Endurance Tests Two days after his dog gets hit by a car, my son starts playing dead. I'm washing dishes when I see him through the kitchen window: sprawled in the backyard, neck bent in a tight angle against the bottom of a tree, the undersides of his arms mushroom pale. I run for the back door, plates rattling on the counter, my sudsy hands slipping on the knob. "Chris!" I yell, on my knees next to him. "Chris!" Crying as I reach to straighten his arms and legs, lift his head from the hollow of the tree root. But I force myself not to touch, not to damage him further. "Please," I whisper.
Arms wobbling, I push myself to my feet to call 911, and then I see him smile. Just slightly, the corner of his mouth tucking into the cheek. Squinting up at me through one slitted eye. "Gotcha."
Behind the bushes, at the back of our yard, was where I'd dug Jake's grave. It was dark as I shoveled pieces of wet earth and piled them to one side, and I wasn't sure how well the shrubs would camouflage. But Chris had already seen the heavy garbage bag dragged behind the garage and the towel, rusty with blood and dirt, stuffed into the bin. I'd said it would be better to stay in his room, knowing even as the words pressed past my lips that he wouldn't. His face against the front window, watching me pass. Me slapping the mound with the shovel, knowing it wouldn't matter how flat it was; he wouldn't forget what he had seen or turn his mind from what was gone.
The next night, my ears twitch as Chris fizzes motor sounds in the bath, varying them for each boat, each speed. My breath loud in my ears at any silence.
"Hey, Mom," he calls. "Can you get me a towel?"
I jump from my bed at his voice, try for nonchalance in mine. "I thought second graders remembered that kind of thing," I say from the bathroom doorway.
"Come on, Mom."
"Just going with what you've told me." The phone rings, and I point a finger at him. "No splashing all over the floor."
Wet head flipping water with the nod, a fierce motor sound. I'm busy here.
Back down the hallway, I grab the phone just before the answering machine clicks. "Hello?"
Silence. "Oh, sorry, I almost hung up."
Ben. "Hi," I say, no nonchalance this time, just a compression, a loss of air.
"I thought you weren't there."
"Chris is in the bath."
"Well, that's what I was calling about."
"His bath?" I joke hollowly. Faint motor sounds buzzing down the hallway.
"Come on, Elise. Chris. When I should pick him up Friday."
I can't get used to visitation rights. Sometimes, I want to shake Ben at the front door and make him explain why he's so good about getting his two weekends a month, when four years ago he couldn't wait to leave us both. Other times I feel sorry for him. On the good days.
"And why aren't we doing Saturday like normal?" I flip through my desk calendar, phone cord twisting around my wrist.
"Because I want to take him up to the cottage. I told you last time." He had, but I want to make him tell me again. This is my game. Playing amnesia.
"Are you sure he's up to being away from home two nights in a row?" I bargain.
"Elise, he wants to go, and you know it."
"So it's just going to be you two?"
"Of course."
"Guys' weekend, huh?"
"We might look for a dog. I know he misses Jake."
"No dogs for a while unless you keep it," I say, and he sighs. I've won this round, but it doesn't matter. My ears twitch again, scanning for splash sounds, but there are none.
"All right, whatever. When can I come by?"
"Six. See you." I'm already hanging up, his good-bye tiny and canned. I glide down the hall, remembering playing Indian when I was Chris's age, silently moving over leaves. I'm on patrol, ready to catch him at it this time.
I push open the door, and he's face down, arms and legs splayed, hair clouding out from his scalp.
"Chris," I demand. Then shout. I look for a heartbeat to tremble the surface, but then I can't wait; I'm on my knees, sliding on tiles, dragging him from the water, maybe more roughly than necessary. He twists, reflexively throwing his arms around me, sucking in air. But his eyes are still closed, as if that alone can maintain the illusion.
I sit him on the mat and lean against the tub next to him, not caring that the water's soaking through to my underwear. "Why are you doing this?" I watch him breathe, touch dripping horns of hair, try to replace my grab with gentleness.
No response. Even now, shivering, arms wrapping around his chest, he doesn't open his eyes. He grits his teeth to stop their chattering.
"It scares me when you play dead. Is that what you want?"
He opens his eyes and hugs himself tighter. "I want my towel."
That night, I stare at the ceiling for a good hour before finally giving up on sleep. Downstairs I'm looking through bills. Too late to call Marcie, my closest friend, even with her late hours and the time difference.
In our small town, Marcie was the only child whose parents were divorced. Her father had moved out to the Midwest and remarried. My father was gone, too; dead of a heart attack only two years after I was born. So Marcie and I were linked, daughters without fathers, and our mothers let us wander between our houses like sisters.
But it was the summer of the endurance tests that glazed our friendship, preserving it for later years. The drills started by the creek that ran behind all of the houses on our street. The first test involved walking barefoot over the sharp stones that washed down from the quarry. Sandals for markers. That first day, Marcie moved them farther and farther apart as the sun angled down through the trees, and I wouldn't back down, even when the wrinkled skin between my toes bled. We limped home. Then at it again, the next day. It was Marcie who pushed me to get up when I crouched, soaking my raw toes in the trickling water, our secret preparation.
In bed again, I set my own marker in the gravel. There won't be any discussion about playing dead. Something tells me there might be better choices, that I should be patient and communicative, talk through the problem, all the wisdoms I might offer a parent complaining of a homework-refusing child on teacher conference night. But in times of discomfort, we turn to what we know, and my accountant mother wasn't one to facilitate self-esteem through family involvement after a full day of crunching numbers, for which she was paid far less than her male counterparts. So the next night, I'm all business, helping Chris pick out school clothes and making him a lunch downstairs while he selects a story to read to me. But when I come back upstairs, he's already turned out the overhead light; only the night light glows beside his bed. Stretched on his back, eyes pinched closed, chin pointing up in an angle defying the relaxation of sleep.
I sit on the bed, my hip against his rib cage, and run my fingers through his fine brown hair. His father's hair, exactly. "Chris," I whisper in his ear, letting my lips tickle him. "You aren't fooling me. OK?" This is too much; he squirms and opens his eyes.
"Mom," he moans, stretching the word into two syllables, "I was sleeping."
"No, you weren't." I match the singsong in his voice.
"Yes, I was."
"Honey, please. Give me a break."
"No!" Angry now, he twists away from me, shoulders curled into his neck.
Much as I had done, those nights of fiercely whispered arguments, to Ben.
Marcie and I were writing and occasionally visiting in college when I met Ben. I was new to dating, on which Marcie alternately teased and coached me. During fall break of my senior year, I spent a weekend with her at Amherst, where she was studying political science on scholarship and secretly dating her married professor. When I told her Ben and I were going to get married when I graduated, she shook her head. "With all the men I've dated, you'd think someone would've asked me by now." Books and notes surrounded her on the narrow kitchen table. She rolled a tube of lipstick under one hand. "Not," she said, "that I would say yes."
That spring, my mother flew with me to Ohio, where Ben's large family lived. She walked me down the aisle of the small church; Marcie was my maid of honor. The reception took place on Ben's family's farm -- sweet wine and slices of roast beef on sun-dappled paper plates. I would have agreed to live there, if he had suggested it. But we came to this town because Ben and a college friend planned to start their own architectural firm.
Ben wanted to design a house for us, but there was never time between my teaching and his fledgling business. We bought this house, and I was happy that it was near the elementary school and that it had a big front yard, which I imagined crowded with our future children and their neighborhood friends. Over the next six years, Ben knocked in walls, moved doorways, and added skylights and porches and landscaping, as if these would make him believe we weren't living in a row of houses as uniform as beads on a string. When I wanted to discuss children, offering to quit my job, Ben said we couldn't afford it; what with a mortgage and the firm's uncertain future, we needed my teacher's salary. I knew exactly what he was trying to do when he brought Jake home from the pound; he wanted to put me off, substitute a dog for a child.
Of course, once Ben had agreed to fatherhood, he seemed to embrace it, but somehow I felt his meticulous preparations were more for himself than our child. He built a crib with high slats; he installed an intercom system -- the speaker on my side of the bed. He spent long hours working at the growing firm; we needed a safety net, he said one night, pulling a pillow to himself. Instead of me.
Eating dinner Friday evening, I study Chris as he checks the bright-green watch his father gave him with the same upward snap of his wrist. He glances at me, as if he feels guilty to want to know the time. His duffel bag waits by the front door. "Are you excited?" I ask.
"Yeah. Dad says he's going to take me ou...
