Little Children (13 page)

“It’s okay,” he said, grimacing from the effort of self-discipline. “You don’t have to do that.”

“But I want to.”

He raised himself up on his elbows.

“Could we just take a break for today?”

She lifted her head, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

“If that’s what you want.”

She looked so crestfallen—they had never “taken a break” before—that Todd felt he owed her an explanation. A bit sheepishly, he told her it was opening day for the Guardians, and that his place on the team still wasn’t secure. Some of the guys—they were cops, men who’d been tested by fire—suspected him of being a pretty boy who’d crumble under pressure, and he was determined to prove them wrong, to show that he belonged.

“I always get nervous before games,” he added. “In high school I used to throw up in the locker room. It was my body’s way of relieving tension.”

“I used to throw up in high school, too,” she confessed. “It was my body’s way of purging a big meal.”

He wasn’t sure if she was kidding, so he limited his response to a polite chuckle.

“I’m sure it sounds ridiculous,” he said. “I’m a grown man. I should have more important things on my mind than a football game.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” she told him. “No more ridiculous than me worrying about my ugly toes.”

“You have beautiful toes.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

“You’re gonna be great tonight.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t played for ten years. It used to be such a big part of my life. That’s who I was in high school, even in college—Superjock, Mr. Quarterback. Then when I stopped, I just stopped. I didn’t even miss it. But now that I’m doing it again, I can’t help feeling like something important’s on the line.”

This whole time he’d been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at her bare breasts and sympathetic face. It was a nice way to look at a woman.

“I envy you,” she said. Almost absentmindedly, she threw one leg over his waist and straddled him. She began slowly rocking her hips, pressing herself against him, a moist groove engulfing his softness. “I missed out on all that. I was a smart girl. Drama Club. AP English. I pretended to look down on the cheerleaders, but I was really just jealous of them.”

“Why?”

Her breath was warm against his ear, her voice husky.

“Because they had you.”

He was hard again; it hadn’t taken much. She leaned forward, reaching back between her legs, guiding him inside. He arched his back, lifting her up. She pressed down against the movement.

“You have me now,” he said.

Ever since his first practice with the Guardians, Todd had been hearing ominous rumors about their opening night opponents, who were widely considered to be the nastiest team in the league, as well as the best. He didn’t give it a second thought until he saw the Auditors file onto the field, one guy bigger and meaner-looking than the next, like finalists in a Mr. Steroid contest. Five were white, two black; all of them wore nylon rags knotted gangsta-style on their heads.

“Jesus,” said Todd. “Are these guys really accountants?”

The teams shook hands at midfield; with only seven on a side, there wasn’t any need for captains. The Auditors were stone-faced and utterly silent during the ritual, like heavyweight boxers trying to intimidate a challenger during the weigh-in. Todd thought the tough-guy act was ridiculous, but also felt a cold splinter of fear enter his lower abdomen, a sudden inkling that maybe he was in over his head. He wished he hadn’t let Sarah talk him into having sex.
Oh no
, he thought.
I’m a dreamy, weak-kneed lover-boy in a velvet smoking jacket.

The Guardians won the coin toss and elected to receive. Todd and DeWayne Rogers dropped back to return the kick. Right on time, Todd felt a welcome jolt of adrenaline rush through his system, a biological response to the bright lights, the goalposts and yard markers, the knowledge that large men intent on mayhem would soon be charging in his direction. It no longer mattered that the bleachers were empty, that no one except the players themselves gave a damn about what was going to happen on the field. From where Todd was standing on the twelve yard line, it felt as real as any game he’d ever played.

There was no ref, no whistle. The Auditors’ kicker just raised his right hand and brought it down in a chopping motion to signal the beginning of play. He jogged toward the ball, his teammates moving in unison on either side of him, and booted it high into the sky. Todd lost it for a moment in the glare of the stadium lights, then found it again, a little chocolate egg spinning end over end, growing larger with each revolution. He was relieved—and immediately embarrassed by his relief—to see that it was plummeting toward DeWayne, that it wasn’t his responsibility.

By the time Todd started moving forward, looking for someone to block, the Auditors were stampeding down the field, shrieking out a weird, ululating battle cry, as if they were a tribe of ferocious native warriors bent on avenging some ancient insult. It was a chilling sound; Todd felt naked and defenseless in the face of it, suddenly amazed to find himself standing on a football field without pads or a helmet, but he wasn’t standing for long. One of the Auditors clotheslined him as he rushed past—a rock-hard forearm to the face—and the next thing Todd knew he was scrutinizing the cosmos, his head humming emptily, as if every last thought had been knocked right out of it, his body blessedly free of sensation, at least until a very large sneaker descended upon his left hand, grinding it into the turf as though it were a lit cigarette that needed to be extinguished. Todd’s gaze traveled north from the sneaker. A cheerful-looking black man with massive thighs was attached.

“Yo,” said Todd. “Could you get off my hand?”

“I could.” The big man smiled, revealing a golden tooth. “What’s the magic word?”

After Aaron fell asleep, Kathy surprised herself by calling her mother. Normally, when she was feeling stressed out about her marriage, she turned to her older sister, Claire, or her college roommate, Amy, for advice and encouragement. Both were sympathetic, highly intuitive listeners who also happened to be big fans of Todd. The bottom line, as they often reminded Kathy, was she’d been lucky enough to marry a good-looking, intelligent, and kindhearted man who was willing to stay home and care for a small child while she pursued her dream of making documentary films. So what if he had a little trouble passing a test? JFK, Jr. didn’t ace it on
his
first try either, right?

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, hi, honey.” Marjorie sounded flustered, raising her voice to make herself heard over the blaring TV. “It’s late. Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” Kathy insisted. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hold on. I had it in my hand a second ago.”

“What?”

“The stupid remote. Where the heck did it go?”

For the same reasons that she sought out Claire and Amy, Kathy tended not to confide in her mother when she was feeling angry or exasperated with Todd. Marjorie’s first impulse was not to defend her son-in-law or to reassure her daughter about the choices she made. Her inclination, conscious or not, was precisely the opposite: to sow discord, to exaggerate the significance of whatever it was that was bothering you, and ultimately, if she could manage it, to pull you down into the swamp of her own unhappiness, just so she could have a little company.

Kathy’s father, Rick, had jumped ship after three kids and sixteen years of wedlock, not for a younger, sexier woman—which would have at least been understandable on some pathetic, totally clichéd level—but for a sickly neighbor five years Marjorie’s senior. The humiliation of
that
—of being traded in for Gail Roberts, a middle-aged divorcee with a smoker’s hack and orthopedic shoes—had done permanent damage to Marjorie’s psyche, scarring her with the bone-deep conviction that men were liars and marriage a cruel joke, the punch line of which always came at the expense of the unsuspecting wife.

“There,” said Marjorie, as the TV went mute in the background. “That’s better. So how’s my little guy?”

“Great. He’s sleeping right next to me. What a cutie.” Kathy gazed down at Aaron, who was shirtless, wearing only a pull-up. His rib cage looked frail beneath the taut skin, his limbs scrawny and delicate. And yet it was oddly easy to imagine him stretched out and bulked up, a fully grown man, as strong and handsome as his father. “What are you watching?”

“
E.R.
just started. School bus went into a ditch.” Marjorie clucked her tongue, as if reacting to an actual disaster. “What a mess.”

“I can call you back when it’s over.”

“That’s okay. I saw this one already.”

Kathy kept quiet, waiting for her mother to pose the inevitable next question.

“So where’s Todd?”

“Out.”

“I’m surprised the library stays open this late.”

“Oh, he’s not at the library,” Kathy reported. “He’s playing football with his buddies.”

“Football?”

“He joined some kind of team. They play tackle without pads.”

“But it’s ten o’clock.”

“You should have seen him before he left the house. Couldn’t eat dinner, couldn’t carry on a normal conversation. All worked up, like he’s playing in the Super Bowl.”

“Did you say tackle?”

“No helmets or anything.”

“He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t break his neck.”

“If he does,” Kathy said, “he better not come crying to me.”

In the pause that followed, Kathy flashed on a strangely vivid image of Todd in a wheelchair, his mouth open wide, waiting for Kathy to feed him another spoonful of baby food.

“Can I ask you something?” Marjorie said. “Do you think he’s having an affair?”

“An affair?” Kathy scoffed. “He joined a football team.”

“Honey,” Marjorie said, affecting a tone of world-weary patience. “It’s just a smoke screen. Nobody plays football at this time of night.”

“These idiots do. He comes home drenched in sweat, scrapes, and bruises all over his body.”

“If you say so. But do you remember when your father took up golf? He bought a new set of clubs and started getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings? Well, it turned out he wasn’t spending much time on the golf course.”

“It’s not an affair I’m worried about, Mom. Something’s wrong with Todd. He doesn’t talk about the future anymore, doesn’t even like to think about it. It’s like he’s stuck in place, like he doesn’t even realize that his life is slipping away from him.”

“Do you want me to come up for a visit? I could keep an eye on him while you’re at work, make sure he’s staying out of trouble.”

Kathy scrunched up her face and raised her middle finger to the phone. She should’ve known it was hopeless to try and have a serious conversation with her mother, one that would require her to imagine a world in which not every man was as heartless and deceitful as her ex-husband. And even
he
was hardly the monster Marjorie made him out to be. For all his faults, her father had built a loving and long-lasting relationship with Gail, nursing her through the twin afflictions of emphysema and chronic arthritis. Whenever she visited them, Kathy was touched to see how he fussed over that poor woman, fiddling with the pressure on her oxygen tank, making sure the plastic tubes were properly situated in her nostrils, holding her hand as she sat gasping for breath on the couch.

“You know what, Mom? I shouldn’t burden you with this stuff. It’s not like you don’t have troubles of your own.”

“That’s okay,” Marjorie said cheerfully. “It’s no burden. I’m happy to help.”

The Auditors’ middle linebacker started talking trash during the very first series of the game. He was an angry slab of muscle—five-ten or so, maybe two-twenty—with a buzz cut and a demonic-looking goatee.

“Sweetheart.” The linebacker waved to Todd as the Guardians broke their huddle and approached the line of scrimmage. “Over here.”

Todd ignored him, glancing left and right to make sure his teammates were set. It was third and eight. The linebacker amplified his wave, crossing his arms overhead, as though signaling to a rescue helicopter. The sleeves of his T-shirt had been ripped off to expose the barbed-wire tattoos encircling his grotesquely pumped biceps.