He scalded himself one morning stepping into a too-hot shower. She was downstairs ironing. She heard him scream and ran upstairs and saw him standing sobbing on the bath mat, dripping wet, his right foot, leg, thigh, and the right side of his butt splotched lobster-red. She reached into the medicine cabinet for the antiseptic spray and covered him with the stuff.
"It's going to be all right," she kept saying, hugging his chest. Robert just kept crying.
Finally the spray had its effect and he calmed down. She took him by the hand and led him into his bedroom and laid him on his left side on top of the cool, fresh sheets.
"Just stay here awhile," she said. "Don't try to get dressed."
Then she went looking in his drawers for something big and loose for him to wear, pyjamas or something. Everything looked too tight so she went to her own bedroom and took a pair of Arthur's.
He looked at her and laughed when he saw what she was carrying.
"Those're Daddy's," he said.
"That's the point," she said. "They'll be nice and big on you."
"They'll fall down!"
"Let 'em."
He laughed again and then went suddenly serious on her.
"Daddy says pain's all in your head," he said.
"Does not."
"Does too. That's what he said to me, anyhow."
She thought about it. She guessed that Arthur'd been talking to him about Indian fakirs on beds of nails, fire-walkers, that kind of thing. But Robert wasn't talking about the mysteries of neurological functions now. He'd got it mixed up. It was clear he was worrying about expressing pain, ashamed of crying. He was talking about some ridiculous macho thing. Getting into the fakirs and fire-walkers now would probably only confuse him.
But she was going to scotch this one right away.
"Daddy's wrong," she said. "If you hurt, you hurt. Period. And it's all right to yell as hard as you want to or cry as hard as you want to. You don't have to try to tough it out just because you're a boy. Okay?"
He nodded. "Okay."
But then over time when he still kept falling and bumping into things she saw very little in the way of tears.
Not even after a nightmare. And he evidently had some doozies.
The worst thing, though, from both hers and Robert's point of view, was that at the age of almost eight he'd begun to soil the bed at night.
Not wetting it. Having bowel movements in his sleep.
It didn't happen every night but as many as three or four a week.
He hadn't done that since he was out of diapers. And now here he was back in them again, and damned humiliated by it. At an age when all the other kids wanted to go over to friends' houses on sleepover nights or have other kids to their house he could have none of it. He got asked and then he had to lie and say no, his mom was too strict and wouldn't let him.
Close friends like Cindy knew the truth. With most of the other mothers she simply backed his lie. Let them think what they wanted about her. She didn't trust them with his secret.
She didn't even tell his teacher, although she was working closely with Mrs. Youngjohn on some of his other problems. Lydia could see that just having it happen to him at all embarrassed the hell out of him. Other kids and parents knowing would be awful.
He started doing something very strange which she thought was somehow related.
The first time he did it she figured he was just being sort of perverse. Kids could be that way.
But later, as it continued, she wondered.
She walked into his room one night where he sat on the bed playing with his guys, bashing them into each other. Some superhero war game.
"Got to put this on," she said and held up the diaper. "Bedtime."
By then he knew the drill. But he didn't have to like it. "Just a minute, okay? Just one more minute," he said and continued bashing away.
"Now," she said.
He sighed and made a face, making a big mock show of anger as he took off his clothes and got onto the bed.
And that was when he did what struck her as so completely odd.
He knelt on the bed stark naked and pressed his skinny chest directly to his knees.
His forehead rested on the mattress.
He dropped his arms behind him, fingertips touching his feet.
His pale white butt was sticking straight up at her. It was so unexpected that she laughed.
"Robert, what are you doing? How am I supposed to get a diaper on you in that position?"
She couldn't, obviously. It wasn't possible.
He didn't answer.
"Robert?"
He didn't move, either.
Protest, she thought. He doesn't feel like going to bed yet and he doesn't want the diaper on so he's found a brand-new wrinkle. Kids.
"Hey. Robert. This is not funny. Now roll over on your back so I can get this on, okay?"
He did as he was told.
She looked at him in silence as she worked. His expression was almost somber.
Poor little guy, she thought. Bromberg, the child psychologist he was seeing, wasn't doing him a damn bit of good. Bromberg said it would take time. Well, it was taking too damn much time. Every day she could see another grain of his happiness, his childhood, his personality being washed away like sand on a beach by these constant waves of exclusion and humiliation.
I'm different, he must think.
I stutter and I shit the bed so I'm bad.
And how to tell him that he wasn't bad without—just by discussing it—humiliating him further? Without admitting that any kid who did this all the time at his age had a pretty good reason to feel screwed up and different?
He was the only kid in his class who was seeing a psychologist.
He was aware of that too.
She was afraid to say anything to him at the moment, to call any more attention to his problems. Afraid to give them any more undue weight and substance.
Instead as she handed him his pyjamas she asked him about the other thing.
She smiled. "So what was that all about?"
"Huh?"
"Your cute little butt in the air. What was that stuff?" She thought he'd laugh but he didn't. He only shrugged. "Well, it's a whole lot easier on me when you're lying on your back, don't you think?"
He nodded.
She pulled the covers up over him and leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.
"Night, honey," she said. "You sleep well."
"Night, mom."
His voice sounded so small to her. Like the voice of a child half his age.
She turned off his light and went downstairs and hours later fell asleep on the couch wondering what to do for him or if there was anything she could do at all.
She thought that night that she'd seen the last of what she came to think of as the butt-in-the-air, knee-chest position. She hadn't.
It happened over and over. Irrationally and to no purpose. She'd walk into the bedroom with the diaper and there he'd be.
Like it was some sort of strange compulsion.
She tried to get him to explain what it was about. He would talk to her about plenty of other things but not about that.
All she got was an eerie silence.
And she was beginning to be afraid that her little boy was truly going crazy on her.
That something inside him was surfacing, something she'd been blind to. Some basic mistake of her own or something she'd overlooked—which would mean she'd failed as a mother to a stunning degree—or maybe that some resonance of their problems with the marriage was rising up inside him to take a terrible toll.
She told Bromberg and Bromberg tried to dig it out of him, the reasons for it, but Robert wouldn't speak to him either. Only shrugged like it was nothing.
When it was eating her up inside with worry.
It wasn't normal.
She knew she wasn't responding well at all. She was afraid of this behavior! And being afraid led her straight to a kind of irrational anger. He
was scaring her.
A couple of nights she lost it, started yelling at him—what's wrong with you? you know I can't put this on you when you do that! where's your head, Robert?—and then hearing her own voice use the same words on him that her father had used on her so long ago, felt so guilty that she felt like crying.
Sometimes she thought that she was going crazy too. This was straining her sense of control, her feeling of being able to handle her life.
"Kids do lots of weird stuff," Arthur said. "It'll pass. You'll see. It's just some stage he's going through."
He was trying to be reassuring but what he was actually being was infuriating.
It was not some stage.
Her son was in trouble. Trouble right across the board. And this compulsion of his. This meant something.
Ten
Party Talk
November 10, 1994
"Okay," he said, once they'd taken off their coats and paid the sitter and she had gone outside into the cold night air. "What the hell did you think you were doing back there? I mean, who do you think you are, Lydia?"
It was the first he'd spoken to her since they'd left the party.
Since she'd told him what she'd done.
"Cindy's my friend," she said. "I think she has a right to know that that man is lying to her."
She wanted a cold drink of water. There was a taste of wine growing more and more sour in her mouth. She headed for the kitchen. He followed her.
"How do you know he's lying? What makes you so sure?"
"He tells you he's definitely decided he's staying with his wife? And then tells Cindy that he's madly in love with her? That's not lying?"
"Maybe he's undecided. Going two ways at once. You don't know. Plus it's none of your damn business."
She poured and drank the water. Arthur went to the refrigerator for another Miller Lite. She was tired. She didn't need the argument. It was late and she needed sleep.
"Listen, I'm not a gossip, Arthur. I thought about it a lot. I didn't just go off and do this thing. You think I wanted to say something? You think I enjoyed breaking the news to her or even getting involved in the first place? I didn't. I also know he's a friend of yours, even if not a very good friend ..."
"Who says that? Who says he's not a good friend?"
She sighed. "Arthur, you see him two or three times a month. He comes into your restaurant. You talk to him. You buy him a drink. And that's that. Don't make out like he'd donate you a kidney or something, please."
"I happen to like the guy. Jesus Christ, Lyd, he's Chairman of the Board at Groton Chemical!"
"What's that got to do with it? Cindy's my best friend. Do you understand that? And she doesn't deserve to get jerked around by this guy! She got enough jerking around from Ed before the divorce."
She saw that the first beer had disappeared and he was already opening another. She turned on the water in the sink and started cleaning off some of the dishes. Even though she could have just as easily stuck them in the dishwasher or even left them for tomorrow. If she got busy maybe he'd go away.
"You compromised me, Lydia. You broke a confidence. I can't believe you'd do this to me! Do you know how much business this man throws my way?"
"I don't care how much business he throws your way. You don't need his business. You certainly don't need it as much as Cindy needs a decent life with a decent man who's not going to lie to her again the way her damned husband did."
"Maybe his intentions are good. Maybe he's just confused."
"That's ridiculous, Arthur."
"Look, everybody lies anyway. You lie to get what you want."
''I don't."
"No. You don't. You're fucking perfect."
"I didn't say I was perfect."
"You sure as hell seem to think you are."
She turned to him.
"I don't lie, Arthur. Do you?"
And she never saw it coming.
One moment his hand was at his side and the next moment he was slapping her.
She fell back against the sink, oddly aware that the water was still running and raised her arms to her face reflexively to fend him off because now that he'd put the beer down on the sideboard he was at her with both hands. The blows were getting through and they were hard, coming fast. He was using the heel of his hand and ball of his thumb, pounding at her, trying to hurt her, hitting at her head and cheeks and jaw, and she could smell the beer-stink on his breath and did not know whether she was more shocked or frightened at the attack.
She heard herself shrill his name once as she slid down the wall of cabinets to the floor and heard him growling at her, bitch, you fuck with me? grabbing at the collar of her blouse and pulling her up, ripping the fabric, so that she was kneeling in front of him held in place by one of his hands while he hit her with the other and she was crying, sobbing, she had her arms out in front of her but it wasn't any good, he was using his fist now, short tight jabs to the eye, to the nose. Punishing her. She could hear the pain roaring in her. Her entire face and head burned with pain. She inhaled her own blood, swallowed it. He was going to kill her.
She saw her father beating her mother in a drunken rage.
The man was bigger. The man was going to kill her.
Suddenly he threw her back into the kitchen cabinets and stood and released her. Her eyes skittered up to him and thought, he's crazy, he's gone crazy because she saw that he wasn't even looking at her now, he was standing over her looking up into the fluorescent lights above. He seemed tranced. Alien. He was panting and his shirt was torn—had she done that? He looked like some primitive warrior slipped somehow into modern clothes standing triumphant above his prey, his victim.
You bastard, she thought.
You coward.
He stepped off her and in four long strides was out of the room.
Headed for the stairs.
No! she thought. You are not going to touch him!
Her hand slid across a pool of her own blood as she tried to get up and then she was up and running after him, his own half-empty bottle of beer appearing as if by magic in her hand. She was halfway up the stairs when she saw him turn the corridor down the hall to Robert's room and then she missed a step and slipped again, her half-closed swollen eye betraying her. She pulled herself up by the banister, spilling the beer across the wooden stairs but holding tight to the bottle because if he came after her again or did anything to Robert, she'd use it on him, she would.
He wasn't in the darkened hall but there was a night light on in Robert's room and she raced toward it, flung herself into the entrance.
Then stopped.
Robert was asleep.
And Arthur was sitting on the bed holding him—his eyes closed. Gently rocking.
I'm living with a madman, she thought.
Dear god. I have been all this time.
"Get away from him!" she hissed.
Arthur opened his eyes and looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time all evening and was surprised to find her there.
Madman.
She stepped forward and raised the bottle.
His expression changed from that dazed look of surprise to something that seemed to her like sadness, genuine and deep.
She wanted him out of there.
"Get away!" she said.
He didn't seem to understand at first.
Then he set the boy down gently on the bed and stood staring at her a long second before he stepped slowly forward. She moved aside for him, aware of the bottle clutched in her hand and ready to use it if she had to. He didn't even glance at her as he walked past her out the door.
A moment later she heard the front door slam and a moment after that heard his car start up and pull away.
The dark felt suddenly thick with ozone.
She collapsed to the floor.
She was crying silently and everything throbbed and she couldn't see at all out of her right eye. Somehow she was going to have to clean herself up and get R
obert out of there. She was going to have to make up a story for him as to how she got this way so he wouldn't be frightened seeing how she looked. She was going to have to pack a few things and phone Cindy and pile their stuff into her car and then drive to Cindy's house and get him settled in.
And she hoped Cindy had a camera.
Because her next stop was going to be the sheriff's office.
He wasn't getting away with this.
She was not going back to him.
It was her and Robert now.
Eleven
Duggan
It was late, almost four in the morning. Hell of a time to wake folks up if he was wrong. But he wasn't wrong. The way she described it, there was only one place he'd go after that.
"Officer Welch will take your statement, Mrs. Danse, and then we'll let you go get some sleep."
She nodded.
The woman was one big bruise. He wondered what she'd told her son about that. When they'd picked her up at her friend's house and driven her over to the clinic she was worse. He'd taken one good look at her and insisted she get medical attention right away. You didn't mess with blows to the head.
The photos they'd taken were impressive.
If she decided to go after him the photos alone could probably put the bastard away for a little while.
Privately he thought that would be the best possible thing for Arthur Danse.
He got out of the chair. His back hurt. Everything hurt. The station needed better chairs for guys like him. He was old and it was late.
"I'm going to see if I can't have a talk with Arthur," he said. "Make sure he knows what we know until that restraining order comes along. Okay?"
She removed the ice pack from her face and nodded again. "Thanks."
Tiny little voice. He'd heard its like before. Usually, right after the anger passed. As the realization of what they'd been through, and maybe what they'd escaped, settled in.
Officer Welch—who was Martha Welch, thank you very much, and for his money, a credit to both her sex and the badge—stopped him at the doorway on his way out.
"No backup, Ralph?"