Something Happened

'How do you know?'

'You told me.'

'Sometimes I cry.'

'I'll come back.'

'I don't want to be alone.'

'You wouldn't be alone. You'd have Mommy.'

'Mommy doesn't like me.'

'Yes she does.'

'She yells at me.'

'I yell at you.'

'You don't like me.'

'You're full of bull. I'm always sorry afterward. You don't have to worry. I'll come back. I'm never going to leave you.'

'When you die?'

His question catches me by surprise. 'What made you think of that?'

'I don't want you to,' he answers solemnly. 'Maybe that's what made me think of it.'

'Ever?'

'No.'

'I'll try not to, then,' I laugh. (My laugh sounds forced, hollow.) 'For your sake. I don't want to, either.'

'You have to,' he speculates. 'Won't you?'

'Someday, I guess. By that time, though, you might not care.'

He looks up sharply. 'How come?'

'You'll be all grown up by then, if you're lucky, and won't need me anymore. You'll be able to take care of yourself and won't want me around. You might even be glad. I'll finally stop yelling at you.'

'Hey, slut, come here,' he calls out excitedly to my daughter with a grin of incredulous wonderment. His eyes gleam. 'Do you know what Daddy just said?' His eyes gleam. 'He said that when he dies we might not even care because all of us will be all grown up and able to take care of ourselves. We might even be glad.'

My daughter's mood is dour and unresponsive (and I feel already that she will soon be deep in deadening drugs, if she isn't using them already).

'What about Derek?' she demands with inspired malice, and her eyes grow bright and cold. I frown. (She is proud of this thrust.)

'I wasn't thinking about him.'

'You forgot about Derek.'

I forgot about Derek. I wish I could forget about him more often. It's hard to forget about him for long (while he's still here in the house with us, although I always try. When he's out of sight, he's usually out of my mind. We should send him away someplace and have him out of our house and minds for good. What a relief that will be. It would be upsetting. My daughter wants me to. My boy doesn't. It's no use seeing doctors anymore). Like my boy, I am afraid of doctors, nurses, and dentists (although I pretend not to be), and I guess I always have been. I'm afraid they might be right. (In the army, I would look directly at the needle when I got my immunization shots because I wanted so strongly to turn my head away. I am no longer a blood donor: I no longer give blood to my company blood bank when the Personnel and Medical Departments set up facilities annually to take blood from hardier employees than myself who volunteer and get thinned orange juice back in exchange. I do not set a good example for the people who work for me.) I am empathizing already with my boy's wisdom teeth. He has never mentioned them before (or I would have been empathizing with them sooner. I hope they're not impacted. How will I ever be able to get him to a dentist if he knows they are going to be pulled? Maybe he'll be different by then. And maybe he won't. I am not looking forward to having my own teeth pulled. I rarely get new cavities now, but old fillings fall away and teeth do have to be cleaned, and I don't like having my soft gums pricked by those hard, sharp dental instruments until they're sore from back to front and awash with blood. I don't like having my palate tickled when the backs of the uppers are polished. I am afraid to visit my dentist twice a year. I need periodontal work and have to go once a week). I am afraid of Forgione too (and would not want to have to climb ropes for him. He sneaks into my dreams occasionally too, along with niggers and other menacing strangers, steals through shadows in the background and slips away before I can find out what he is doing in them), although I do not associate him with the anesthetist at the tonsillectomy (who did not threaten me at all, although he did, quite cheerfully, give my boy a liquid anesthetic through a pink rubber tube as we watched. Is that an enema? Maybe he's right). No, I know I will never forget that tonsillectomy of his, or my own, or my daughter's, or the sequence of repetitious medical messages in hushed tones from doctors who told me to my face that my mother had probably suffered another small brain spasm or stroke and was degenerating simultaneously from progressive arthritis, so it was sometimes hard to be sure (for all of these were morbid and revolting experiences and I am unable to repress the memory of them), and I know I will also remember and dislike that last prospering young doctor with the pinstripe suit and exaggerated good posture (he was younger than I was and makes more money) as he stepped out onto the patio (I will never forget him) after examining Derek that pearly spring day (I will never forgive him), the screen door banging closed behind him, to tell us, with something of an unconscious quirk of a smile on his otherwise smug and emotionless face (I think I will always remember his smile):

'He will never speak.' That bastard.

All my life, it seems, I've been sandwiched between people who will not speak. My mother couldn't speak at the end. My youngest child Derek couldn't speak from the beginning. My sister and I almost never speak. (We exchange greeting cards.) I don't speak to cousins. (I may never speak. In dreams I often have trouble speaking. My tongue feels dead and dry and swollen enough to choke my mouth. Its coat is coarse. It will not move when I want it to, and I am in danger and feel terror because I cannot speak or scream.) I wish I didn't have to leave my family and go to Puerto Rico. (I worry when I have to go away. I worry about all of us. I worry what would happen to them if I did not return.)

Derek is pleasant enough most of the time (for a kid that cannot speak) and toilet trained now. He hardly ever causes a disturbance anymore when we take him out in public and usually does not act strange. But he will achieve a mental age of not much more than five, and arrive at that slowly, and turbulent emotional changes are expected with adolescence and full physical sexual maturity. (If he lives that long. I have heard that certain kinds of retardates — that's another thing we call him now — have a life expectancy shorter than average, and that's another thing I catch myself counting on.) He has a dreamy, staring, uncomprehending gaze at times that makes him appear preoccupied and distant, but apart from that, his face is not especially distinctive. (He does not embarrass us unless he tries to speak. We tell him not to.

'Shhhh,' we whisper.)

'Will he ever speak?' my boy asks.

'No.'

'Will you send him away?'

'We'll do what's best.'

'Would you send me away if I couldn't speak?'

'You can speak.'

'If I couldn't?'

'You can.'

'But if I couldn't. If something happened to me.'

'We would do what was best.'

'For who?' sneers my daughter.

'For all of us. We aren't sending him away just because he can't speak.'

'Please don't give him away,' begs my boy, who is unable even to look at him without drawing back.

'Then why don't you help us with him?' I demand. 'You never want to play with him. Neither of you.'

'Neither do you,' sneers my daughter.

I do not reply.

My boy is silent.

In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of the family is not afraid of any