Do You Read Me?

The aftercare pickup line winds slowly down to us, with Jax’s finger itching at his walkie talkie’s send button. He knows the rule is to wait to use it until we’re at the car, but he digs it from my bag as soon as he catches up with me, not willing to lose an extra second of holding it. I’d love to stretch that walkie talkie moratorium beyond the school day for a longer break from its racket, but I’d never ask that of him. Jax’s behavior has been irreproachable since John left, as if he thinks he owes penance for every tear I’ve cried. Or maybe he thinks that one step out of line will get him tossed out of the house, too. Never mind that John left of his own accord. Jax’s good behavior keeps our daily routines running so smoothly, I forget sometimes what that must cost him.

While we wait, I study outlines of the zoo animals painted onto the cafeteria wall behind the checkout station, remembering when the mural was no more than pencil drawings with the art teacher corralling tiny eager helpers. Jax painted the lion’s tail himself and only recently got old enough to stop mentioning it every time we reach the end of the line.

Jax is finally big enough to do without the booster seat, and he opens the car door and climbs in on his own, resting the walkie talkie in his lap to strap himself in. The buckle clicks, then, Chrchrchr. “This is Jax. Over.”

Ever since Damien down the street got the set for Easter and gave Jax the spare, it’s been nearly nonstop chrchrchr. “This is Damien. Jax, do you read me? Over.” Then, chrchrchr. “This is Jax. I read you. Over.” Coughing in and out of every task around the house. Brushing teeth. Finishing homework. In the morning over breakfast cereal. Halfway to the bus stop when Damien’s fluff of hair is already cresting the hill in front of us, on the way to the same bus stop. By Easter, Jax’s dad had been gone long enough to prove he wasn’t coming back. The toy breathed new life into him just when he needed it, even if not so long ago, before the walkie talkies, Damien was a sometimes-friend. As in, sometimes he was nice to Jax and sometimes he ignored him. At least once he threw a stick at him.

Traffic snails out of the school parking lot. Clouds hang thick with rain that wants to fall but won’t. The sky and the slowness and my long workday blend together to cast everything in a gray haze. With Jax in the backseat saying, chrchrchr. “This is Jax. Over.” Over and over.

Before now, Damien has answered immediately. In the rearview, Jax’s face shows the same center crease as when his dad forgets to pick him up for their Wednesday dinners.

Chrchrchr. “This is Jax. Over. Do you read me? Over.”

Nobody tells you when you have kids that you won’t like some of the other little kids. I mean, you really won’t like them. Damien Tuller is one of those kids. I didn’t like him long before the walkie talkies, long before my husband left, turning our family into a three-legged table, a broken thing. Long before Damien started poking into the absence with snide comments, like, Why doesn’t your dad like you anymore? Questions Jax comes home and repeats to me afterward, convinced that Damien asking something makes it true. If John showed up like he should, my comfort could gain more traction against Jax’s doubts. I could even suggest he call his dad for reassurance, but too often when Jax calls, his dad doesn’t answer.

Chrchrchr. “This is Jax. Over. Do you read me? Over. Please, Damien. Please?”

“Maybe his battery ran out,” I say.

“It had the same charge as mine at the bus stop this morning.” Damien’s mother collects his handset before school every day, too.

“He doesn’t have aftercare, though. Maybe he ran out of battery at home?”

“Talking to who?”

Why couldn’t Jax like one of the other kids on the street? Grant or Holly or Channing? They might not thunder into a room the way Damien does, out-louding any other sound in a five-mile radius. They might portion out their attention rather than pouring it on full force. Damien has spunk, I see that, but he’s all unmodulated energy. Open nerve endings. He’ll barrel into Jax and tackle him in the grassy area at the end of our cul-de-sac. So excited to see him, Damien won’t notice Jax’s eyes flash with terror at his sudden force, but, there on the ground, they’ll morph into a rolling ball of laughter, then leap back to their feet, hair mussed, cheeks red, ready to sprint toward the next adventure.

Chrchrchr. “This is Jax. Over.”

Always with Damien there’s that little off-kilter thing. His not answering the walkie talkie is new, but new in a way that feels familiar.

*

At home, Jax peels off his jacket and drops it with his shoes by the door, then mopes into his bedroom. Instead of reminding him to put his things away properly, I cut him a break and rinse leftover breakfast dishes and stack them in the washer. Hang a fresh hand towel. It’s been just Jax and me for nine months now. Before that, I’d roll in with Jax from aftercare and John would call out from the kitchen, NPR murmuring from his laptop. Pans sizzling on the stove. Strong scents of curry or za’atar funneling toward the front door. He’d smile at me and high five Jax as Jax dervished past the kitchen on his way to his bedroom to grab his magic kit.

The kit was a gift from John, complete with top hat and book of tricks, and their after-school ritual involved Jax sitting across the kitchen counter practicing one trick after another while his dad finished making supper. Plucking the right card from a deck. Disappearing a quarter. Tapping the little cardboard wand against the rim of the hat and saying “Ta-da!” John seemed to love those moments as much as Jax did. Gave no sign that he was just biding his time before making himself disappear.

Now the magic kit sits under piles of dirty shoes at the back of Jax’s closet. Jax doesn’t sleep right. His appetite gets wonky. He’s missed a lot of school, and I’ve missed a lot of work. Some days I’m sure I’m about to get fired, but then my boss calls me into her office and gives me one of her understanding looks, asks if I’m okay. She had her own messy divorce at my age. Thank God someone nice is left on this earth.

I whip up fettucine alfredo from a package, with a side of peas from the freezer, every so often peeking down the hall where Jax curls on his bed, facing his half-closed curtains, his room dim and sad looking. I sneak up on Jax’s doorway, cellphone poised in my hand like a walkie talkie. Chrchrchr, I say, grinding the sounds at the back of my throat. “This is your mother. Do you read me?”

Peeking around the doorframe I see Jax, rolling toward the door, his face plain. He catches sight of me and smiles without showing any teeth. “Nice try,” he says.

Why are kids mean? Damien and Jax are only eight. Five minutes past unicorns and tooth fairies. Too early for the world to crush them. And after John left, I wanted those unicorns and tooth fairies back so bad. I wanted singing angels to descend around the house and soften everything for Jax, who’s first to share his snack with any kid in class without one, who grieves roadkill, who worries where birds and squirrels go in the rain.

I tell Jax five minutes until supper and wish I could kiss him where it hurts like with skinned knees when he was small. When he was smaller. He’s still small. He’s had more than enough hurt for his size. Sometimes I want to kick the world in the gut. Fuck it up in a back alley somewhere. At least let him get big before you hurt him. At least that.

Then, as I’m walking back to the kitchen—Chrchrchr. “Are you mad at me? Over.” Chrchrchr. “Did I do something? Over.”

One time Jax came home crying after Damien pelted a baby rabbit with driveway gravel. How angry it made me, but I hid my seething the best I could. I said something like, “We don’t throw rocks at living things. You know that right?” And he just pinioned me with this shaming look of disbelief.

“He didn’t mean to, Mom.”

Words that grated at the base of my jaw. All the times John apologized that same way. So many things he hadn’t meant to do. “Not meaning to do something doesn’t make it okay. You have to mean not to,” I said. “You have to mean not to hurt people. Not hurt living things.”

Dinner is another walkie-talkie-free zone, so Jax sets his handset by his plate and shovels food with one hand, resting his face on the other fist. He grunts yeses and nos to my questions about school. Beyond needing it right beside him, he does his best to pretend to ignore the silent walkie talkie. Stops himself short on the way to picking it up again and again.

When I scruff his hair and smooch his scalp on my way to the sink with dirty dishes, he flinches, wanting to be too old to find comfort in it, but he still smells like earth and baby shampoo. He’s changed so much since John left, though, and the bigger-kid shape of him still surprises me. His stretched-out torso, longer jawline, stronger cheekbones, harder set to his eyes. Fragments of the baby he used to be tangled up with the man he will be.

It’s John’s night, but this week instead of forgetting, he canceled. So Nyla, the 15-year-old babysitter from down the street, comes over after supper to cover my weekly date with myself. My sister’s idea. Sometimes Arletta joins me, but she’s got two kids of her own and teaches a pottery class at the community art center some weeknights. We fall in and out of sync with each other.

In front of Jax, I remind Nyla how he needs to charge the walkie talkie before bed. We learned early on that the batteries run dry overnight, and the charging rule keeps Jax from staying up late mumbling bad jokes to Damien like he did at first. Tonight, with the cold shoulder routine going on, holstering the walkie talkie is Jax’s best bet to sleep at all. I show Nyla the charger by the key basket at the front door and kiss Jax one more time. Breathing that scent into the bottoms of my lungs. I remind myself how none of this lasts. He’ll finish growing up. He’ll leave me behind. Not in a flash of anger like his dad, but in minuscule increments over years. The way he’s supposed to. And, along with countless childhood moments I’d rather not forget, this shit with Damien will fade to nothing.

Nyla herds Jax to his room to gather drawing supplies, but his face retains the sallow shade of a bereaved old man.

During lunch I scrolled movie listings, but nothing appealed. I’ll browse sales at the mall again until enough time passes for me to go home without having to explain myself. When Arletta calls later, she’ll wag her finger at me across the phone waves. “You need to get back out there more than Jax needs a new pair of jeans.” When I tell her I’m not ready to get back out there, she’ll cluck and tell me, “John’s not coming back, Grace,” like I don’t already know. I love my sister, and she means well, but tonight when she calls, I’ll let it ring. Let her think I’ve gone to bed.

The clouds burst once I make it to the mall parking lot. I cut the engine and listen. The rain drumming the cartop recalls the tin roof of my childhood home. I’ve always loved the sound of rain.

John proposed in the rain. At a picnic he’d planned and replanned for weeks. The first time, Arletta had an emergency at work, needed stitches, and I had to pick her up from the ER. She works in IT but slammed her hand in a filing cabinet, caught it on a sharp metal edge. A coworker had dropped her off, and she was woozy after getting sewn up, so I stayed with her until she felt better. I almost broke up with John because he’d seemed so unsympathetic when I had to cancel.

His father had a heart attack on the second attempt. A mild one, luckily—his fatal one struck when Jax was four. The third try, when I still only thought we were after a meal in the park, I joked about what tragedy this picnic would bring on. The old bad-things-happen-in-threes superstition. John didn’t get the joke. Probably because it wasn’t funny. By now, we could count our marriage as that third thing.

We wound up in a storm much like this one, holed up under one of the park’s wooden shelters. He lay a table with chocolates and cheeses and sliced fruits and veggies while the rain gushed. The shelter was pointless. Rain slashed sideways like someone turning a hose on us. But he crouched onto his knee. I could hardly hear him over the rush of water, but that didn’t stop me from crying. From kneeling in front of him and shouting yes straight into his face. Because I loved him then, and he loved me. We had no reason to think it wouldn’t last forever.

No sale is worth getting soaked for, so I scroll my phone and listen to a podcast about climate change and impending extinctions, let about an hour go by, then fire up the car again. My windshield wipers slap back and forth, blurring the bright red light of the Red Lobster sign at the edge of the lot. The wipers’ rhythm and cars sluicing rainwater through the streets make a murky soundtrack for the slow ride home.

Back on our street, all the lights are on at the Tuller house. Their house sits at the top of a rise, and Damien’s mother stands silhouetted in their open front door, calling something into the mizzly air. Their dog must have gotten out again.

I slow down, about to roll down my window and shout an offer to help when the rectangle of light at the Tullers’ front door goes dark. Lorna must’ve stepped back inside, with or without the dog, and I hate how relieved I feel.

I pull the car into the drive. If only John wasn’t so absentee, maybe one mean kid wouldn’t annoy me so much. Maybe I’d be nicer.

Inside, I peel my drenched sweater off my shoulders and hang it from a chair, then I peel some cash from my wallet, walk Nyla to the door. She texts her mom that she’s on her way, and I offer her an umbrella, but she shrugs her jeans jacket over her head instead and hustles down the street that way. I watch through the storm door until she flicks her porch light twice, home safe.

A yellow shaft of hallway light jags into Jax’s room. I tiptoe to his bedside, plant the lightest kiss on his scalp. He shifts to the side and lets out a groggy hello. He smiles and blows a drowsy kiss. Walkie talkie forgotten in its charger.

In the dark kitchen I grab a beer from the fridge and pop the cap at the rooster-shaped bottle opener mounted on the wall behind the key basket. I lift the walkie talkie from its charging cradle and roll it in my hands. It’s one thing when people hurt each other by accident, but when they do it on purpose?

“I don’t like the way you smell,” was the last item on the list of reasons John counted off on his fingers the day he left, his face growing smugger with each reveal. As soon as the door banged behind him, I took a long, hot shower and scoured the entire landscape of my body.

“He just said that to be mean,” Arletta said, when I called her, dripping from the shower and crying hysterically, grateful for the sleepover at Damien’s that had kept Jax out of the house, that gave John the privacy he needed to stage the recitation of his grievances. “Please, Gracie, tell me you didn’t believe him.”

Had he always been mean? I don’t think so, and that image of him pops back to mind, kneeling at my feet, his face tilted up in adoration with rain streaming across it. “This is the beginning of our happily ever after,” he’d said.

Surely Damien is asleep by now. His walkie talkie charging in his basement playroom. Nobody near enough to hear it. I thumb the send button. Chrchrchr. Chrchrchr. Chrchrchr. But I only pretend to press it when I speak. “This is your conscience calling. Over. Do you read me? Over.” I wait, as if he could answer an unsent message. Then I press the button again, another quick Chrchrchr. “One day all your meanness will catch up to you. Over.”

I lean the bottle back for a long swig, then almost cough the mouthful across the table when the walkie talkie chrchrchr-s back at me. Had I held the button the whole time after all? I gulp what’s left in my mouth then stare at the little handset in the middle of the table, afraid to touch it.

It stays silent. I finish the beer and cycle through the usual roster of end-of-day duties. Tidying Jax’s shoes by the door. Collecting his jacket from the floor. Snapping off lights in each room on my way toward bed. Until, in the foyer, when I’m about to switch off the porch light, I notice a strange movement through the front window. A figure on the porch.

With the light on out there, anything I do in the darkness inside is invisible, so I sidle to the door and double-check the deadbolt. A soft knock sends me leaping backward. Three more gentle raps, and the sound of a person shuffling their feet. Then a gasp, like a swallowed cry. I unbolt and open the door just enough to see who’s standing there.

Damien’s mother.

“Lorna, good Lord, are you okay?”

“Grace, it’s Damien. Have you seen him?” She’s soaked and shivering. Her hair in sopping spirals by her face. Her canvas jacket three shades darker than usual. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”

“Jesus, Lorna. Have you called the police?” I fight the image of Damien, crammed into a car trunk, speeding down an interstate somewhere. Scratching and banging to get out. Hearing how his meanness will catch up with him. Then wind yanks the storm door from my hand, and I pull Lorna inside. She drips in the foyer, and her shoulders shudder from the cold or fear or both.

“The police are tired of us,” she says. “This is something he does.”

“Let me get you a towel at least.” What else can I do? I lead her to the kitchen and flip on the light over the stove, gentler than the blare of the overhead. It casts a scant beam across the kitchen table, and there’s Jax’s walkie talkie, stranded and silent. Our eyes hang on it a moment before I break the spell and rustle a couple of hand towels from the drawer by the sink.

Lorna tamps water from her hair, and a familiar scent drifts off her. Cloying, fruity. It must be from their dryer sheets. Something else about Damien I’ve never liked. The very smell of him makes me recoil. The same as what John said about me. How mean is that?

Finished with the towels, Lorna lumps them into the center of the table. One finger grazes the walkie talkie. She looks disordered, lethargic. It’s ten o’clock at night, her son is missing. What’s with this listlessness? It must be some kind of shock. I fill the kettle with water and aim a question over my shoulder, pretending casualness, “Is there something else we should be doing?”

A peep escapes Lorna, then gets caught in her throat and kicks into a full-on spasmic coughing fit. She waves a hand that she’s okay while I fill a glass with water and scoot it across the table to her. I tell myself it’s not my place to panic, though I’m not really sure that’s true, then rustle the cabinets hunting for tea. Nothing seems like the right thing to do, but making tea is as close as I can get. A task that should be easy, but after John tossed the house in his mad exit, the strangest things landed in new places or disappeared altogether. I don’t know how he found time in the chaos of his exodus to scramble and hide things he didn’t want for himself. Things with meaning. When I emptied the kitchen trash the day after he left back in July, I found my favorite winter pajamas crumpled in the garbage bin behind the house. When he’d said they made me look like a sack of potatoes, I’d thought he was kidding.

After a long draft of water, Lorna wipes her lips with the back of her hand, lets out a few final low-throat coughs. “Sorry.” Then her chest heaves with a breath in, shoulders droop with a breath out. “He does this sometimes.”

“He does what exactly?”

“He leaves,” Lorna says.

I picture Jax at four years old in the backyard with sunshine dappling his dark brown hair and his backpack sagging off his shoulders, nearly bursting with favorite toys and boxes of Pop Tarts and Goldfish crackers. Running away, or what he considered running away, struck him as high adventure when he was little. He’d get as far as the creek down the hill, with me watching from the kitchen window. His chest puffed with pride over that little taste of freedom. What a big boy he was, I’d say when he got back. What a big boy to come home again. To know where he was wanted most and who would take care of him. Teaching kids to do without us is what we’re here for, but it’s the hardest part, watching them learn how.

“Or he hides. For all I know he’s in the attic somewhere right now. But he’s a really good hider. And he doesn’t answer when we call his name, even if we’re standing half a foot away from him. That’s why the police don’t like us to call them anymore. They want him to be gone longer first.”

She fingers the placemat in front of her. Jax’s placemat with its jam stains and toast crumbs. I mean to shake them out after every meal, or at least at the end of the day, but I forget. Lorna doesn’t notice the mess, the leftover morsels clinging to her wrist. Or she pretends not to, to be nice.

“We should’ve been listening better. I knew he was pissed,” Lorna says. “You know how kids get pissed when they’re punished. He got in trouble at school for skipping homework. So I grounded him from the walkie talkie.”

“That explains a lot.” The kettle begins to throttle on the burner, the water nearly boiling.

Lorna sweeps her head toward me, as if she’d half-forgotten I was there. “Crap. I should’ve told you. The way the two of them have been at it. Was Jax very upset?”

If I’d learned this earlier, I would’ve been angry, but anger doesn’t make sense anymore. I shrug. “He was wondering,” I say then turn back to the cabinets. I check behind the saucepans, the cookie pans, the cereal boxes. What made the chamomile important enough to hide? I wish there was a dust cloth big enough to gather all that’s left of John. Then I’d rinse it and wring it, rinse and wring, rinse and wring, till nothing of him remained.

“It could’ve been half an hour, an hour before we knew,” Lorna says. She’s rocking her empty water glass back and forth on the table, the last droplets catching the light. “He was upstairs after dinner, finishing homework, we thought. I mean, that’s what all the trouble was about, so we were hoping he was falling in line. I was cleaning the kitchen. Mark was on a conference call with Singapore in the study. We didn’t hear anything. We usually hear him leave.”

“Usually.” I taste the word in my mouth. When John left it felt like such a singular thing. Imagine my own child leaving, over and over. “That must be rough.”

A brittle laugh poofs from Lorna’s lips.

Behind the cleanser under the sink. That’s where I find the goddam tea.

The kettle whistles and I pour, place our mugs on the table, deal myself the chipped one, offer honey, sugar. The necessary banalities of hospitality. But surely we should be doing something else? Something more? Chamomile fucking tea. It’s all I’ve got. At least I found it.

Lorna closes her eyes over the lip of her mug and breathes in the scent, the tea too hot to sip. Then she groans her eyes back open. “I don’t know if you knew this, but Jax is the only kid in the neighborhood who doesn’t tease Damien about his stutter,” she says. “It’s getting better. He sees a woman for it up at school, but it embarrasses him. All the kids know where he’s going. ‘Time for you to go to t-t-t-talk to somebody, Damien,’ they say. He has a couple of other learning things. A kind of dyslexia. Some fine motor problems. The doctor says he could grow out of all of it eventually, but it’s hard to believe when no one seems to understand what’s causing the trouble to begin with.” She looks up at me over her mug. I tug the string of my tea bag, watch color seep out into the water around it.

“The school day is hard on him,” Lorna says. “He gets angry. It scares some of the other kids sometimes. Jax is always good to him, though. I’ve never told you how much I appreciate your son.”

Then it hits me, why John hid the chamomile. An image of a very young Jax in footie pajamas, scuffing toward me across the kitchen floor one night after his dad and I had argued. His eyes wide in the half light. His mouth a tiny line. He pulled his stool to the counter and riffled the kitchen cabinet before I could stop crying enough to ask what he was doing out of bed, and he snaked his hand around the different teas. He couldn’t read. He must’ve recognized the box from other times like this. “You have to do the water,” he said, his voice quiet but clear from across the room. When the tea was ready, he climbed up into my lap and burrowed against me. I could feel his body relaxing more and more with every sip I took, which made me notice my own body relaxing. It made me feel good, chamomile tea. Even Jax knew, so that’s the message from John. He wants to make it as hard as possible for me to ever feel good again.

“Jax is maybe a little too good at understanding people.” I crane around Lorna for a view down the hall, and the sight of the ridgeline of his folded legs under his brown blanket soothes me. “But I’m glad he’s kind to Damien. I didn’t know about any of that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s been a while since he snuck out. I thought he was getting better,” Lorna says. “It took me awhile to think of it, but I thought he might’ve come by here earlier. That you or Jax might’ve seen him? I thought it was worth a knock anyway.”

 “Of course it was worth a knock,” I say. “I was out for a while earlier, and Jax was asleep when I got back, but we hadn’t heard anything before I left. I mean, Jax was trying.” A knife edge sneaks back into my voice, even in this moment, when the truth is that I could’ve just called Lorna and asked what was up instead of nursing grievances against a child. “Hey, I don’t know if it’s relevant, but a few minutes ago, the walkie talkie made that throat clearing sound.”

I put the walkie talkie in her hand, and she presses the button. Chrchrchr. “This is Mommy. Over.” Chrchrchr. I never pictured Damien calling her Mommy, but of course he would. He’s just a little kid. “This is Mommy, and we’re worried. Over.”

We wait, staring at the walkie talkie, willing it to answer.