the blue parka, the strands of kelp. Gom poured some coffee and sat across from her. “Did you see this?” Adrianne asked, breathless, holding the newspaper.
“I know. Isn’t it awful?” Gom’s generalized concern made it clear that she did not connect the murder with their visit to the beach the previous afternoon.
“Do they know…?” Adrianne shrugged.
“They think she was hitch-hiking.” Gom sipped her coffee and frowned. “To think of all the times you did that without telling me. What if anything had happened to you? And they say whoever did it tore off her ears, can you believe it?” Adrianne blanched, remembering the scrap of paper she’d found.
“I’m sorry,” said Gom. “You’re still eating.”
#
Later that day, Adrianne took the kids to town. Gom had a washing machine but no drier, and instead of going to the trouble of hanging her laundry on the line or of putting Gom, who was always offering to do a wash, to the trouble, Adrianne preferred to use the laundromat in town. She had more-or-less recovered from the initial shock of the murder, but her perceptions had subtly shifted. She honked at a woman jogging peaceably along the narrow shoulder of the road and wondered what would happen if she hit her. She’d heard somewhere that people hit by cars fly clear out of their shoes.
“I know,” said Melvin hopefully. “Let’s go to the beach!” Paula’s brow darkened at the suggestion. She sucked her bottle sullenly.
“No,” said Adrianne more assertively than she’d intended. “No beach today. We’re going to wash the clothes and then maybe go look at some shops.”
“Shops,” growled Melvin, curling his upper lip to his nose.
The laundromat bustled with its usual clientele: ex-hippies who lived back in the woods interspersed with transients and a few neatly dressed tourists. Usually Adrianne was charmed by the laissez-faire ambience of the place, but today she took one step inside and drew back into herself. Unkempt, barefoot children ran shrieking down the aisles. Men with dense beards and women trailing scarves scuttled between churning machines, grouping and regrouping in twos and threes to talk. They could have been talking about anything.
Adrianne did not deposit Paula on one of the chairs by the door as she usually did. She gripped her hand tightly, braced the laundry basket against her other hip, and made straight for the nearest available machine. She had only half loaded it when Paula threw herself to the floor and began screaming. “What’s the matter, Paula?” asked Adrianne. She’d meant her voice to sound soothing, but she could hear the panicked edge. Paula would not allow herself to be picked up. She flailed and shrieked inconsolably.
Suddenly, Adrianne remembered Melvin and frantically scanned the room. He was toward the back with the other children, engaged in some kind of game. One little girl stood apart from the others, transfixed, one hand in her mouth, her eyes on Paula. “Melvin!” commanded Adrianne. For a moment everyone stopped and looked at her, and in that moment she saw herself as they must have seen her, looming over her terrified daughter, face contorted, shouting at her son. For a moment she wished she had it in her to be the woman they saw, to shout her children’s capacity for suffering out of them, to beat into them some kind of permanent safety.
Melvin shuffled over, obviously abashed at having been called away so ignominiously. He showed his mother a face that seemed prepared to admit the possibility of guilt. It made Adrianne feel ashamed. She turned quickly to finish loading. After a few moments of uncertainty, Melvin turned to Paula, who was sobbing quietly now with her thumb in her mouth. “Get up, stupid,” he said.
#
Adrianne had trouble sleeping again. She looked over at Paula who had kicked the blankets down beneath her feet. She lay sprawled out against the white sheets like a skydiver fixed in time. If only she could control or even predict the forces that shaped her children’s lives. If only she could ensure their happiness. Adrianne reached over and straightened Paula’s blankets. She was such an odd child, lovely and odd. Adrianne loved the oddness in her, yet it made her uneasy. She could not help feeling that it was somehow her fault, the result of some obscure thing she’d done wrong.
Sometimes Paula would stand frozen before an object – a lamp, the kitchen sink, a chair, her shoes – for minutes on end without blinking. She would stare at it until some ineffable event took place, then go on about her life as though nothing had happened. Adrianne lay very still, staring at Paula, trying to reproduce the effect. She would clear her mind and wait for Paula’s essence to reveal itself. It would not even be called Paula or Paula sleeping, it would simply be. But before that moment of insight burst upon her, she fell asleep.
#
The next night, Gom took them out to dinner at a seafood place, a dilapidated shack on the docks of a fishing basin up the coast. They got a table in the back, next to the studded red leatherette door that swung into the kitchen. Across from Adrianne, above Gom and Melvin’s heads, a poster pinned to the wall read: ‘First Aid for the Choking Victim.’ Adrianne studied the three circles at the bottom of the poster. In the first, a woman sat stiffly in front of her dinner, mouth open, eyes wide with alarm. ‘1. Cannot speak or breath,’ read the caption. The next circle showed a close-up of the woman’s face, now purple, one hand clutched to her throat. Around the circumference of the circle was written, ‘Universal sign for choking.’ The third circle showed the woman bent face down on the table next to an empty plate of food, with the caption, ‘3. Collapses.’
Gom turned around, following her gaze, then turned back, smiling. “Not very appetizing, is it?” Adrianne smiled back faintly. She knew how the purple woman felt; she hadn’t been able to breath for weeks. She thought of the girl on the beach and got up quickly to go to the ladies room. When she’d done vomiting and rinsed out her mouth, she looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. She felt a little better. She was pale, and the stress lines at the corners of her eyes looked deeper than usual, but if she had caught sight of herself unexpectedly, she’d still know who she was. Dale, on the other hand, was becoming less clear in her mind. She was no longer sure she would recognize him if he walked into the room. Though she couldn’t bring up his face, she knew that it was his hand clutching her throat.
#
When the kids were safely asleep, Adrianne dragged herself to the kitchen. Gom, sitting at the kitchen table struggling to stay awake enough to write a postcard, raised her head. She looked done in, and Adrianne, seeing it, felt a stab of guilt. She loved her mother, but after leaving home nearly 20 year before, she’d come to realize that a week was about as long as she could sustain the effort of showing that love before the cracks appeared. It had been nearly two weeks.
Except for her evident exhaustion, Gom didn’t show the strain. She was better at it. A better person. A better mother. A wave of resentment washed over Adrianne as she stuck her head in the refrigerator and rehashed all the things that Gom had done to make this trip easier for her, starting with giving up her bedroom to her and Paula and sleeping on the futon in the study.
“You never did get any dessert did you?” asked Gom, rising from her chair.
“That’s OK,” muttered Adrianne. “Just looking.”
Gom came over and nudged her out of the way. “Let’s see if there’s any parfait left from last night. Would you like some parfait?”
Adrianne shrugged. “Sure, parfait sounds good.” She went to the table and sat across from Gom’s half-finished postcard. She turned it over, revealing a sepia view past the bridge, down the beach where the girl had been found, to where the ocean was torn by rocks.
“No. No, I don’t see any. That’s right. Parfait’s all gone. Melvin finished it this afternoon. How about some nice vanilla ice-cream?”
“No thanks, Mom. I’m really not that hungry.”
“Let’s see,” said Gom, rummaging deeper. “We have some old fruit salad you could put a little brandy on, or a slice of cake might be good. It’s Aunt Louise’s upside-down cake, and you could have a glass of milk with that. How does that sound?” Gom was deep in the refrigerator by now.
“No thanks, Mom,” repeated Adrianne, making a conscious effort to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Oh, I know! Just the thing: Eleanor’s homemade raspberry jam. If you put a little of that over the ice-cream … and we still have a few oatmeal cookies that need to be eaten….”
Adrianne took a deep breath. “Mom.”
“Some grapes, then? Or….”
#
At breakfast Adrianne announced they would be leaving the next day. Gom protested, but not strenuously enough to interfere with their preparations. Melvin was willing to pack, with Adrianne’s help, but he was overly conscientious about it, as if he were packing for some disaster of as yet undisclosed proportions: a trip to the hospital or to the tornado shelter. He was so anxious to do the right thing that he couldn’t. He dropped most of his socks while trying to carry them with his underwear. He put his sneakers, treads down, on top of his best white shirt. This was not the Melvin of a few weeks before whose self-assurance had been, at times, breathtaking. Adrianne suddenly realized that, in spite of all the time they’d spent together recently, in some ways she’d lost track of him, of Paula, too.
“Everything OK, Melvin?” she asked remedially. He nodded his head several times and looked worried. Adrianne felt a pang of conscience. She was probably too hard on him, her moods too arbitrary. “Is there anything you want to tell Mommy?” she asked, touching his head gently to make her good intentions clear.
He took a small sharp breath and said a frightened sounding “No,” before leaving the room. Adrianne continued packing, furrowing her brow as she considered whether to follow him or not. Paula started crying in the next room. She had just gone down for her nap. A minute later Melvin returned, toothbrush and comb in hand. She took them from him and laid them gently on the dresser, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that he would need them that night.
Paula was howling now, the word “Mommy” escaping her like a banshee. Every nap time for the past few days had been the same: first the crying, then the howling, then screaming that ended abruptly in vomiting. She didn’t want to let it get that far today, but as she rushed from the room she wondered what she had done to trigger this new response.
Paula stopped howling as soon as Adrianne picked her up. In fact she started to giggle, toying with the nap of Adrianne’s sweater and squealing, “Mommy, Mommy,” with coy delight.
“It’s not funny,” scolded Adrianne. “You’re supposed to be asleep,” but Paula’s glee was infectious, her flattery irresistible, and soon they were deep in play, tickling each other beneath the chin and trading cascades of laughter. At moments like that, Adrianne felt that Paula would be OK. But how rare those moments were, and how seemingly unrelated to external events.
Soon Paula settled down again, and Adrianne sang Three Blind Mice to her, stroking her hair until she fell asleep.
When she returned to Melvin’s room. His clothes were all packed and his suitcase was closed on his bed. He was standing by the dresser, looking at her with an expression on his face that was hard to read. She looked back at him and cocked her head to one side. “So where are we going?” he asked, as though he were finally ready to hear the truth.
“What do you mean?” asked Adrianne.
Melvin reflexively looked at the suitcase on the bed.
Adrianne gave a startled laugh. “Home!” she exclaimed. Sentences formed in her head and collapsed of their own weight. She started toward him and was stopped by his look. He looked less like a child, as if he had begun the life-long process of qualifying certainty with doubt, thought with worry, perception with fear.
“We’re going home, silly,” she said. Then she went and hugged him whether he wanted her to or not.