The Kingdom of Childhood

That night he lay in bed with his hands behind his head, exhausted from the day’s work, listening to the murmuring on the other side of the wall. His mother’s voice was nearly inaudible; only his father’s baritone vibrated noticeably through the drywall. He closed his eyes and tried to take advantage of the sound. When he was a child he had found it easier to fall asleep when he could listen to the meandering drone of his father’s voice. But shortly he heard his mother laugh; the bed creaked, and before long the sounds grew different, more rhythmic in some ways, more random in others.

He turned over on his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head.

It had never bothered him before, but tonight it did. It was too easy to visualize now. Like learning a new language, the sounds didn’t all run together like they used to—what each represented, he immediately recognized. It was gross, all of a sudden; but also, it gave him a feeling of dread. His mom was on bed rest. Rhianne had a long list of things she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and this was one of them. He hated the thought that she was giving in to it anyway, driven by the same monster that he couldn’t control, the same weakness that had driven her to Booger. She was pregnant. She was a mother. She needed to be better than that.

He pressed the pillow against his ears with his fists and waited until it was over.

At the funeral, back in July, Bobbie’s grave had been a neat rectangle sliced into the turf. Its edges were so sudden and stark against the healthy grass that it might have been drawn by a child, Harold and his purple crayon, sketching an incongruous shape right here; because goodness knows none of us was quite sure how it came to be there. The rich gardening smell that rose up from it, good loamy soil, seemed like an affront to her, something to be ignored. Now, in the chill November air, everything was more correct. The yellow grass crunched harshly beneath my thin-soled shoes; the wind carried the smell of drying leaves, and where there had once been a gaping wound in the earth, there was now only a hard ridge, barely visible, like a scab.

I approached her headstone in my pea coat, flowerless and empty-handed. Prayers were not on my agenda; she and God could hash out her needs between themselves, and I knew I wouldn’t be doing her any favors by offering myself as a reference. I stuffed my hands into the sleeves of my coat and spoke aloud to her, haltingly.

“Bobbie,” I began, “I’m sorry about what happened in your classroom the other day. I know you would think I’m horrible for what I’ve been doing. Believe me, I think about that often. You aren’t the kind of teacher who would ever have—done anything wrong with a student. I didn’t intend to make you the host of anything like that.” I took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m very sorry.”

A small plastic nosegay had been wedged into the flower holder. Its lurid green stems shivered stiffly in the wind. I thought about how Bobbie had looked in the hospital that last week, lying in her bed under a jumble of clear tubing, her hair soft and short and growing back finally, her droll gaze gone flat and perturbed as she stared at the television. At one point her sister-in-law came in and told her she was putting up a great fight. I’m not fighting anything, she snapped. I’m not winning. I’m not losing. I just lie here and it fucks me up. It’s cancer, not a football game. I felt terribly sorry for her then. I didn’t pretend to know how she suffered, but I knew what it meant to feel helpless that way, invisibly taken over by a force that confounded you.

I crossed my arms over my chest, letting my coat bunch up against my chin. “I just don’t know where to go from here. I can’t stop, Bobbie. I crave him worse than I’ve ever craved anything. I just have to let it run its course until he gets tired of me. And I know he will. I know it, and I can’t stand it. I’d do anything to keep that from happening.”

I clutched my arms more tightly around my coat and snuffled noisily. Tears overflowed onto my cheeks and immediately chilled. I wiped my gloved hand beneath my nose and felt my neck tense with an unreleased sob. And that was the worst thing: knowing that I was speaking into the void, into the endless empty space before me. Because only Bobbie knew what the word anything meant coming from me, and if she wasn’t here to stop me, who would?

On Tuesday the students returned to school punchy and disobedient, as though having one day off made them feel entitled to two and they would punish us for not granting it. As the day wound down, the low roar of teenagers being let out of Madrigals practice was audible from the opposite side of the school. I found Scott playing Medieval Judo with his friends in the hallway outside the multipurpose room. Zach was spread-eagled on the tile, apparently recovering from a mortal injury.

“Ready to leave?” I asked Scott. I looked down at Zach. “Are we taking you home?”

“Uh-huh.” He raised his knees and then, with acrobatic quickness, leaped to a crouch and then straightened up.

As I had done before, I dropped off Scott at home with an excuse that I needed to stop at the grocery store across town. Once we pulled away from the house, Zach said, “I don’t think he’s going to buy that one much longer.”

“He doesn’t care. He isn’t paying attention.”

The side of Zach’s mouth twisted with doubt. “I wouldn’t be too sure. That’s probably what my mother thought, too.”

My heart palpitated. “Your mother found something out?”

“No, I mean, when she was getting with the yoga guy. She probably thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Oh.” A cold light rain had begun to fall. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. “Okay, I’ll try to be more innovative.”

I turned into the school parking lot, but it was still full of cars from extracurriculars. “I forgot about that,” I said. “Damn.”

“It’s not a good night for it anyway,” Zach said. “I’ve got a lot of homework tonight, seriously. And I’m out of condoms.”

“Your teachers know you had Madrigals tonight. They’ll let you slide on the homework. And we can go without the condoms.”

“No, we can’t.”

“Yes, we can. I’ve been on the Pill for weeks now, and neither of us is sleeping with anybody else, so far as I know.”

“Yeah, but it’s still safer if you use them.”