Under the Influence (13 page)

C
heri was on the phone, as she often was, when I got to my ex-husband's house to pick my son up for our weekend together—the first in over three years. My son's stepbrother, Jared, sat on a booster seat in front of a half-eaten Pop-Tart, gesturing with an uncapped felt-tip pen. Seeing me in the door, Cheri pointed in the direction of the living room, where I could hear the sound of cartoons. Dwight was out golfing, probably. Ollie was on the couch in his pajamas. He looked pale, and his neck, in the stretched-out pajama top, seemed skinny and pinched, birdlike. There was a bowl of cereal on the coffee table and a bunch of toys on the floor that must have belonged to Jared. My son didn't look up.

It was never my style to make some big, dramatic entrance, even when I had been aching to put my arms around him. I'd learned, over the course of the sad gray months, then years, since he'd moved away to Walnut Creek, that it took Ollie a few hours—sometimes as long as a day—to get comfortable with me again after we'd been apart. It no longer surprised me as it first had to see his blank, impassive expression when I came to pick him up. I knew that when I hugged him, his body would be taut and wary. Sometime later, if I was lucky—right around the time I had to say good-bye—he'd fold into me in the old familiar way, and I'd glimpse for a moment the way it had been before between
us. Then it would be time to bring him home, and I'd feel the armor come up.

“Hey, Oll,” I said. “Good to see you.” I lowered myself onto the floor beside him.

He was sucking his thumb, a habit I knew he was trying to break because kids at school teased him about it. When he was alone, or anxious, he reverted to his old ways.

“Want me to help you get your stuff together?” I said. I could be irritated at Cheri, or Dwight, for not having taken care of this, but what was the point?

“I want to finish my show.”

I sat down next to him on the couch, resisting the impulse to pick him up, to press him up against me. I rubbed his back. Ran my hand over his hair. Sometimes, when I came to pick him up, he'd have a buzz cut—for convenience, I figured—but this time Ollie was overdue for a trip to the barbershop, and his toenails were long. He looked like a boy whose mother had not been watching out for him as closely as she should.

Although Ollie had been going back and forth between his father's house and my apartment for three years now, somehow we'd never gotten around to buying him a real suitcase or duffel bag for his stuff. With Cheri on the phone still, I reached under the sink for a plastic trash bag to gather his belongings for the weekend.

Two sets of underwear. Two pairs of socks. In the old days, when he lived with me, we used to make a game of matching the pairs, but now they were all thrown in the drawer together. All white. Cheri probably found that easier than keeping track of all the interesting designs—cars, dinosaurs, Transformers—that I used to buy for him.

I reached in the drawer for his Boston terrier shirt that he loved, though it was too small now, and a couple of others—one long-sleeved, one short.

“We need to bring your swim trunks,” I told him. “At the friends' house where we're going, they've got a pool.”

“Nobody ever showed me how to swim,” he said. The implication was clear enough: I should have taught him.

“I'll be in the water with you,” I said. “They'll have a noodle.”

“You said they have a dog,” he said. Wary as usual.

“Three of them.”

“Do they get cable?” he said.

“Wait till we get there,” I told him. “We'll be having way too much fun to watch TV.”

“I was going to watch a show about robots,” he said. His voice had a quietly resentful tone I knew well. As if every wrong thing in the world right now was my fault.

“Cheri has a DVD player in her van,” Ollie said, once he'd buckled himself into the backseat of my Honda. I hated it that the law now required children to sit in the backseat, instead of up front next to you, where you could talk. Evidently this was safer, but driving this way, with Ollie behind me, I always felt more like a chauffeur than a mother.

“Well, I prefer to have a conversation,” I said. “I haven't seen you in two weeks. I want to hear what's going on at school. What's Mr. Rettstadt been teaching you lately?”

“Nothing.”

“I don't believe that. Tell me one thing.”

“Blah blah,” he said. “Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blabaddy blabaddy bladda bladadda blah.”

“I went to the library,” I told him. “I got a stack of books for us. There's one about insects.”

“I hate insects.”

That didn't used to be so, back when he lived with me, when we'd spent the better part of an hour studying an anthill. But this was not a point to win.

“There are other books,” I told him.

“I hate reading.”

In the end, he fell asleep on the drive. I had thought we might stop at a park we sometimes went to, where he liked to ride his scooter, but by the time we made it across the bridge it was past noon, and I knew Ava would have lunch ready for us, so I headed straight for Folger Lane.

“I think you'll like these friends,” I said when he woke up, a mile or so from their house. “They've been looking forward to meeting you.”

I hated the sound of my own voice, saying this stuff. I sounded like a flight attendant.

“Ava, the wife, can't walk,” I told him. “She has a wheelchair. She's got a special car that lifts her up into the seat.”

“What time is it?” Ollie said. Thumb in mouth then. Eyes glassy, staring out the window. “When do we go home?”

Pulling into their driveway, I was thinking I'd made a terrible mistake. My son would not allow himself to have a good time. Ava and Swift would try their best, but later, after we left, they'd look at each other and say, “Thank God that's over.” They'd be kind, but agree not to ever invite us over again. They might even come to the sad but obvious conclusion that it was probably for the best that I did not have custody of my son.

Then Ava was throwing open the door for us. Lillian came right over to Oliver and started running around in circles the way she always did when she met someone new, and Sammy wagged his tail, making a happy yipping noise. But the big surprise was Rocco, who usually growled at everyone who wasn't Ava, but appeared to take an immediate liking to my son. From the moment Ollie walked in the door, Rocco was licking his hand and following him.

“Pleasure to meet you, Oliver,” said Swift, offering his hand. “Can I get you a drink?” Like Ava, he was one of those rare people who do not adjust their tone of voice in any way when speaking with a child.

“Do you have to put money in that?” Ollie asked. He had noticed the pinball machine, which Swift had been smart enough not to point out. Better to let Ollie discover things for himself here.

“For you, buddy, it's free,” said Swift. “My son Cooper used to play that all the time. When we first got it, he was too short to reach the controls, so we got him that box there.

Ollie climbed up on the makeshift step stool. He was stroking the controls. Then he looked at me, as if I might tell him not to touch it.

“It's fine,” I told him. “These are our friends. You can do whatever you feel like.”

After lunch, he wanted to see where the dogs' beds were. Then Swift showed him the den, where he had taken out Cooper's old Ninja Turtles.

“Is your kid around?” Ollie asked.

“He's big now,” Swift told him. “The only kid around here now is me.”

Ollie looked at him hard. Sizing him up.

“You can make yourself at home, bud,” Swift told him. “The one place you've got to be a little careful is by the pool. Ava made this rule, there has to be a grown-up around if I'm going in the water. This would apply to you, too.”

“But he's not a kid,” Ollie whispered to me.

“You got me there, buddy,” Swift told him. “But I misbehave a little now and then, same as kids do. The only difference is, nobody sends me to my room.”

We walked outside. They stood at the side of the pool for a moment, the two of them looking down at the water, Swift darkly tanned—he never believed in sunscreen—Oliver's legs, under his too-big shorts, the color of milk.

“I don't know how to swim,” Ollie said. His voice was low and husky. Back when my son still lived with me, I'd taken him to two different sessions of swimming lessons, but Ollie had always been afraid of the water.

“You don't say?” said Swift. “Maybe it's time we did something about that.”

He picked up my son and threw him over his shoulder. Still holding onto Ollie, he jumped in the water. I thought Ollie would cry, but he came up laughing.

In the end, the two of them spent most of the afternoon in the water. By four o'clock, Ollie was jumping off the edge backward and doing dead man's float from one end of the pool to the other.

“You were kidding me, right?” said Swift. “When you told me that stuff about not swimming. You're a natural. You'll be a champ.”

“I didn't know I could swim!” said Ollie. “I never came over to your house before.”

“Well, now you know what you need to do,” said Swift. “You have to come visit us more often.”

My son's face took on a serious expression. As if Swift had just offered him a job, and he, after consideration, was accepting the offer.

“Do you think your kid will mind if I play some more on his pinball machine?” Ollie asked. Swift had shown him a photograph of Cooper hang gliding over the Arizona desert, and another of Cooper in the skybox at a Giants game.

“I think he'd like you to do that,” Swift said. “Maybe one of these days when you come over, he'll be here, too, and you guys can hang out together.”

Ollie played pinball for a while and tossed the Frisbee to Rocco out in the yard. Then Ava made us smoothies and let Ollie throw every single thing he wanted into the blender. A little before dinnertime we all got in Swift's Range Rover and drove to the park to take the dogs for a walk. Rocco stayed next to Oliver the whole time.

We went out for hamburgers. Swift ordered Ollie a root beer float. Sitting with me in the backseat, with Rocco on his lap, Ollie leaned close to me. “I wish we didn't ever have to go home,” he whispered.

My son fell asleep in the car. This gave Ava and Swift a chance to get caught up on what was happening with Elliot, though—even with Ollie sleeping—we avoided some of the specifics.

“So you really like this guy?” Swift said.

I told him I did. “It's not some huge deal,” I said. “But it's always easy with him.”

“Easy,” said Ava. She sounded skeptical.

“And how does he feel about my little buddy here?” said Swift. “Because this little guy deserves to have a great guy in his life. The best.”

“Let's not jump the gun, darling,” said Ava. “Helen's just dating this Elliot person. It's not like they're getting married.”

“It's a fair question,” said Swift. “Helen needs to think ahead.”

“Well, Elliot probably wouldn't be a natural with kids, like you,” I told Swift. “But hardly anyone is.”

“But good in bed, right?” he said, grinning as usual.

“Hush,” said Ava, gesturing in the direction of Ollie.
“Her son.”

It was past ten o'clock when Ollie and I got back to my apartment. Though he was too big to carry up the stairs, I managed—it felt so good, getting to do this again, and afterward, laying him on the air mattress I'd set up for him and unlacing his shoes. The last thing he said, drifting off, was to ask if we could go visit our friends again tomorrow. He called Swift Monkey Man.

The next morning Ollie asked again if we could go back to Monkey Man's house, but I'd promised to have him back at his father's by noon. We sat outside on the little balcony off my living room—looking out over the parking lot—and I gave him a haircut. I could have stood on that balcony forever, my son in the chair with a towel around his neck, me with the scissors, clipping his wispy blond hair. I didn't want it to end, and though I might have been wrong, it seemed to me that he was happy, too. His shoulders—so tense just one day earlier—weren't hunched up in that way they often were. He was singing “Yellow Submarine,” one of the songs he'd heard on the jukebox the day before at Folger Lane.

On the car ride back to Walnut Creek, he was already talking about what he wanted to do the next time we went over to Monkey Man's house. Play with the dogs again. Try out the air hockey table. And go swimming some more with Monkey Man.

“Is that guy a superhero or something?” he asked me.

“You could say that,” I said.

T
he Monday night after I brought Ollie back to his father's in Walnut Creek, Elliot took me out to dinner.

“I hope this won't sound needy,” he said. “We only went three days without seeing each other. But I just missed you so much. I can't even remember what it was like before you were in my life.” I could have felt happy that he felt this way, but instead I registered a certain irritation. As if he had nothing else going on.

“I totally respect your decision not to introduce me to Ollie yet,” he said. “I just look forward to the day when you feel sure enough about the two of us that you can do that.”

I didn't know what to tell him. The truth was, my reluctance to introduce Ollie to Elliot was only partly about the relative newness of our relationship. The other part came from my fear that if the two of them did meet, Elliot wouldn't know what to say to Ollie. And that Ollie would think he was a dork. It came from recognizing that Elliot would be nothing like Swift. And Ollie would wish he were.

And it wasn't just my fear that Ollie might not think much of Elliot that had kept me from including Elliot in our time at the Havillands'. I also worried about Ava and Swift's judgment of Elliot. I worried that Elliot might embarrass me in front of my friends. Or worse, embarrass himself.