Lord Fear (18 page)

She will think of him tonight as she holds her little girls until they fall asleep.

—

Way out at the end of Brooklyn, Josh is five years old, in his mother's arms, trying to explain.

He is trying to tell her what these moments are when she feels like she loses him, when he loses himself. He settles on a word. He calls them
glimpses
, as Beth holds him by the shoulders and crouches to his level. She can see what the word means. It's in his eyes, fear like an iron gate swinging shut, until he's howling syllables but no words, punching the air. He sees shadows
moving toward him, ceilings collapsing. He feels his body like hissing steam. He is outside that body, only able to peer in, not help himself. Beth has to hold him in the kind of wrap-up that lifeguards are taught to use on the drowning.

He looks like he's drowning. But then, competing with that image, there's the word,
glimpses
, and the fact that her five-year-old has the capacity to attach vivid, metaphorical language to his feelings. In the middle of this storm in him, he can stop and articulate. Beth debates telling him that's a lovely word choice he's made, but then a small flailing hand catches her ear and all she says is, “Ow, honey, stop please.”

Beth has spent a good portion of her life coaxing boys out of nightmares. She was a leaned-on older sister, then became a mother not long after moving out of her childhood home. She's always been good at swaddling. But it was easy with her brothers. They woke up from what was so awful.

None of that was real
, she could tell them, without lying.
You were sleeping, and sleeping doesn't count. Monsters are for sleeping. This is what's real. Brooklyn is real. I'm real
.

What do you say to a child about a waking nightmare? Josh's eyes are open; it's reality that frightens.

It's noon and already she's been embarrassed today. The phone rang while she was doing dishes, and the moment she heard that drawn-out nasal hello from Miss Greenberg, kindergarten czar, Beth knew what was wrong.

“What's wrong?” she said anyway, and Greenberg, voice humid with disdain, said, “Oh, dear, you should probably come take a look for yourself.”

In the classroom, Greenberg trapped Beth and her problem child in the corner by the cubbyholes. Josh vibrated in Beth's grip. All the other children stared with round eyes, every one of them as angelic as a grape-juice commercial. They seemed to already know to be silent and somber, not to tease, when Josh
got like this. They were concerned, and that made the contrast even starker. Josh had been going to therapy for a few months, and Beth hadn't been able to bring herself to tell any of the other mothers. It felt like that would be extra confirmation for the reports that she was sure these kids were giving as soon as they got home from school—
that poor boy was at it again
.

“Honey, stop,” she told him, as quietly as possible.

And then, “Please stop.”

And then, the words ripping from her,
“Tell me what I can do for you.”

He howled down the hall of the school, and into the car, and all the way home along Ocean Avenue. He howled in the parking lot, in the lobby, in the elevator, his cries echoing off the metal until Beth felt the sound pulsing behind her eyes.

The moment the apartment door opened he ran away from her. She found him in his bedroom, just a lump under his covers, finally quieting. He pushed his sheet until it slid off him, and there was his face, eyes scrunched tight. He stood up to run again, and that's when she got him by the shoulders, crouched to his level, asked him to explain, please explain.

Now she sits outside his room and waits for him to get hungry and emerge. After finding the right word, after giving her
glimpses
, he shut off. He's offered her no more explanation or affection, or even acknowledgment. She hears him breathing in there. She thinks of all the things she's done wrong: She crashed the car once on the West Side Highway when she was pregnant and has always worried that she broke him inside her. She ignored him when he cried as a colicky baby, let him exhaust himself because she once read something about self-soothing.

“I'm sorry,” she calls into the bedroom.

He says nothing back.

“It's my fault,” she says. “Whatever you're feeling is my fault. I'm sorry.”

Still, he says nothing. She can't see him and she can barely hear him, but he looms. He expands; he fills the hallway. He is all around her. How can she not think about her son, who she made this way?

—

He never stops looming.

On the deck, in the backyard of a house in Rockland County—cedar-shingled, two-car garage, hedges bought full-grown—he looms. My father's business partner lives here, and when the family visits, the countryness of the place is still a novelty to Beth. They sit in a circle and talk about the countryness—trees, yes, look at all of them.

The partner and his wife have sons, too, around the same age, and so all the sons are expected to play with one another among the trees, that most basic social arithmetic. It's the companion equation to that of young Jewish fathers, who grew up with nothing, pointing at lot lines and planning all the things they will one day own. And young mothers cutting watermelon slices, saying nothing about themselves. Beth has already been shown the kitchen again, agreed again that such counter space is impossible to find in the city.

The four boys are running, and Beth sees Dave fall, coltish legs folding over a tree root like a wooden puppet suddenly abandoned by its master. She makes a little involuntary
oh
noise and takes a step toward her son, but before the worry can even peak, he's up, running to catch the others, pretending to fall again to make them laugh.

She calls to him anyway, at his back, “Honey, are you okay?”

He doesn't hear her and the words settle into the lawn. The other mother smiles at her, recognizing the impulse to worry for no reason. All of this, Dave's fall, his rise, the understanding smile of mutual motherhood, is to be expected. Beth knows that. It's relieving, or at least it's supposed to be, the notion that every
role here is preordained. She is meant to over-worry and her son is meant to defy her fears. But Beth likes to worry, and this is where Josh does his looming.

A minute after Dave runs away from her calls, Josh materializes behind Beth's chair. She doesn't have to turn around to see him. She feels him linger. He's already nearly as tall as she is, taller now that she's sitting. He casts a shadow on her torso. Nothing needs to be said. A scene that was normal has been made not. There were four boys, feet clomping, and four parents, stationary, and Josh has made the numbers uneven, crowding in on the adults, already at the fraying edge of what should be a limitless tolerance for play.

My father is mid-sentence. He is always mid-sentence. He's talking about a movie, one that he swears they saw together, but Beth can't remember it. He's making loud and certain statements about this movie. He's saying something about how one cannot really
understand
this movie until one understands its influences. Beth must time her interjections. His words are like fan blades, and she is a little girl trying to stick her finger in the fan, pull it out before she feels a sting.

She says his name once, a whisper. Then once louder. Then almost a yell.

He doesn't turn his head toward her or their son still lurking. Only his eyes move, and they stab at Beth—
Could we please not have any fucking embarrassment? Just for an afternoon. Please?

Beth pulls her eyes like a hitchhiker's thumb.
We need to leave. He needs to leave. He has been trying so hard for you to behave like he's having fun
.

Josh kneels on the deck and begins to wrap the cotton of her skirt around his fingers.

A full and vicious fight happens without any words or movements. Beth wants my father to look at their son. He won't. She is a nag. He is an asshole. Josh is fine. Josh is breaking. Beth looks
down at her boy, now so close that he could rest his chin on her lap if he wanted to. He looks up at her. He is saying
please
, again and again. He is always saying
please
, though it's a word he never speaks out loud. A silent word keeps her awake into the early morning just in case, gives her a sense of purpose stronger than anything she's ever known.

“Fine,” my father says out loud. And then to the hosts, “We're going. Apparently it's time to go.”

That night my father sleeps, sunburned and snoring, and Beth watches him until it becomes clear that he will not open his eyes. Then she walks down the hall to Josh's room, past family photos that show no detail in the dark. She finds Josh awake, sitting up, feet tapping on the floor. He sees her looking through the doorway and stands. She begins to say something that might come out like an apology or at least an excuse for him—
It was so
hot
out there today; I think that wore us all down
—but all she manages is a short, wordless noise as Josh grabs a picture frame off his wall and holds it high above his head. He waits for her to say, “Don't,” and then as soon as she does he throws it down with all his strength.

The smash isn't as loud as she expected. Shards of glass plink across the floor. Josh gives his greatest defender a defiant look. Beth goes to find a dustpan. She returns to kneel beneath him, ignoring the sting on her bare knees. She's done this before. The littlest shards catch in broom bristles, so she uses her cupped hand to scoop. She stretches for each sharp fragment. She won't let him cut his foot and bleed in the mess he made.

—

Years later, there's a drum set sitting on the same patch of floor where she once cleaned broken glass. It's not brand-new anymore, but Josh cares for it, and it's still cellophane-shiny. Josh is on the stool that came with the drum set, and he's smiling a full, real, mesmerizing smile.

“Play more,” Beth is telling him. “Again. Can you do that exact same thing again?”

And he does it. He complies with her request, happy to do so.

The drum set was a birthday present, one of the last things that Beth and my father ever agreed upon and bought together. They gave it to him the morning he turned twelve, and both were too rapt, too hopeful, to give in to impatience when he spent the day beating on the cymbals, eschewing all rhythm in favor of sheer volume.

Then my father splurged on four good seats for
Dreamgirls
on Broadway, and they went as the kind of family Beth always wanted to have—father handsome and suited, sons near stoic, behaving as though they weren't overmatched by high society but rather born of it. Josh stared at the orchestra section, his feet tapping along with their sounds, and Beth smiled to herself as she planned how she might describe him to anyone who asked—
oh, he's our musical one
.

It was a moment so brief and perfect that Beth feels the need to prove and reprove its existence to herself. For two years, she has worked at quantifying his talent. Every day noise fills the apartment and still she asks for more. Play again, play louder. Her friends say she's something between a lunatic and a saint, but it's just the two of them in the apartment so often. My father is gone. Dave is out with friends, being a normal boy who wants nothing to do with his mother. There would be no sound at all if Josh wasn't providing it.

He messes up a little on a transition and says, “Shit, fuck.”

She rushes to him. No it wasn't even a mess-up, she tells him. She couldn't hear anything wrong. Play it again.

“My little Ringo Starr,” she says, sitting down on his bed. “My Ringo, it was perfect.”

Ringo is the only drummer she knows.

“Ringo, what will you play for your mother next?” she says.

“Ma, stop it,” Josh says, but it doesn't sound to Beth like there's much conviction in his voice. This is banter, for God's sake. Real, snappy, teenager-to-mom banter, the boy growing bashful the way he should, the mother pushing through the bashfulness, saying,
No way, mister, I'm not going to let you off the hook of my positive reinforcement
.

“Play it again for me,” she says. “Please.”

“It wasn't even anything, Ma. It was nothing.”

It's never nothing. It's always something, and something new. Last week she paraded him in front of two neighbor ladies who had come over for afternoon coffee and a standard post-divorce checkup, though they never would have said it aloud. “How am I?” she said to them. “Come look at this, and you'll see how I am.” Josh had been given a xylophone and sheet music by the percussion teacher at school, and he was dutifully staring at the squiggles on the page, forcing himself to play until a sound that was sophisticated and melancholy rang from the metal strips. It was a classical German song with an impossible name. He was making beauty out of something Beth couldn't even understand.

Beth clapped long and loud for him then, kept going after the neighbors stopped. She claps that way now as Josh relents and begins to play once more. She stays on the bed, leans in as though she can barely hear him. They are maybe two feet apart. If she wanted to, Beth thinks, she could reach out, cup his shoulder with her hand, and he would not shrug her off because he would be concentrating too hard.

The next morning, the fan is creaking in the kitchen and he hates her. That's how things go. He calls her a bitch while she makes him eggs and won't tell her why. She watches him eat in silence. She hates silence. He leaves the plate for her and stalks back to his room, and it feels like she can't breathe. All morning, she can't breathe. But at some point, finally, she hears music. She
returns to his doorway, and there he is, talented and restrained, the way she loves to see him. He is concentrating all his energy on making something sound right. She walks to his bed and he doesn't tell her no. She asks him to play more.