The Cradle (3 page)

She knew everything in advance. As they watched the towers on television, she knew Bill’s thoughts. She could see them. He
stood quietly in the living room, wearing his suit, staring at the screen, car keys still in his hand. Briefcase there on
the floor, leaning against the couch. Something like: all those Arabs now must pay, damn them to hell! As though it could
be erased. And as she watched her husband, she saw more: it would slip from his mind into Adam’s, from father to son. She
could guess about the announcements coming over the PA at Adam’s school, too. She could guess how they would say it. She could
imagine all the years of the country’s anger that would come, imagine the whole shift of feeling that would overtake their
street and their suburb and the restaurants and buses, seep all through Chicago, to all of the Midwest, to the South, to the
coasts, seep into every person, no matter who they were. Not bloodlust but uncertainty. And with that came anything.

And Adam. When she became Prometheus that morning in the living room, she saw his whole path as well. No one remembered that
about Prometheus—he was a seer, not just a thief, not just the demigod chained to the rock and eaten. She saw the future just
as he had. The world would bristle, war would come, and Adam would go toward it. She saw it and knew it would be true. He
was only twelve years old, but she knew him well enough, even then. He would look at every person who said, no, it’s wrong,
and he would say, no, you’re wrong. And he would look at every person who said, yes, it’s right, and he would say, maybe it
is; maybe it’s right, maybe it’s not. I’m going to see for myself because I, unlike you, am not afraid.

That was Adam’s way. He knew he could be unique in the world if he guessed at what other people feared and then immediately
did that very thing. Every play battle, in one blink of his child’s mind’s eye, would shimmer and become human and real. In
an instant he could move past every one of his friends and every one of his classmates and be standing alone. Except he could
not possibly understand what that meant. At twelve years old or nineteen years old, he could not understand what that meant.

“I feel like donuts,” Adam said.

“Donuts?”

“I know Daddy Warbucks feels like donuts. What does the ol’ champion say?”

Renee wasn’t watching this exchange. Her back was to them both. Now the sun had come up and the snow in the backyard was glaring
bright. The sense of their Illinois home being an absolute arctic wasteland had faded some, and now it even appeared beautiful
to Renee, in some abstract way. In some alternate universe, this exact family is on their way out to go ice-skating together,
she thought. She felt gray and numb. She was at the sink, looking down at the bits of onion and dill that had collected in
the drain guard.

She reached her finger down and started scooping up what she could.

“Then, let’s have them,” she heard Bill say. “I’m no anti-donutist.”

She turned.

“Okay, my boys. Let’s have them, I agree,” she said. “Should I go? Why don’t I just bring them back?”

“We can all go,” Adam said. “Isn’t that weird? To imagine actually, like, sitting down at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

Adam laughed. He had stripped his layers down and was now wearing only jeans and a white T-shirt. He’d already buzzed his
hair once, which had upset her. It had grown out a little since and he hadn’t done it again. Still, it was only fuzz. Beneath
his light stubble his cheeks were rosy, and she could still see the twelve-year-old boy in his long face. Now, she admitted,
it was a man’s face, not a boy’s—strong cheekbones and a strong jaw, considerate and expectant eyes. He was athletic, he looked
strong. But when he looked at her, she saw the child first, then what was real.

“That sounds like a fun adventure,” she said.

Bill just stared.

“Let’s all go,” she said, nodding. “I think it’ll be nice. I haven’t eaten a donut in about five years.”

For a moment the two watched her at the sink.

“You’re totally not into this,” Adam said. “It’s fine.”

“I am,” she said. “Really.”

“I do like the fake positivity, Mom.”

“It’s not fake,” she said. “It’s not.”

“Eating donuts here, at home, is also interesting,” Bill said. “To me. Incidentally. Do you two realize what it’s like out
there?”

Adam stepped sideways; he stood directly behind his father. She watched as he ceremoniously placed his hand on the skin of
Bill’s bald head. Adam started rubbing back and forth. Bill didn’t bother turning around and looking up. This had happened
before. It was their routine.

“What does the genie tell you?” Bill asked, still holding his coffee cup.

“The genie tells me that your attitude about the donuts,” Adam said, “sucks ass.”

“What else does it say?”

“The genie says you want to go out, not stay here.”

“All right, all right,” Bill said, pushing Adam’s hand away. “Let’s go sit at Dunkin’ Donuts, then. Like every family should.”

Adam had taken quite a shine to what this week was becoming: anything he wanted. It reminded Renee of how he’d been at Christmas
a decade ago. All the usual things—unable to sleep, obsessed with his presents, Santa Claus. Wanting to camp on the roof to
see. But his enthusiasm for the holiday ran deeper than it did for other children, she knew. The idea of
gift,
of
present
. Of getting when it was not asked and giving when it was not asked. She had seen his fascination with it over the years.
The transition of things—that was his obsession.

Was it such a stretch to say this same feeling was what drew him to Iraq? No clear idea of what he would be giving but the
sense that it was, asked for or unasked for, another gift? If so, if that was really it, then she was sorry, he was her son
but he was an idiot. The blurred lines infuriated her. He had probably heard some blustering man on CNN one day say something
about the gift of freedom and used that to make up his mind.

As she slid her coat over her shoulders and found her hat, she thought that this was the perfect paradox of parenting: they
ignored every lesson you taught and instead found lessons you had never thought to teach and made them their own. They got
them somewhere, picked them up, looked at them like they were shiny baubles on the side of the road—they understood that they
were not their parents’ laws and not their history’s laws, so they made them their own. For freedom’s sake. Or maybe just
to survive.

She looked in the mirror and brushed her hair aside, tucking a clump of bangs beneath the elastic of the maroon wool. She
did not feel old. She was fifty-eight years old and she felt forty-two, and she’d felt forty-two since she’d turned forty-two.
She’d had Adam at thirty-nine. So late the doctors had been concerned. Bill had not wanted any children. Neither had she.
But she’d woken up one summer day in 1988 and realized she’d been wrong, and she’d said to Bill she was wrong, and he’d thought
and had said, finally, okay, I understand. We’ll have one. We can do this—at least we’ve got the money now, huh? Renee had
thought: when did we ever not have the money?

She didn’t look old. Good skin, her mother always said. You have good skin, absolutely unlike mine. Renee was glad for whatever
genetic anomaly made it possible. Now, adjusting her hair, she felt what she always felt when she looked at her face—glad
it was her own but surprised this was the thing that stood her place in the world and showed people it was she.

Here is me, she thought.

“Ready?”

“I’m ready.”

Dunkin’ Donuts wouldn’t have been too difficult a walk, but it had snowed overnight, then frozen over, and the sidewalks weren’t
clear. She waited beside Adam in the snow as Bill backed the car out of the garage. The air was cold but not unbearable. She
let it come down into her lungs and meet with the warmth of her body. She imagined it down there, swirling.

“It’s cold, huh?” Adam said.

The garage door was coming up. Adam put his arm over his mother’s shoulder and squeezed her once, quickly, as though to warm
the air in her lungs. It meant more. She knew it was his way of trying to apologize. He’d done it over and over again these
last weeks, made small apologies. Replacing the batteries of the smoke detector as an I’m sorry, sweeping out the garage as
an I’m sorry. He couldn’t say it out loud, because he didn’t actually mean it, but he could give invisible apologies that
were just apologies for making her so afraid.

“It is,” she said, tightening her shoulders at his touch. “Yes. Brrr.”

“Mom,” he said, looking down at her. “Come on.”

“What?”

“I can tell you don’t feel good. It’s obvious.”

“Can you?”

He looked at the white lights of the car as it crept from the garage. “Just don’t get all weird. I’m leaving in a couple—”

“Weird is a lazy word, Adam. Don’t you dare use it on me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” she said, “and you know what I mean, and we’re going to get donuts. I’m fine.” She twisted her head and looked up
at him. “Is that weird?”

“No,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay,” he said, taking his arm away. “You’re not, but okay.”

They drove down the street, just a half mile, Adam in the back, his knees up awkwardly, Bill leaning forward and being careful
on the slippery roads. She tried to find the word Adam hadn’t been able to find as they sat in an orange booth at Dunkin’
Donuts. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t remove her coat or hat as they ate. Perhaps it was the urge to flee at a moment’s
notice. Both Bill and Adam did remove their coats. They hung on the hooks attached to their booth. Dunkin’ Donuts, she thought.
I have never, she thought, actually been in a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was down the street from the house she’d lived in for fifteen
years, and she’d driven past it nearly every day. She’d walked by it, she’d stared at the bubble lettering. She’d looked through
the glass at people chomping down. Still, this was the first time she’d ever been inside.

She ate one donut and they each ate four; they had coffee and she had water in a Styrofoam cup. As they talked she looked
out the half-frosted window at the whitened street, saw cars sliding here and there, and thought: not weird but displaced.
Not weird but discord. Not weird but unexpected. Not weird but inharmonious. Not weird but improper. Not weird but juxtaposed.

“—-still going to Hawaii, then?” Adam was saying.

She turned back to them. Adam stared at her. Bill, also, looked and waited.

“Are we still going?” she said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

She looked at her husband. “I don’t know. Are we? Have we decided? I thought all this was all on hold.”

“I think we’re going,” Bill said, pushing his chin down in what Renee had always taken to be something he did in meetings.
“All things considered. We need sun. Both of us.”

They’d had the plan for a year, longer than they’d known that Adam would be leaving. The idea of the trip, now, to Renee,
was repulsive. Vacations were unethical. Adam was going to the desert to be killed to prove a point about the upper middle
class’s dedication to democracy, and they would be lying on a beach, tanning, while it happened.

She was the one to plan it and now she would rather die than go to Hawaii.

“I do need it,” she said. “I do need a break, it’s true.”

She would find some other way to kill the trip after Adam was gone. Her fear of flying would overwhelm her the week before.

“You’ll get it,” Bill said. He patted Adam on the shoulder. “Next year, kiddo, you come, too. Try to have a wife with you,
okay? Or at least a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, right,” Adam said, smiling widely, and Renee looked at the smile and thought: you are a child.

She turned away from them. Through the window she saw a mother pushing a stroller. She caught the slightest glimpse of a puffy
blue hood ringed with fur inside and imagined the baby sitting upright, eyes open, taking in the cold and snow. Some little
boy having his first taste of what it was like when the elements became disagreeable. The mother was dressed in brown fashionable
clothes and had a black stocking cap on. She looked rich. Bill and Adam again dropped into their own conversation, and Renee
scraped a piece of frosting from her fingernail. All she had to do was check in once in a while. She knew that. She was allowed
her leeway. Adam could get donuts on Saturday morning and she could stare out the window while it happened. They all agreed
that she would drift off here and there.

And why shouldn’t I? she wondered. Here, here, I make this choice, good-bye. Then she could daydream. She could think about
what she would write later on. She could form phrases, crack them apart, lock them back together. She could do whatever she
wanted if they could do whatever they wanted.

She looked at the plowed piles of snow up against the curb—there was one mound in particular that seemed to be almost a perfect
pyramid, and someone had made the decision to place a snowball at the peak. She hoped it would snow again tonight, that they
would all be able to sit together in the living room after supper and they would all be able to glance up, from time to time,
through the windows and see the white dropping down, and that way, they would all know—that way, there would be one more thing.
She imagined it: black-orange sky, white snow. Maybe even red fire in the living room. If she was allowed to make a memory,
right here, today, that would be exactly it. If God reached down and handed her a sack with every single thing inside of it
and told her she was allowed to make just one memory from the ingredients, whether or not it happened, whether or not it was
real, that would be exactly it.

It didn’t snow again. Instead of staying home, Adam decided to go bowling with his friends.

It was Saturday night and he was leaving on Wednesday. He promised to come again tomorrow, watch football with his father,
and afterward stay for dinner. Now Bill was on the couch, glasses low on his nose, engrossed in an episode of
Mystery!
She watched it with him for five minutes but decided to go to the office and look over her manuscript.