Domestic Affairs (27 page)

But today was one of those mornings when Charlie cried for me to drive and it seemed important to say yes. We couldn’t find one of Willy’s boots, and then halfway down the driveway Charlie realized he didn’t have his bear. The car was very low on gas, and I’d left my wallet at home. Five miles down the road, I remembered that Audrey had forgotten to take her avocado seed for science. Willy pulled Charlie’s hair. Charlie bonked Willy on the head. Willy dropped his bottle. I had to pull over to the side of the road to retrieve it. By the time we got to the Corner Store, our first stop, to wait for the two children we’d pick up there, I was irritable and jumpy. The car bringing the other kids was late, and because it was five degrees above zero, I kept my motor running.

Fifteen minutes later, the other car drove up, bearing our first two passengers. I put on the parking brake and hopped out to help the children into my van, whose side door is a little tricky. But I must not have pushed the brake down far enough, because suddenly I saw my van, with my two sons still buckled inside, begin to roll away, headed straight for the highway.

No way to catch it, hop in, and push the brake in time. Nothing to do but scream, and of course I did. And then I realized that the car wasn’t going to roll out into the highway after all. It was going to slam into another vehicle that was parked in its path. A second later, that’s what happened.

I suppose the whole thing probably happened in the space of ten seconds, but that time seemed endless as I stood watching. I saw my two sons’ heads, in their winter beanies, bobbing in the driverless van. Saw the other car, a blue Ford, and the left front end where mine was about to hit. The other two children I’d been about to pick up, and the mother of one of them. All of them standing there helpless, like me.

An instant later my car hit the Ford and came to a stop, and I was able, then, to fling open the door and put my arms around my children. Who were fine—laughing, even.

The damage to our van was negligible: a ripped bumper, a couple of scratches. The other car had fared a little worse, and so, still shaking, I had to walk into the Corner Store to announce the license number of the now-dented Ford and wait for the owner to come forward. He turned out to be the husband of Audrey’s piano teacher, just finishing his scrambled eggs and home fries. A policeman was sitting next to him at the counter, and on his other side the owner of our local body shop. The three of them escorted me back to the two vehicles to assess the damage and write up a report.

We exchanged names of our insurance companies. I apologized again. Then I piled my two passengers in and headed (very late now) to Route 31 to pick up my final passenger and ferry the group the rest of the way to school.

In the car, driving the final stretch of highway, I played the scene over and over in my mind. I asked Charlie if he’d been scared. “No,” he said. “I knew if we kept going you’d run home and get our other car and catch up with me.” I tried to remember the precise moment when I’d stepped on the parking brake. Whether, in the back of my mind, there had been that uneasiness a person gets when she knows something’s wrong, knows there’s something she’s forgotten, but thinks that—just this one time—she’ll get away with it. Like the times I have laced up my son’s shoe, vaguely aware of a wrinkle in the sock, or sand in the toe, but too impatient to start over. Or when I simply pour an extra couple of ounces of milk into Willy’s bottle without checking to see if what’s in there is still good. All those little moments when corners can—and should not—be cut.

Well, I got the children to school. I drove home. Left Willy with our babysitter. Headed out here to work, but ended up spending most of the morning on the phone to one friend and another, telling and retelling my story. Hoping, I guess, that if I told it enough, I’d finally be free of it. By the fourth or fifth telling, I had the words pretty much set. My voice no longer shook as I described the sight of my sons rolling away from me, headed for that Ford.

I felt reassured when friends told me their own parking brake and car pool horror stories. It could’ve happened to anyone, they told me.

But the truth is, I was a prime candidate for trouble this morning. It was the sort of morning when, if I were an airplane pilot or a trapeze artist, I would simply know to stay on the ground for a while. The sort of day when, not for any obvious reasons, just a general distractedness, something was almost destined to go wrong. Only, motherhood—though it’s a high-risk occupation too—doesn’t allow for off days or for days off. There is no vacation.

It was winter, the day before Audrey’s fifth birthday. Charlie was not quite one. We’d been snowed in for a couple of days, and now that we were finally plowed out, I had a long list of errands to run, with less than an hour until it would be time to pick Audrey up at school. Twelve children coming for her party the next day. The cake unmade. Golden Dream Barbie heads—those disembodied oversize Barbie heads that are cut off at the neck and mounted on a base, with makeup and curlers included—half-price at Zayre and just what my daughter wanted. My son had fallen asleep in the car instead of waiting until we got home, and if I roused him, I knew, he’d be cranky for the rest of the trip, the rest of the day.

So I left him in the car while I ran into the store. This was Keene, New Hampshire, not New York City, but still the thought of child theft flashed long enough that I didn’t leave the motor running (in case someone might want my car, and take Charlie along for the ride). And I made the conscious decision not to lock the doors, vaguely picturing some farfetched catastrophe—fire, flood—that might require a person to open the car door and rescue my son. You might ask why, able as I was to envision possible disaster, I would leave him there at all. All I can say is that the distant possibility of full-scale catastrophe was unreal to me that day, compared to the difficulties—small-scale, but certain—of life with an eleven-month-old jolted from sleep and wheeled through a crowded, fluorescence-lit discount store, and then returned to his car seat for another forty-five minutes on the road.

So I left him. I parked in front of the store. I ran all the way to the toy department. I got the Barbie head and stood in the express line, with my money all counted out and a restless, uneasy feeling: the sort you get three days into a vacation when you begin to wonder whether maybe the iron’s plugged in back home. All those little actions—the cashier’s small talk to the woman ahead of me, her hesitation at the price of the toy, the way she paused to open a new roll of quarters—seemed to take much longer than usual, but finally my purchase was paid for and I was out the automatic doors. My car was easy to find, with a crowd gathered round and a police car beside it, siren on, blue light flashing. When I got close enough—to hear the policeman’s voice: “Is this your car, young lady?” to see the women shaking their heads—I could see my son awake in his car seat (from the siren, probably) and screaming.

The first thing I did was to get Charlie out of his seat. Then there were lots of questions. What was I doing and did I have a job? Who was the child’s father? I can’t remember most of what the policeman asked me except “Why doesn’t he even have mittens on his little hands?” And I remember—with surprise, as someone who is always polite, even obsequious, with police officers, and is reduced to tears by a speeding ticket—asking the policeman loudly whether he had any children, and if he’d ever tried keeping mittens on a toddler? “Well, as a matter of fact, my wife had our first ten days ago,” he said. “And I can tell you she’d never leave that baby alone in a car.”

Eventually he let me go, and of course my son cried all the way home, and I was pretty shaky myself—the odds of us all getting killed in a car accident on our way home probably tripled. But we made it back, my daughter loved the Barbie head, I baked a cake in the shape of a little girl with brown eyes and brown hair, the party went well. A few weeks later an unfamiliar voice called on the phone, asking to speak with my husband. It was a child-welfare officer, wanting to know if Steve was aware that his wife … et cetera, et cetera … and would he inform her that someone from the department would be paying us a home visit?

So a welfare officer came to our house and looked Charlie over while Audrey, to whom I’d explained the situation, hovered over him, saying things like, “Remember, Mom, when we took Charlie to the Children’s Museum?” and “Sing us that song Mom always sings when she puts you to bed, Char.” And eventually this child-welfare officer pronounced me a fit mother and said he’d take my name out of the files provided we had six months with no further problems. Before he left he told me about a man, referred to him, who had been left in charge of his four-year-old and newborn daughters one afternoon and how the man left them for a minute to go to the bathroom, and how, when he came back, the newborn was dead. What do we learn from that story, I asked him. Only that terrible things sometimes happen.

Last month a woman I knew slightly was making scalloped potatoes while her three children played beside her in the kitchen. This was in the mountains of Nepal, where, in my imagination, the dangers come from lions and tigers. But in fact what happened to this woman’s three-year-old son—while she turned her back to reach for another potato—was that he put his right hand into the Cuisinart and in about one second all four fingers on that hand were gone. The parents were on a plane to the U.S. with him the next day. Within twenty-four hours they were talking with surgeons and physical therapists and psychologists, and the scale of their dreams for that particular beloved child had shifted from any possible images of him as a concert pianist or major league pitcher to the slim hope that maybe, a few years down the line, one of his toes might be successfully grafted onto what was left of his hand.

When I heard about this mother the first thing I said—the first thing everybody says, probably—was that I’d never again let my children pour ingredients into the Cuisinart for me, that you can’t be too careful. And it’s true, a parent must always be watching for fingers in car doors and cars backing out of parking spaces, dry-cleaning bags and thin ice and electric outlets. And it’s also true that I shouldn’t have left my son in the car.

But you can be Mother of the Year and still there’s always a moment when you blink your eyes or turn your back. Audrey, at age three, was attacked by seagulls and nearly lost an eye while I sat on my towel, twenty feet away, making sure she went in the water no farther than her knees. And as a matter of fact, you
can
be too careful, I believe, and if I’m sometimes, to some eyes, too casual a parent (giving birth to my children at home, for starters; letting my five-year-old carry her newborn baby brother; letting him climb stairs alone) it’s partly because I was raised, myself, so protected from dangers that I never broke a bone or chipped a tooth or sustained a single injury requiring stitches. As a result, I grew up with a different kind of invisible damage, with too much fearfulness. What I believe is, there’s no removing all danger from the world; there’s only keeping the odds down.

People we know in the city, seeing the main street of this small town where we live or making the five-mile drive beyond it, through woods and farmland, to our house, say what a wonderful place this must be to raise children. And of course, in many ways it is. Summers we swim daily in a waterfall down the road. This winter we built a snow fort covered with pine boughs, and we ski out our back door. More than one fundamentalist-survivalist religious group has settled in this particular valley of New Hampshire out of a conviction that we’re situated in such a way as to escape the worst of a nuclear blast. There are—I reassure Audrey, after watching a scary movie on TV—no bad guys around here.

So yesterday I let her, for the first time, walk off alone down our dirt road for a quarter-mile journey through what are mostly woods, to visit neighbors, just moved in, who have a daughter her age. I bundled her up warmly for the trip (hat, mittens, snow pants) and gave her a plastic bag filled with popcorn to eat along the way. I stood at the window, watching the pom-pom on her hat bob off down the driveway. Then she dropped the popcorn and kernels scattered in all directions; she bent to pick them up with her mittens still on, which made the job difficult. Then a strong gust of wind came. She gathered up what she could that the wind hadn’t blown away, set out again, dropped the bag again. She bent down a second time, picking up kernels one by one. I thought of how impatient I’d been with her, just before she left. How (with Charlie asleep, and wanting to savor the time alone) I’d complained that she was taking too long putting on her boots. The way I’d brushed her hair (not absolutely unintentionally) just rough enough that she cried out once.

I wanted, then, to run out and put my arms around her, take her hand and walk with her the rest of the way. It seemed suddenly as if the sky had darkened and there was a wolf behind every tree. Of course, what I actually did was just stand there.

Word came this morning that my friend Janet’s seventeen-year-old son was killed late Friday night—one of two passengers in a car going too fast down the wrong side of the highway. The three boys hit an old pickup truck whose occupants remain in intensive care. All three boys are dead.

I didn’t know Janet’s son, except as a skinny figure leaning out the passenger side of another friend’s truck (he never learned to drive), trying to bum a cigarette from my husband. But I knew his story from his mother. There was no way to ask Janet how she was, how things were going in her life, without getting to “How’s Sam?” And he was never fine, his life was never going well, and as long as it wasn’t, neither could hers, of course. Inescapable fact of parenthood: a person’s destiny comes to be controlled no longer simply by her own actions, but by the lives of however many satellites she has sent into orbit.

Janet’s son was known as a town bad boy. There were drugs, of course, and school suspensions. Juvenile officers were involved, and later the police. Sam’s father—divorced from Janet and living in another state—had broken off communication with his son a few years back. There had been counselors and therapists and, for Janet, a parents’ support group called Tough Love. A while back Janet had found a residential drug treatment program in another city—the kind of place a kid goes to when he has reached the end of the line. He agreed to try it, the town agreed to pay part of the enormous cost. I’d never seen Janet look so hopeful as she did in September, just after Sam had left for Odyssey House. Two days after Christmas he was home for good. Kicked out (and nobody has to get himself kicked out of a program like that—you can leave anytime) for plotting to break into the center’s office, steal the operating cash, and go on a spree.