The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

A small plastic nosegay had been wedged into the flower holder. Its lurid green stems shivered stiffly in the wind. I thought about how Bobbie had looked in the hospital that last week, lying in her bed under a jumble of clear tubing, her hair soft and short and growing back finally, her droll gaze gone flat and perturbed as she stared at the television. At one point her sister-in-law came in and told her she was putting up a great fight. I’m not fighting anything, she snapped. I’m not winning. I’m not losing. I just lie here and it fucks me up. It’s cancer, not a football game. I felt terribly sorry for her then. I didn’t pretend to know how she suffered, but I knew what it meant to feel helpless that way, invisibly taken over by a force that confounded you.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, letting my coat bunch up against my chin. “I just don’t know where to go from here. I can’t stop, Bobbie. I crave him worse than I’ve ever craved anything. I just have to let it run its course until he gets tired of me. And I know he will. I know it, and I can’t stand it. I’d do anything to keep that from happening.”

  I clutched my arms more tightly around my coat and snuffled noisily. Tears overflowed onto my cheeks and immediately chilled. I wiped my gloved hand beneath my nose and felt my neck tense with an unreleased sob. And that was the worst thing: knowing that I was speaking into the void, into the endless empty space before me. Because only Bobbie knew what the word anything meant coming from me, and if she wasn’t here to stop me, who would?

  On Tuesday the students returned to school punchy and disobedient, as though having one day off made them feel entitled to two and they would punish us for not granting it. As the day wound down, the low roar of teenagers being let out of Madrigals practice was audible from the opposite side of the school. I found Scott playing Medieval Judo with his friends in the hallway outside the multipurpose room. Zach was spread-eagled on the tile, apparently recovering from a mortal injury.

  “Ready to leave?” I asked Scott. I looked down at Zach. “Are we taking you home?”

  “Uh-huh.” He raised his knees and then, with acrobatic quickness, leaped to a crouch and then straightened up.

  As I had done before, I dropped off Scott at home with an excuse that I needed to stop at the grocery store across town. Once we pulled away from the house, Zach said, “I don’t think he’s going to buy that one much longer.”

  “He doesn’t care. He isn’t paying attention.”

  The side of Zach’s mouth twisted with doubt. “I wouldn’t be too sure. That’s probably what my mother thought, too.”

  My heart palpitated. “Your mother found something out?”

  “No, I mean, when she was getting with the yoga guy. She probably thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Oh.” A cold light rain had begun to fall. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. “Okay, I’ll try to be more innovative.”

  I turned into the school parking lot, but it was still full of cars from extracurriculars. “I forgot about that,” I said. “Damn.”

  “It’s not a good night for it anyway,” Zach said. “I’ve got a lot of homework tonight, seriously. And I’m out of condoms.”

  “Your teachers know you had Madrigals tonight. They’ll let you slide on the homework. And we can go without the condoms.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Yes, we can. I’ve been on the Pill for weeks now, and neither of us is sleeping with anybody else, so far as I know.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still safer if you use them.”

  “Safer for what? I don’t have any diseases. Do you?”

  In a scornful voice he said, “No. But they say you ought to act like everybody does, anyhow.”

  I gave a deprecating laugh. “Oh, the things they teach you teenagers.”

  Zach sighed and looked out the window. I asked, “Do you want me just to take you home?”

  “You may as well. There’s really no place else to go.”

  “Oh, be creative,” I suggested. “It’s suburbia. Parking lots are a dime a dozen.”

  “We’ll get caught.”

  “Not if we’re careful.” I turned onto the road toward the lake.

  “I won’t last.”

  I shot him a furtive glance. He sat with his knee against the dashboard, chewing the side of his thumbnail. “What?”

  “I won’t last. It’ll be over in ten seconds. There’s nothing in it for you anyway.”

  “Zach.” I laughed. “Is that the real reason? Is that why you’re so uptight about covering up? Because I swear you’re like Linus and his blanket with those things.”

  “No,” he said, the disparagement thick in his voice. He cut a glance toward me. “It’s because I don’t want you to get pregnant, for God’s sake. If that happened my life would be over.”

  “I don’t want that any more than you do,” I told him coolly. “That’s why I went on the Pill.”

  I turned the car into the deserted lot next to the lake and parked toward the back, near the woods. I laid a hand on his thigh and said, “Hey.”

  He turned his face toward me.

  “Why are you so moody?”

  “Because thinking about cops and babies doesn’t turn me on.”

  “Is something else the matter?”

  “No. I’m just tense. I’m tired.”

  I slid my hand beneath his hair and massaged the back of his neck. His skin felt warm, warmer to the touch than my own. For a moment he did not respond; then, not drowsily but deliberately, he closed his eyes. The tension in his neck dissipated beneath my fingers, but his body, even slouched low as it was, looked ready to spring. I rubbed my flat palm in small circles down his back. He curled forward in response, little by little, until his forearms rested against his thighs. His jeans puckered at the back of his slim waist, the bumps of his spine disappearing into the gathered elastic of his boxers.

  “Do you remember,” I asked, “when I took you out for coffee, back before, and you rubbed my feet, and you asked me—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I wanted to see what you would do.”

  I grinned. “After I apologized a dozen times for that episode in the playhouse? That’s not very nice.”

  He shrugged. His hair swung freely at the side of his face.

  “The apology felt a little phony. I was curious what would happen if I pushed it.”

  “Except I called your bluff.”

  “It wasn’t a bluff. If it was, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

  I stroked the small of his back, the skin so smooth it felt sculptural. “You’re right about that.”

  He leaned his forehead against the dashboard and sighed. Then, extracting himself from my hands, he climbed over the center console into the backseat. The car rocked lightly on its shocks.

  Twisting around to face him, I asked, “What are you doing?”

  He loosened his belt and regarded me with an impatient gaze.

  “You changed your mind?” I asked.

  “You didn’t change yours.”

  “I was just buying some time.”

  He beat an edgy rhythm with his palms against the leather. “You want it or not? Because I really do have a ton of homework, and it’s getting late.”

  I cringed. “Don’t say it like that. It sounds awful that way.”

  “Is that a no?”

  I should have affirmed that it was. I knew the full litany of what he did not want to do, and this was where it began. If there had remained any possibility that life could throw a cup of cold water in my face and reverse the course of things, it would have been that moment, that question.

  Instead, I climbed into the back of the car.

  And it was at that moment that I stopped being a woman who had made a series of exceedingly bad judgment calls, and became a child molester.

  PART II:

  ZXP

  18

  When he finally got home, he clomped straight up the stairs and took a shower. As the water he
ated up he stared hard at himself in the mirror, his image growing ever-fuzzier in the steam, and took inventory of his flaws. His skin looked like crap. He needed a haircut. Without judo or yoga his muscles were going soft, and on top of all of that, he was still short.

  He wasn’t likely to grow much more at this point. Clearly he was, for all intents and purposes, a man. He didn’t feel at all like an adult, and normally took pleasure in that fact. He had the rest of his life, after all, to muse darkly over the tedious matters of the world. As long as he had the freedom to dwell on the entertaining and the trivial, he would do just that. And so he hated it when adult concerns crept in.

  He was pissed at himself for ejaculating.

  He had felt sure he wouldn’t. For that matter, he had been determined not to. He felt tired and crappy, and annoyed at her—no, angry—for driving him out to the geographic center of nowhere and leaning on him to have sex with her. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t felt him out—she simply took for granted that he was available for that purpose, as if, because he was sixteen and in her car, he was a captive audience with a permanent erection. It made him feel less like the irresistibly charming Zach Patterson and more like the sum of his parts.

  Of course, he could have flat-out turned her down, but it felt like more trouble than it was worth. She would have come away with a bruised ego that could, in the long run, make his life extremely miserable. It was easier just to give her what she wanted and go home.

  Still, he had thought there was no way he would finish. He wasn’t in the mood, wasn’t happy with her personally, and was terrified—despite her careless assurances—of getting her pregnant. It should have been a supernova of a buzzkill, but in the end, he couldn’t help it. His body, which he loved, had betrayed him.

  He scowled at himself in the mirror and got into the shower, leaning his forehead against the cool tiled wall. The hot water felt good on his back, but he seemed to be growing more tired by the moment, rather than more refreshed. When he got out he toweled off and pulled on a clean pair of boxers, combed his hair, and started down the stairs. He made it halfway, then stopped and sat, cradling his head in his hands.

  “Zach, is that you?”

  His mother came around the corridor and, one hand on her hip and the other on her belly, stopped to look at him in surprise. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t feel so great.”

  She waved him down and he followed obediently, moving with what seemed like an enormous effort. She reached up—for he was taller than her, at least—and laid her palm, deliciously cool, against his forehead.

  “Oh my goodness my,” she said. “How hot was that water?”

  “Normal. I feel chilly, though.”

  He walked past her and lay down on the sofa. She covered him with two afghans and returned from the kitchen with the basketful of lozenges and supplements and homeopathic tablets. And for the second time that day, he resigned himself to the fact that his body was, by an act of nature, about to let him down.

  The next day, when I picked up Scott from Madrigals practice, I noticed Zach was missing from the group. Wednesday morning, I contrived an excuse to visit the Upper School and, peeking into the eleventh-grade class, saw his seat empty. That afternoon I worked up the nerve to call his mother.

  “Does he need a ride to the choir concert Saturday evening?” I asked. Even to my own ears, the innocence in my voice felt forced.

  “Thank you, but he won’t be needing it,” said Vivienne. “We’ll drive him if he goes.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s just got some sort of bug. Fever, cough, sore throat. I suppose he’s all right.”

  I remembered massaging my way down his spine, taking note of the heat of his skin. The radiant warmth of him had felt sensual to me. It had never crossed my mind that it was abnormal, that he might be sick. How could I not have noticed? Had he been my own child, I would have. And he was somebody’s own child. Vivienne’s.

  The groveling shame I had felt when he glared at me in the car returned, but a deeper part of my mind rushed to suppress it. I said, “Well, we’ll miss him at the concert. I hope he feels better soon.”

  “That’s kind of you. I’ll pass the word on to him.”

  It was not until after I hung up the phone that the thought occurred to me: measles. I felt a rush of fear. Had I overlooked an illness that serious? But, no—it was most likely just a cold. Of the fifteen children who had contracted the virus, none were Upper School students. There was little mingling between the two sides of the school, and most of the unvaccinated students were in the Lower School.

  Then I thought of Zach in my kindergarten classroom. Not once. Many times.

  I thought of everything he had told me about his family. Everything I knew about his body. I thought, these people are true believers.

  And then I thought, it can’t be.

  Before school began I slipped into the main office in pursuit of Zach’s student file. My surreptitious search turned it up quickly, the only P in the bunch, marked with a yellow tape flag that indicated it was one of the files missing either a vaccination record or a signed exemption. The only health-related paperwork it contained was the birth history survey filled out by his mother, describing in lyrical prose his home birth in rural New Hampshire. If I wanted to know whether Zach was our latest case of measles, I would have to ask him myself.

  As soon as my last morning student left with his mother I tore out of the parking lot at a speed unbecoming of a kindergarten teacher. Once on Zach’s street I slowed to a crawl, scanning his driveway and the curb in front of his house for cars. Both his mother’s sporty little Volvo convertible and his father’s green pickup truck were gone. I parked one house down to be on the safe side and crunched through the dry leaves that covered his lawn. When I knocked on the door I felt a moment of wild fear that his mother was home after all, but just as I backed away from the door it opened, and there he stood in the living room’s muted light, wearing a gray T-shirt and baggy pajama pants. His jaw and upper lip were stubbly with the beginnings of a beard that matched his hair, and he wore glasses with thin, black-wire frames. The effect was jarring. He looked ten years older.

  “Hey,” he said, opening the screen door. His voice sounded lower and raspier than usual. “What’s up?”

  “Your mother said you were sick. I wanted to, you know, check in.”

  “Kind of dangerous for you to just show up like this, isn’t it?”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “I can’t check in on Scott’s friend?”

  His laugh, accompanied by a curled lip and half-rolled eyes, frightened me. “You’re lucky my mom’s not here,” he said. “She went to see the midwife because she’s worried the baby’s not kicking enough. Kinda ironic, huh? She’s paranoid about the baby, and then you show up.”

  I winced a little, and he sighed. “C’mon, it’s cold out. You’d better come in.”

  I stepped into the foyer. Newspapers lay strewn on the dining room table, and a basket of laundry overflowed on the sofa. A cat meowed at me from atop the pile, but didn’t come over to investigate.

  “Doesn’t look like Luna likes you,” Zach said as he walked toward the kitchen. I took a few tentative steps in the same direction, watching as he picked up a blue-glazed mug and drank from it.

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked politely.

  He nodded, still drinking. “I’ll be back on Monday.”

  I followed the rest of the way into the kitchen. “I was afraid you had the measles.”

  This time he shook his head. “No way. I’ve had my shots.”

  “Have you really? I wasn’t sure. I checked your file,” I said, then immediately regretted the confession. “It was flagged for missing an immunization record,” I added, as if my nosing around had been merely a clerical matter.

  “Really? My mom must not have gotten around to turning it in yet.” He nodded to a blue homeopathic-remedy tube on the counter. “She’s got me
on phosphorous. She tried three others and none of them worked. I’ve also been ordered to drink a truckload of Yogi Tea.”

  “Is the phosphorous helping?”

  “I guess.” He downed the rest of the tea and turned toward the sink. On the counter was a cutting board with a half-sliced lemon on it, and a teddy bear-shaped bottle of honey. As he rinsed the mug, he said, “If you want anything out of me, now’s not a great time. I haven’t taken a shower in two days.”

  I balked at his assumption. “I wasn’t thinking that. You’re sick.”

  He shrugged, his back to me. His shoulders, thinly covered by the ancient T-shirt, looked slight. “I was sick on Friday, too. Didn’t seem to bother you.”

  “I had no idea you were sick. You never said a word.”

  He set the mug on the drainer and turned to face me.

  “I had a fever of a hundred and one. You were in my lap.”

  “Zach,” I hissed, horrified to hear him say it aloud. “I’m sorry. But I just came to check on you because I was concerned. Don’t make it sound like I only care about one thing. That’s simply not true.”

  He leaned back against the counter, and suddenly the vague swagger of his posture, the way the window framed his strong, lean body, conspired to make me feel as if I were ten years old. “Name a second thing,” he suggested.

  I replied with a nervous laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. Name a second thing.”

  He looked at me, his hands braced against the counter behind him, and waited on my answer. I hesitated, and not because I didn’t have a second thing to name. Since the week end of the marathon playhouse construction, I had turned the puzzle of my attraction to him over and over in my hand, held it to the light, examined its every facet. He was good-looking, but Scott had plenty of friends who were more conventionally attractive than Zach, and none had ever tunneled into my mind the way Zach had. As a lover he had proved himself more competent than I would have expected from one so young, but that alone would never lead me to take the risks I took for him. No, the reason was something else entirely—that his very being tugged at my mind as though anchored somewhere in its darkest depths, and that the act of seducing him, regardless of whether he reciprocated the plea sure, calmed a place inside me that had never been calm. But I could put none of that into words. I only knew the power of the way my mind stirred at the thought of him, recoiled at the notion of losing him, and loved him with the hollow, groveling love a hostage has for her captor.