"Wilson? We've got breakfast ready," Judith cooed.
"I don't like the way he's just lying there," I said.
"Wilson?" Judith tried again.
I thought the boy's face looked oddly puffy, his fingers pale.
"Wilson? Wilson?" Judith turned to me. "I can't wake him up!"
And neither could I. I knelt down and shook him. He was cold, his head too floppy. "We need an ambulance!"
As Judith raced to the phone, I rolled Wilson to his side, releasing pizza-lumpy vomit from his mouth. One of his eyes, nearly closed, showed only a slit of white; the other studied a poster of the great Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. The surfaces of both eyes were dry. The boy looked dead. But he couldn't be. I felt hot, stupid, sickish.
My wife returned, closing the door behind her, phone to her ear. "We have a problem," she announced, trying to stay calm, "we need an ambulance… we have an eight-year-old boy who isn't breathing… What? I don't know! We just woke up! No, no, we just woke up, he didn't! Oh, please, come- I don't know how long-" And then our address and phone number. "Please, please hurry!"
"He was fine last night."
The door opened. Timothy poked his head in, eyes panicked. "Mom?"
"I want you to close the door, Timmy."
" Mom."
"Do as I say."
He glanced at me. "The other boys-"
Judith growled, "Close… the door."
He did. He did what his mother told him, and would in the future. Now Judith knelt next to Wilson. "What did you say? He was fine?"
"Yes."
"You checked on all the boys?"
"Wilson woke up."
"What did you do?" Something twisted in Judith's voice.
"I gave him a glass of milk and put him back to bed."
She seemed to be searching around him, lifting up the other boys' sleeping bags and pillows. "Not peanut butter?"
"I gave him milk," I repeated.
Judith shook her head violently, in anger or frustration. "He has a severe peanut allergy, it's this crazy, crazy thing!" She grabbed Wilson's backpack and frantically pulled out underwear adorned by Jets insignias, a fresh shirt, and socks. "His mother made me swear not to give him anything with peanuts in it. Not the tiniest bit. Even molecules. It sets off a chain reaction in his immune system. She had to call the restaurant ahead of time to explain, and he carries a shot just in case." She looked at her watch. "It's too late, it's- I threw away all the peanut butter in the house! I threw away the eggs and the cashews! I looked at all the candy!"
"Judith, I gave him milk."
She unzipped the boy's sleeping bag and pulled it back, finding aplastic case marked EPINEPHRINE INJECTION- FOR USE IN ANAPHYLACTIC EMERGENCY. "It's empty!" she cried. She pulled the sleeping bag open further. Next to the boy's limp hand lay a yellow plastic injector device with a short needle sticking out of it. "There it is!" she said. "He was trying to- he knew… oh, he knew!" Weeping, she bent down to kiss the boy, as if trying to bring him back to life. "Oh God, I promised… I promised his mother-" She looked up and faced me savagely. "Was anything on the glass?"
"Like what?"
"Like peanut butter!"
"No. There was some grease on my fingers from dinner, maybe."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"I ordered in some Thai food, sweetie, it wasn't-"
"Oh God!" Judith stood rapidly, hand to her mouth. She rushed from the room in horror, and as our lives fell away minute by minutethe arriving EMTs, the police, the call to Wilson's parents, the other boys, now traumatized, crying or chattering nervously, the retrieval of the murderous empty glass (the peanut oil still on its lip, still smellable as the intensified essence of peanuts), the arrival of the other parents- as all that we had known about ourselves crumbled into oblivion, I could not help but recall that drink of milk- the cool glass beaded with condensation, the surface of the milk itself curved upward where it clung to the glass, the satisfying incarnation of liquid love, almost tasteable from arm's length, ample and full, safe and clean. Who would have thought it, who would've thought that I, Bill Wyeth, dependable, tax-paying minivan-man, respected partner in a top law firm, would kill an eight-year-old boy with a glass of milk?
Then I recalled that Wilson was one of the boys I'd wanted invited, for his father was Wilson Doan Sr., a managing partner in one of the city's major investment banks, itself one of my firm's largest clients, a company with offices in 126 countries. His boy had choked to death on my ambition- you could see it that way, you really could.
And an hour later Wilson Doan Sr. stood before me in the hallway of New York Hospital, his only son and namesake still and forever dead. He was a large, strange-looking man in a black coat. His wife had rushed into the hospital screaming, and when the aides explained that her son was not in the emergency room, that he was "downstairs now," she'd collapsed to the floor, growling with grief, writhing as hope left her body. Wilson Doan had seen this. Worse still, he had seen me see this. Now, with his wife sedated, he held his hairy fists at his sides, looking at me directly, and I realized I'd shaken his hand once, years ago, at some function- at Parents' Night at our boys' school, perhaps.
"They said you gave him a glass of milk with peanut oil on it."
"Yes," I said, anxious to apologize. "It was a tragic accidentI'm so sorry."
Wilson Doan was a big man, but what was most noticeable about him were his eyes; slightly crooked, one higher and larger than the other, they gave his face a disturbing complexity; half his expression was public and confrontational, the other private and detached in its scrutiny, the smaller eye coldly noncommittal. This was probably the secret of his success.
"We gave your wife absolutely explicit instructions."
"Yes. She followed them."
"And you didn't?"
"I didn't know."
"Why not?"
"Judith didn't tell me."
"Why not?"
"She didn't expect me home."
He said nothing, his eyes upon me, murderous.
"I flew home as a surprise," I added. "To be with my family."
"I see."
He was trying to retain the skin of civility, yet yearned, I could tell, to hit me, to pound and punch me until I was broken or until, years from now, his rage was extinguished. And I wanted him to do it. Yes, I did. I wanted to be released from my guilt; I wanted the intimacy of his hot fists upon me, for in making my pain I would feel his, and he would know this. He could have hit and kicked me for a long time, and I would have taken the beating as a warm rain. Welcomed, purifying.
But that did not happen. Instead we stood there tensely, he hating me, and me fearing his hatred. Two men dressed in clothes identical in quality and style and even point of purchase for all I knew; two men with wives and real estate and reputations and secretaries and ever longer ears and portfolios and aging parents. He knew too much about me, finally, for him to strike. If he struck me, then he struck at himself, or the idea of himself, for we were that interchangeable, and the fate of it, what had befallen us, was reversible in an instant. My son, his greasy glass of milk. He knew he could've done the same thing.
But there was another reason Wilson Doan Sr. didn't attack me then. It wouldn't have been good for him. Construable as an unseemly display. He was a banker, after all. If he was unable to control his emotions in public, what happened in private? People would talk. (They always do.) The Daily News might run an item. And that was bad for business. But his restraint terrified me all the more because I knew that his impulse must have release sometime, somewhere, and that the further away Wilson Doan's reaction was- the more remote and delayed the detonation- the worse it would be for me. Every minute that he hated me without satisfaction would be another minute in which he gathered his resolve and refined his stratagems. No doubt, too, he understood this, staying his hand with a promise to himself that my eventual punishment would far surpass a mere beating.