“Jesus Christ,” his grandfather said. “Mother of fucking Mary.” Then they both gulped when they recognized the sound of Cabot’s car. She pulled into a parking stall beside them and emerged from her driver’s side door, catching her son’s punished face through the window glass. Maybe at first she thought his gnarled face was just an optical illusion, but when Jared rolled down his window, she wept instantaneously. When Cabot cried, seventeen-year-old Jared cried too.
“This was not supposed to happen,” she said. Her sobs were like hiccups. She took Jared’s face delicately in her hands, as if he were covered in thistles, prodding his injuries, tapping his wounded skin. This was Jared’s version of the incident in the criminal complaint, but even as different renditions would emerge in the coming days, nobody disputed the fact that Cabot had insisted Jared show up at the clubhouse. Her son’s poor face had been tenderized, nothing to Pomeno but raw meat. If Cabot had coordinated the effort, what kind of mother was she, after all these years?
Irie was our only child who needed barbaric reminders to behave. She stirred the beast inside me. Perhaps we overindulged her moods and whims, ready, when she was born, to be parents but not yet disciplinarians. Both of us were pushovers the first baby-go-round, blessed with a girl who seemed not the product of Ryan and me but rather offspring to an opera singer and gladiator—fierce, unreasonable, and gifted at hooking adults into her highly emotional paradigm of the world. Who was to blame—us or her, nature or nurture?
One time, Irie refused an antibiotic by biting her tongue until blood streamed from her lips. Another time, she lopped off a chunk of hair at a sleepover, enough strands to fully stuff a business-size envelope, which was how the friend’s mother sent the locks home. The list of parents, teachers, coaches, principals, and supervisors she would drive to madness in her early childhood and elementary years was long and unforgiving. Whenever an adult approached me head-on, I’d stop breathing, bringing on self-induced dizziness, preparing to endure the next installment of ongoing bad reports.
In kindergarten at our neighborhood school, Irie’s teacher compared her to Tina Last’s son, the wild and unruly boy with an underbite and the voice of a cartoon monster. Later to be diagnosed with EBD, emotional behavior disorder, and relocated to a school that could accommodate his needs, Irie’s counterpart lived under the supervision of the voodoo doll mother. Neither tattooed nor pierced, except in my earlobes, a von Trapp girl in satin sashes, I’d stare at her spiked face as if looking in a mirror, fully aware we shared something in common, our children evil twins of the monogrammed ABCs reading carpet.
Tina Last appeared in constant need of exorcism, and I wondered, what did I look like to her? She slicked her hair to the scalp, tied it in a blood knot at the nape of her neck. Every week, she sewed a new metal hook or grapple to the sleeves of her army coat, a garment that surely also served as a torture device. Most of us wear our negative emotions, be they umbrage or grief, beneath our flesh, alongside our guts, hidden away, opting instead for polka dots and paisley, living, literally, under wraps. Tina Last would not conform to such norms. She walked about in public inside out. Each buckle, hook, sharp pin, and clasp represented pain, and I’d wince just looking at her.
She hovered in my peripheral vision, in school hallways and on sidewalks around our neighborhood, a reminder of my own depression history. Sometimes I wondered if I’d conjured up this alter ego. When I was first pregnant with Irelyn, a friend warned us of her nickname: “Irie sounds like ire as in anger, just one letter’s difference.” Pregnant and still teaching seventh and eighth graders at EAGLE School, I surprised myself once by screaming, truly at the top of my lungs, unendingly, to quiet the classroom. Although I was mostly too relaxed a mother, once our children began to arrive in quick succession, Ryan teased me about my quarterly meltdowns. Four times a year, I’d scream so fiercely our kids scattered like bugs, to hide from me beneath their beds. In small doses, I scared the bejesus out of them, as Tina Last did me.
Whenever we’d brainstorm options and investigate loopholes for sending our children to different schools, I’d think of Tina Last. Her son’s EBD diagnosis had afforded them the opportunity to receive an education elsewhere in the district. We’d later learn that Irie was not disturbed, just anxious, therefore naughty—nature and nurture. Her eldest-sibling status mixed up inside her a carbonated concoction of love, protectionism, and resentment. Anxiety brewed within our daughter as depression had percolated in me. Once when my stepmom asked Irie how she felt about Francis’s birth, she said, “Just one more kid to worry about.”
Even before siblings, Irie’s intensity burned hot. When she was only two years old, we were stuck awaiting Leo’s arrival in an Extended Stay America hotel room. We were no longer renting in Madison, but Leo’s due date and Ryan’s final exams coincided. We needed to be geographically proximate to the Madison Birth Center and the UW Law School, which were fifteen minutes from each other but nearly two hours from Oshkosh. A long weekend became two weeks, the three of us packed into a small room off the Beltline. Irie had arrived ten days early, so at four centimeters dilated and mostly effaced, my cervix seemed poised but unwilling to release Leo. Larger than I’d grow with any other pregnancy, not to mention continuing to indulge Irie with breast milk, as nursing was known to stimulate labor, I was baffled by Leo’s delay. Meanwhile, biting and twisting my nipples as a toddler bites instead of sucks on a straw in a milkshake, Irelyn was refusing naps, and I was desperate for daytime rest.
Surely she felt as trapped
