The first thing I do every morning after walking into my top floor office is to open the windows. Dust gathers inside the pyramid shaped room quickly and every night it seems to get filled with ages worth of dust and cobwebs. So every morning I go to the the big arched window and throw it open to clean the air. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or if there is a hoard of horse flies buzzing viciously outside, the humid air is better than a stuffy dusty room.
Once that’s taken care of I can turn check the circuit board then turn on the lights. The power of the whole stage can be controlled with a simple switch from my office - a fidgety switch that likes to flicker off when my back is turned. For the first few months when we moved in here I thought our power was getting cut because the rent was late or the city was having a blackout. No, it’s just an old church in an old part of town.
Theaters must strike the right balance between light and dark. The unpredictability of a dark stage focuses the audience attention on the moment, even if it disturbs the actors. I once had to explain this to a group of teenagers before during a drama club session, it still mystifies me how they couldn’t separate themselves from the audience.
“Ow!”
I cry out as I stumble into something hard and bulky and on wheels. I look down and notice the blue bassinet and suck at my teeth, pushing it over to the other side of the window into the shady spot next to the small standing table with an old wooden chair where I sometimes sit to pump breast milk. That bassinet should not have been on the other side of the window.
I don’t have time to wonder who could have moved it, or why, as I immediately go back to the routine of checking the box and turning on the lights. Once that’s done, I unlock the latch to my personal bathroom and open the closet to air out old costumes and props that we have to store in my crowded office. Every corner of my office is crammed with the baby supplies, toddler toys, 7 years worth of theater outfits and several large cases full of old church supplies.
“Must get rid of old Bibles,” I remind myself this every morning. But come Sunday I have no idea where to send them and end up keeping them in the old box I found them in. “They must be moldy by now.”
My theater, named “Threadbare Production House” since it technically started as a props and costume design company, is set inside an old three story Pentecostal church that was abandoned in the 1980’s. The entire building had gone through several rebranding including a school house, a large bookstore and even some kind of art gallery or restaurant before I came here and bought it last year. I got the place for a steel since the area around us is mostly for local businesses and private schools. I barely needed to do any renovations since the main chapel was easy to convert into a main stage and the several smaller chapel rooms were easily turned into practice and dance areas. That left the second floor free to turn into administration spaces, dressings rooms and even a cooking area. The only problem was there was no space to put me and all of my maternity care supplies until they hacked open the attic and found an old desk just sitting here along with the church supplies.
I’m jostled from my thoughts by the smells coming from outside. Curiosity wins over and walk over to connect the smell with the image. I smell pinching, ripe fruit. Something like newspaper burning. When I look down, the street vendors are starting to open and the local workers are smoking cigarettes on the side. The fruit stall has stacked crates of oranges, mangos and bananas behind them. And everyone smoking is lingering around, a few talking to each other or just sitting quietly and staring into the distance off stage.
As I stare at the top of their heads, my tongue begins to lick the back of my teeth and my lips pucker. I want a cigarette.
The smell has me craving the little bad habits of adulthood that I was supposed to swear off once I became a boss and a mother. When I opened my own theatre company, I swore off all liquor that wasn’t wine. When I had my first child, I swore off smoking. The second one meant banishing all ultra processed foods like yellow cheese and refined sugar. And this last one meant, well, that I had sworn off fun.
It’s agonizing to be a sober, healthy woman in a theater company. Especially one that’s includes kids and adults plays. There’s nothing more tortuous than gathering outside with the actresses during a set break as they all smoke and pass around mugs of stale coffee or tea. Four months ago I had the sudden urge to take up the habit again, probably because I was swollen up at eight months pregnant with a three year old attached to my hip and struggling to find a school to send my five your old to in a strange new city inside a strange old country.
Four months later and everything is still strange but less new. The five year old is six and in kindergarten, the three year old is four, the fetus is a baby. And I’m… still fat. Fat and wanting a fucking cigarette.
Whenever I want to fall back into my self destructive tendencies I do one of two things: Work and think about my family. And since I’m already at work, I walked over to my desk at the back of the attic room and reached over to pick up the silver photo frame that held our most recent family picture. It was a recent photo with a picture of me holding my newest son, Gabriel, wrapped around my chest with a long scarf in a tribal pattern to hide my wide shoulders and upper arm fat. My husband is standing directly behind me while holding our daughter, Elena, up while our other son, Noah, straddles my lap. We’re all pushed in together, posing in front of the city fountain where we had paid a photographer to make it look like we were naturally all outside in the busy, colorful street and not posing for hours trying to capture the “good side” of Mexico City without getting in anyone’s way.
The frame didn’t really look special at first, it wouldn’t turn heads on its own. But when you pick it up and hold it in your hands, you’re able to see all of the tiny details that had been carefully engraved into it. Dogwood flowers that popped up along the frame with details etched in, several tiny birds hiding under leaves in the corners and the smallest engraving of the silver smiths’ names.
It was an heirloom passed down to me from my father. His family had a strange tradition where the youngest child was always given something silver once they moved from home. Apparently he had been given this picture frame, one of the only pieces of silver his family kept during the Great Depression, and it had been passed along from youngest son to youngest son and so on. I found the tradition inspiring when he handed it to me as my college graduation present.
Now, a fully grown woman with 3 kids and bills to pay, I kind of think a nice set of China would have been a better inheritance. Silver involves way too much upkeep, and the frame has a thick crust of tarnish along the decorative edging.
Just as I’m lost in examining my family’s past, the sound of the door being thrown open a little too quickly startles me. I jump back and see Elaine, our theater’s accountant, walk into the office in the quick small steps that a tap dancers makes. She pulls off her sunglasses and waves over to me, her silent greeting an apology for forgetting that the door is old and could easily be thrown off the hinges when she opens it like that.
“Oh, it’s just you.” I smile and let out a long relieved breath. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting that door is not as heavy as it looks.” Her apology is said in a quick sincere breath as she walks over and gives a half hug, quickly wrapping an arm around my shoulder and giving a tap, before pulling away and to put her large tan faux leather bag down on my desk. “I’m gonna start going over last seasons’ finances before I look ahead to this seasons’ reports. Do you have anything for me yet?”
“No, I haven’t looked at our income statement yet.” I really dread thinking about money first thing in the morning. But I can think better when my children aren’t around so Elaine knows to get straight to the point. “Do you need to file them by the end of the day?”
“No, I just like knowing if it’s ready. I have to cover payroll tomorrow so it’ll help.”
“I’ll get it to you by the end of the day then.”
“Cheers.”
Elaine reached into her bright red handbag and pulled out a small pastel blue box. She opened it and produced a slim cigarette and a yellow lighter, quickly lighting the tip and sucking in the smoke while laying the box and lighter on my desk in front of my photo.
“Where’s Gabriel?” Elaine asked, spotting the empty bassinet near the window.
“With the nanny. I think she moved the bassinet last night.”
“You think she’s gonna run off with the baby and raise him as her own?” She let out a slow breath of smoke and grinned. “Before I do?”
“Right. Because an elderly Mexican woman raising a half white baby is so common.”
“It’s Mexico City. Stranger things happen.”
I nearly entertain her idea before there’s a light tapping at the door. Before I can call out, it opens and in steps the nanny carrying Gabriel in his baby basket in one hand and holding his oversized baby bag in the other. She manages to not only walk in with everything without bumping into anything, but quickly puts the bag down on the standing table by the window and picks him up with the now free arm to cradle him.
We’re both pulled out of our conversation and drawn over to the baby. Elaine walked over, flicking her cigarette out the window in one graceful move and leans down to babble at Gabriel. Elaine always looked at Gabriel as if he was the sole source of love in her life. She was so happy whenever she saw him that I sometimes felt guilty for taking him away from her whenever he needed to be fed or changed.
The nanny hands off Gabriel to Elaine like a perfectly packaged loaf of bread. As Elaine walks off, gently bouncing the giggling four month old I corner her to ask about Elena and Noah, my other kids who have tight schedules to manage everyday.
“Y Elena? Se ve a la escuela sin problemas?”
“Si, nada problemas. Noah se ve a la casa de su amigo, Jose. Jose y se mama veniran aqui despues almuerzo y poderemos jugar juntos a la parque. Puedo traer Gabriel conmigo si quieres?”
“Ah… si. Esta bien.”
Really all of this is only a show to remind everyone here that I’m the mother, even though most of the fun seems to be passed along to Elaine and the nanny. I’m still reeling from last week when Noah, crying over the fact that he had fallen off the front porch of our apartment and badly skinned both of his shins, called out for Tia and not me. He even began to howl louder when I picked him up and attempted to disinfect his legs, only settled when the nanny came in twenty minutes later holding Gabriel and spoke to him quietly in Spanish in the other room.
My lack of maternal authority aside, I just don’t like the fact that I can’t comfortably speak Spanish with her. I have been living in Spanish countries off and on for the last five years to the point that I can make jokes about the lisp in Barcelona or Argentina’s “sho”’s. But in front of this woman? It’s like I can barely get out a halting textbook Spanish question in under two minutes.
I’m lucky I don’t have to say much. After “yes you can take Gabriel to the park later”, the nanny just leaves to go back to the house to tidy up from breakfast, then get started on lunch. I groan to myself as she leaves, upset that I continue to talk to her like she’s a sub character in some trashy tv show and not the only person in my life I trust with the care of my children.
Elaine has known me for so long that she doesn’t even have to guess what I’m upset about. She simply lays Gabriel down in his bassinet and sits down on the chair next to it.
“At least you’re trying,” Elaine said gently before crossing her legs and leaning against the table. She fiddles in the baby bag to pull out Gabriels’ pacifier and sleeping toy so he’d have a silent morning. “I know some people here, men mostly, who pretend like they don’t need to learn ANY Spanish.”
“When was the last time you spoke Spanish?” I asked while sitting down on the window sill, glad it was sturdy and wide enough to support my weight. “And I mean REALLY spoke Spanish! Had a conversation that wasn’t going from point A to point B like buying milk or something?”
“Hmmm, that’s a good question.” Elaine looked up as she thought back over the last couple of years. “I haven’t had a good conversation in Spanish since… Do you remember that old laundry woman we used to use?”
“Of course,” I nodded. “She used to watch after Noah and Elena before we got our nanny. Always gave them snacks and got stains out of all our costumes. She was really helpful.”
“Right. Well do you remember what we talked about when we both came in when you were close to your due date?”
“Of course. How could I forget.”
I remember the day clearly. It was raining on a Thursday, a terrible day usually since everyone is overbooked and preparing for the weekend. We had run into her little shop that was on the end of the street to pick up the kids and our dry cleaning for the weekend. It was raining so badly that we all decided to stay in and have a cup of tea with her.
Her shop was just as cramped as my office but a lot brighter, thanks to all the colorful clothes and weavings hangings around. The kids played in front of the TV that was playing some local tv show on full blast while the three of us sat back and chatted casually about what ever topic our vocabulary covered. The woman much have been in her late 50’s or early 60’s but she seemed happy to entertain two foreign women who were killing time in her personal space while the rain hammered on.
It was there that she started asking a lot of questions about my baby, or rather the one on the way.
“?Que es su nombre?”
“?Que quieres estar la color de su ojas?”
“?Sabes que como va en la ciudad? Quieres se ir a escuela aqui como se hermana?”
They were all very casual questions, some of which I think I had answered before. But the way she asked them made me think she was interviewing me. They were so familiar, like she was collecting evidence or something.
Near the end she had asked me a question that threw both me and Elaine off. We looked at her confused and asked her to repeat it again. We asked it several more times before finally I had to call Elena over and asked her to translate.
“She said do you want to know what Gabriel’s future is.” Elena said bluntly with a bored and annoyed expression. “She said you can know if you let her check now or before he’s like five months old or else nobody can see his future when he gets too big.”
With that, Elena silently excused herself to watch TV and Elaine and I stared at the woman. We were, for lack of a better word, dumbfounded. What was this woman talking about? Of course I thought my daughter had misunderstood something, but after checking several more times we found it was correct.
This woman wanted to tell me my child’s future! Or, more exactly, she wanted to make sure he HAD an exact future. Apparently when a child is first born, that’s when you can most clearly see what’s going to happen to them because they know who and what they are then. When they get older, they forget who they are and get lost trying to find it again so it’s best to know now and not later.
We left her shop when the rain stopped and promptly found a nanny and new dry cleaner the day after. I managed to ask our nanny once about the woman and she had not only confirmed the story, but gave Elaine and I a detailed process (translated by Elena again) about how the fortune telling ritual was supposed to go.
“And what does she even need again?” Elaine asked, forgetting these little details even though they were ingrained into my mind.
“She needed corn flour, milk, a shoe box with three dice, a candle and a sewing needle.” I recited the ingredients as if reading off my grocery list. “She would prick the thumb of baby and let the blood drip into a small clay pot with milk and corn flour. Then she’d pour the mixture into the shoe box over the dice and seal it with candle wax. You’re supposed to let it sit overnight for like three days and come back.”
“What? Is she baking a cake or something?” Elaine laughed at the idea of having to wait for your future and not even get to have it delivered. “You know! When I hear there’s gonna be some fate divinity ritual thing! I think of blood sacrifices and like blind men speaking in tongues and stuff! The whole Greek affair.”
“The fates used a needle, thread and spindle to make the string of fate.” I quip very matter’o’factly. “Maybe seeing the future is a lot simpler than we think it is.”
“Yeah, look at me. All I have to do is look in a mirror.” Elaine walked up
“Oh don’t do that.” The whine that comes out of my mouth is too thick to be playful. “Don’t get me started! I can’t look at a mirror without thinking my chin looks’ like a turkey’s gizzards.”
“You look amazing!” Elaine chastised, my insecurities always make her angry. “You lost the baby weight the moment you walked out of the hospital. No one can even tell you’ve had three.”
“I’m fat.” I walked away over towards Gabe who’s gurgles were turning into faint chirps. “At least I’m not the only one gaining weight here. I was so afraid he was allergic to my breast milk or something with how he was always spitting up more than he was swallowing down.”
“It was a faze.” Elaine spun around and strutted toward the bassinet, smiling down at Gabe. “He loves the boobies now.”
“I just hope I can start weening before he starts teething.” My nipples tighten in memory of Elena’s baby teeth coming in. “I’d like to be able to keep my nipples attached to me.”
“We all like a little nipple biting.” Elena looked up with a completely composed face. “Do you think most men get their oral fixations from being bottle fed? You might be saving his future girlfriends’ a lot of trouble if you just let him practice biting yours.”
“Okay, out with you!” I roll my eyes at her Oedipus jokes. “My son is not a pervert and even if he were, it’s his fathers’ fault.”
She laughed and looked down at Gabriel. The look in her eyes told me she thought the world of my son and had no worries for him. She was one of the few people I knew who thought the future would be fine and made everyone else relax about it as well.
“Well I have to go now. Those taxes have to be done sometime. And that means going to two different tax bureaus on opposite ends of the city, if I’m lucky.” Elaine announced her intention to leave with a small turn as she gingerly picked up her bag and made her way to the door. “Exiting stage right!”
I laugh and linger around the same spot, watching as she walks away. As if on cue, I walk over to my desk and notice she left her pack of sky blue cigarettes on my desk. Giving into my desires, I pick up the pack and sit by the open window as I light up and hover away from Michael.
Looking out the window, I make a note of all the familiar heads I see. The fruit stall owner, the grocery clerk. But I don’t see the old laundry woman. It’s odd how I haven’t seen her again. She lives so close by. But she never comes to any of our plays and we’ve since stopped using her as our dry cleaner, so it should be normal to never see her again. Still, I keep feeling like she’s here somewhere.
I look over at Michael, sleeping in his bassinet, holding this little wooden doll that I still have no idea where it’s from. He’s sleeping so soundly. A blessing. Elena and Noah were terrible sleepers, it’s only Gabriel who seems so at peace with me.
I only get three good inhales in when I hear the door open. In comes a tall man with shoulder length black hair and thick, slightly hunched over shoulders. My husband. I quickly stomp out the cigarette against the window frame get up to shut it to block the smell of smoke and rotting mangos.
“Hi,” I say quickly as I shut the window. I haven’t been caught yet so I try to sound bored and not excited. “You’re here early. Did you want to have coffee together or something?”
That would be new. Usually he stays locked in his studio all morning smoking cigarettes faster and faster, one by one until the words come to him. Then he stays at his computer, crossing out words in a notebook and deleting letters on the screen, until well after everyone’s lunch time. Then we have expresso downstairs in the communal kitchen where it’s nice and shady and talk for hours like our children and debts don’t exist before he’d locked back into his work and I return to being the boss-mom-main signatory and automatic answering machine. So I won’t get to see him until I’ve locked up the theater and am at home, calling him down because dinner is ready and the kids are driving me crazy.
Really, a coffee in the morning with my husband sounds like a scene from Romeo and Juliet at this point.
“No.” He says, his voice deflating me more than his disregard to my suggestion. He sounds tired. “I’ve got the script. I want you to look at it.”
“Now?” I balked at his presumption that I had free time this morning. Didn’t he know we needed to prepare to open the new season? That I have a baby and an income report to look after? “We haven’t even set the new program line up or rehearsal slots yet.”
“You need to look at it.” His voice dips lower and gets quieter, holding out the script in his hand like he was pointing a gun at me. “I’m serious, it can’t wait.”
Now that he’s stepped into the center of the room I’ve finally got a good look at him. He looks bad. Unshaven and unbathed. He reminds me of the mangy street dog near our apartment with patches of missing fur and mites crawling all over its red rashy skin. The dog always stops in the middle of the street when traffic is low and begins to scratch itself violently before rolling over onto the tarmac and hurling itself around in circles. It’s a miracle no one’s ever run over that dog.
Carefully I got up from the window sill and walked over to take the script. Luckily Gabriel had fallen asleep, so we had at least 30 minutes of silence to ourselves to look over it together. Only, there was only one copy of the script and I had a feeling that this was the only hard copy he’d made.
“That was quick,” I carefully take the pages from him. Handling them like I was holding a bomb and not a baby like I usually would. “I know you told me you were working on something but I didn’t think you would put it together so quick. Is this just a short play or some kind of introduction to a larger work?”
“Different script,” he turned away from me and began pacing the left side of the room away from our son. “The other one wasn’t… It wasn’t coming like how I thought. And then this happened and the ending… The ending’s different.”
“It’s different?” I look at him suspicious. Was this man the same writer who always said he knew the ending before he even knew the main characters names? “I thought you said you had an idea for the main feature.”
“It is.” He nodded and then looked at the floor. I noticed he was wearing his old blue basketball shoes with the big hole in right toe box. “Same idea. Like… What would you do if you knew the future and couldn’t do anything to stop it? I just had to rework the ending. Just. Read it.”
I don’t like being given directions as if I’m being directed. But I am a speed reader and he does seem serious about this. I feel like if I say “no” to him he might break down crying, or hit me. Frankly I don’t know which one would be more traumatic for Gabe so I go ahead and just read it.
I held out the script that simply had the word “Angel” written on it. The story was simple. It was a three part play that told the story of a young man and his interactions with the five closest women around him: his mother, girlfriend, sister, an art collector and his former lover/teacher.
He had done this because we always had more actresses than actors, men are notoriously hard to get on stage and we have too many women in our auditioning rooms who leave either crying or grumbling about how they never get any lines. So I’m glad he’s put together something that would have more women than men in it.
The story seems very clear cut. It follows the main character, Angel, from when he’s in college and until he’s 33. He goes to art school, has his first big show that shoots him into stardom, and ends when his career has fallen due to a mix of creative block, drug abuse and a strange love triangle between him and all of the female characters.
I cringe at the different insinuations of incest. None of the lines outright say it’s happening but you get the drift. The mother is read as this high strung woman who constantly nit picks all of her children and his sister is somehow both distant and overprotective, like she’s jealous of any other woman in Angel’s life. It’s almost as if both women are fighting for him, fighting for control over him and his decisions. It’s caused him to push away every woman who comes close to him, yet he also always puts them at the center of his decisions and mistakes.
Is the boy this hen pecked survivor of an overbearing estrogen filled plot? Maybe. The allusions to Mexican culture is strong in here as well, from his name to the way he’ll drop phrases like “jefe” and “como va?” although I don’t know why. Apparently he goes to school in Santa Fe but then the plot takes him all the way to San Francisco and LA, meaning we’ll have to have multiple sets with very different backgrounds all set up and ready to be changed halfway through before intermission. And the notes for lighting cues is all over the stage, literally! All of these cues for super soft lighting or intense pin prick light shots makes it seem like he wants the entire stage lit only by candles.
“It needs work. A major rework.” I say as I flip to the next page, keeping the technical issues to myself and sticking to the plot. “The lines are weird. They’ll all start speaking naturally and casually but then, out of no where, they’ll become over dramatic and fatalistic. I’m not saying it’s not good, it just doesn’t fit the tempo well.”
“Keep reading.” He says, still looking at his feet. Now waving back and forth. “Don’t stop until you get to the end.”
I don’t have to struggle. I’m engrossed. The story is ridiculously over the top, horrifyingly graphic but fascinating. We’re taken to how he shoots up for the first time in college behind the art room supplies closet, and how his art professor walks in only for him to hastily coming on to her. It’s a scene that makes you question who’s being assaulted here. Then during his first show he’s seen fighting with said teacher-now girlfriend who gets into an argument with both his sister and a local art collector. It’s a scene that shows his struggle for staying authentic to his vision but being pulled between who he’s seen as: brother, lover or struggling genius.
“I’m at the third act,” I say while turning the page. “Are there only three acts? Usually there’s at least four.”
“I only wrote the most important parts.”
Well that might be an overstatement. The third act is set when Angel turns 33 and opens with his mother breaking into his studio to berate him about not attending his fathers’ funeral and locking himself away. She’s angry that he’s hiding away from her, from his family, from his responsibilities. She’s going on about how you have to see every creation through to the end, even if it fails and falls apart. How she had watched her own business fall apart after he was born and had to move back to the US to raise him and his sister alone only for him to run away-
And then there I am. I recognize myself. In this story I’m the mother.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, I’ve seen myself in many characters of his. He’s ripped me a part and put me into different characters so many times that I’m more insulted if I don’t see myself. And yes, I don’t like the mother here but she’s tolerable. He’s made worse portrayals of me before.
Of course, that doesn’t mean this one is flattering or anything.
Angel turns to Clara, his pregnant girlfriend, and points to her accusingly.
ANGEL: Don’t talk to me about faith or Hell because I never had it! I was never raised with it. Never comforted by it or threatened with it. It means nothing to me. My mother was a godless woman. Sure, she worked in a church but she didn’t believe it was a church anymore.
What did that mean? Was he, my husband, inadvertently saying I was damning our son because he hadn’t been baptized or something? He’s just as much an atheist as I am! And he’s the one who pushed me to get this church, not the other way around!
And the last scene is heart wrenching. We’re taken to his studio, this wrecked room full of unfinished pieces inside an old factory that had been renovated into artist lofts. There he meets his mother and his girlfriend. She’s pregnant and his mother is yelling at him to be responsible and finish something in the room. He does: He shoots them both in front of an empty canvas where their blood splatters the white board into the shape of a heart.
I am astonished. Mesmerized and horrified at the same time.
Is it an allusion to gentrification? How the art scene will scene can sometimes suck all of the life force from an environment until the ruins become inhospitable? Is it about how we reject nurture and care in order to stay true to ourselves? Is it a man’s fear of disapproval to the point that he rejects all possible futures? How his only true “creative collaboration” will be destroyed because he cannot control it and refuses to be controlled?
I go back and reread the last scene again. Something about it sticks in my mind. There’s this one line, this one line that’s so out of place from the rest of the script that it won’t stop ringing. Won’t stop yelling at me, demanding I pay attention to it.
The lines rip through my mind.
Angel picks up a silver picture frame, old and gray, and holds it over his head threatening to throw it at either of the women in front of him.
ANGEL: Tarnished! Tarnished like silver! Just like this picture frame my mother used to keep all of our family photos in. She thought it made us all beautiful but it doesn’t! If you don’t polish and shine silver it turns an ugly shade of grey. It becomes worthless. Just like everything in here! Nothing matters if it’s never taken care of the right way!
I twist my head and look over at my desk where my picture frame stands. There, my family is smiling back at me the same way they are in the script. Everyone huddled together in a foreign country with happy, posed expression framed in time.
Something about this seems wrong. Something about it seems to familiar. I’m rushing back to the last page where Angel is standing alone, the two women’s bodies lying on the ground as he drop the gun on the floor. But all I can hear in my mind is the sound of rain and a telenovela playing in the background.
ANGEL: I remember everything that set these events in motion. Like the needle pricking through my thumb. The candle burning my skin. Blood dripping down on wax that sealed my fate. I had no way to stop it.
I don’t drop the script. My hand falls to the side as I clutched it in my hand and looked up at my husband. His head had been bowed this entire time, he didn’t dare to look up at me as I read the script from start to finish. His messy flop of hair reminds me of how I watched people below on the ground from the window. Each one was as unrecognizable as he is.
“What did you do?” I asked calm even though my throat felt tight and hot.
“I just wanted to check.” He said slowly.
“What did you do?”
“She already helped us once,” he explained with his hands even though his eyes were still pointed to the ground. “You remember how Gabriel wouldn’t stop throwing up? Or how Noah kept getting sick even though there was nothing wrong?”
“What did you do to our kids?”
“It was a simple fix!” He shook his head and his voice picked up but he still would not look me in the eyes. “She didn’t hurt them! Both times, it was just an egg. Cracked an egg in a bowl with corn flour and then she’d mix some stuff growing in a pot. She had them drink it, Noah didn’t complain and swallowed it all. We watered it down for Gabriel and he drank it through the bottle. And then they got better! The both did!”
“What did you give our children?”
“I just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t get sick again or we’d lose them or or or-“
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SON!”
My voice rang out in the room and silenced any sound that could have come in. My chest tightened and I felt hot, heaving air beat through it as if I had been running for miles.
“I… I did what I thought was responsible.” He picked up his head and looked through me, his eyes unfocused and stretched beyond a point behind my head as if he was looking through me. “I thought that, if she told us something good then we’d definitely do it. Definitely help him be better. Get a good life. That’s what you’re supposed to do as a father. Help them become independent. Help them learn how to take care of themselves.”
“What did she say…”
“She said I did nothing.” His voice got quieter and quieter. Like he was disappearing. “She said… I don’t matter in his story. Only the women do. That there was a mother, a sister and a daughter. And that he… He kills them all over his art.”
“What is going to happen to our son?”
“I don’t matter in his story.” He keeps looking like he’s not there or I’m not there and like Gabe isn’t sleeping in the little blue crib right across from us. “He’s gonna do whatever he does. All that matters to my son is being an artist. But he doesn’t even want me to see his art?”
“Stop talking about art and yourself, dammit!” I yell at him again to try and snap him out of himself. “What did she say was going to happen? Why does she say he does this! What went wrong! What did I do!?”
How my screaming hadn’t woke up Gabe was beyond me. I was more angry that it hadn’t woken up my husband, this man who should have consulted me about this. About taking my son to this woman, burning him and brandishing him with this story that hurt everyone involved in it. Yet he had the gall to claim he was the one most hurt by it.
“Would you?” He asked in a soft voice that seemed to creep up out of him. Like a hermit crab shyly peaking out from inside his shell, he tried to pull something out to justify his assault on me and our son’s future. “Would you… do anything if you knew how it was going to end?”
We stare at each other for what feels like an eternity. I stare back at those giant, fish bowl sized eyes that seemed glazed over. I feel like I’m looking at an absolute stranger. I want to tear into his face and rip him apart, at the same time I want to scream and cry and beg him to tell me everything that happened.
But he doesn’t. Instead he just slowly, like a lumbering giant who has just been scolded, turns around and stumbles his way towards the exit. I have no idea where he’s going and I don’t stop him.
As soon as he’s gone I twist and run towards the bassinet. Gabriel sleeps soundly inside and even in my anxious rush I don’t dare to wake him up. Instead, I reach down and gently turn over one of his hands with my thumb and pointer finger. There, on the thumb of his left hand, I see what looks like a freckle standing out.
How could I have overlooked this? A hole, a puncture mark, appeared on my baby’s finger and I didn’t see it? Worse, I notice the edges around it are a deep red color. Could that have from from a candle flame burning the wound shut?
My face twists up and I know I look like some kind of monster about to throw a tantrum. I try to hold the screams inside but a thin, high pitch wail escapes between my lips. Sucking in a loud stream of air, I manage to hold it in.
My baby, my baby was hurt and I didn’t even see it. And, while I don’t know if I believe this reading or this script or not, I know that my baby will be hurt. I can see it, I can see the child and grown man this boy will become. And while I hold so much love for him that I feel like I will burst in two, I don’t know if he’ll be able to find the same love outside of this little bassinet. Can he? Can he find love and hope and faith on his own? Or will he turn out like his father and I, living off of work and cheap cigarettes and strong cups of coffee in order to get through each day?
What curse can we pass on to an innocent child by trying to help them become who they want to be? Will they turn out like silver, or be tarnished from overwork?