Stranglehold (12 page)

She thought about it. She guessed that
Arthur'd
been talking to him about Indian fakirs on beds of nails, fire-walkers, that kind of thing. But Robert wasn't talking about the mysteries of neurological functions now. He'd got it mixed up. It was clear he was worrying about
expressing
pain, ashamed of crying. He was talking about some ridiculous macho thing. Getting into the fakirs and fire-walkers now would probably only confuse him.

But she was going to scotch
this
one right away.

"Daddy's wrong," she said. "If you hurt, you hurt. Period. And it's all right to yell as hard as you want to or cry as hard as you want to. You don't have to try to tough it out just because you're a boy. Okay?"

He nodded. "Okay."

But then over time when he still kept falling and bumping into things she saw very little in the way of tears.

Not even after a nightmare. And he evidently had some
doozies
.

The worst thing, though, from both hers and Robert's point of view, was that at the age of almost eight he'd begun to soil the bed at night.

Not wetting it. Having bowel movements in his sleep.

It didn't happen every night but as many as three or four a week.

He hadn't done that since he was out of diapers. And now here he was back
in
them again, and damned humiliated by it. At an age when all the other kids wanted to go over to friends' houses on sleepover nights or have other kids to their house he could have none of it. He got asked and then he had to lie and say no, his mom was too strict and wouldn't let him.

Close friends like Cindy knew the truth. With most of the other mothers she simply backed his lie. Let them think what they wanted about her. She didn't trust them with his secret.

She didn't even tell his teacher, although she was working closely with Mrs.
Youngjohn
on some of his other problems. Lydia could see that just having it happen to him at all embarrassed the hell out of him. Other kids and parents knowing would be awful.

He started doing something very strange which she thought was somehow related.

The first time he did it she figured he was just being sort of perverse. Kids could be that way.

But later, as it continued, she wondered.

She walked into his room one night where he sat on the bed playing with his guys, bashing them into each other. Some superhero war game.

"Got to put this on," she said and held up the diaper. "Bedtime."

By then he knew the drill. But he didn't have to like it. "Just a minute, okay? Just one more minute," he said and continued bashing away.

"
Now
," she said.

He sighed and made a face, making a big mock show of anger as he took off his clothes and got onto the bed.

And that was when he did what struck her as so completely odd.

He knelt on the bed stark naked and pressed his skinny chest directly to his knees
.

His forehead rested on the mattress.

He dropped his arms behind him, fingertips touching his feet.

His pale white butt was sticking straight up at her. It was so unexpected that she laughed.

"Robert, what are you doing? How am I supposed to get a diaper on you in that position?"

She couldn't, obviously. It wasn't possible.

He didn't answer.

"Robert?"

He didn't move, either.

Protest
, she thought. He doesn't feel like going to bed yet and he doesn't want the diaper on so he's found a brand-new wrinkle
. Kids
.

"Hey. Robert. This is not funny. Now roll over on your back so I can get this on, okay?"

He did as he was told.

She looked at him in silence as she worked. His expression was almost somber.

Poor little guy, she thought. Bromberg, the child psychologist he was seeing, wasn't doing him a damn bit of good. Bromberg said it would take time. Well, it was taking too damn
much
time. Every day she could see another grain of his happiness, his childhood, his personality being washed away like sand on a beach by these constant waves of exclusion and humiliation.

I'm different
, he must think.

I stutter and I shit the bed so I'm bad
.

And how to tell him that he wasn't bad without—just by discussing it—humiliating him further? Without admitting that any kid who did this all the time at his age had a pretty good
reason
to feel screwed up and different?

He was the only kid in his class who was seeing a psychologist.

He was aware of that too.

She was afraid to say anything to him at the moment, to call any more attention to his problems. Afraid to give them any more undue weight and substance.

Instead as she handed him his
pyjamas
she asked him about the other thing.

She smiled. "So what was that all about?"

"Huh?"

"Your cute little butt in the air. What was that stuff?" She thought he'd laugh but he didn't. He only shrugged. "Well, it's a whole lot easier on me when you're lying on your back, don't you think?"

He nodded.

She pulled the covers up over him and leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

"Night, honey," she said. "You sleep well."

"Night, mom."

His voice sounded so small to her. Like the voice of a child half his age.

She turned off his light and went downstairs and hours later fell asleep on the couch wondering what to do for him or if there was anything she could do at all.

She thought that night that she'd seen the last of what she came to think of as the butt-in-the-air, knee-chest position. She hadn't.

It happened over and over. Irrationally and to no purpose. She'd walk into the bedroom with the diaper and there he'd be.

Like it was some sort of strange compulsion.

She tried to get him to explain what it was about. He would talk to her about plenty of other things but not about that.

All she got was an eerie silence.

And she was beginning to be afraid that her little boy was truly going crazy on her.

That something inside him was surfacing, something she'd been blind to. Some basic mistake of her own or something she'd overlooked—which would mean she'd failed as a mother to a stunning degree—or maybe that some resonance of their problems with the marriage was rising up inside him to take a terrible toll.

She told Bromberg and Bromberg tried to dig it out of him, the
reasons
for it, but Robert wouldn't speak to him either. Only shrugged like it was nothing.

When it was eating her up inside with worry.

It wasn't
normal
.

She knew she wasn't responding well at all. She was
afraid
of this behavior! And being afraid led her straight to a kind of irrational anger. He was
scaring
her.

A couple of nights she lost it, started yelling at him—
what's wrong with you? you know I can't put this on you when you do that! where's your
head
, Robert?
—and then hearing her own voice use the same words on him that her father had used on her so long ago, felt so guilty that she felt like crying.

Sometimes she thought that she was going crazy too. This was straining her sense of control, her feeling of being able to handle her life.

"Kids do lots of weird stuff," Arthur said. "It'll pass. You'll see. It's just some stage he's going through."

He was trying to be reassuring but what he was actually being was infuriating.

It was not some stage.

Her son was in trouble. Trouble right across the board. And this compulsion of his. This meant something.

November 10, 1994

"Okay," he said, once they'd taken off their coats and paid the sitter and she had gone outside into the cold night air. "What the hell did you think you were doing back there? I mean,
who do you think you are
, Lydia?"

It was the first he'd spoken to her since they'd left the party.

Since she'd told him what she'd done.

"Cindy's my friend," she said. "I think she has a right to know that that man is lying to her."

She wanted a cold drink of water. There was a taste of wine growing more and more sour in her mouth. She headed for the kitchen. He followed her.

"How do you know he's lying? What makes you so sure?"

"He tells you he's definitely decided he's staying with his wife? And then tells Cindy that he's madly in love with
her
? That's not lying?"

"Maybe he's undecided. Going two ways at once.
You
don't know. Plus it's none of your damn business."

She poured and drank the water. Arthur went to the refrigerator for another Miller
Lite
. She was tired. She didn't need the argument. It was late and she needed sleep.

"Listen, I'm not a gossip, Arthur. I thought about it a lot. I didn't just go off and do this thing. You think I wanted to say something? You think I enjoyed breaking the news to her or even getting involved in the first place? I didn't. I also know he's a friend of yours, even if not a very
good
friend ..."

"Who says that? Who says he's not a good friend?"

She sighed. "Arthur, you see him two or three times a month. He comes into your restaurant. You talk to him. You buy him a drink. And that's that. Don't make out like he'd donate you a kidney or something, please."

"I happen to like the guy. Jesus Christ,
Lyd
, he's Chairman of the Board at
Groton Chemical
!"

"What's that got to do with it? Cindy's my best friend. Do you understand that? And she doesn't deserve to get jerked around by this guy! She got enough jerking around from Ed before the divorce."

She saw that the first beer had disappeared and he was already opening another. She turned on the water in the sink and started cleaning off some of the dishes. Even though she could have just as easily stuck them in the dishwasher or even left them for tomorrow. If she got busy maybe he'd go away.

"You
compromised
me, Lydia. You broke a confidence. I can't believe you'd do this to me! Do you know how much
business
this man throws my way?"

"I don't
care
how much business he throws your way. You don't need his business. You certainly don't need it as much as Cindy needs a decent life with a decent man who's not going to lie to her again the way her damned husband did."

"Maybe his intentions are good. Maybe he's just confused."

"That's ridiculous, Arthur."