Bewilderment

-

NO SITTER IN MY CONTACTS LIST could watch him all weekday on such short notice. Fortunately, I didn’t teach that day and could work from home. At quarter to nine, while canceling and rescheduling appointments, I got the automated text. Your child is absent without excuse. Are you aware of this (please reply Y or N)? I pressed Y, then phoned the office and told a curt, skeptical staffer that Robin had a doctor’s appointment I’d forgotten to call in.

I applied myself to email triage, then finished the delinquent edits for the article for Stryker: dimethyl sulfide and sulfur dioxide in our models of atmospheric disequilibrium. Sulfur-based life, in place of carbon: I thought about what lunch might look like in such a place, while cooking up Robin’s favorite lentils with masses of melt-away onions and the barest hint of tomato. In the afternoon, Robin knocked on my office door with several small questions about his paintings for which any answer at all would do. He was lonely. By morning, I figured, he’d be ready to head back to school.

We knocked off again for dinner. Robin wanted Aly’s signature eggplant casserole. He insisted on laying out the layers. Our finished result was not a success, but he ate with the appetite of someone who’d put in a full day. After dinner, I asked for an exhibition. A few paintings remained from the many that he’d destroyed in anger. He mounted the day’s work on a bare wall in the dining room using bits of reusable tape. I was forbidden to come in until he said to. There was an ivory-billed woodpecker and a red wolf and a Franklin’s bumblebee and a giant anole and a clump of desert yellowhead. Some were more skillful than others. But they all vibrated, and the colors shouted, Save us.

That’s a bird and a mammal and an insect and a reptile and a plant. To go with yesterday’s amphibian.

I still don’t see how a nine-year-old held still long enough to paint them. He was channeling some other maker. “Robin. They’re incredible.”

The woodpecker and the anole might already be extinct. How much should I ask for them? I want to send in as much as I can.

“You could ask people how much they might want to pay.” Used-car trick, put to a good cause. He took the pictures down and stashed them in his portfolio. “Careful! Don’t crumple them.”

So many more to do, Dad.

The next morning, after breakfast, he announced he was staying home to work some more.

“No way. Get going, now. We had a deal.”

When? What deal? You said you believed in me!

In one quick escalation, he went from nine to sixteen. Blocked from doing right, he stared me down with a fury bordering on hatred. His lips pursed and he spit near my feet. Then he wheeled, ran back down the hall to his bedroom, and slammed his door. Twenty seconds later, a skin-freezing scream turned into the thunder of toppling furniture. I pushed in his door against a mass of junk piled up behind it. He’d pulled down a five-foot-high bookshelf, and books, toys, model spacecraft, and arts-and-crafts trophies spilled across his bedroom floor. When I stepped into the room, he screamed again and swung Aly’s old ukulele into the multi-paned window, breaking both the glass and the instrument.

He lunged at me, howling. We fought. He tried to claw my face. I took his arm and twisted way too hard. Robin screamed and dropped sobbing on the floor. I wanted to die. The back of his hand was half a crushed butterfly. Aly and I had had a pact, the only one she ever made me swear to. Theo? Whatever happens, we must never hit that child. I looked around the room, ready to throw myself at her mercy. But she was nowhere.