And at these times I hated him. It sounds awful to say, but it was true. He was like something alien to me—a blind, embryonic troll from another dimension, with balled up fists and a slime-covered face, unable to fully perceive our universe. He frightened me. I didn’t know what he was and didn’t think I ever would.
I shouted at him a few more times, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, but needing to shout at him all the same. It was just me and him in the car and he wouldn’t hear me, so it felt like the rules were suspended, like I could blow off some steam and there wouldn’t be any consequences.
But by the time we got home, I had calmed down and Jacob’s crying had decayed into a soft whimpering. After parking the car, I opened his door and stood there for a few moments, looking at him and seeing not the hated monster, but my son again, strapped securely into his booster seat.
“Are you all right, Jacob?” I asked him gently.
His red eyes turned to look at me, tears glistening on his face under the dome light inside the car. “Where’s Mommy?” he asked.
“She’s inside,” I said, swallowing back some of my frustration for the sake of peace. Mommy, always Mommy. When he began looking around with disorientation I added, “We’re home now. Mommy’s inside the house.”
He began to struggle then, desperate to get free of the seat belt restraining him, but his little fingers weren’t schooled enough to unsnap the buckle. I helped him out and he ran to the back door, clawing on its locked surface and crying out for his mommy to come. By the time I got there with the key Jenny was already opening the door from the inside.
“Alan?” was all she could say before Jacob burst into a fresh set of tears and ran for his mother’s protective embrace. The two of them practically collapsed on the floor of the back hallway together, Jacob clinging tightly and Jenny trying to comfort him while protecting her belly, where his sister slept in her prenatal fog.
Jenny’s questions were rushed and panicked. “Oh my god, what happened? Are you hurt? Did you get hurt?” But Jacob had no more answers for her than he had had for me, just a long and plaintive howl like the cry of injustice itself. She looked up at me, eyes afire.
I opened my mouth but I had no answer for her, either. It was as if all my words had been tossed out of my brain and into a jumbled pile on the floor. I could have started picking them up, but they wouldn’t have been in the right order, and I knew I’d have to sort through them while my son cried and my wife continued to glare at me in order to put them back where they belonged. It felt easier to just stand there and look at the mess.
“Alan! What happened?”
I shook my head. “They tried to play soccer,” I said, as if that explained anything.
Jenny dismissed me angrily and then tried to get to her feet. Pregnant, and with Jacob clutching her tightly, she had some difficulty, but when I attempted to help she shooed me away and relied instead on the knob on the pantry door. Planting Jacob on her hip, his nose nuzzled in behind her ear and beginning to settle back down into whimpers, she turned and retreated into the house.
I stayed in the back hallway and listened as her feet went up the stairs and moved into Jacob’s room. I remember thinking about leaving then, about getting back in my car and driving away, never to return. The size of the task before me seemed that big, and the confidence I felt in my ability to complete it seemed that small. It shamed me, but the idea of giving up and starting over somewhere else had a certain dark appeal to it. It seemed like it would have been better than standing in the back hall like a misbehaving child, waiting for his mother to come down a dole out her righteous punishment. But like that child—afraid of what might happen when mother returned, but more afraid of what life would mean without mother in it—I simply closed and locked the door and quietly made my way to the bottom of the stairs.
I could still hear them above me—my wife and child—Jacob now not whimpering at all, and the two of them in some kind of hushed conversation. As I turned my head to try and better pick up what they were saying, I saw Jenny’s knitting set out on the coffee table in the living room, the remote control and a cup of tea on the table beside one arm of our sofa, and the television frozen on some frame of one of her favorite cooking shows. The knitting, I knew, was a toddler-size sweater with a dinosaur pattern on the front—something she was trying to finish and present to Jacob as a special gift before Crazy Horse was born.
I couldn’t hear any talking now, and when I looked back Jenny was standing at the top of the stairs. We stared at each other for a few moments, and then she slowly made her way down the steps, easing into each movement as if her back hurt.
“Alan, what happened?” she asked when she reached the bottom. Her voice was softer and much less threatening.
“What did he tell you?” I countered, jealous that Jacob had undoubtedly told his mother what he was feeling.
“He said Tyler kicked him. Is that what happened?”
“Yeah. He’s not really hurt, is he?”
“I don’t think so. He said he got kicked in the chest, but I didn’t see any marks or bruises.”
I shook my head and looked away. I could feel the tears in my eyes but I blinked a few times and drew them back in.
“Alan, what really happened tonight?”
It was a loaded question—loaded in my mind at least. What Jenny wanted to hear was the recitation of events, and I could have said them, could have gone through the long litany like the play-by-play announcers Tyler’s dad surely listened to. But that’s not what I wanted to say at all. I wanted to say something entirely different.
What happened tonight? I failed, Jenny, that’s what happened tonight. I failed as Jacob’s father and as your husband, just like I’m failing at work and with the job search. I’m an impostor. I can feel the wall crumbling around me and I can’t do anything about it.
“Honey,” she said, obviously seeing the hurt in my eyes. “What is it?”
I sighed. “They tried to play soccer tonight,” I said again, not knowing if I would be able to say what I wanted to say, but knowing at least that I had to start somewhere else.
“Uh huh.”
“Well, they’ve never done that before and Jacob wasn’t ready for it. Every other night they’ve just had us practice our skills together and that was fine because I could encourage him and keep him engaged. He doesn’t know how bad he is, but I do. I look around and see how well the other boys are doing. They’ve got real skills. They’re not like Jacob. They’ve been playing with soccer balls and footballs and hockey sticks, probably since they came home from the fucking hospital. You know how most men are. Come on, sport, when you finish with all that breast feeding, how about tossing the old pigskin around with dear old dad?”
Jenny wrinkled her brow. I felt raw inside and I wanted to lash out, but I was getting carried away and I was losing her.
“Never mind,” I said, composing myself. “The point is tonight they put all the kids into their own soccer game. No dads to serve as buffers, just fifteen kids all going after the ball at the same time. Jacob couldn’t handle it. Everyone was better than him and he couldn’t get the ball and he had a meltdown. He pushed a kid and tried to steal the ball, and when he went to grab it he got kicked.”
“By Tyler?”
“Yes, by Tyler,” I said, dismissing from my mind the fact that I had just reconstructed that chain of events from past behaviors I’d seen Jacob exhibit. My eyes, after all, had been diverted while all that was supposedly happening on the gymnasium floor.
“But it wasn’t on purpose," I continued. "Tyler was going for the ball and Jacob got in the way. Tyler was just doing what boys do—what boys are supposed to do. He kicked at the ball and got Jacob instead.”
“Then what happened?”
“What do you think happened?” I snapped, angry more at myself, and knowing I would hide behind the anger instead of confessing my fears. “I carried him out of there and brought him home. He was screaming like a banshee, Jenny. You know what he’s like when he gets hurt. The slightest scratch will send him into hysterics. Remember last fall when he cut his finger? You thought he was going to pass out from all the screaming and made us all go to the hospital.”
Jenny looked at me crookedly, clearly not liking the reminder of how she had overreacted.
“Look,” I said, “he got kicked in the chest tonight. Like the cut on his finger he wasn’t seriously hurt, but Tyler thumped him a good one, and he reacted the same way. What else was I supposed to do?”
“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe he would’ve calmed down after a while and could’ve gone back into the game?”
Does he need a breather? The memory of Marcie’s words suddenly stung me, as if even she knew more about parenting little boys than I did.
“Alan, what is it?” Jenny said with fresh concern. “What’s the matter? It’s here, isn’t it? Right here between us, whenever you talk about Jacob. I can see it but I don’t know what it is? Will you tell me?”
I opened my mouth but no sound came out. The words were there but I held them back.
And suddenly she was hugging me, her pregnant belly pushing into me, her arms squeezing my back, and her soft voice telling me it was all right, all right. It was tender and intimate, and it scared me more than anything else that had happened that day because I hadn’t known she was going to do it. I hadn’t seen it coming. I had thought she was still mad at me.
In a moment I felt Crazy Horse kicking away in her womb. They seemed like violent kicks to me, and they caused Jenny to break the embrace, putting one hand on her stomach and one hand on the banister to steady herself.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t think this daughter of ours is going to have any trouble playing soccer.”
And then she smiled at me and, for a moment, everything really was all right.
“I overreacted, didn’t I?” I asked. “Like you did with the hospital. I should’ve given him a chance to calm down.”
That seemed obvious now, but at the time it had been the farthest thing from my mind.
Jenny reached out and grasped my hand. “Why don’t you go up and talk to your son?” she said. “He’s calmed down now. Maybe you guys can play a game or something?”
“You want to get back to your cooking show?” I teased.
“It is supposed to be my night off.”
I nodded, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and began making my way up the stairs. Jacob’s bedroom door was closed but not shut tight. With two fingers I gently swung it open and found him sitting on his bed, one of his giant picture books spread open on the mattress before him.
“Hi, buddy,” I said meekly from the door.
No answer. Just his little head turned down, ears sticking out, and eyes scanning the pages.
I wasn’t sure what I should do. The part of me that Jenny had helped build back up wanted to go in and give him a hug, but the part of me that even Jenny couldn’t reach wanted to close the door and pretend he didn’t exist. I slowly moved into the room and sat down on the bed next to him.
“Hi, Jacob.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
I put a gentle hand on his back. I could feel the knobby buttons of his spine through his shirt. “What are you looking at?”
“It’s a mystery search book,” he said, his attention still clearly on the page. “I’m looking for ten sharks.”
I looked at the book. It was a big one, twice the size of a news magazine, and the two-page spread Jacob had open was filled with a colorful under-the-seascape, hundreds of little cartoon fish swimming around and past each other. Just glancing at it made them all blur together and my eyes swim.
“How can you tell which ones are the sharks?” I asked.
Jacob pointed to a column of ordered fish on the far left-hand side of the spread. There at the top was a little gray shark, with a sharp top fin, powerful tail, and an angry mouth. Below him was a yellow number ten. Scanning down the column I saw other kinds of sea creatures with other numbers beneath them—six dolphins, five stingrays, seven seahorses.
“You’re supposed to find all of these fish?” I asked, running my finger down the column.
“Yes,” he said with a kind of sigh. “But I’m starting with the sharks.”
“How many have you found so far?”
“Three.”
He was so focused on the task that his answers to my questions came as if from the back of a dark cave where he was carefully rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. Drawn in by his concentration I began to search through the seascape myself, my eyes focusing on and rejecting each fish one by one. It didn’t escape my notice that this kind of interaction was far easier with Jacob than anything I may have thought to demand of him.
“There’s one!” I said with a pointing finger, stumbling across a shark the way you might find a buffalo head nickel in a jar of loose change.
“That’s four,” Jacob said, and then dutifully showed me the three he had already found. They were all slightly different, but unmistakably sharks, lost in an ocean of other creatures.
We kept at it until all ten sharks were found. When we had six, I climbed more fully onto his bed, my back resting against the headboard, and pulled Jacob over to sit next to me. He nestled in comfortably under my arm, the book spread open on his lap. He found some and I found others, and Jacob seemed just as pleased either way. When there was only one left to find I spotted it but didn’t point it out right away.
“I see number ten.” I said.
“Where?”
“Can you find it yourself?”
He looked up at me, no sign of the tears he had previously shed. He clearly wanted to do this, to find the remaining shark on his own, but he also clearly wanted me to tell him, seduced by the idea that such a thing could be known. “Give me a hint.”
“A hint?” I said, deciding to test him a little, to see if he could handle this small challenge. “I didn’t get any hints.”
“Please, Daddy?”
“Well, all right,” I said as if making a great concession. “Let me see here. The tenth shark is between a jellyfish and a swordfish.”
Jacob rapidly turned his attention back to the book. I looked down on the golden fuzz on the back of his neck while his eyes scanned the page anew. Coming up the stairs I had dreaded the idea of talking to him about what had happened at Sports Class. It had felt like one of the mandatory duties of fatherhood—you know, talking to your son about the role sports can play in teaching a young man about teamwork, healthy competition, and self-improvement—but my heart wasn’t in that kind of thing. And I abandoned the idea altogether the moment I saw the peaceful concentration Jacob showed over his mystery search book. He rarely showed the ability to focus on any one thing for so long, especially on things that were difficult. He usually gave up too easily, occasionally breaking a toy or throwing a fit if he didn’t immediately succeed. This studied fascination with the mystery under the sea was something new, and I decided it would be better to reward this as positive behavior than to call attention to another one of his failures.
“There it is!” Jacob cried triumphantly, his index finger stabbing at the tenth shark like a spear. “Right between a jellyfish and a swordfish. Just like you said, Daddy. Just like you said!”
“Good job, buddy. That was a really good job.”
Jacob looked up at me and smiled, his eyes glowing and his white baby teeth glistening. My arm was already around him, but I pulled him closer to me and kissed the top of his head.
“Now,” Jacob said, turning back to the book, happy, but all business. “Let’s find those six doll-fins.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, knowing then and there that the two of us were done with Sports Class forever. If Jenny wanted us to go somewhere for our bonding time, I could now think of dozens of other more productive things we might go 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.
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