Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. The house felt strange to me, like it wasn’t mine anymore. It was no longer sanctuary. It had been invaded. I felt like a rape victim. Violated. Our house was no longer private, full of our spirits, thoughts, even our arguments. It was nothing more than a thing of glass, wood and brick that any thug with a crowbar or a screwdriver could bust open.
The milk tasted like chalk and rested mercury-heavy in my stomach. I poured the rest down the drain and went to bed.
Ann was asleep, and I was grateful for that. I had feared she would insist on a mercy fuck; sexual first aid. She worked that way sometimes, and I hated it. She meant well by it, but that didn’t make me like it. Tonight I would have despised it, no matter how much I loved her or how enticing she might be.
I lay there looking at the ceiling, listening to Ann breathe. My stomach kept churning the milk around and around, and an instant replay of what had happened earlier was whirling endlessly through my head: swirls of shadow and muffled sounds, a flashlight, revolver steel, the wind from a bullet against my ear, the report of my own gun, the lights going on, the empty eye socket, blood and brains on the landscape painting and the very wall on which we taped our yearly Christmas cards.
It wasn’t until daylight that I felt like sleeping.
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.”