But you are done with these women. You are done. They can bulldoze their way through life and you will run for the exits if you see them. They have brought you nothing but grief.
Your baby boy realizes you aren’t going to pick him up and turns his head to Anita but doesn’t make a sound. Kicks his legs and shoves his hand back in his mouth.
Guilt is a useless emotion. What does it do, really? Makes you feel bad and that makes you feel virtuous because you feel bad.
Big eyes. He’s giving you big, hopeful eyes. He can see you. He has power, but it’s quiet, nothing obvious or flashy. You move in carefully, cautiously, but Anita is not looking, steadfastly not looking, not watching TV or listening to music, but not participating in this little scene. It wasn’t Anita who called you. You are here because your son wants you here. He wants someone, anyone, and he has no idea who you are. Anita or Psycho Maggie will banish you back to the woods any minute.
Baby Boy Trickster reaches out and grabs for your hand.
Oh, that is impossible. There is no way that you can feel his warm, chubby fingers locked on your pointer, but here we are. Your baby can touch the incorporeal.
This is all he wants from you. He wants you to let him hold your finger as he gnaws on his other fist, his cheeks chapped and shiny with drool. You’re not the fatherly type. This is well-established. No one is going to argue with that statement. You don’t see the point of kids. But you’re curious about what else your boy can do. You feel an unusual flutter that is…pride? Excitement? What the hell is this?
The world shifts. Not your heart, or you, or anything in particular, but you feel the futures you were going to move through die and here is your new future, taking his drooly fist out of his mouth to offer you a damp Cheerio.
The very basics of magic: everything you meet, you’ll meet again.
Magic is a gravitational-like force, surprisingly weak unless you have a decent mass of material, of powers. Then magic becomes the great attractor. The stronger the magic, the harder the pull. Baby Boy Trickster here blasted through all the considerable warding his mother and grandmother put up and yanked you from your grave so that you would be standing here now to keep him company, and the kid didn’t even break a sweat.
Pop.
Blue’s Clues you could deal with, but the Teletubbies were relentlessly creepy. Bob the Builder was okay, but someone needed to send a Terminator back in time to kill the guy that thought up Thomas the Tank Engine. Jared the baby Trickster developed a fixation on Percy and he wanted you to be Thomas so you could go on adventures together. They’re all whingy nerds, you thought. But Jared was more interesting than the woods around your grave, even when he was rolling the toy Percy obsessively over the wooden tracks of the very expensive train set Sophia had given her “grandson” for Christmas. Now there was a nuclear explosion ready to happen. You were very much looking forward to watching Sophia nuke Maggie. Jared hugged Percy to his chest and slept with Percy beside him, resting on his very own Percy-sized pillow made from a rolled-up feminine hygiene product with a Percy-sized blanket made from a dishcloth.
Toy Percy went missing at school. Jared hid under the bed and stuffed his jacket into his mouth and cried. He wanted you and you popped into his room and he told you how Percy was in his backpack on his hook but then he wasn’t and the teacher asked if Jared played with him at recess and he said no but she didn’t believe him and she let him cry at the back of the class. Maggie knocked on the bedroom door and you zipped back to your grave. Whatever transpired while you were gone you never knew. A few days later, you were in the corner looking out the window when Phil came home saying they had found Percy and Jared gripped his toy and took him back to his bedroom and left him on the tracks and crawled under the bed again.
This is the kind of thing you aren’t good with. You didn’t really care about the whole Percy drama. But if Jared was going to mope, maybe you could speed things up.
“What’s up?” you said, sliding under the bed. “Percy’s back. I thought you’d be happy.”
“It’s Percy,” Jared said. “But it’s not my Percy.”
“He’s a replacement Percy, huh?”
Jared nodded. “But if I say anything, Mom and Dad will be sad that I’m sad.”
“And that makes you sadder?”
“It hurts.”
“Ah.”
Kids. Little weirdos with lax bladder control. Slightly better than monkeys, but more prone to bite.
“Story,” Jared said.
You told him about your grandfather, who took your finger and traced the carved symbols on a one-ton granite rock down the beach that makes a calendar with the light from the setting sun and the shadows from the peaks of the mountains. The sun set on this mountain on December 21 and walked across six mountains to here on June 21 and then it walked back and that was one year. When the sun hit a specific spot on the mountain marked by the calendar rock, it was time to leave the winter camps and go to where the herring spawn. And when it reached here, you had to go to the rivers where the oolichan spawn. And here the first growth of seaweed would be ripe and you had to go out to the rocks the seaweed liked to grow on, where the ocean
