Cold in July

4

I could have slept in, but I didn’t. I got up, dressed for work and went into the kitchen to sit at the table with Ann and Jordan.

Jordan was playing with his food, as usual. Seldom did a morning pass without some sort of fight between me and the boy, or between the boy and his mother. Something to do with the way he ate, or playing at the table. The kid couldn’t get out of the house until he had spilled his milk. It was like a morning ritual that had to be observed.

And there were thousands of little things he did that made me climb the wall, and it was the same for Ann. She and I went through each day joyful for him and mad as hell at him, trying to figure if we were overly demanding of a four-year-old, or if he was a real life Dennis the Menace. Or worse, some sort of criminal in the making, created by us, seasoned by our impatience and anger, tempered by his genetics, having acquired all the things we hated about ourselves, and none of the things we prized.

I thought too, each night as I went to bed, that no matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough. I never missed a day yelling at the little guy, or losing my temper in some way, and I certainly told him no more often than yes. Though I tried to listen to him describing what the Pink Panther and Woody Woodpecker and the Pokey Puppy did, there were times when his little voice was like chalk on a blackboard and I would tune out his enthusiasms, and I knew he could sense it.

Then too, there was the other child, the one I thought about more often than I ever expected. The one Ann had carried inside her for eight and a half months and I had felt move inside her and had heard gurgling around in there when I put my ear to her stomach. The same child that filled her with poison and sent her to the hospital for days and prompted the late-night phone call in which she told me, “Our baby is dead,” and then began to cry.

They used drugs to make her deliver, then offered us the body. A little girl. They said if we didn’t want her they would autopsy the body for research and dispose of it. Later, I found out if we had asked for her they would have handed her to us in a black garbage bag.

At times I thought we should have at least looked at her. Maybe given her a name and had her buried. Other times I felt we had done the right thing. But right or wrong, the face of the child I never saw came to me in my dreams; a cold, gray face with its eyes open, and the eyes were like Ann’s, bright, bright green. And I would awake. Sweating.

Sometimes I would drive by the hospital and see dark clouds, hanging over it, clouds that seemed full of storm. But I would know that it was smoke from the black incinerators out back; incinerators where placentas and lab experiments were disposed. And I wondered if my unnamed child had gone there after autopsy. Just so much ruined meat in a black garbage bag, cooked to past done, transformed to soot that would cling to the hospital roof and outside walls.

And when I dreamed or thought these things, I would always think of Jordan and wonder how he put up with my inadequacies as a father. Times like that, I felt like a bad actor masquerading as a parent in a school play.

I determined that this morning I would let nothing he did irritate me. It was the millionth time I had turned over that leaf in my mind. Each time I had failed to live up to it, but like some sort of Zen exercise, I thought repetition might make it easier for me eventually. And after what had happened last night, I saw the world in an entirely new and vulnerable light. It was just good to see the boy sitting there with his cereal, and as always, I took a secret pride in seeing my features on his little face. His hair was blond like his mother’s, but the almond shape of his eyes, the prominence of the lips, the cleft in his chin, were mine.

Looking at him now, I hop Kim e froed I was more of a presence in his life than my father had been in mine, and I hoped I wouldn’t haunt him the way my father haunted me. That when it was all said and done he would have more than some uncertain memories and that there would be more between us than Christmas cards from distant cities with “love” written at the bottom.

I leaned out of my chair, kissed and hugged the boy. “Good morning, big guy.”

“What was all that racket about last night, Daddy?” Racket was his new word. He used it every chance he got.

“Some people we had over.”

“Why?”

“We needed them.”

“Why?”

“Just for some things.”

“What things?”

“Nothing much. You like that cereal?”

“Yeah.”

It was some sort of processed, multi-colored junk filled with too much sugar and air. I felt like hell for letting him have that garbage, but his mother liked it too, and there were those damn television commercials that offered toys and games inside, and that fueled him for it, and like so many parents, I had my weak moments. But I determined then and there that next time we went shopping we would come home with oatmeal and granola, eggs and bacon, a variety of fruits. Compliments of Richard Dane, part-time killer, full-time father.

“Taste?” Jordan asked.

I dipped my spoon into the mess and brought it back full of bright animal shapes. It tasted like shit.

“See,” Jordan said. “It’s good. You can get a fwizbee with one bogs top.”

“That right?”

“Uhhuh.”

“You finish the cereal, then we’ll send off the box top. Maybe you can start having some oatmeal when this is gone. Wouldn’t that be good for a change? Oatmeal.”

“I don’t like oatmeal.”

“Some eggs. Maybe some sausage.”

“I don’t like that neither. Just seerul.”

I nodded, not wishing to argue, but grateful I had gotten his mind off the police. I was even more grateful he hadn’t awakened last night and seen the dead man on the couch.

“You going to work?” Ann asked.

She could see that I was shaved and dressed, but she was giving me an invitation to stay home. It was an idea that did not appeal to me, however. Being in the house all day with her gone and Jordan at day school would just cause me to replay last night endlessly in my head. Every-time I looked at the couch or at the brighter spot on the wall where the painting had hung, it would come back to me.

“Sure, I’m going.”

“Feel like it?”

“Close enough. It’s better than staying here.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Some.”

“Sorry I was asleep when you came to bed.”

“That’s all right. I was too tired anyway.”

“That’s why you go to bed, Daddy, cause you’re tired,” Jordan said.

I smiled at him. “You’re right. I should have known that.”

“I know everythang,” he said.

I winked at Ann.

“What you doing with your eye, Daddy?”

“Something in it.”

“Gid it out?”

“Think so.”

Jordan turned back to his breakfast, and I found there really was something in my eyes.

Tears.

I excused myself before they could notice, went to the bathroom, washed my face and stared in the mirror. I thought maybe I should see a different face looking back at me, but it was the same goon I saw in there every day. Killing a man had not altered my appearance in the least I still looked like a fairly healthy, not too bad-looking, starting to bald, thirty-five-year-old man.

Jordan appeared in the doorway.

“God to go bad.”

“Come in.”

“You gid out.”

I patted him on the head, closed the door and went out The tears started again. Goddamn, I’d never been this weepy before. But then it hit me what the tears were all about. It wasn’t just that I had killed a man. It was that I was suddenly aware of Jordan’s mortality. I had accepted my own some time back, but not his. After the loss of the first child I felt that I had paid my dues. But I knew now that was ridiculous. There are no such things as dues. Nothing’s promised.

I got to thinking about what might have happened had Ann not heard the noise and alerted me. What if Jordan had heard the sound, got up to investigate, wandered into the living room in his feeted Superman pajamas, clutching his teddy bear?

A grim scenario formed in my mind. The burglar hearing Jordan, turning, drawing the gun, firing without consideration, a red blossom opening in my son’s chest…

I heard the toilet flush, and I went into our bedroom and closed the door, sat on the edge of the bed and hoped Jordan wouldn’t come in. I tried to dismiss all thoughts of mortality from my mind, my family’s mortality and my own. I sat there for a few minutes until the lie of permanence and absolute happiness was once again real enough to hold and my inner eye was blind enough not to see it slipping between my fingers like sand.