Little Children (19 page)

“Wouldn’t you know it?” he chuckled.

She didn’t mind paying. It was her father’s money anyway. A thank-you would have been nice, though, a simple word of gratitude. But R.J. just acted like it was his due, the least he deserved for sitting through dinner with a crazy woman.

But maybe she’d misread his signals, she thought, as they sat quietly in the car, staring at the shadowy playground. Maybe he liked her. Maybe he was as shy and awkward as she was, and simply didn’t know how to behave around women. He didn’t seem like a guy who’d had a lot of girlfriends.

She smiled, to let him know that it would be all right to kiss her or just hold her hand. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss
R.J.
, exactly. She just wanted to kiss
someone
, to remember what it felt like, to know that she’d taken one more step in the direction of a normal life.

R.J. smiled back. She must have been a little more encouraging than she’d meant to be, because instead of kissing her, he started undoing his belt, and then his zipper.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You must have misunderstood.”

“Don’t be scared,” he told her. “It’s not gonna bite.”

If R.J. had been a little more interested back at the restaurant, Sheila would have told him about the vision that had triggered her second so-called breakdown, the most beautiful and important thing that had ever happened to her.

She was driving on the highway during the evening rush hour, coming home from a temp job, a mind-numbing eight-hour shift of data processing for a payroll company. It had rained all day, but now it was clearing, a strong breeze erasing the bad weather from the sky so quickly that it looked like time-lapse photography.

The sun was sinking, ducking in and out of the scudding silver-gray clouds. At one point, she happened to be looking straight at it as it emerged from hiding, inexplicably transformed into something glorious. A moment before it had been a pale yellow orb, but now it was an enormous red fireball, its rays separating into four rosy beams, one of which—the second from the left—was directed right at Sheila’s windshield. The touch of that crimson sunlight through the glass, the sudden reassuring warmth, landed on her skin like a blessing.

She knew it was a bad idea to look directly at the sun, but she couldn’t avert her gaze. A face had emerged from the clouds, and it was trying to speak to her. She rolled down her window to hear the words, but it was no use; the road noise was just too loud.

She slammed on her brakes, right there in the center lane, setting off a chain reaction of violent swerves, squealing tires, and furious horn-blowing, capped off by the sound of one crash, then another, behind her and off to the right. She gave the collision no more than a passing glance—a three-car pileup, nothing too serious—as she climbed onto the warm hood of her car and from there onto the roof, so she could get a better look at the face in the clouds.

It was a boy, seven or eight years old. Brown hair. Freckles and a cowlick. An innocent but mischievous expression. A face she’d seen before, or imagined she had.

“Hello!” she called. “I can see you!”

“I can see you, too,” he replied.

By then he wasn’t just a face anymore, but an entire body, his blue jeans and black-and-orange-striped shirt standing out vividly against the flat gray background. And suddenly it was obvious: He was her child, the one she’d aborted during sophomore year. But he was more than just her unborn son.

“You’re God, aren’t you?”

“I am,” he told her. “And you’re my special mommy.”

“Will you forgive me?” she asked.

“You’re already forgiven.”

She felt so much better knowing that, relieved of the burden she’d been lugging around for so long, the terrible guilt of not having given him a chance. But he was God, so of course he was okay.

“I’d like to know you better,” she told him.

“You will,” he promised her.

She sat with her hands resting in her lap, and comforted herself with the thought of God’s sweet face while R.J. finished his ugly business in the passenger seat. At least he wasn’t touching her. He wasn’t even looking at her, just staring straight ahead at the playground as he yanked on himself, once in a while muttering something disgusting in a threatening voice.

“You bitch…you whore…little crybaby…piece of shit…”

After a while the words dissolved into whimpers and R.J. exploded with an angry bark of relief, lurching forward as if he’d been shot, bracing himself with his free hand against the glove compartment. He rested his head on the dashboard, breathing in hiccupy spasms that sounded like sobs. After a while he straightened up, wiping his dirty hand on her seat. He studied Sheila with cold eyes as he zipped up and fixed his belt.

“You’re not gonna tell on me, are you?” His voice was soft and taunting, but worried nonetheless.

Sheila shook her head. He pressed his index finger against the base of her chin, forcing her head back until she was staring up at the padded ceiling of the car.

“I hope not,” he whispered. “Because I don’t like tattletales.”

He removed the pressure. She lowered her head cautiously and looked at him. He put his hands over his face like a child playing peekaboo and started moaning into his palms, making a sound she interpreted as a kind of apology.

“Let’s get you home,” she told him.

THE BAR EXAM WAS A TWO-DAY MARATHON, AS MUCH A TEST OF
physical endurance as legal knowledge. Day One was the MBE, two hundred nitpicking, densely worded multiple choice questions, a mental root canal that made the SAT seem like a routine cleaning by comparison. Once they had you thoroughly battered and demoralized, they made you trudge back on Day Two for the essay section, which for Todd, at least, was even worse: an eight-hour confrontation with the blankness of his own mind, the white noise of his inability to think made even louder by the furious scratching of his fellow test-takers’ pens and pencils. It was as if he’d never gone to law school at all, as if he were living through an endless, real-time version of the nightmare in which you find yourself naked in an unfamiliar classroom, taking a final in Swahili or electrical engineering, some subject about which you know exactly nothing, except that you’d enrolled and somehow not managed to attend any classes.

“Eat your breakfast,” Kathy told him on the morning of Day One. “You don’t want to fade in the home stretch.”

Todd took an obedient bite of toast. Despite her frequently—and, at times, angrily—expressed worries about his preparation and motivation in recent weeks, Kathy had slipped back into the role of supportive spouse as the actual exam date approached. She smiled at him as though he were a child returning to school after a brief illness.

“I have a good feeling,” she said. “They say the third time’s a charm.”

They also say, “Three strikes and you’re out,”
Todd thought, but he didn’t say it out loud. There was no reason to make this any worse than it already was.

“I’m going to buy a bottle of champagne,” she continued. “We’ll put it in the fridge and open it as soon as you get the good news.”

As far as Todd was concerned, there was only one upside to this whole ordeal: The results of the bar exam wouldn’t be announced for several months, so Kathy wouldn’t know until late November or early December that he’d failed for a third time. Maybe by then it wouldn’t matter so much.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned her. “We’ve been down this road before.”

“This time it’ll be different,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

She sustained this stubbornly optimistic mood all through breakfast and the short drive to the commuter rail station, and Todd did his best to play along. It was a relief to kiss her and Aaron good-bye and step out of the car, a relief to finally stop pretending. He stood in the parking lot, briefcase in hand, waving as they drove away.

A flight of metal stairs led up to the platform, but Todd remained below, pacing in front of the pay phone, forcing himself not to keep checking his watch every fifteen seconds. Sarah pulled up at 7:45 on the dot, just as the train rumbled into the station, its horn blaring a wake-up call to a herd of lethargic commuters. He climbed into the Volvo and kissed her hello.

“Right on time,” he said.

She studied him for a moment, trying to detect a trace of ambivalence beneath his cheerful demeanor.

“You sure about this?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he flipped open his briefcase, spinning it a quarter turn on his lap to reveal the contents: a bathing suit, a container of heavy-duty sunscreen, and a bottle of chilled white wine, still sweaty from the refrigerator.

“Quite the Boy Scout,” she told him.

It was a gorgeous summer morning, hot but not yet muggy, with a gentle intermittent breeze stirring the air, the kind of weather that made you wish you had a sunroof or convertible. They lit out for the North Shore, moving freely against rush-hour traffic, the radio turned way up to compete with the rush of wind and road noise through the open windows. Sarah reached across the gearshift console and squeezed Todd’s hand. She looked prettier than he’d ever seen her, her eyes bright with adventure, stray ringlets and unruly corkscrews of hair blowing across her face.

“I never did this in high school,” she confessed. “Not even when I was a senior.”

“I’m corrupting you.”

She laughed. “Better late than never.”

The idea had come to them just two days ago, and had blossomed into a plan with only the slightest coaxing. Todd had been agonizing about the test to the point where he’d become tedious even to himself. He knew he was going to fail, so why go through the motions? Why waste two whole days of his life on a hopeless and unpleasant quest? Why not spend them on the beach? Why not spend them on the beach with Sarah?

From there it was only a short journey to here. Kathy was taking both days off to watch Aaron, so Todd was clear on that front. And wasn’t Jean always volunteering to baby-sit Lucy? All Sarah had to do was concoct a little story about an old friend from college, an unexpected layover in Providence, a welcome chance to catch up.

“How was Lucy?” he asked. “She cry or anything?”

“Are you kidding? She just about shoved me out the door. How was it at your place?”

“The usual,” he said. “Everybody happy but me.”

They were on the beach by nine, their blanket spread on the cool sand, anchored at the corners by Todd’s shoes and briefcase, and a small cooler Sarah had filled with fruit and sandwiches and a six-pack of bottled water. Todd lay back, cradling his head in his hands, and smiled up at the perfect morning sky. Whatever guilt he was feeling was muffled by an immense feeling of relief: The sun was shining, the surf crashing, the gulls banking and crying out overhead, and he wasn’t sitting in the sickly light of a cavernous conference center surrounded by five hundred other would-be lawyers, sharing a table with some Ivy League whiz kid who was going to ace the test on his first try and be ruling the world by the time he was thirty.

“Can you believe it?” Sarah’s hand moved lightly over his thigh. “It’s our first real date. Without the kids, I mean.”

Todd raised himself on his elbows and looked around. It was still early, the beach mostly empty. The only other people out were solitary joggers and dogwalkers and a few families with small children.

“Think we should’ve brought ’em?”

She leaned forward like a penitent, her face momentarily eclipsing the sun, and kissed him on the shoulder.

“Not today. Today’s just for us.”

They rode the waves, then walked the length of the shore holding hands, stopping to examine the occasional shell or stone, marveling at the speckled beauty of a crab claw, shaking their heads at the sight of a washed-up tampon applicator tangled in seaweed, a pair of safety goggles with a broken strap. A tanned retiree jogged past, his potbelly wobbling over a pair of inadvisably skimpy Speedo trunks.

“Richard took me to a nude beach once,” she said. “Back when we were dating.”

“Around here?”

“In New Jersey. At one of the state parks. He found it in a guidebook.”

Todd wasn’t surprised. Sarah had recently told him about her husband’s sexual proclivities—the panties, the way he’d try to pressure her into attending a “swingers’ party” back when she was still breast-feeding.

“Did you take off your clothes?”

“Just my top.”

“Very European of you.”

She smiled. “I like to think so.”

“What about Richard? Did he go for the full-body tan?”

“Are you kidding? He was naked in the car on the drive down. Just a towel draped over his lap. Got some pretty funny looks from the toll collectors.”

They fell silent for a moment, smiling their greetings to a frustrated father about their own age, a big sunburned guy who’d been trying for a least a half hour to get an unwieldy box kite airborne, while his beautiful twin daughters—they were five, maybe six—looked on with expressions of withering contempt. He’d just finished a thirty-yard sprint, trying to create an updraft, the kite dragging along behind him, plowing the sand.

“No breeze,” he panted defensively, as if he suspected the strangers of laughing at him. “Yesterday it worked fine.”

Todd and Sarah made sympathetic faces and continued down the beach.

“So tell me,” he said. “Did it turn you on?”

“The nude beach?” Perhaps unconsciously, she reached down and pinched the sweet roll of fat perched above the waistband of her bikini bottoms. “God, no. You want to feel young and thin and attractive, go spend a day with some nudists.”

After lunch they checked into the Sea Breeze, a justly inexpensive motel tucked between a propane supply store and a seafood shack on a soulless commercial strip half a mile west of the beach. It was the real deal, an old-fashioned, independently owned and operated fleabag, fully equipped with moldy wall-to-wall carpeting, a hideous synthetic bedspread that felt oily to the touch, and an unambiguously phallic painting of a lighthouse hung over the bed as if for inspiration. They toasted each other with Todd’s wine, poured into plastic cups liberated from sanitary plastic wrappers, and made love without showering, their bodies sticky and gritty with the obligatory day-at-the-beach coating of sand and salt and sunscreen residue.

“We’re like two pieces of Shake ’n Bake chicken,” he told her.

Todd was pleased by the metaphor, but Sarah shook her head, as if he’d said something offensive.

“No jokes,” she said. She was lying on her side, her legs scissored across the highly flammable sheets. “Not today. I want to concentrate.”

“On what?”

“On you. I want to feel you inside me.”

She closed her eyes, her face tightening into a grimace that suggested effort more than pleasure. All morning long he’d been fantasizing about being alone with her in a private place, no kids to worry about waking, a chance to finally cut loose. He imagined her shouting his name with the breathy gusto of a porn queen, startling the clerks at the propane outlet, making the waitresses blush at Ricky’s Chowda Pot. But instead she seemed oddly subdued, even quieter than usual. When he moved into her, she released a soft sigh. His retreats elicited an even softer whimper.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded, harder than necessary, as if she’d lost the power of speech and needed to be extra emphatic.

“I want to help you,” she said.

“How?”

“You’re sad.” She torqued her neck to look him in the eyes, daring him to disagree. “I want to make you happy.”

“You do.” He gave her more accessible breast a friendly squeeze. “This is about as happy as I get.”

“She puts too much pressure on you. I wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s not her fault.”

“Give me a chance,” she pleaded. “I know I’m not as pretty as she is.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Liar.”

“You have a hot ass.”

She smiled naughtily, bucking her hips to meet his thrust.

“You think so?”

“Oh, God. I’m gonna come.”

“I want to feel it.”

A wave of energy surged up from his toes.

“Now,” she commanded.

His body lurched, arching at the waist. A big shudder buckled his arms, followed by a smaller one. She gave a yelp, as if she’d been scalded. For an immeasurable amount of time, he was nothing but suspense and release, clenching and unclenching, until one last fluttery spasm turned his arms to jelly, and he collapsed on top of her, crushing her beneath his bulk. She gave a throaty chuckle and wriggled herself free.

Todd woke with a start, head foggy, body infused with dread. For a moment or two, nothing made sense—the dingy room, the labored wheeze of the air conditioner, the stark afternoon light pouring in around the edges of the curtains, the unfamiliar dead weight of the arm across his chest.

“Whuh?” Sarah’s face was bleary, vaguely alarmed. “Something wrong?”

Todd’s eyes shot to the digital clock/radio on the bedside table. It was only two-fifteen. They still had plenty of time. He let his head drop back onto the pillow.

“Just a bad dream.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. It’s already gone.”

All that remained was an image of a conveyor belt, an endless procession of identical yellow flashlights, but how could that account for the odd thumping in his chest, the panicky shortness of his breath?

“Was it about the test?” she wondered. “Maybe you’re feeling bad about that.”

He wished she would shut up about the goddam test. Of course he felt bad about it. He had paid four hundred dollars just to sign up, four hundred dollars that were gone forever, and had wasted countless spring and summer evenings pretending to study for it. He had convinced his hardworking, ever-hopeful wife that he was making a good faith effort to pass it at this very moment, when, in reality, he was in bed with a woman he’d just fucked in a cheap motel, speculating about a dream.

“It wasn’t the test,” he explained. “I think I was supposed to be doing some kind of quality control, but I didn’t know how to tell the good flashlights from the bad ones.”

She sat up and nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She looked sweet, he thought, totally absorbed in the conversation, unconscious of her own nakedness. Her nipples were hard from the AC, just begging to be sucked. Without trying, he pictured her on the nude beach in New Jersey, unwilling to remove her shorts, her husband-to-be browbeating her for being a prude.

“What happened?” she said. “Did you ever even
want
to be a lawyer?”

“It was kind of an accident,” he admitted. “This guy in my frat, Paul Berry—he was the one who wanted to be a lawyer. He had this idea that it was an exciting, glamorous career, like on
LA Law.
He registered to take the LSAT, but he didn’t want to do it alone. We got drunk on tequila one night, and he convinced me to sign up, too, just to keep him company. We went to Stanley Kaplan, studied together for a few weeks, and sat next to each other at the test. When the results came back, it turned out I did way better than him. With the scores I got, it was stupid
not
to go to law school.”

“Not if you didn’t want to be a lawyer.”

“I didn’t know what I wanted. I put it off for a couple of years after college, worked a couple of different jobs, nothing too interesting, then finally put in the applications.”

“Law school must have been pretty tough.”