I felt so comfortable with her that I almost said, My mom was like that, too. But I had managed not to mention my parents at all. And she, maybe sensing my cues, had never asked.
“She scrubs and scrubs even though nothing’s ever dirty,” said Luke. We’d been eating dinner together when she made her admission. “It’s like she’s trying to wash something away. Something no one else can see.”
Rachel didn’t say anything, just pushed some chicken around her plate.
But Luke kept looking at her, pinning her with his gaze. “So what is it, Mom? What are you trying to get rid of ?”
She swallowed her food. And I thought how reversed were the roles between them. He seemed like the parent, leaning forward, looking for eye contact. She was the bullied child, shrinking into herself.
“Just dirt, darling,” she said, not looking up from her plate. “Just dirt.”
It was then that I realized she was afraid of him. Who could be afraid of their own child?
On a simple silver tray, there was a simple silver locket. I found this odd. She wasn’t a locket type of person. It wasn’t her. I saw Rachel as practical, unsentimental. Then again, she was opening a bookstore in the electronic age. Maybe she was prone to fits of nostalgia. It was a nice piece, platinum, from Tiffany & Co. I opened it carefully with my fingernail, but not before catching sight of myself in the mirror.
What are you doing? I asked the pale person in the mirror. She’s fugly. She looks like a boy. You’d think at this point in my life, I’d have been immune to schoolyard taunts. My whole life, I’d been enduring bullies and their nasty, slicing words. I’ve never understood why some people seem to delight in cruelty, in making people feel bad about who they are. I ran my hand through my hair-which looked like pitch in the dim light, short and messy. Not styled messy, but like actually messy since I hadn’t bothered to draw a brush through it today. I didn’t spend a lot of time in mirrors. In fact, I actively avoided them. I wasn’t one to primp and preen. I was more of a wash-and-go kind of person.
If I looked at myself, I had to think about who I was, how I was moving through the world. And that’s the last thing I wanted. Still, I picked up Rachel’s brush and ran it through my hair. I looked, really looked, at my face. I was too much like my father. Why couldn’t I have been more like her? I thought.
I was aware in this moment that my actions constituted a terrible breach of privacy, something I would have railed against. I, who keep so many secrets, was poking around in my employer’s bedroom. I put the brush down quickly.
Inside the locket was, predictably, a picture of Luke. In the opposing frame, there was a chiseled-looking blond man in his thirties. Was it Luke’s father? They looked nothing alike.
Luke’s father, like my parents, had been conspicuously absent and unmentioned. And I, naturally, had never asked about him. There was no mention of divorce, ugly or otherwise, or warnings about his showing up at the house. Luke never talked about him-no discussions about weekends with his father, no phone calls or cards that I saw. I knew it was a sore spot, since our first back-and-forth. Maybe he had died. You wouldn’t keep a locket on your dresser with a picture of someone you’d divorced. Would you? But wouldn’t Rachel have mentioned it if Luke’s father had died? I usually didn’t like to pry. But maybe it was time, since Luke was clearly prying into my past.
There was a slim, low-profile desk in a little alcove behind the master closet. Rachel’s silver laptop sat open. I pressed the touch pad and the screen came to life with a blooming, purple lotus flower. But the box itself was password protected.
I sat in the white leather desk chair and slid open the top center drawer. Inside, there was a book, bound in dove-gray cloth. Embossed in silver across the middle was the word Journal. As I ran my finger along the cover, I heard a car door slam outside. I shut the drawer quickly, leaving the journal unopened, and headed downstairs.
15
Dear Diary,
It’s a silly thing to write, isn’t it? Dear Diary. It’s such an innocent, hopeful salutation. As if logging your feelings in a book, narrating your life, has any meaning, does any good at all. But, for me, this is the only place I can be really honest. Everywhere else I’m wearing a smiling mask, putting on a show of myself and my life. You are the only one who knows the totality of my feelings, the depth of my spirit, however dark and bottomless.
It’s only in parenthood that we realize how truly powerless we are in this life. I imagine this is true for all parents. You cannot cushion every fall, soften every blow of disappointment. You can’t alleviate the sting of rejection or failure, mend every hurt. When your child suffers, there’s an ache that doesn’t go away until the tears are dry, and the smile returns.
I imagine that’s what it feels like for the parent of a normal child. I am powerless, too. I am powerless to protect others from my son.
There was the boy he bit so hard, so deep, that the tiny arc of teeth marks bled and turned purple before my eyes. His mother and I had been sharing a cup of coffee at my dining room table. I’d actually been enjoying myself. We’d met at preschool. And either she hadn’t heard the rumors about my son or chose to ignore them, but she said her boy had asked for a playdate. I was almost giddy with relief. Someone wants to play with my kid! We were sharing a laugh, just like normal parents, over how funny children could be sometimes when a shriek of pain and dismay rang out from the room where the boys were playing.
I won’t forget the look on her face, or how hard she tried to be polite as she cleaned the wound, with my fluttering frantically around for Band-Aids, Neosporin, and my son looking on with an expression that could only be classified as malicious curiosity.
“I’m so sorry. Really, I’m so sorry,” I said as she shuttled her weeping child toward the door, gathering up his backpack that looked like a cute little monster, his hat and scarf. To my son: “Can you say you’re sorry? You know we don’t bite our friends.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He clearly didn’t mean it. “Anyway, he’s not my friend.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Really, these things happen. We’d better go.”
It would have been better if she’d raged and been angry. But on her face there was only concern for her son, and for me. I could see that she felt sorry for me. I watched silently as they drove away in their red Honda.
“I didn’t like him,” he said. “He was stupid.”
“Is that why you bit him?”
“I bit him because he asked me to bite him. He wanted me to bite him.”
I stood there at the door with him. He was lying and I knew he was lying. And he knew that I knew he was lying. It was a metacommunication that passed between us. He slipped his little hand in mine.
“We don’t need any friends, Mommy.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. Because we don’t have any.”
My sister and nieces came to visit a few weeks ago. She and I have had our differences over the years, though admittedly it’s largely my fault. I have always been the prickly one, the one prone to temper and the one who holds grudges. And unhappiness hasn’t made me easier to get along with, I’m sure. But I was truly flooded with joy when she and the girls got off the plane. I waved and ran to them; my sister dropped her bags to take me into her arms while the girls ( just two and four) clambered around our legs. So wrapped up in my son and all the drama surrounding his life, I had badly neglected my family.
The girls were cherubs, chubby and golden-curled, Gerber faces and sapphire eyes. They were so normal. They giggled, they cried, they played, they fought. They reached for their mother and clung, or ran off laughing. They were toddlers in all their wild beauty. They weren’t silent and watchful. Their tantrums weren’t rages. They were disorganized and messy; how I envied my sister.