The Babysitter

“My dad writes musicals,” Bobby cried out. “Heads Up! Have you heard of it? It’s still playing.”

“Of course, I love that show.” And the girl began to sing, they always did. Some people get songs stuck in their heads; Cindy had one stuck in her life. Her husband Scott’s pièce de résistance—it needled its way into her thoughts, her conversations, her walks in Riverside Park, her trips to the Museum of Natural History with her boy, Bobby, who was no help. He never tired of boasting of his father’s achievements, wherever they went.

“Heads up!” Bobby piped, joining the girl in song in the middle of the teeming Hall of Mammals. First the dramatic ascent—the major sixth, Cindy knew that much by now—and then the chromatic fall. She had always found the hook self-indulgent, and silently relished the validation from certain passages of the Times review (“The man can certainly stretch a syllable”), letting the show’s outrageous popularity soothe her guilt: neither she nor the critics could put a damper on the power of runaway tween fandom.

This girl was just the right age, a late teen by now, maybe twenty, certainly precocious: cardigan-clad, hair disheveled on purpose, thick black glasses. Cindy saw so many girls like this lately, intentionally dressing themselves world-weary, while the sparkle in their eyes begged to differ. Why pretend to look like you couldn’t get out of bed? Cindy turned to stare at the black rhinoceros, but her eyes were drawn instead to her transparent reflection. The glass before the diorama was unforgiving, showing her how she imagined she looked all along: spectral, insubstantial. There, but then again, maybe not. Could be just a trick of the light.

There was nothing intentional about her, not the dread that lay heavy on her eyes when they opened, not the frizzy zigzag of her loose black curls down to her shoulders, nor the lopsided wrap sweater unwrapped, dripping grey past her knees to the squeaky museum floor. And the slack corners of her pale mouth, the pockmarked cleavage beginning to look like a sagging scar—all of this was happening to her, wasn’t it?

It was like this: day after day of summer with a six-year-old idiot savant (that’s only what she called him in her head, she would never admit to it). He was far from autistic, anyway, especially if the measure was social skill. Social comfort, more like; who could judge skill at this age? The expectations didn’t require it. He could say and do whatever came to him, without giving a thought to anyone else, and everyone knew to chalk it up to overstimulation, all that new information. Relatives, strangers, they loved him. There was no end to his parade of connections.

He did have an island of genius, though: curiosity. Boundless, exhausting, suffocating curiosity, with the memory to bear it out, so that his questions, while compulsively shared, at least built on each other, didn’t stagnate or repeat. But she hardly thought that would help him win the favor of his future peers, should this quality persist.

To be sure, he was a lovely, lovable boy.

He knew why, once in a while, a potato chip turned green. And he knew that the atmosphere was mostly nitrogen. He loved the sound of feet on gravel, the smell of dirt. He called New York a concrete jungle, their basement Upper West Side apartment King Louie’s Palace, and his father Baloo (which left her to wonder if she was somehow his captor, the eponymous, deranged orangutan, trying desperately to be something she wasn’t).

“And my mom here, she has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” Bobby exclaimed, once the song had run its course.

He thought information was like water, free flowing from the source. There was his deficiency, the idiot to his savant: absolutely no discretion.

“Bobby, let’s go to Asia,” Cindy said. “Nice to meet you, Michelle.”

She squeaked down the hall, trusting her son would follow, hiking up her scoop-neck, wrapping up her sweater. Why must these museums get so damn cold? She was already knee-deep in her mid-summer virus, she could feel it. Nothing to be done.

“Mom, her name wasn’t Michelle, it was Samantha.”

“Bobby, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell people private things about Mommy.”

“What did I do?”

She had to keep in mind that he might actually have considered a diagnosis on par with a best-selling Broadway musical. To be fair, both were expedient means of introduction; they certainly cut to the chase. Bobby even presented them with equal aplomb. He had not yet conceptualized a gradient from the shelf of his father’s trophies on the one hand down to his mother’s pile of garbage on the other (which reminded her, she still hadn’t cleaned the apartment). He may very well have said “and I’m an idiot savant, isn’t that coolio?” if she ever let her subtext slip. He was a six-year-old-boy, after all. But still, she inferred just a twinkle of malice.

“Mommy’s problem—her health issues—they shouldn’t be shared like that. Nobody wants to hear about…that.”

“Oh. Okay. Have you ever been to actual Asia, Mommy?” There was that recurrent swell in her chest that caught her breath, more frequent all the time. She was too hard on him. He could take criticism just like that, no muss, no fuss, no flare-ups. For god’s sake, she had it easy.

She did wonder, though, if he really internalized it. If it was no more than a brush-off. How else could he move on so easily? She, for one, held on tightly to each blunder. She felt as if she was always a word or two back from her next faux pas, whether with Bobby or a gaggle of thespians, it didn’t matter. At another workshop, or fundraiser, or post-show on Restaurant Row—conversation was like fishing line always threatening to snap.

They came to the elephants, frozen stiff. She had never liked these tableaus. It had something to do with imagining a herd of animate elephants happening upon themselves stuffed, the ensuing confusion and distress. All those anthropomorphic characters probably didn’t help. But Bobby had no problem distinguishing cartoon buddy from subject of study, and began to circle them with careful interest. He sniffed, he squinted, he craned his neck.

“I’ve been to Japan,” she said, unsure if she should interrupt his reverie. There was always the question of what to address. He was opposite her now, she saw him through the legs of the beast. She saw him place his palms on the base of the display, bracing himself for a better view of the underbelly.

“Eh, eh, eh!” called a nearby guard.

He jumped back and resumed his walk, stroking an invisible beard. Cindy stood stock-still, avoiding the do-your-job look from the man in uniform.

“And I’ve been to China,” she said pathetically. There was always the problem of timing.

As he arrived at the starting point, inspection complete, Bobby spun frantically around on one leg, attempting to stop on a dime with his hands outstretched, but slipping and falling instead. She was always seeing things in slow motion. Couldn’t she have caught him?

“Ow!”

Her purse fell from the crook of her arm as she knelt to place her hands—where? his shoulder, his hip? Where did it hurt? She could hear her belongings rolling out of reach.

“Bobby, Bobby…” she said, hoping to console but sounding helpless. He rolled away from her and into the fetal position.

“It’s okay, I’m okay.” He brought his right arm around to his narrow back, wincing once, twice, before he could grip it firmly. Then he rolled the rest of the way, pausing for a moment on his hands and knees, one foot forward, then the other. Finally he lifted his spine, overextended just briefly, and exhaled. She half expected him to bow. Cindy couldn’t match his careful reconstruction. In one fell swoop, using all the wrong muscles, she launched her hefty self back onto her feet. Then she remembered her scattered things.

“I was going to say a spell,” Bobby explained. “Unfreeze your knees, please. Oh no, I’ll get that!” He rushed to gather the spillage. “You’ll get too tired,” he said.

“You have to be more careful,” she said in the midst of a head rush.

“Did you see any tigers?”

“What’s that?”

“In China. Did you see any Siberian tigers?”

“It was more of a—” A tall, scruffy man with jean cut-offs, suspenders, and a septum piercing was approaching her son. “—a business trip. Oh no,” she said as the man began to help collect her items, “we’re fine. Don’t bother.”

It was too late, he had already involved himself, so she held her bag open for Bobby to pour in what he’d amassed between his arm and his torso, and the man grabbed what was left. A lighter and a bottle of pills—perfect. He tossed them in underhand, from an unnecessary distance, nodded at her, and then winked at Bobby. God, what did people think that communicated to a child?

“What do you mean, a business trip?” Bobby asked, watching suspenders reunite with an elfin, bespectacled man, long arm over sharp shoulder.

“You know Mommy used to be a lawyer,” she said. He took her hand—how his stayed so warm, she had no idea—and led them farther down the hall. He stopped short in front of the gibbon.

“You went to China to be a lawyer?”

“You could say that. We were working on a big deal with other Chinese lawyers.”

“It was a big deal? Was it in the paper?”

“No,” she said.

“So you didn’t see a hoolock gibbon?” He pronounced each syllable distinctly, in what he called his radio voice, nodding his closely-cropped, tightly-packed head for assistance as he read the plaque: “Who—Lock—Gy—Bone?”

“No, Bobby, I was mostly in a conference room and a hotel room. It was pretty awful.” She considered stopping there. Her chest swelled, her breath caught, again that simultaneous contraction and expansion; what was it, dammit, some kind of allergic reaction to uncertainty? She was suddenly reminded of a feeling from childhood: a shallow, painful breathing out of doors, a reaction in the woods and by the lake. To mold, they’d decided.

Nothing to be done—the family trip was cut short, her father curtailed of his fair proportion of pleasure out there in the wilderness. “I hope when you have a kid,” he’d said in the car to her sulking rearview image, “somebody will teach him how to fish.”

Cindy brought her hand to her sternum, patted it lightly, and went on. “Actually, I got hurt over there, Bobby. I was hit by a bicycle and went to a hospital where nobody spoke any English, and they did such a bad job that I had to have the whole surgery redone here in the States.”

“Wow.” He squatted down, to change his perspective on the gibbon, perhaps, which was stuffed to look ready to pounce.

“You were only two.”

No, he was imitating it, that’s what. “So you’ve never been to India?” he asked, perfecting his pose and refusing to look her way.

“Um, no.”

“So you’ve never been to actual Asia, I guess?”

Conference, hotel, and hospital rooms—they were all antiseptic by design, and essentially scrubbed of any character. “I guess not,” she admitted.

“Mom, do you think people will ever be in one of these?”

Cindy felt acutely the need to lie down.

No, that wasn’t it; the need was chronic, it followed her around like a doting shadow. It’s just that now, confronted as she was with this morbid guessing game, it took the opportunity to press down on her shoulders and remind her, firmly, that it was always there.

—

Cindy worried about boundaries.

The attention she paid him as a baby, that came easily: she held him close, she kissed him on the nose, the ears, the perfect upper lip in the shape of a moustache. Breastfeeding was a welcome reprieve from the endless information diverting New Yorkers’ attention. She could look him straight in the eyes, those starry little eyes (like Scott that one time he’d dropped acid, sweet, dumbfounded, speechless) and imagine herself as he saw her—she was the whole world, the wellspring of all his needs and comforts, limitless and incomprehensible, but undeniably good. Regardless of what she’d read or what she knew or what quip she had at the ready, in those thirty minutes she was effective on a reassuringly mammalian level.

And then one day, it wasn’t so clear. “We want to be careful not to coddle for too long, yeah?” Scott had asked in his typical way, like he could trick her into thinking it was her idea on the table. Was it too much? This nose rub or that drawn out stare (look-fests, she called them to herself)—was it alright as long as she kept from crying? Was it wrong, to feel her most stripped-down and true? Was she somehow asking more of this little person than she should?

She began to overcompensate, for fear of transferring responsibility, somehow, to the detriment of Bobby’s fragile psychology. She let him find his way—didn’t reach for him unless he asked, didn’t smooth out his hair for a minute, didn’t linger when they hugged. Remembered never to smell him like you smell a baby, those luxurious inhales.

Of course, the concerns were always compounding. Soon she had to take care with what she said, a whole new realm of contact. She wanted to teach him reciprocity, but didn’t want to burden him with her adult thoughts, so often laden with pessimism. Maybe life for Bobby would not give rise to trauma and resolve into affliction, and even if it would, she didn’t need to pave the way. So she bottled her business until it spilled out of its own volition. At intervals she would burst with information, carelessly, told with no tenable purpose except to release a bit of the pressure. Like just now, with the China disaster: two inadequate sentences to cover a pain it was unfair to share—he couldn’t possibly understand—but one so inherent to her condition that she’d expect her constant companion to know. Immediately she regretted it and wished she’d stuck to her guns, tight-lipped and exclusively receptive.

Oh, who was she kidding? He wouldn’t even let her clean up her own mess. The roles were already reversed.

Scott—once he’d done his damage—went the other direction, as if to drive home the point that she was chronically behind the parenting curve. He spared his son no detail of his glamorous life—their talk was fifty-fifty. He wouldn’t have labeled it a flip-flop, though: less coddling meant more candor. To him it was a perfectly consistent approach.

They had an open door policy at home. If it was important enough to discuss, it was important enough for Bobby’s perceptive little ears. “A family of three is only as strong as its least informed member,” he said. Cindy thought this rule was suspiciously convenient: it coincided too well with the loss of the couple’s own current. Somewhere along the line Bobby had become the buffer. She couldn’t help resenting the way Scott brought up, say, her visit to the doctor’s office while on the couch, over the racket of the umpteenth Friday Jungle Book viewing. Open doors didn’t prevent them from, at the very least, huddling discreetly in the bedroom.

“But she’s not a psychiatrist. She’s not a psychologist, either,” Cindy had said once she explained her physician’s judgment. Father and son lay on the sectional sofa, Bobby using Scott’s legs as his backrest. Cindy leaned her hip on the armrest, far out of reach.

“Well, is she saying it’s psychological?”

Cindy heard that filtered of its euphemism: “is she saying you’re nuts?”

“It’s complicated and apparently not that well understood,” she said. “It’s not obviously physical, but it’s also not what they call a conversion disorder. You know, I’m not going blind because I’m sad.”

“I hope you’re not going blind at all.”

“Apparently cognitive behavioral therapy has helped in some cases.”

“Does she have a reference for you?”

“What’s a reference?” Bobby asked—eyes flitting from one Baloo to the other—as if understanding the word would clear up everything that came before it.

“Another doctor,” Scott said. “A special one for the mind, or maybe for the soul.” He dug his thumb into Bobby’s belly button, apparently the boy’s personal portal to the realm of the spirit.

Thick as thieves, those two. Cindy thought her son was special, but she was sure that Scott considered him a prodigy. For what, particularly, was still to be seen, but that didn’t matter to his father; he insisted on treating the boy like an old soul. It gave him a reason to bring work home with him, to talk in more lyrical riddles, as far as Cindy was concerned. She was often disappointed with his supposedly mature explanations—Bobby asked what a reference was, not this reference. She could have added her two cents, but she didn’t have the energy, especially once they began their weekly rendition of “Bare Necessities.”

“Yeah, she had a few. I need to do some more research,” she said as they bobbed their shoulders.

In reality, Cindy had no interest in that. She’d been to a therapist in New York once before—four sessions and a recommendation that she take up more hobbies. It left such a bad taste in her mouth that she’d never gone back, not even after the China accident, when her friends, husband, and mother threw the term PTSD around like she deserved a spot at Walter Reed. And now, with this recent array of symptoms, all she really wanted to know was if she had something serious: diabetes, MS, Lupus. She liked Dr. G for never pushing (and for never calculating her body mass index). Here’s the information you asked for—she ruled out the definitive disasters—here’s my opinion, and here’s medication I think will help. She knew of Cindy’s misgivings about therapeutic solutions, so she kept her diagnosis just shy of necessitating their prescription: chronic fatigue syndrome (or myalgic encephalomyelitis, or systemic exertion intolerance disease, or PBMIS—Please Believe Me I’m Sick).

Honestly, Cindy didn’t mind resting in the dank, disparaged crevice between mental and physical, where symptoms drove assessment. It seemed like the lesser evil, at least. Most people didn’t bother with you there, didn’t want to toss their hat in the etiological ring and clutter their browser with tabs of the CDC criteria compared to the NIH study compared to the word of some doctor from Stanford. That’s not why they became family doctors, which was fine with Cindy—that’s not why she went to them. It was a perverse standard of care, but she wasn’t looking for an advocate, a platform, a voice for her pain. She was looking to be left alone.

Which was probably why she brought up the potential therapy bit at all—to throw Scott off her trail. He, with his positive affirmations and penchant for sharing, would prefer to think she was pursuing some “actionable” solution than to know about the reality of her new Lexapro scrip. He already looked askance at her occasional use of a beta-blocker before a busy night out.

Come to think of it, maybe those would help with the panicky chest swells, or maybe she needed a third; Klonopin worked for some friends from the theater. Cindy sat in her usual spot in Riverside Park now, happy to be rid of the taxidermy and A/C, while Bobby muttered to himself, stick in hand, over by a knobby tree. The picnic quilt beneath her was appliquéd with panels of colorful concentric circles. “Like the Kandinsky,” her mother had said matter-of-factly when she presented it to Cindy’s father on their Independence Day anniversary, way back when. Cindy remembered their gentle give and take: Mom wasn’t big on camping, but for months she constructed this ode to his love of green spaces; Dad wasn’t much for art, but he toted the conspicuous thing wherever they traveled; for his wife never ceased to amaze him, yet he tempered his esteem to match her modesty, never lavishing her with all the praise he felt she was due, never pressuring her to try for more than imitation in her craftwork. They were masters of conscious compromise, not quite compatible from the start, but content to whittle themselves to a perfect fit.

Cindy knew she hadn’t inherited that capacity for acceptance and effort in equal proportion, but she didn’t know why. Why was she prone to avoidance and retreat? Neither of her parents ever achieved what she’d call success, while in her marriage one partner did. She and Scott lacked the solidarity of the undistinguished—was that part of it? Better for the couple to keep things even? Couldn’t have been about income, though. When Heads up! was just gaining traction, Cindy was bankrolling the home front while Scott was off tuning the purse strings of Broadway’s benefactors, the invisible lead section of his orchestra. While pregnant, while nursing, while willing her weight to recede but watching it grow, all before they reaped the reward of the show’s latent worth—Cindy was the breadwinner, and still she’d felt a hierarchy in place. Not that she was especially envious of his skillset. More because her job as a corporate lawyer had turned into a dead end, a truth epitomized by that fateful blow to her torso. Her nascent career left her with nothing more than a six-inch scar on her belly and a profoundly irritable bowel.

And now, tucked safely away in a midtown ivory tower, Scott tweaked a new musical about dirty politics while Cindy obsessively tracked the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan on her phone, cursing some kind of missed opportunity. As if Ms. Kagan had robbed her of the limited spotlight afforded to women of their ilk. Like there existed some precise formula of skill, choice, and luck that she’d never had the chance to solve for prestige, since this woman had hoarded the cheat sheet. How had she steered clear of the streets of Guangzhou? How had she built a winning hand from the cards she’d been dealt? Somehow she followed the right series of open doors, apportioned her energy just so, and learned quickly the limitations of charm as a substitute for other absent assets. Unlike Cindy, she must have drawn conviction from her mother’s early, sympathetic assertion that “people will tell you you’re not beautiful.” Maybe she made it a point not to marry a man in show business. More likely, by assuming such ridiculous parallels between herself and Madame Justice, Cindy had simply and finally fallen off her rocker.

Before closing her eyes, she looked up and around for her son. There he was, exploring new territory freely, inching slowly but surely toward a bunch of clean-cut twenty-somethings lounging on a grassy slope, no doubt hoping they’d join him in a game he just invented. How was it he came to be so securely attached, in light of her anxious, disorganized record of responding to his needs?

She let her hand fall to the ground as her phone droned with the voice of a woman in power. She let the video play on—a murmur in the grass—another ambient reminder of her irrelevance, like the constant din of the city: busy, busy people who knew exactly where they were headed, running and weaving and wriggling their way there, while she did her best to stay out of everyone’s way…

“Mom, are you sleeping?”

“Not sleeping, resting.” She kept her eyes closed just to see how long she could get away with it.

“I made a friend,” he replied, and her sun-dulled senses were abruptly aware of a second body looming there, a larger, adult one. Her heart beat faster from embarrassment, for what in particular she didn’t have time to assess.

“Hi there, I’m Mike,” said a disembodied voice. Cindy squinted into the sunlight, heard the dulcet tones of confirmation proceedings, fumbled to pause her phone, thought to block the glare with it—

“Ooh!”

She’d reflected the rays right into Mike’s face.

“So sorry.” With only a bit more finesse she got to her feet and slowly got hold of herself and her surroundings. Bobby had brought over one of the twenty-somethings, a slim, fresh-faced young man in a blue polo who could have been Bobby-from-the-future, with eyes as bright and tail as bushy. Even the logo on his shirt was jolly—a little smiling beaver.

“No problem,” he said, shaking it off.

“Mike knows Dad’s musical!”

“Of course he does, sweetie.”

Mike was quick to explain, as if he guessed she’d had enough of this sort of introduction, or else didn’t want to come off as a groupie. “Your son was so easy to talk to; we struck up quite a conversation,” he said. “Those are my friends over there.” He made a show of pointing and the two groups exchanged waves.

“And we’re your friends over here!” Bobby countered.

“You’re right!” Mike smiled and gave her son a look of such sincere curiosity and kinship that it was all Cindy could do to refrain from saying, no, actually, we’re not.

“I could tell—” Mike began, and “We went—” Bobby said, at once, so Mike laughed heartily, like the quirks and kinks of social interaction were nothing if not delightfully entertaining. Was it Bobby who inspired these amplifications, who brought out the overstatement in the adults he encountered? Mike deferred to the boy, saying, “no, you go.”

“We-went-to-the-Museum-of-Natural-History,” Bobby said as fast as he could, bouncing up onto the balls of his feet, elevated by the encouragement of his doppelgänger.

“Oh yeah? I used to love D.C.’s version. Those were always the best field trips. I remember wondering if there were any dinosaurs buried right there, under their own models.”

“Whoa, that would be weird!” cried Bobby.

“That’s where you’re from?” Cindy asked, feeling that due diligence was her responsibility.

“Yeah! And now I’ve lived in Brooklyn for about two years. I’m about to go to law school, actually.”

“Mom used to be a big deal lawyer!” Bobby squeaked, to which Cindy couldn’t help but respond with a sigh, before continuing to probe: “You’re leaving the city so quickly?”

“No! No, I can’t leave before I’m part of the club. I’m waiting for that outsider feeling to wear off, you know—everyone else shares some secret about how to just be in this place, at ease among eight million neighbors, and I’m still…surprised by most street corners, like the buildings were assembled the moment before I noticed them. Like up here, this neighborhood is a total mystery to me, it’s so disorienting. But I guess that’s what’s great about it, right?”

“We live two blocks away!” Bobby revealed, egged on by a fellow over-sharer.

“No way! You’re so lucky!”

Bobby beamed. “Did you know New York City is an estuary?”

He seemed at ease enough to Cindy, albeit overeager; the spitting image of her son, so much to say to whomever would listen. He was surprisingly comfortable with this strange generation combination, and in no hurry to return to his own age group. Bobby looked at him with glowing admiration and super-concentration—racing to catch up to everything he was rattling off—and Cindy wondered how Bobby’s days would differ with such a suitable companion, a kindred spirit who provided more fodder for his mill of a mind. How—oh, how—could she lure Mike away from his institution of choice and towards a fifteen-dollars-an-hour nanny job, all so she could take a nap?

“So, then, you’ll be attending…?”

“NYU,” he said.

She shook her head at the coincidence, rueful, as always, in response to her past. “I was class of two thousand and two.”

“No way!” he said again. And then his expression went somewhere unexpected—serious, concerned. “That means you were living down there for…”

It was usually younger people who brought it up: where you were that day, how you heard, what you said. People like Mike, who were still in middle school when it happened, with grown-ups around to direct their movements and manage their exposure to tragedy, so that in memory it’s written like myth. Was it somehow gratifying for them, to imagine it now through the eyes of an adult? Fuel for their growing suspicion that everything, always, is on the verge of breaking?

She still hadn’t said anything. Mike wasn’t one for long silences. He started to pick at his cuticles.

“Sorry, it’s just that ever since I moved here I’ve imagined what it must have been like, you know, to live here when it happened.”

She was right—it was a kind of romanticizing, and she wasn’t interested. He wanted to find meaning where there was none, and that, Cindy thought, was the real myth—that it mattered who you were with, what you saw, when you knew.

“What? What are you talking about?” Bobby’s face was impatient. He wanted his conversation back.

Cindy looked at the ground, stalling. She hadn’t explained to him 9/11 or war or hijacking or hatred. Would there always be so much to cover? Her cheeks burned.

“Oh, well, back when your mom was in school,” Mike began, and her stomach dropped, wait, she couldn’t believe he would—“a man taught there who would go on to become one of the most famous judges in America.” Oh thank god she hadn’t just fumbled another teaching moment.

This man-boy could take a hint. He respected her parenting choices even when she didn’t spell them out, and could patch up his own error. Bobby didn’t press any further; he was put off by how little he understood of this exchange. He lowered his humble head and ambled away, like maybe this was one of those talks for adults, and if he couldn’t see them, they wouldn’t notice his exit. If only! Cindy thought. If only she could tell him that all the little exits and entries got easier, that his boyish maneuvers were on track. Neither could she bring herself to echo her own mother with a “that’s rude” or an “it’s not polite to”—she’d chastised him once already and it felt bad enough for a day. Besides, she wasn’t usually a don’t stare or can I be excused? kind of parent. Why does anyone live in this city if not for the license to stare? And why shouldn’t he walk quietly away from discomfort while he still can, scot-free?

Mike gave her a look of apology and relief, as if he too had something to lose from bungling the proper pace of Bobby’s education. She felt, in spite of herself, an affinity between them, a result of the briefest agreement where there could have been discord. Averted crises—they were grounds for the sweetest little moments of pleasant surprise. Mike wasn’t so bad, not such a meddler after all. Amazing how fast her opinion could shift, she thought—of someone new, that is. Each bit was such a large share of the whole, so it was easy for the preponderance of the evidence to be good. Later on in a relationship, well, let’s just say that if Scott came home that night of all nights without judgment all over his face, she’d still have nothing she wanted to say to him.

What followed was a sort of shorthand: Cindy waved off his apology, Mike said “I wasn’t thinking,” she said “it’s hard to know,” and then he made as if to follow Bobby, to maintain their charming rapport, but only with her support, so she nodded—sure, go ahead, be my son’s friend for the day, what harm could it do. They talked about the river; Mike asked what Bobby knew about fishing; Bobby said that you catch them using bloody worms; Mike said the worms have teeth. Cindy thought of her dad’s calloused hands, gripping a walleye around its ribcage. He would have loved to see his grandson the naturalist, the way he leapt up and reached out for wildlife. She’d never been able to keep her own clumsy, clammy hands from withdrawing in fear of the scales.

It turned out luring Mike away was unnecessary. “I’ve been looking for a part-time job that’ll fit well with school,” he said after half an hour. “You should see our house!” Bobby insisted. Cindy didn’t object. She felt she should, but she didn’t. Instead she let a numb, tingly sensation wash over her—the mental fog of a spectator, with no say in the course of events. Soon Mike was saying goodbye to his friends. Even from a distance, Cindy could tell they were perplexed by his decision to run off with a mother and child. It was body language she was used to: the shrugging, the halfhearted hugs and closing of ranks once he walked away, when confusion would turn to offense and they’d assure each other that he was an oddball who should be left off the next group e-mail. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, because he didn’t look back. He was too busy walking and talking with Bobby—up the hill, across Riverside Drive, and back home—revealing everything he pleased.

“Once, I got to visit a national park in Odisha…” They’d somehow come back around to Asia. “…that’s a state in India, like New York—and I saw the rarest thing. There was this leopard teaching its little cub how to hunt. And I realized—” He stopped midsentence and looked down. “Wait,” he said. “Do you care about this?” What an odd thing to ask, she thought. He was straightforward with Bobby, free of pretense. She had the eerie impression she was watching her son, years from now, in conversation with an equal. He looked so grown up, so earnest, so ready for something—or someone—new.

“Yes, I care,” Bobby said, plain and simple, but sweet and reassuring, too.

So Mike went on, and Cindy trailed behind, holding her heart with one hand.

—

“Cindy?”

Cindy!”

She woke with a start. If going to sleep was like falling, then waking was hitting the floor. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d come to naturally, with gentle sunlight across her face, and a chance to remember her dreams. Not here. They had yet to move to a place with a bedroom window, because who in their right mind would give up this location? This place had character, like the servants’ quarters of a Gilded Age mansion.

“What is going on?” Scott was seething. He couldn’t stand still; he busied himself picking up the toys and mail and clothing that littered the floor.

She flipped her pillow to hide the puddle of drool.

“Can you be more specific?” she said, feeling foggy.

“Are you high?” He threw a bunch of socks into a corner chair already covered in the paper and plastic remains of a shopping trip. They flopped back to the carpet.

He never got like this, but still she had seen it coming. The beady eyes turned mean, his weight thrown around with abandon; he really did look like a bear.

He belted it out: “Why did I just come home to find my son with a complete stranger?” Cindy heard the devastating sound of Bobby beginning to cry, like a siren winding up. No one had turned off the television, so it rang over the insufferable bounce and scat of “I want to be like you” from that godforsaken movie. Somehow she had fallen asleep to it? The afternoon came back to her: Bobby sharing his Seuss collection, Mike reading one while she prepared a makeshift dinner through bleary eyes; the inevitable transition to the television; her apologetic retreat to the bedroom for a lie-down, “just a quick lie-down,” and Mike’s kind concern; not caring how it might look, what kind of mother she might appear to be.

“Hello?” yelled Scott. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Would you lower your voice?” she spat. She padded her way to the open door, but was too slow—Scott grabbed her wrist.

“He’s fine, I told him to wait on the couch,” he said, and she stared at his hand on her. The hairy knuckles.

“Then I’d like to close this.”

“Why don’t you leave it and answer me.”

“Dammit, Scott!” She wrenched her arm from his grip and slammed the door, slammed it with a force she hoped would make up for all the times she’d left it. The pleasant breeze caught her off guard—didn’t fit—made her giddy. When the door made contact with its frame, a small mirror fell from the neighboring wall and shattered on her dresser. This was absurd; she felt like she would break character, break the fourth wall, turn to the audience and start laughing at her own dramatic display. She ran her fingers up through her hair and held the frizz in a bunch over her head. Fainter crying from Bobby now—he would have to get used to a little mayhem.

“What the fuck?” Scott said, throwing up his arms like he was dealing with an unmanageable inmate.

“It was a babysitter, Scott. Nice guy. Name is Mike—going to law school. Where is he?”

“I told him to get out of my house! He was lying on the couch with our son, watching a movie, all cozy, and you don’t even know his last name?”

“It’s Simmons. Want his social security number?”

“And you met him today?”

“Yes.”

“Bobby called him his friend?”

“Bobby thinks everyone is his friend!”

“What do you need a babysitter for? What all do you have to do besides look after him and clean this place?”

For effect he bent down and threw a blouse into the air with a ridiculous flourish. She covered her mouth to smile as it fluttered its way down.

“Has he even eaten?”

Now she hid her whole face in her hands. She hoped he thought it was from anguish.

“Mhm. Some chicken.” Here came the ripples of nonsense, the crackles and pops of hysterics. “And broccoli!” She held her breath.

“Cindy…”

He sounded so defeated. So tortured. So phony. I mean really—over this? That little jolly beaver of a man? Watching Jungle Book? Eating grapes?

“You can’t just bring people into our home to take care of our kid when you’re tired of walking in the park. That is a joint decision that requires vetting. This is a partnership.”

Cindy burst—that solemn word!—she was in stitches.

“A partner—I’m sorry.” She held her side, she couldn’t get it out. Tears fell, just as surprising as the laughter. Her reaction multiplied when she touched her eyes to confirm they were real. She shook her head at the ceiling, like something up there would understand. She looked around—anyone? Why couldn’t she stop? She got a glimpse of his outrageous face—scared! he looked scared! she could only imagine what her own looked like—before she opened the door and fled, laughing, crying, out of her mind.

Cindy barreled through their stupid Gothic entryway and felt the evening air on her wet cheeks. She heard her own whimpers like they came from someone else across the street, so small and pathetic. She counted the cobblestones in the sidewalk to calm down. At fourteen she settled, and started to hum. A melody offered itself before she realized what it was—“Heads u-u-u-u-up.”

Another sad, sweet laugh escaped her. That song. Dear god: she was wired all wrong.