Jenny was nothing more than a shape under a pile of blankets. She always turned the thermostat way down at night, more to create her ideal sleeping conditions than to save any money. In the winter the heat was off and in the summer the air conditioning was turned on full blast -- whatever it took to get the bedroom down to sixty degrees. Even before her pregnancy she claimed it was the only way she could sleep comfortably. With a new life growing in her womb, her sensitivity to heat was even more pronounced. If there was a way for her to sleep inside the refrigerator, she probably would have given it a try.
I slowly drew back the covers on my empty side of the bed. Jenny was lying on her side, facing away from me, and as the blankets came back I revealed her shoulders and her wide back, her whole body seemingly girded with extra thickness in order to better support our small daughter growing inside. I couldn’t see her belly, but I knew it was enormous, the outlined bulk of it clearly present in the shadowy darkness of our bedroom.
I gingerly climbed under the covers and drew them up to my chin, my natural sleeping position putting my back towards Jenny’s. In the creaking and bouncing of the mattress I was sure I was going to wake her, but after I settled into position a dark and total stillness descended on the room. Jenny had demanded black-out shades in all three of the bedrooms -- ours, Jacob’s, and the one that would soon be Crazy Horse’s. Like freezing temperatures, it seemed, complete darkness was a requirement of Jenny’s sleep cycle. But now, since I had left the bedroom door open behind me, I could see some moonlight spilling into the hall from the bathroom window, and it gave just enough illumination for me to see the shapes in the bedroom carpet and the piles of folded laundry on my dresser.
I was exhausted, but I tried to keep my eyes open as long as I could. It was a kind of sleepy game I played in quiet moments like this. It helped to calm my wayward thoughts while I simply observed my vision slowly fuzzing and unfocusing in the darkness that engulfed it. There was a lot on my mind, but most of it easily drifted away.
The next moment, it seemed, it was 6:52 AM, the glowing green numbers on my bedside clock flipping to 6:53 just as I became aware of them. I did not remember closing my eyes nor falling asleep, but the evidence seemed clear that both had happened. It was Jacob’s shout that had woken me, and now I heard it again. Not a cry, not a wail, but a shout. An angry one.
“No, Mommy! No!”
He was downstairs. In the dining room, from the direction of his voice. As was Jenny, whose terse command followed at a lower volume but deeper intensity.
“You will eat these peaches, young man.”
“I won’t! You can’t make me!”
The next sound was not hard to identify. Jacob’s bowl of peaches -- probably the one with the picture of his favorite train engine on the bottom -- fell onto the hardwood floor of our small dining room.
“Jacob!”
I closed my eyes and put a pillow over my head. Working for so many hours on the road had actually earned me a comp day from the company, and this was how it was starting. It was not what I had imagined. All year long, I was typically the first one up in the house, my office hours compelling me to rise and, in the winter months, depart before the sun even rose. So I had decided that on this rare comp day I was going to sleep as late as I could and stay in bed as long as I wanted. A bit of self-indulgent luxury, sure, but some part of me thought I had actually earned it. After working that meeting and dealing with all its attendant bullshit, I thought I was entitled.
“Jacob! You clean that up right now!”
“No!”
“You do what I tell you, young man!”
“No!”
Evidently, I was not. And I was suddenly very angry. The pillow I had tried to clamp over my ears had done nothing to block out the disturbance. Jesus fucking christ, I boiled, can’t I get even one extra hour of sleep in this goddamn house? I decided then and there that I was not getting out of bed, no matter what happened downstairs. Fuck them. Fuck Jenny and Jacob both. Let them kill each other for all I cared. I was not getting out of this bed.
But when Jacob started screaming -- a full throated banshee cry that would curdle milk -- I found myself bounding out of bed, leaping physically out of the cocoon of blankets I had wrapped myself in, my mind fatefully still encased in its furious red carapace.
I tore open the bedroom door and flew down the stairs. Rounding the corner, my bare feet slapped to a hard stop in the dining room, where I found my wife and my four-year-old son locked in some dire combat. Jenny had one of Jacob’s forearms in her tight grip while she desperately tried to unbuckle the straps that held him in his booster chair. Jacob’s face was red and wet, his body contorted into a disjointed position, his toddler spoon held like a weapon in the chubby fist Jenny was holding away from her eyes.
“What the living fuck is going on down here?!”
“Alan!” Jenny cried. “Help me! Help me, goddammit! He’s out of control!”
Jacob wasn’t the only one. All three of us were caught up in the swift moving river of our own frustrations and there was nothing any of us could do in the moment but ride the current. I ran forward and blindly grabbed Jacob under the shoulders, attempting to yank him up and out of there, but Jenny had not yet undone the buckle, and both his booster seat and the dining room chair came with him and his wildly kicking feet. I didn’t care. I was strong. I kept pulling, but before I could drag him away one of his tennis shoes connected with Jenny’s face, and she flinched and fell away with a yelp of pain.
“Jenny!”
“Get him out of here!” she wailed, cowering in the corner like a beaten animal. “Get him out of here!”
I did. I shook Jacob free of the entangling straps of his booster chair, the plastic seat and wooden dining room chair falling to the floor with cracking thud, wrapped him in a great bear hug, and ran upstairs with him. He twisted and squirmed against me as if my arms were white hot branding irons on his slender body, but I held him fast. In our struggle I tripped and fell once on the stairs, both of us getting rug burns that we would each discover later, but I did not release him until we were inside his room. There, I literally threw him onto his bed. And then, as if I had just released a rabid tiger, I ran from the room and slammed the door shut behind me.
Inside, Jacob howled, angry, frightened, and probably hurt. He was unreachable. When in the throes of a tantrum, Jacob was imprisoned at the bottom of a miserable well, blindly clawing at the walls around him. Eventually, I knew, he would wear himself out, and only then would he be able to look up and see the small circle of sunlight above him.
I took a moment to catch my breath, getting my own anger under control, and then went downstairs to check on Jenny. I found her sitting on the floor of the dining room, her legs splayed out under her pregnant belly, her back against the wall between the window and the sideboard, a look of resigned failure on her bruised face. Jacob’s shoe had caught her just below her right eye, the yellow stain growing there already darker than any normal amount of foundation could cover.
I will still in the boxers and undershirt I had slept in. I could even feel the pressure of a full morning bladder. But I went over and crouched down in front of her. Her head was shaking, and her eyes did not look up to meet mine.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” she said, defeated. “No. I am not all right.”
I sat down next to her, leaning my back against the same dining room wall, and put my arm around her. Upstairs, Jacob was still screaming.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, taking a closer look at the bruise on her face.
Now she did look at me, her eyes brimming over with tears. “Why is he like that?” she croaked. “What have I done wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, deciding to only answer her second question. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Do other four-year-olds kick their mothers in the face?”
“Jenny,” I said. “You know that was an accident. He was having a tantrum.”
“He’s still having a tantrum. Listen to him.”
We paused for a moment to do exactly that. Through the floorboards, it sounded like a troop of wild raccoons were being tortured upstairs.
Jenny shook her head, the tears now spilling down her face. “That’s not normal, Alan. There’s something wrong with him. He needs help. And I can’t… I can’t…”
She couldn’t continue, burying her face in my shoulder and crying openly.
I held her. I didn’t know what else to do.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
No comments:
Post a Comment