The Boy Read Free Page A

phone.”
    “It was her first birthday for fuck’s sake.”
    “I tried. No one answered.”
    Fastidious and feline in his tailored suit, Eva’s father laid a coldly furious eye on her. “You were going to express your regrets to an infant over the phone?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Suggesting what, if I may inquire, as the reason for your absence?”
    “Work,” Anna said, knocking back a shot.
    “Oh, work, ” he said, his voice smooth and dangerous. “I’ll leave you the privilege of telling her that when she’s old enough.” And of course, years later, when the question came out of nowhere, Anna found herself unable to meet her little girl’s eyes.
    “Why, Mamma?”
    “I had to work.”
    “It was my first birthday! The biggest birthday of all!”
    “Not really.”
    “Yes really.”
    “What about zero to one? Zero to one seems bigger to me.”
    “Mom.”
    “What?”
    “There’s no cake from zero to one.”
    It was impossible to explain, the obscure misery of those lost years away from her job when she was with her child, away from her child when she was on assignment, never at the right place at the right time, balanced, as if on a tightrope, between points she could never reach.
    She kept it up, though, until the day a bullet came zinging past, setting off an echo in one ear. The ring became a nightly persecution, doubling in depth and strength, keeping her up, wearing her down, making her crazy in the mornings trying to light a cigarette with that dead vibration in her skull.
    “Why don’t you just bloody quit?” the girl’s father asked, reaching over and putting out her cigarette, “You do realize you have a child.”
    “I thought you had one, too.”
    “Small children need their mothers, not their fathers.”
    “Says the resident expert on small children.”
    “I don’t claim to know much about children, Anna, but what I do know, what only a fool could fail to notice, is that this constant going away on your part, this constant vanishing act, is harming her.”
    “How about you put in some time?”
    “I do the best I can.”
    “Which, scrupulously added, comes up to zero . Or right around there.”
    “I do the best I can, Anna, the best I can. And will you please stop smoking? It’s a filthy habit.”
    She went around to a few doctors, sat in waiting rooms with little Eva in her lap and that dead ringing in her ear, and got told the same thing over and over: avoid loud noises. So she quit her job, her life on the road, that vastness that for years had been her soul, and settled down with a man she did not trust and a toddler with an iron will. “NO,” Eva had formed the habit of saying, pounding her little fist on the table. “NO.”
    “No?”
    “NO.”
    “What do you mean, no?”
    “NO.”
    “No is not an option, Eva.”
    “NO.”
    “No is the wrong answer, Eva.”
    “NO.”
    “Eva, there is no such thing as NO, do you understand?”
    “NO.”
    Inconsistency, Anna would learn, was not one of her daughter’s shortcomings. It was NO and NO and NO again until after their escape from Eva’s father to a new continent, to a furnace of light at the southern end of the Rockies and to motherhood redefined, reimagined, reconceived, with Anna shuttling between therapy and parenting classes, and Eva on a stubborn diet of white bread and green beans.
    “Pretty limited food range your daughter has,” a mother of five astutely and perhaps not unkindly observed after a playdate.
    “I know,” said Anna. “I’m trying to expand it.”
    “She’s what? Three?”
    “Four.”
    “Too late.”
    “Too late to feed her?” She got a pitying look. “No. Too late to introduce her to new food.”
    The woman’s eyes were large, her skin sufficiently translucent to produce in Anna an instinctive current of distrust.
    “There’s been research done, tons of research done, showing that infants under one will try every type of food at least five times if it’s given to them by