Cutting Teeth: A Novel (40 page)

“Fuck,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked, guiding his hand with her own up toward the overhead light—a single exposed bulb.

A tiny fishhook gleamed in his finger.

“Uh,” he said, starting to feel faint, as if his body were turning inside out. He’d always had a fear of blood, which Grace had teased him about before Hank was born, telling him he was going to faint in the delivery room. He hadn’t.

“Don’t worry,” Tiffany said calmly, “I’m an expert. ’Member? My granny was a fisherman’s wife.”

“No, please. Wait.”

“Take a deep breath,” Tiffany said, and, fluidly, pinched the fishhook, twisted it gently, and removed it from his flesh. He closed his eyes, and yellow spots danced across his lids.

When he opened his eyes, she had his finger up at her lips and the warmth of his blood was mingling with the warmth of her mouth, and she was sucking, his finger moving in and out of her blood-tinted lips, her tongue darting at the tip like a fish nipping at bait. She moaned, or at least he thought she did. “Oh God,” he whispered, then her hand was in his pants, and he was lifting her so she sat on a shelf, a rough wooden plank. Her dress tore as a Disney princess music box fell to the floor, leaking slow, tinny sounds.

Together, they tugged at the straps of her dress, fingers fumbling over fingers, and he pulled her breasts free—they were
his,
the breasts of his dreams and his fantasies, so many long showers spent thinking of these breasts as he jerked off until the steam made the paint buckle on the bathroom walls, and the real things surprised him, their softness, their scent, their salty taste as his tongue reached for her nipples, so pale he couldn’t tell where the nipple ended and the breast began, then she was saying something, directing—
from behind
—and he flipped her over, and pulled her dress up and kicked her feet apart—
yes!
she cried—and he slid his hand between her legs and then slid his wet fingers over his dick and he was inside her with one thrust, his belt buckle hitting the cement floor with a clang, and she was saying—
do it do it do it fuck me
—and he had a hand on her back, and the blood from his finger was spreading into the green silk like it was tissue paper, and he tasted something sweet on his tongue like sugar water, and it wasn’t until he came with a spasm that knocked a piggy bank off the shelf, the painted clay shattering at his feet, that he realized he had breast milk on his lips.

once upon a time

Susanna

“Once upon a time,”
Levi repeated after her, his voice slow and dull with exhaustion.

The baby twisted inside her when it heard its big brother speak. Levi’s head was in what little lap Susanna had left. She knew she smelled like vomit and anxious sweat and pee—she had lost control of her bladder when she’d looked out the window facing the water and seen the blue lights of the police boats sweeping the shore.

Levi didn’t seem to mind the smell. He’d buried his head in her lap and asked for a
once upon a time
story.

“Shhh,” Susanna hushed, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “Shhh,” praying that her stampeding pulse would relent. The baby, she thought. Don’t hurt the baby.

Too much worrying not good for mommies,
Tenzin had told Susanna, her palms pressed together, her eyes brimming with concern, before taking Harper, Hank, and Wyatt back to their beds.
And worrying not good for mommies’ babies either.

“Once upon a time,” Susanna whispered, “there were two mommies.”

“A mama and a mommy,” Levi mumbled.

“Quiet, Lee. Please. You listen to the once upon a time story and make the pictures in your head.” She coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and the baby kicked in protest. “Yes, a mommy
and
a mama. And two little boys. In a big white house in the country. With green shutters. And apple trees and berry bushes. Even a tree house.”

“With a pirate-scope!”

“A telescope. Yes, sweetie. And a puppy. Maybe some chickens. Fresh eggs for omelets. Mama will make a garden for us, ’cause we need some spinach and chives to cook up in that omelet.”

She stroked the back of Levi’s neck where the skin seemed impossibly soft. Don’t think of Dash’s beauty mark, she told herself. That smooth patch of skin she’d kissed a hundred times since he’d been cut out of her.
Don’t you think it, Susanna, don’t you do that!

“And a baby,” Levi said.

She bit her lip to stop the sob from climbing out. Bit down until she felt her lip split.

“And a baby,” she said. “You and Dash will be such good big brothers to your baby. You’ll teach him to talk, and play cars, and build Legos…”

He interrupted her, “Nah, Mama. It a girl baby. Me and Dash, we want a girl baby.”

Outside, a wave smacked into the deck and Susanna felt the floor tremble under her swollen feet.

“That’s so sweet, baby,” she said and leaned over her stomach to kiss his forehead. He tasted salty and it made her think of the sea, of Dash in the sea, his little body slammed into the sandy bottom, explosions of pebbles and a storm of bubbles, and she thought she was going to vomit and sat up too quickly, Levi’s head bouncing off her lap and into her belly. The baby jerked one-two-three times. A temper tantrum, Susanna thought, and almost laughed. She’d tell Allie and Dash that when they returned. They’d like that.

“Mommy wants a baby girl too. It’s funny.” Levi giggled. “She says she wants to dress it up. Like a dolly.”

“She did? Mommy really said that?” The baby rolled and jabbed Susanna so low, she imagined a tiny hand reaching out her cervix.

“Pink stuff,” Levi said, then yawned big. “Pretty pink stuff. Girl stuff.”

“Shhh,” Susanna hushed again, this time for the baby. She rubbed her belly, and after one last ripple of movement, the baby—
she,
Susanna thought—quieted.

“Once upon a time,” she began again, “there was a mommy and a mama, and two boys, and a baby girl, and they lived in a big white house in the country. With green shutters. And apple trees. And berry bushes. And a tree house.…”

castles in the air

Tiffany

Tiffany could feel
him dripping out of her. Leaving her.

There was the whisper of cloth tearing. “Shit. I tore my dress. I love this fucking dress.”

Rip was hunched over, breathing heavily, holding on to the shed wall.

“We have to get out of here,” he said. “Where the hell is everybody?”

“Still looking, I guess,” she said, ruffling his thick hair. “Don’t worry. They’ll find him soon. The cops are down there. There’s nothing we can do.”

“What?” He stood. “Find who? Hank? Is it Hank?” He gripped Tiffany’s shoulders, too hard. “Tiffany, tell me what’s going on.”

“Hank is fine, silly,” she said. “It’s Dash who’s gone missing. Just disappeared out of his bed while we were all downstairs. Poof! They’re all down there. On the beach. With the cops. Looking.”

Rip pushed past her, threw open the door, and was gone. Part of him was still dripping down her legs. All his future babies, she thought, dying as soon as they left her warm cove and hit the cold night air.

She stepped on something sharp on the driveway and when she lifted her foot, she stumbled and her hand reached for but then slid off the hood of a car, slick with dew. She lay on her back, the pebbles biting through the thin silk, and lifted her foot. A piece of broken pot. She yanked it free. Where were her shoes? Oh who cared? She was a sprite.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Sprites didn’t wear shoes.

Tiffany stood and tra-la-la-ed up to the deck, trying to regain the feeling she’d had earlier, of being a fairy fantasy in her green silk dress. As she turned the corner, the sea wind hit her, pressing the dress tight against her body and making her nipples harden. She found a cushion speckled with black mold and carried it to the chaise lounge, where she lay, her legs open to the silver blanket of sea stretching all the way to the blinking lights of Connecticut. Just like Gatsby’s light.

Oh, how hot she’d been for Jay Gatsby. Exactly her kind of guy. He came from nothing and made himself into everything, with his rainbow of silk shirts and his library of wall-to-wall books. She’d thought of him many nights her freshman year of high school as she lay on the bathroom floor (the only room in her father’s double-wide with a lock), her cheek pressed into the pilled bathroom rug that stank of mildew, her breath held so her father and stepmother wouldn’t hear as her knees knocked against the cold tile and her hips thrust into the hand she pressed tight over her white cotton panties and the circling wave of heat stirred inside her until it overflowed.

She had tried to tell her mother about the book, during one of their two-hour-long custodial visits, she and her mother in the one-bedroom rental near the school where her mother worked as a lunch aide. What a stupid child she’d been, she thought now, remembering how she’d started to read her mother a passage from the book, how she’d prefaced it by explaining the book was meaningful to her, the kind of sharing that pervy Mr. Jones, the state-mandated social worker, urged her to do in the visits with her mother.

“Girl,” her mother had interrupted, “I don’t got time for meaning. I got three jobs to work.”

Tiffany’s foot was pulsing now and she imagined the blood seeping out, trickling down the leg of the lounge, then across the deck floor to the drainage holes, stuffed with sand and pebbles and dried seaweed, mingling with the sea.

Look at me now, Mama. I was one of them. And now I’ve gone and fucked it all up. It’s exhausting, Mama. The never-ending thinking and wondering. Worrying. Did so-and-so
really
have fun at the playdate? If yes, then why hadn’t they texted to set up another date? Would there be birthday-party invites and a spot at the hoity-toity
mommy and me,
a step closer to the even hoitier-toitier preschool? Will I be good enough for them, Mama? Will they let me in, Mama? Will they love me?

She looked away from the star-pocked sky, let her knees fall together, and leaned over to vomit onto the deck floor.

taking the plunge

Nicole

As soon as the rangers
had disappeared into the woods—like a legion of warring soldiers with their chained beasts—Nicole slipped out of Josh’s arms and walked to the edge of the path. “Wait!” he had called to her, but she looked back at him and smiled, saying, “Don’t worry. I know these woods,” before stepping into the labyrinth of branches.

He had let her go, she thought now as she ran, leaping over tree roots. He had believed in her, and this filled her with an adrenaline-like rush, and she ran faster, her hands held out in front of her to bat away twigs and tear through spiderwebs.

Nothing bad is happening, nothing bad is happening,
she chanted between panting, so that her voice bounced off the hulking trees, their branches black against the moon-bright sky. She tried not to think of the fairy tales she’d told Wyatt, the ones he begged for because they were the scariest. His favorites, once her own, were about little children lost in the woods, far from Mommy and Daddy, alone in a test of life or death. Would they choose the house made of candy, where a witch’s bone-melting hot oven awaited? Would they befriend the blood-thirsty wolf on their way to Grandma’s house? Or would they remember what their mothers had taught them, that there was so much to fear in the woods, that you must always be on guard, watching, waiting for danger.

These were her woods, after all. The woods of her childhood. Her summer playland. She and her brother had spent each dew-filled morning to cooling, firefly-flecked dusk in the state park’s thousand acres. They were explorers searching for treasure, using her father’s rusted machete to hack through the jungle, really a tangle of vines and shrubs, of bramble and bittersweet. They took turns being Indiana Jones (the other his sidekick) in pursuit of the Holy Grail, villains hot on their heels. When the sun was high, they sat in the shade of a flowering dogwood on rocks carpeted with soft green lichens. They ate pimento-and-bologna sandwiches with dirt-streaked fingers and chugged from a thermos of powdered lemonade.

They cooled off with a quick dip in the Sound, then back to the park, to lie on their stomachs at the lip of the pond and name the spring peepers and bullfrogs; the Eastern painted turtles and blue-gilled sunfish, and to claw through the mud in search of baby dragonflies, sea worms, and leeches. They turned on their backs and watched the Rough-winged swallows feed midair on dragonflies and damselflies.

At the end of every summer day, when she exited the woods, her sneakers slung over a shoulder, her bare feet sinking into soft, night-cooled sand—her body bug-bitten, thorn-torn, dirt- and sweat-streaked, and sore, Nicole had felt relief, but with relief, a loss. She had trudged up the dunes toward the warm glow of her parents’ house, the scent of roasting chicken and onions in the wind, comforted by the thought that the woods would always be there. Tomorrow and the next day.

She had felt safe in those woods, she thought now as she ran along the trail. She laughed aloud, so it echoed off the canopy and sounded like the distant giggling of a child. A Great Horned called from above and she responded, just as she and her brother had many times in the gloaming of her childhood, “hoo-hoo, hooooo, hoo-hoo!” She raised her arms so that her fingers grazed the leaves as she ran. Sassafras, red maple, pepperbush, blackgum.

Nothing bad is happening,
she was whispering under her ragged breath when she found Dash curled at the foot of an old elm tree. His arms were wrapped around his knees, his teeth chattering, his face moon-white. When she shined the spotlight on him, he shielded his eyes with a hand and let a keening wail loose, his head thrown back. As if he were begging the trees, the stars—her mother’s angels—for aid.

“Don’t worry,” Nicole lied, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

*   *   *