BACK THROUGH THE RABBIT HOLE and down the stairs. I tuck the boy into bed and arrange his pillows around him. Sam is breathing well now. But his body is too warm and the hair at the back of his neck is damp. I settle onto the floor with the remote control and flick on the television. I watch cartoons for a while but they depress me for some reason. I surf away and come upon a rerun of Starsky & Hutch squatting on some channel ominously called TV Land. The implications of such a channel are too brutal to wrap my noodle around and anyway Huggy Bear is giving a wildly animated, hopelessly rhetorical, and truly surreal speech about human rights. He’s wearing a maroon suit and a pink tie and a big straw hat and his eyes are bugging out of his tiny head. I’m good for about five minutes of this before I freak out and am forced to flee TV Land. I cruise the TV universe until I find a ball game, the Red Sox and Yankees.
This has potential tragedy written all over it and I promptly mute the sound.
I am tempted to skulk upstairs and get a beer and a sandwich but I’m in no mood to run into any of the others. I don’t want to know what they’re up to and besides, beer would only make me want a cigarette and I would rather not smoke around the boy. I fetch a juice box from the little fridge and settle in to watch the Yankees massacre the Sox.
Baseball slows the vital functions and in no time I am dreamy, contemplative.
I contemplate the boy. He is approximately forty-nine pounds of flesh and bone. Blond hair and big brown eyes nearly black. He has eyes that could swallow you. His nose is the size of a button, the size of my thumbnail. His unflawed skin is somewhere between pink and pale yellow, the flesh of a peach. His hands are devastating. His hands could make a monster weep. He smells like the sun, like the fine sparkle of dust swimming in a burst of sunlight. He smells like a color you can’t name.
He breathes, in and out. Five years of life, barely a ripple.
But there is some serious voodoo packed into his small body and it’s not just him, but all children. There is nothing on the planet quite like a sick or injured child, a frightened child. Jude is a cool hand and usually nothing touches her, nothing moves her. But I could see the boy tugging freely at her cold, broken heart.
This is something that fills my head, sometimes. The idea that I broke her heart somehow.
I fall asleep next to the boy and dream that we are lost in the woods together. Sam is unchanged. He is five years old, with long blond hair. I am nine, his brother. The trees are dense and twisted, with thin black branches that hang just above our heads and tangle together like terrible hair, blotting out the sky. Unseen wolves howling in the dark, their voices ghostly.
Sam is brave, though.
He pushes ahead and I follow him and when we come to a house of gingerbread and licorice, I know that the house is not safe. It’s not safe but I have no control over my limbs and I stroll directly up to the door and hammer on it while Sam helps himself to a tasty chunk of cinnamon rain gutter. The woman who comes to the door is no crusty hag, however. She is maybe thirty, with hair black as tar. She wears raw leather pants stained with what looks like blood and a vest made of fine silver chain. The woman smiles when she sees us and her teeth glitter white as needles. I don’t trust her but Sam shouts hooray when she asks if we like sugar cookies. He trots inside and I follow him, helpless. The woman strokes my face and her fingers are cold and bony, with long black nails. She purrs that it’s a shame but I am too old for her table, that my skin will be tough and gamey. But my brother is still soft and plump and if killed properly and marinated in butter and blackberry wine he will make a delicious stew. The woman asks me to gather wood for her fire and I comply.
I am not stupid, however.
I am only vaguely aware that this is a dream and I can’t seem to wake myself up but I know this woman. I would know her anywhere. I shiver myself awake and Sam is sitting on his haunches like a little stone frog beside me, staring at my face with profound curiosity.
My head hurts, he says.
I know, I say. Mine does, too.
You were talking, he says.
What was I saying?
You said you weren’t hungry. Then you said the boy is my brother.
Jesus.
Am I the boy?
Yes.
You were having a dream, he says. A bad dream, huh.
Very bad, I say.
What was it about?
His face is pale and fine, his lips still rosy with fever. He is so close to me that I can smell his breath when he exhales. The air coming from him is sour. The smell of sick.
How do you feel? I say.
He thinks for a minute. Okay, he says. But not my arm. My arms hurts.
What’s wrong with your arm?
I don’t know, he says.
Show me where it hurts.
He pulls his sleeve up over the elbow and I see it right away. On the pale underside of his biceps, there is small white mark surrounded by red flesh. It could be a puncture. It could be an insect bite. I take a deep breath and remind myself that kids get nervous when adults freak out.
That doesn’t look bad, I say. Do you remember feeling sick today?
Yeah, he says.
When did you feel sick?
Today, he says. A little while ago.
He bobs his head up and down and sideways and shrugs one shoulder and I remember that he’s five and therefore has no real sense of time.
Uh-huh. What were you doing?
I was sitting on the floor, he says. I was playing with the guys you got me. Wolverine and the guy with fire on his head. They were fighting.
Ghost Rider, I say.
Huh?
The guy with fire on his head is Ghost Rider.
Oh, yeah.
Who was winning?
Wolverine, mostly.
That makes sense. What else were you doing?
Nothing, he says. I was only watching TV… I was watching Sailor Moon and I was having some chocolate milk. That’s all.
Chocolate milk, huh.
He nods, vigorously. I like chocolate milk. I love it.
The trees are dense and twisted, with thin black branches that hang just above our heads and tangle together like terrible hair, blotting out the sky. Unseen wolves howling in the dark, their voices ghostly.
The boy is brave.
I don’t even have to think about it. The chocolate milk is bad, poisoned. I haul it out of the fridge and look at it carefully. The boy is watching me and it occurs to me that children, like animals, generally have a keen nose for madness. I don’t want to scare him, so I whistle softly as I examine the chocolate milk.
Paranoid people don’t whistle, surely.
What I’m looking at is an ordinary plastic milk jug with a white, screw-on top. Brown and white paper label with a bar code and the words chocolate milk two percent and Sunny Fields Dairy in bright, cheerful script followed by your average nutritional bullshit in small print. The jug is half empty. Or half full, if you’re a positive thinker like me. I unscrew the top and sniff it, then the contents of the jug. It smells like chocolate milk. But that’s too easy.
Do you want some? says the boy. He’s looking at me.
No, I say. I’m not thirsty.
