Imperfect Spiral (11 page)

“I almost caught that one!” Humphrey said.

No, he didn't.

It wasn't that hard to catch a well-thrown football.

“Humphrey, you're clapping at the ball,” I said.

“No, I'm not,” he said.

“You're slapping at it. You're slapping it away.”

“No, I'm not.”

I had taken a couple of juice boxes from the Dankers' refrigerator, and now he took them out of my backpack.

“Why do you want to slap that poor ball, Humphrey?” I said. “What did that poor, funny-looking ball do to you that makes you want to slap it?”

There went those gears clicking away in his head. In my three weeks with Humphrey, I had found I could best make a point by being funny and by playing with words.

“I'm slapping the ball because it's been bad. Very, very bad.” Click, click. “It runs away from me when it's supposed to hold my hand. And it hangs on to me like a baby when it's supposed to run and get its exercise.”

“What shall we do about these problems,” I said, “other than slapping the ball?”

“I don't know,” Humphrey said. “I think I'm just going to have to keep slapping, slapping, slapping.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Poor, poor, pitiful ball.”

“Poor, poor, pitiful, poopy, poopified, putrid ball!”

“Wow.
Putrid
. That's not your everyday
p
word.”

We drained our juice boxes. “Back to this football,” I said. “I have an idea that might help you catch it. You know how you said the ball is running away from you when it's supposed to hold your hand?”

He nodded.

“Think of the ball as a baby. I mean, a little baby-baby. It doesn't know it's supposed to hold your hand. So when I throw it to you, you have to cradle it in your arms to catch it. You have
to cradle it like it's a baby. Like this.” I tossed the ball up and caught it in a cradling way.

“Like a baby,” Humphrey said.

“Rock-a-bye baby,” I sang out.

“In the treetop,” Humphrey responded, also singing.

“In your arms, the football cradle,” I said. He started to run out for a pass, but I stopped him. “Just toss it up, right here.” He tossed it maybe five inches into the air. “A little higher,” I said. He followed my instructions.

“Toss and cradle. Toss and cradle. That's good,” I said. After a while, I took the ball and tossed it to him from just a couple of feet away. Then I moved a few more feet away.

“You slapped it,” I said when the ball escaped Humphrey's arms.

“Because it's bad,” he said.

“I don't think so,” I called out in a singsongy voice. “Cradle that baby.”

He did. I tossed it to him from six feet away, ten feet, fifteen feet. He cradled the baby and ran it back.

“Good. Great! Now go long!” I said, at the same time thinking,
Listen to me with the football lingo
.

He didn't know what “go long” meant.

“Go long—it means ‘run far'! Then stop and look back for the throw.”

Far, in Humphrey's case, meant running maybe twenty-five feet away. He turned, expectantly. I launched a sweet, gentle spiral his way. “Cradle it!” I yelled.

“Yes!” he rejoiced. He ran the football back. “Again!”

He didn't catch it every time. But he caught it enough of the time.

“I'm a football catcher!” he said.

The sun had disappeared behind the trees that rimmed the park. Time to head home.

He didn't want to go. “I still have to learn how to throw a spiral,” he said.

“You do, and you will,” I said. “Just not tonight. You don't want to be here in the park when it's dark, do you?”

“I like the dark,” Humphrey said.

“I like it, too. But we need to start walking home. Look—you can already see stars.”

I knew that the low-hanging white discs in the darkening sky were Venus and Saturn, although I didn't know which was which.

“Which one came out first?” Humphrey asked.

“I don't know.”

“
Did
one come out first?”

“Well—yeah.”

“How come I can never see the first star?” he asked. “Whenever I look, there's always more than one.”

“I guess you'd have to pay really close attention,” I said. “You'd have to just sit down and say, ‘Okay, I'm not going to do anything but look up at the sky and wait for the first star to come out.'”

“Let's do that next time,” Humphrey said.

“Okay, but—it's probably about as exciting as watching paint dry,” I said. “If you catch my drift.”

“I catch your drift,” Humphrey said. He skipped a little to catch up with me on the path leading out of the park. “And now I can catch your football, too.”

Not to let me come to the funeral. Or not to want me there, since, as Mom and Dad said, there are no invitations to a funeral. They must really hate me.

They have a right to. They have a right to hate me. And they have a right to find me despicable. And to think I'm incompetent. That's not a strong enough word. Careless. Mindless. They're also not strong enough. There may not be a strong enough word to describe my failure. Because, honestly, how hard is it to keep a little boy from running into the street?

He was
not
an out-of-control kid. He was perfectly easy to control. Unless you were an incompetent, careless, mindless,
horrendous
babysitter.

After two sessions of sitting around looking at each other, one hundred minutes of me looking at her looking at me, for which my parents paid I don't know how much—my therapist, Dr. Gilbert, had an idea.

“Are you a writer, Danielle?” she asked.

“Not especially,” I answered, truthfully.

“Hmm. But are you comfortable writing?”

“I don't mind writing.”

“Do you think you might be more comfortable writing your feelings than saying them out loud, for starters?”

“You mean, sitting here and writing?”

“That's not exactly what I have in mind, although that's a possibility. What I meant was writing your feelings down at home, and then reading aloud what you wrote when you come to see me.”

“So you mean, doing homework?”

“I guess it is like homework. But I wouldn't want you to feel burdened by it.”

“But what if I did feel burdened by it?” I asked.

“I'm open to alternatives. Or we could continue to sit here as we've done for two sessions. Sometimes sitting in companionable silence can be very helpful, but I'm not sure that's what's happening here.”

I didn't have a better idea. And she was right, it wasn't
companionable silence. It was just silence. Almost total silence on my part, punctuated by her occasional questions and conversation starters. I wasn't trying to be difficult. I just found the concept of sitting there and talking to this middle-aged lady who doesn't know me difficult.

Now, having just recited my first therapeutic work of literature, I'm looking at her again.

“Do you really think the Dankers hate you, Danielle?” Dr. Gilbert asks.

I sigh. “I wrote it,” I say.

“No, you wrote that ‘they must' hate you. And that they have a right to.”

“I don't know,” I say. “I don't know what they think about me. Maybe they don't think about me at all. Why should I even presume to think that they have any thoughts about me? How self-centered am I? ‘Oh, poor me, the Dankers hate me.'”

Dr. Gilbert allows herself a small smile. “I wouldn't take it quite where you did, but, yes, maybe they aren't thinking about you. So if you think that may be the case, I suppose you could call yourself even more names and berate yourself for being self-centered. Or you could let yourself off
this
hook, at least—you could let go of the feeling that they hate you.”

“Mr. Danker always hated me,” I say.

Dr. Gilbert raises an eyebrow.

“He always made me feel stupid and clumsy and in the way.”

“Did Mrs. Danker?”

“No.”

“Did Humphrey?”

I shake my head.

“Maybe that was just Mr. Danker's problem,” Dr. Gilbert says.

“His problem?”

“Maybe he's not great at interacting with a teenage girl.”

“Or a five-year-old boy,” I say.

“I don't know about that,” Dr. Gilbert says. “Did you not like his interactions with Humphrey?”

I think back. There wasn't much to judge. My job was mostly to be at the Danker house when the Dankers weren't there. As for Mr. Danker and Humphrey—I never could figure that out.

“Sometimes it looked kind of—
off
, I guess, to me,” I say. “Hot and cold. One day I'd think Mr. Danker was terrible at being Humphrey's father. Another day I'd think he was good at it.”

Dr. Gilberts nods encouragingly.

“But what do I know,” I say. “I was just the babysitter.”

Back in the spring, Mrs. Danker had purchased tickets to a children's concert, intending to take Humphrey in the summer.

“It's the National Symphony,” she explained to me the day before the event. “They have these wonderful programs, where they choose pieces that appeal to children, and they talk about the instruments and narrate the music. I've been looking forward to taking Humphrey to his first one.”

But she couldn't reschedule her treatment. And Mr. Danker could not get away from work.

“So … unless you can't stand classical music …”

“I'd love to go,” I said.

So there I was with Humphrey on the subway, on our way downtown.

“Why is it called the Candy Center?” Humphrey asked. “Do they have candy at the concerts?”

“The
Kennedy
Center,” I said. “Not the Candy Center. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”

“But they still might have candy,” Humphrey said.

“You never know.”

It was a long walk from the subway station to the Kennedy Center, but the weather was nice and we practically skipped along.

“Maybe we'll see Daddy,” Humphrey said. “Since we're in Washington, D.C., and his office is in Washington, D.C. He said he was going to court today. Maybe we'll see him walking to court.”

“You never know,” I repeated. “But I doubt it. I don't think there are too many law offices in this part of the city.”

“How about courts?”

I didn't know where the courthouses were.

“Well, then, you never know,” Humphrey echoed.

We climbed the hill leading to the Kennedy Center's grand entrance.

“Lookit!” Humphrey threw his head way back to look up, up, up at the colorful flags lining the high walls.

We were in the Hall of States, I told him after consulting an informational placard.

“These are the flags of all fifty states,” I said, “plus the five U.S. territories and Washington, D.C.”

“These are really giant flags,” he said.

“They are.”

“I know our state's flag,” Humphrey said. “I'm going to find it. Don't tell me if you see it first.”

I didn't see it first. Humphrey pointed it out.

Our necks hurt after a while.

“I can't look up anymore,” Humphrey said.

“Let's go to the Concert Hall,” I proposed.

We found our seats.

“What are the five U.S. territories?” he asked.

I had wondered when he would come back around to this.

“I was afraid you would ask,” I said. “I don't think I know them all.”

“I bet you do. You know a lot.”

“Puerto Rico is one.”

“Okay. What's two?”

“Guam.”

“G-wam?”

“Yes. Guam.”

“Okay. Next?”

“American Samoa.”

“I love Samoas,” Humphrey said.

“Those are some good cookies, aren't they?” I said.

“Yup.”

I didn't know the two remaining U.S. territories.

“Think, Danielle! Think hard!” Humphrey said.

“I don't know them, Humphrey. It's not that I've forgotten
them. I could think and think and think and still not know what they are. They're just not in my brain.”

“I bet they are,” he said.

“I am not that smart,” I said. “I'm not as smart as you think I am.”

The concert was about to start.

“Alay?” Humphrey whispered.

“Alay? What's Alay?” I whispered back.

“Is that one of the U.S. territories?”

Alay. Al-ay. El-ay. L.A.

“L.A.? The city L.A. Los Angeles?” I asked.

He shrugged. Sheepish. He knew he wasn't quite getting something.

“Whenever Daddy has to go there, he and Mommy make it sound so far away. I thought it was called Alay. Maybe it's a territory. Now that I know there are such things as territories.”