We Are Not Ourselves

14

Eileen was understaffed again, so she had to stay late filling out charts and writing notes, and when she went around to dispense a final round of meds in little paper cups, one patient crashed his fist into his mouth in that way stupid people did when trying to look cool taking pills or eating peanuts, and he missed and sent the pill skittering across the linoleum floor. Pharmacy wasn’t picking up the phone, and she was out of that medication, so she got down on all fours and searched for it. A quarter of an hour later she found it covered in dust under the far bed. She reached her arm up with it from under the bed in a gesture of mutual victory, but as she crawled out backwards on her hands and knees, she saw that he was staring idiotically at her rear end, which she’d left hovering as she focused on the task at hand. She wanted to cram the pill in his mouth and slam his jaw shut, cracking his teeth, but she wasn’t about to let a useless fool like this defeat her poise, so she just placed it back in the little cup. In her chosen profession (in fact she felt it had chosen her, in a kind of malevolent possession) even administrators weren’t spared feeling like pieces of meat.

It was almost six thirty when she hit Eastchester Road. The Hutch was moving, thank God, and the Mets were in Boston, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad on the other side of the bridge. The traffic during the playoffs had been a nightmare: mindless, endless, pointless; very nearly proof of the randomness of the universe. Her sciatic nerve was throbbing and her feet were going numb, and she didn’t have it in her to sit there inching along.

As she approached the Whitestone and the road sloped up toward the start of the cables, she felt her mood lift. Her time on the bridge was the only part of her commute she didn’t mind. She loved the way the cables shot up in a triumphant curve as the first arch neared and then plunged down immediately afterward. Sometimes — it was happening now — the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it. High above the East River, the sharp focus of ordinary life gave way to hazy impressions as the eye worked to contain the vastness it beheld. Then the cables rolled into anchor, the landscape resumed a human scale, and that hopeful notion she’d conceived for the evening at the peak of the span began to recede.

At least the traffic was flowing. She’d be home by seven at this rate. She had called at five to say she expected to be quite late and to ask Lena to feed Connell, and then she’d called again before she left and said not to feed him. Lena had assured her it was no trouble, and Eileen had heard the touch of sharpness in her own voice when she’d said she wanted to have dinner with the boy herself. She had put chicken in the fridge to defrost it, and if she didn’t cook it, it was going to go bad.

That morning, she’d decided that they were going to have a family meal, even though Ed wouldn’t be there with them. If he was forcing her to compromise on her ideal of family time by continuing to teach these night classes, then a compromise was all she could stand anymore, not the complete capitulation she’d made lately on nights he taught, when she let Lena feed the boy and took a restless bubble bath before she went up to get him. She and Connell were enough to make up a family; in fact, they were plenty. In some families, mother and child was all there was. She didn’t need Ed to be happy.

She was angry at Ed for the class that met two nights a week, and she was angry at him for staying late another night to attend to his research. If he was going to be away this much, at least he could be making good money doing it. His turning down the job at Merck still bothered her, and the fact that he’d spent these years taking on extra instruction only served to make him seem more irresponsible somehow.

At the exit for Northern off the Whitestone Expressway, she took pleasure in seeing Shea Stadium empty. Soon enough — it couldn’t come soon enough — this endless season would be over. At 114th Street, she headed over to Thirty-Fourth Avenue, because she didn’t like driving through Corona on Northern. It depressed her to live next to a neighborhood that run-down, though things closer to her end of town weren’t all that great lately either. Some of the reliable old stores were becoming junk shops, and the number of signs with Spanish in them was on the rise.

She wasn’t looking forward to fetching Connell from the Orlandos. It used to be, when he was in kindergarten or first grade, he’d come running when she appeared at the back door, but lately she’d had to fight to get him out of there. They always had the television going, that was part of it, and the place was comfortable in a way that appealed to a kid, with knick-knacks everywhere and interesting clutter. Brenda’s four-year old daughter, Sharon, was usually there. The number of Orlandos present never seemed to dip below three. It reminded her of her apartment during the happy period in her teens when a new wave of relatives came over from Ireland. There were differences, of course: the Orlandos were louder, more physical, certainly more affectionate. She’d dealt with smoke as a kid, but there were more smokers in the Orlando house; everyone but Sharon seemed to have lit up at some point in Eileen’s presence. She suspected that whatever fun Connell had up there paled in comparison to the afternoons she’d enjoyed with all her cousins around, but he didn’t know the difference. Or maybe it was like when she went up to the Schmidts’ apartment to watch television as a girl. She always felt she was escaping the reality of her life. Was that how Connell felt? If so, he had no reason to. She and Ed provided a calmer home than she’d ever had. Still, these days he never wanted to come down. She had to admit that for the first few minutes after they got downstairs, until she put the kitchen radio on and started cooking, her house felt empty by comparison.

She parked and went inside, took her shoes off, and changed quickly out of her stockings. She put her slippers on and went up the back stairs. Lena answered the door in a smock and said, “Come in, come in,” with the carefree informality of a woman perfectly comfortable in her own home. Behind her, Angelo sat at the table in the dining room that had once been Eileen’s own, smoking a cigarette and flipping through the Post. He still had his Sanitation Department shirt on, unbuttoned and untucked, with an undershirt beneath it. His hands were thick, and his fingers were stained from cigarettes, but there was an elegance in the way his hair was cropped and the longer strands on top were slicked back. He gave her a warm smile and welcomed her with a small gesture of the hand. The only books in the house were a few dusty volumes in the glass case behind him, and he hadn’t finished high school, but still he gave the impression he could summon up reliable answers to almost any question put to him. She watched him luxuriously turn the pages of the newspaper, licking his finger and sliding his hand behind the page to flip it as though it were a leaf in an illuminated manuscript. Since Consolata’s death a few months back, he was less quick to yell, and he sat at the table and talked to Connell more, which the boy delighted in. The family was still paying the rent for Consolata’s apartment, presumably out of whatever small inheritance she’d left them. Lena and Angelo were planning on moving upstairs with Gary, to give Donny, Brenda, and Sharon room to breathe. The kids were grown, but it was evident they wouldn’t be striking off on their own anytime soon.

Gary and Brenda were on the couch, Sharon between them, resting her head on her mother’s lap while her uncle held her feet. Donny was in the easy chair. Connell had the smaller couch to himself. They were watching Jeopardy. Connell barely looked up when Eileen walked in. Donny waved; Gary looked embarrassed to be noticed. He was wearing corduroy pants and a T-shirt that was too tight in the gut. He wasn’t fat so much as the shirt was a shrunken relic of his youth.

The question at hand was about which president served the shortest term in office, thirty-two days. Eileen couldn’t remember the name.

“Harrison,” Gary called out, just before the contestant buzzed in with “William Henry Harrison.” Connell said “Yes!” with gusto and Donny grinned proudly at his older brother. The next question in the category asked for the name of the man who shot James Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.

“Charles Guiteau,” Gary said quietly, and a moment later the contestant did too.

It was easier for her when Gary stayed in his room. She didn’t like to think about him. He was the oldest of the siblings, but he’d never held down a job. He had an air of resignation about him, as if he’d already given up on life. At the same time, he had a good deal of intellectual ability. She didn’t like to acknowledge that people with real ability might not arrive at comfortable stations in life. Her cousin Pat had been a bad enough disappointment; she didn’t want to consider the possibility that Connell might fall through the cracks like Gary. She certainly didn’t like to think that something similar had happened to her too, on a smaller scale. She had achieved professional status, but her existence wasn’t ideal, and hard as she tried to hack her way through the thicket of middle-class living, she couldn’t find a way out to the clearing. It would have been easier to see Gary as a savant with an overdeveloped capacity to absorb trivia, but the truth was he was a complex, intelligent individual. She’d heard him discussing issues of the day and couldn’t help agreeing with him, even being enlightened by observations she couldn’t have made herself. And yet there he was, living in the margins, talking to a television, dying half an hour at a time. A claustrophobic sensation swept over her. She needed to forget that people like Gary existed, to forget even the possibility of failure. She needed to spirit her son away or Gary would suck him into the black hole of his life.

Connell rose and slapped Donny five across the coffee table. Then he looked up at her.

“It’s time to go,” she said. “I’m making dinner.”

“Can I come down when it’s ready?”

“No,” she said sharply, then collected herself. “You’re coming down now. They’ve had enough of you up here. Let the Orlandos have their evening in peace.”

“He’s no bother,” Angelo said over his newspaper. “He can stay as long as he wants.”

“Thank you, but he’s going to help me get dinner ready.” She hadn’t had any intention to ask Connell for help, but she needed a good excuse.

“We were discussing politics before,” Angelo said. “He said you wanted him to be a politician. I asked him if he knew what a politician was.”

Eileen offered up a little embarrassed laugh. “What I mostly want is for him to get downstairs right now,” she said, loud enough for Connell to hear.

She said her good-byes and walked to the door. Connell lagged behind, standing and watching the show. Gary got another question right, and Donny and Connell broke into hysterics.

“Connell,” she said. “Come on.”

He took his time getting his schoolbag and followed her down the stairs. She got him set up chopping lettuce while she grilled the chicken. She was going to make salad for dinner, with the chicken spread over it. She’d given in to pizza too often recently, and the nights Ed cooked it was grilled cheese in a lagoon of butter, or cheeseburgers, anything with cheese. The boy was too chubby for her liking. It was true that he hadn’t hit a big growth spurt yet, but it was also true that the tendency toward physical largeness on her family’s side could edge into overweight if it wasn’t watched scrupulously. In the absence of worldly cares, Connell stuffed his face with candy and ice cream. She hadn’t had time to get fat as a kid. When she was only a few months older than he was now, she was planning meals, shopping, keeping the house — things she couldn’t imagine him doing. When she sent him to the store, she had to write a list, and he still inevitably forgot something on it.

She was going to start mapping some order onto his life. Ed wasn’t a big help in that area. He loved the boy so much, was so permissive, seemed delighted by everything he did. Connell brought home a ninety-five and Ed beamed; she was always the one forced to ask where the other five points went. She resented the way Connell walked around oblivious of how carefree his existence was, how little responsibility he had.

She put some cherry tomatoes in the salad and cooked the chicken quickly in the pan. She grabbed some dressing, tossed it all together, and told him to sit down. She served him salad and put the chicken over it.

“This is dinner?” he said.

“You need to eat more leafy greens. Some leafy greens.”

It was seven thirty. Ed was just half an hour into his class, with an hour to go. She spent a few moments of pique in wondering if she and Connell were crossing his mind at all. Connell was eating too fast, as usual. He didn’t even like salad, and yet he was rushing to eat it. There was something irrepressible in the way he ate. Maybe he was trying to speed through dinner so he could get to dessert. He knew the rules: no dessert until his plate was clean. It had been a couple of years since she’d had to stage one of those nightlong sit-ins to get him to eat his meal. She’d figured out what to avoid, and he’d stopped trying to slip it in the garbage when she wasn’t looking and just ate what he was served. Dessert held that power over him. She always kept something in the house, for herself as much as for him, but she took only a little portion, nothing like the heaps he wolfed down. He was going to have to learn restraint if he ever wanted to make a success of himself among serious people. It was unseemly to behave with that kind of abandon. She told him to slow down and he nodded at her and kept on eating at his pace. “Slow down,” she said, annoyed. “You’re going to choke.” She got up to refill her water glass. She stood at the sink drinking it and filled it again. When she turned around she saw him waving his arms, his fork on his plate, and then she saw him leap to his feet, his hands on his throat. She told him it wasn’t funny, and then she saw his face and began screaming, “Are you choking?” but she already knew he was. It had happened a few times when he was a toddler, but it had always been a mere scare, some dense foodstuff, tuna fish or peanut butter, compacted in his esophagus, and he’d been able to breathe through it, but now he wasn’t making a sound. It was time to grab him coolly and dislodge the food with one fist to his abdomen and the other shoving up, but she couldn’t do it.

She’d dealt with choking a number of times in her career. You got your hands in the midsection and gave the diaphragm a healthy shove and out the food popped. A couple of seconds and it was over. You had more time than people thought, a lot more, four full minutes until brain damage set in. But this was her son and she had no room for error.

She had him by the shoulders. She began to panic. She knew she shouldn’t panic, but she couldn’t help herself; she loved the boy so much. She was thinking Please don’t die, please don’t die and she started screaming for help, and then she was shoving him out the door and pulling him toward the back stairs. She got to the stairwell and screamed, “Angelo! Angelo! Angelo!” and ran upstairs and banged on the door and screamed, “Come down!” and then she ran back down, because she had left the boy alone. Her hands were shaking. “He’s choking!” she screamed. Connell was turning blue. She heard someone flying down the stairs, and then Donny was shoving her aside, and then he was standing behind Connell, giving him a muscular approximation of the Heimlich, and then something flew out of Connell’s mouth onto the carpet. He started coughing and wailing a terrified wail that sounded more like a cat’s than a child’s. It was a cherry tomato. He must have swallowed it whole. She picked it up and crushed it angrily in her hand. She sat him at the dining room table. Angelo, Gary, and Brenda came in. Connell kept coughing, though the wailing subsided. She went to get him a glass of water. In the kitchen she saw the plates and slammed them into the trash with their contents. She could feel the feelings rising up, getting ready to wash over her, take her over. He took the water down quickly. She would never get angry at him for eating fast again. It was Ed she was angry at, for not being there, for exposing Connell to this danger by his absence. She was grateful the Orlandos were reliably present in the evenings, and mortified that she, a nurse, hadn’t been able to save him herself.

“Are you going to slow down now?” was all she could think to say when she went back to the dining room. Then she burst into tears. Connell seemed too dazed to cry.

“If you’d been Gary,” Donny said, “I would have let you choke. What do they call that, Gary? Euthanasia?”

Connell gave a little chuckle through his coughs.

“Don’t you do that again,” Angelo said. “I don’t need another heart attack. Two is plenty.”

“You good?” Brenda asked, putting her hand on Connell’s shoulder. He nodded. “Slow down. Your food’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, my work here is done,” Donny said. “I better go find a phone booth to change in.”

“Why don’t you go pick up your dirty drawers from the bathroom floor instead,” Brenda said. “I don’t think the hamper’s made of kryptonite.”

The laughs were welcome, but she could see that Donny had been affected by the brush with disaster. He was wide-eyed and shaking his head. The whole Orlando family seemed unnerved. Connell spent the afternoons up there, but it had never occurred to Eileen that they might in some way have thought of him as being part of their family too.

“Wheel of Fortune is on,” Gary said. They made their way up the stairs. She sat at the table with Connell.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded.

“Shaken up?”

He nodded again. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

“I know.”

“I couldn’t talk.”

He couldn’t know how hard on her he was making this.

“Horrible,” she said. “I froze up.”

“Donny saved me.”

“I don’t know what happened. I’ve done it before. I guess it never meant as much to me.”

“Thank God they were here,” he said.

“I would have done it eventually,” she said. “My training would have kicked in. I think because I knew they were here, I didn’t have to go into lifesaving mode.”

“He saved my life,” the boy said thoughtfully.

“Let’s not go overboard,” she said. “You were going to be fine. We had time.”

He looked like he was in shock. She went to the freezer and scooped some ice cream into a bowl for him.

“Here, have this,” she said. “I don’t think you can choke on this. Maybe you’ll find a way.”

Ordinarily at this time of night she would have made him sit down with his homework, but she didn’t say anything about it. At the moment she didn’t care if he never did his homework again. Maybe this was how Ed felt all the time.

She told him he could take the ice cream to the couch — another first — and she went to get the television for him. The only set in the house was the little black-and-white one in their bedroom. They had been wheeling it out to the living room during the playoffs and the World Series. She cleaned up the pan from the chicken while he watched Entertainment Tonight, and joined him when she was done. The games usually started at eight, or before eight, but when he got up to change the channel to NBC, The Cosby Show was on. It took only a moment to understand that preempting The Cosby Show would have cost the network ad revenue. They lay on separate couches. It wasn’t easy to see the set from that far away. The girl, Vanessa, was trying to wear makeup to school, against her mother’s wishes. The boy, Theo, was attempting to organize his family to do a fire drill. It could have been Leave It to Beaver, except that everyone was black. The world was changing fast. It was hard to fit her son’s America into her memory of how the world had been ordered when she was a child. She felt like a member of an in-between generation, straddling sides in a clash of history. Her life was as remote and ancient to Connell as the stories of the pilgrim settlers had been to her when she was his age.

The Cosby Show ended and the game was about to come on. She told him she was going to the bedroom to lie down, and he gave her a stricken look.

“You’re not watching the game?”

She could tell he was disturbed by what had happened to him, that he didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll watch for a little while,” she said, relenting.

She didn’t blame him. Over and over she had been reliving in her mind the moment when she’d watched Donny pop the tomato out. She wanted to sit next to Connell, to hold him close to her, but she had no idea how to do it. She had no interest in watching another of these games she’d had to sit through so many of in the run-up to the playoffs, so after a few minutes she rose to get Lonesome Dove. She flipped through it distractedly, reading and rereading the same page several times. The Mets fell behind early, and by the end of the fifth inning they were down 4–0.

She knew she wasn’t the softest mother in the world. She worked a lot. She worked, period. Other mothers stayed home, baked cookies, talked to their kids all the time, knew everything their kids were thinking. It had never occurred to her to try to be Connell’s friend. She did her best to encourage meaningful conversations at dinner, the three of them talking as a family, and not only because it would be constructive in lubricating Connell’s future advancement among people who judged a person by how he spoke, but also because she liked to hear what he was thinking. She had worked hard to give him a comfortable life. That was as valuable as providing emotional sustenance. Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs. Still, she couldn’t figure out how to break through the defenses her son had put up, and it bothered her, an intellectual problem as much as an emotional one.

She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.

“Can you stay here and read?”

So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.

Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.

“Still four — nothing?” he asked when he walked in.

Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”

“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”

“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”

“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”

“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”

“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”

He looked at her. “Really choking?”

“It was in his windpipe.”

“What was?”

“A cherry tomato.”

“You got it out?”

“Donny did.”

He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”

“Donny came down,” Connell said.

“To eat with us?”

Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.

“I’ll explain later,” she said.

“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.

“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”

Connell nodded.

“Good.”

And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.

The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out — she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now — Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.

“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”

“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.

Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.

“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.

“Yes, but they’re in New York.”

“They have to win two.”

“They’ll do it.”

“It’s Roger Clemens.”

“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.

“ ‘Ya gotta believe,’ ” Connell answered.

“Well, then.”

It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.

At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.

She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.

“I almost died,” Connell said.

“You’re fine,” Ed said.

“I was scared. I’m still scared.”

Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”

“I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.

“Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”

“You really think they’re going to win?”

“The Mets? Yes.”

“Both games?”

“Both. You’ll see.”

“You’re sure?”

“Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”

As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.

She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched having him there. Still, it was going to be a long night, and she’d be exhausted in the morning, so she’d eventually have to move him off her.

She lay there thinking, I almost lost him. I’m never serving goddamned cherry tomatoes again. Ed better be right about the Mets, or this kid is going to be more disappointed in his father than he is in the Mets. Then again, he has to learn that things don’t always work out the way you want them to.

She went back and forth between thinking it would be nice if Connell got the outcome he wanted and thinking it would be character-building for him not to get it. Fatigue from a long day at work and the effects of adrenaline withdrawal must have been enough to overcome her need for space, because she felt herself drifting off, even though he was still attached to her.

The kid would be thrilled, she thought. Let them win.

The next thing she knew she was waking up. Somehow in the night she had gotten herself to face the boy, who was still sleeping, and Ed behind him on his back, out cold. Connell breathed in and out softly. His lashes were long like his father’s, and in the muted sunlight peeking through the blinds his cheeks looked sweet and full. As if he could sense her looking at him, he opened his eyes and blinked a few times in that half-conscious, slightly perturbed way he used to as a toddler when he hadn’t yet fully come to. He gave her a slumber-drunk smile; then he was back asleep. She didn’t know what to do with everything she was feeling for him, even for her husband, so she got up to take a shower and left the two of them to wake up and find each other there.