And then came her Will. Her reason for breathing. New parenthood was an ordeal but a different kind of ordeal. Will was on their side. They were in it together. It was them and Will against the world. They battled their health insurers for coverage for the emergency room visits they were forced to make — Will was prone to febrile seizures. She battled her family’s stubborn refusal to wash their hands before touching Will. Her mother: Do you think your grandparents washed their hands every time they handled you kids? They battled pedestrians and restaurant-goers who’d give them dirty looks every time Will so much as gurgled from his stroller — as though he were a boom box they’d brought in, as though they were the selfish ones! Arthur battled his employers — for paternity leave, for more vacation time, for more sick days, for more compassion for the new father whose wife had all she could do to keep from going crazy in the house alone with a baby who wouldn’t stop crying because he, well, who the hell knows why he won’t stop crying! They called the pediatrician, whom they liked, whom they trusted, but who frankly was of no goddamned use. New parenthood was a fire alarm that wouldn’t stop, that followed them around wherever they went, even into their sleep — Penelope would wake at three in the morning in a sweat and rush to Will’s crib to find him fine, he was fine, happily asleep. It was one unfixable thing after the next — it was everybody wanting a piece of them, but they barely had enough for each other — and when Will was crying, when he wouldn’t sleep or take the nipple or jump through the hoop in the next stage of development like the book said, it was a total nightmare they couldn’t wake from, but when he smiled or the moment he finally said, “Da,” when he slept through the night or finally got up onto his wobbly fat little legs and took those five, six, seven steps before toppling over, it was a dream they never wanted to end. How could this be? This miracle, how was it she could be so lucky?
And when she felt this way, she guarded the feeling; she didn’t tell her family or Arthur even. It was hubris to feel this way. If anybody else knew, the word might spread, and then anybody could just come and take it away from her. So she told her mother that she was struggling, that it was hard, which was true enough, but she didn’t tell her mother how her heart ached for Will when he was in another room or in another person’s arms. Her mother thought she was doing Penelope a favor when she drove up from Virginia to babysit, insisting that she and Arthur go out, have fun, treat themselves to a hotel, but really all they did was sulk over their candlelit dinners, fidget through the movie distracted, until neither of them could take it anymore and canceled the room reservation and took Will back, relieved to be home, to be a family again.
It was hard, though. Arthur was right. It was life altering, mind altering, they were no longer the same people they once were, not older exactly but different. To be a mother wasn’t merely to have a child; it was to have weathered a fundamental change of chemistry, of identity. She looked back on the years before their marriage, before Will, and thought, Who was that girl? Not meanly. Like a compassionate big sister. She finally understood that contradiction in her parents — was able to reconcile those disjointed impressions she had of them — the hip teenagers they claimed to have been with the prudish fuddy-duddies she knew them to be now. It made perfect sense. She’d read somewhere once that humans shed their old cells every seven years — or maybe it was that humans renewed their cells at a rate of every seven years — so that after seven years one was literally no longer the same person. If that was true, then why couldn’t both versions of her parents coexist? And she, Penelope — why couldn’t it be that she had been both of these people? That she had evolved?
This was the idyll of motherhood, of the family life of Penelope and Arthur and Will.
I’d emerge from these talks at the diner confused. My friendly crush on Arthur’s wife had flared into a chest-burning ache, and with it came an equally hot jealousy of Arthur, who clearly didn’t deserve this woman’s love. I felt guilty. It was like we were having an affair, meeting clandestinely twice a week. We’d sit in our “reserved” smoking booth, and Penelope would go through half a pack of my cigarettes while she talked.
On Halloween, we all put on suits and homemade FBI badges and followed Will’s flashlight trail down the long corridors of the building looking for unexplained phenomenon, which mostly took the form of Reese’s Pieces. Penelope played Scully while Arthur sat by the open apartment door with a large tray of her homemade peanut brittle. There were apparently four other kids who lived in the building, somewhat younger and with whom Will had no interest in playing. These kids and their parents, all in Rite Aid costumes, tagged along with us warily, not sure what to make of our little mafia clique. We went around ringing bells to mixed success. A few on any hall were anticipating our arrival with a cobwebbed door or a red-lit foyer, generous with the treats. Others we’d catch genuinely by surprise, a look of panic on their faces — was there a fire? — until they processed who we were. But mostly, nobody was home.
By the first week in November we had a final cut of Dead Hank’s Boy. I set Suriyaarachchi up with a fellow composition student I knew from conservatory. She was getting her DMA now in Ann Arbor and agreed to score the film for very little cash and a bullet point on a résumé. We collaborated over the course of weeks via Express Mail. With a darkly atmospheric sound track, trimmed to within an inch of its life — a lean eighty-seven minutes from title card to final fade — the movie was more than watchable: it was downright entertaining! Suriyaarachchi went out and bought a giant dry-erase calendar on which to mark the deadlines of every film festival we were eligible to enter, and two, as it turned out, we weren’t — being neither Latina nor Canadian. We put together a “press packet,” with synopsis, production stills, headshots, and résumés. We went at this project with painstaking care, spending hours on these ancillary materials to accompany the tape in the mail, as though these things might make up for any unexcisable failures the film still bore.