Most of the things my son did, spraying a can of deodorant down his throat, eating little orange berries off a tree in the park, berries his friends said were poison, wouldn’t work, but the noose he’d made by attaching his red and gold Gryffindor muffler to the light fixture on his bedroom ceiling could have done the job if the fixture had held his weight.

            When, hearing the thump, I ran into his room, he said he didn’t know what happened. “But I’m not hurt,” he said. “Thankfully.”

             Our daughter Carrie, his little sister, was at a friend’s birthday party. “Don’t tell her.”   

            She doesn’t need to know, I said, picking the pieces of broken glass from his bedroom floor. He wanted to clean it himself, but I wouldn’t let him, afraid he’d get hurt. After I lifted his Power Rangers bedspread up to let any glass bits slide into the dustpan he sat on his bed watching me work. To keep me company, he said. After sweeping and vacuuming I laid a flashlight down on the wooden floor to help find the tiny, shiny bits I’d missed.

            “Good job, Mommy!”

            When my husband Jon found an electrician willing to come on a Saturday, Tad said we should use his birthday money from Grandma to pay for the replacement light, this was something we should make him do.

            Don’t worry about it, we said. We’re just glad you’re all right.

            He was using it as a chin-up bar, I told the electrician when he came, boys will be boys. When he finished I went to his truck with him to pay so Tad wouldn’t know how much it cost.

            Jon and I talked to him at the kitchen table when I was back inside, telling him how much we loved him, how glad we were he was all right, how we didn’t want him to be alone with his problems. But please tell us why did you did that.

            He’d stopped being apologetic then, wouldn’t sit at the table with us, leaned against the stove next to the door to his room.

            “We want to help you,” Jon said.

            My son turned to me and pointed. “You. You can’t help anyone.”

            Are you thinking of hurting yourself now, I asked him, not wanting to say dying, and he took a spatula from the old tin container on top the stove for cooking utensils. I guessed his intent, didn’t try to stop him.

            He hit me in the face with its white rubber blade. I felt the skin around my left eye stretch as it puffed up.

            Tad stood in front of me, holding the spatula, let me take it from him.

            “Are you proud of what you did?” I was blind with pain, I told myself. No one could blame me for whatever I said or did.

            When he didn’t answer I put the spatula back, took a bag of frozen peas, and went into the room I shared with Jon, sat down against the door.

            I held the bag over my eye, listened to Tad talking to Jon.

            Tad said I was boring and stupid and he hated me.

            “Hmm,” Jon said. “Uh-huh.”

            The bag of peas didn’t help the pain and the cold added to my discomfort. I threw the bag on the floor, remembered what Jackie Kennedy said when she refused to change out of her blood-stained Chanel suit. “I want them to see what they did to Jack.”

            I laid on our bed, fell heavily asleep, dreamt not of Tad or President Kennedy, but Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, on the train with him to Petrograd. In my dream, Lenin lost his nerve. He huddled in the corner of their shabby compartment, shivering, crying I can’t do it, I can’t. Krupskaya seized his shoulders, shook him. No, Vladimir, you must not let our people down.

            She may have had Grave’s Disease. Later in life, after Lenin’s death, her face and neck became stiff and swollen, making her look popeyed. In 1917 she was just a little thick in the neck and chin, but, in my dream, her face was massive and she made Lenin look into it. You must not let our people down. I felt the jolt as the train came to a stop. Lenin jumped onto the station platform, climbed on top an armored train car, began to speak.

            Tad was touching me, tentatively, on my arm and shoulder, wouldn’t leave me alone.      

           “What?”

            Had Jon told him I’d be forgiving?

            “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

            “Sorry you hurt me? Or because I’m your mother? Which?” I was cold with the triumph that, in my dream, filled Krupskaya when Lenin addressed the crowd waiting for him at the Finland Station.

            “Honey,” Jon said. “Honey. Tad told me he is sorry for what he did. He doesn’t understand what happened. He loves you very much and never wants to hurt you. He’s having feelings which are new to him and I think he’s frightened.”

            “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

            Tad cried and Jon put his arm around him. “We talked about that, didn’t we, Bud? How Mommy might still be upset.”

            “So everything’s fine and I should make dinner now?”

            “Why don’t we order out? Or Tad and I could get something. Whatever you want.”

            Tad had stopped crying, looked ready to object to anything I proposed.

            “We need to finish the lasagna.”

            Jon said if I wanted to sleep longer he and Tad could take care of supper but I said I still needed to clean.

            “Let me help,” Jon said.

            Once when Tad was a toddler and company was coming, Jon offered to tidy his room, pushed every toy under the bed, expressed surprise when Tad pulled them out at once.

            “Take a break,” I said. “You’ve had a busy day.”

            You make it so I can’t do anything right, Jon says sometimes.

            When they went upstairs I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. The spatula handle had left a long welt down my cheek. There’d be a bruise in the same shape later. The spatula blade had left a rectangular shape around my eye, like a frame. A black eye. I tried to think of what to tell them at work.

            I could hear the TV upstairs. American Family, a show I didn’t like Tad to watch, was on. If I complained, I thought, Jon would say something funny would help Tad relax.

            Carrie came home, gasped when she saw me.

            It looks worse than it is, I told her. Tad didn’t mean to hurt me. He was just playing.

            “But he’s going to have a consequence, isn’t he?”

            He’s already hurting, I might have said.

             “That’s up to Daddy and me.”

            “So you’re just going to let him be mean?”

            When she was little she’d get in my bed during the night but in the morning, she’d go into his room, play with his toys till he woke. “Good morning, Carrie,” I heard him say once. “What an attractive frock.” Little professor we called him, speculated he talked that way because he spent so much time with adults.

            I suggested we make brownies, a treat to distract her. She sighed when she took the mix from the cupboard, as if it were a chore.

            I watched her break the eggs. Sometimes she was careless and I was prepared to help her remove the bits of shell or wipe egg from the counter, calculate if a whole egg was needed as a replacement. She was precise today.

            “You look awful,” she said.

            It doesn’t hurt, I told her.  

            Carrie hasn’t had experience with being hit in the face, didn’t know if you get a black eye on one side the other eye may bruise too from, I think, broken blood cells.

            “I hate him,” she said.

            “Oh, no, sweetheart.”

            She glared at Tad when he came down. Jon said any pasta I made was killer, but this was the best yet. “I think it tastes even better on the second day.”

            Tad said it was worse than the hot lunch at school.

            I ran my finger over my eye socket feeling for a break. Nothing but heat.

            The brownies baked while we ate. If there’d been time I’d have iced them with the Portsmouth frosting I like. Butter, sugar, vanilla, cream.

            “I wish you’d always make them this way,” Jon said. “You taste the chocolate more without that sweet stuff on top.”

            After supper and the dishes I played Polly Pockets with Carrie. “I have fun with Fred,” she said, in her role as Polly. Fred was a Fred Flintstone figure she’d gotten in a kids’ meal, “but it’s nothing serious.”

             Then, as I did every night that year, I read her an entire Junie B. Jones book. She could have read them to herself but she liked it better if I did. The books were all the same. Junie made predictable mistakes, pulled another little girl’s hair, cut her own hair, embarrassed her parents. Carrie had heard the books so many times she no longer laughed at the funny parts, just listened solemnly, snuggled tightly against me in her twin bed.

             Why, I’d wonder, not aloud, didn’t Junie’s parents say we’ve had it with you, you stupid Junie. We’ll put you in foster care.

            I read to Tad every night too though he could also read to himself. He and a boy named Devon were the top readers at his school. Both of them, because of the tests they’d taken and all the books they’d read, had their names and pictures up on big yellow posters as you came into the school. I didn’t say anything but I didn’t think it was right, making the other fifth graders feel like failures. Devon, the little shit, told Tad he, Devon, was really the best reader because Tad read history books and Devon read science books containing more difficult concepts.

            Devon doesn’t know everything, I said, but it bothered Tad, who asked me read him one of his Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Books every night, and talked himself, expanding on how the bubonic plague could spread so rapidly, or why the rise of the merchant class made knights obsolete.

            “I’ll bet you didn’t know that,” he’d say, and I’d say I certainly didn’t.

            He handed me the DK book about Ancient China as I closed the door to Carrie’s room. “I thought you’d enjoy this one.”

            As much as I enjoy being hit in the face, I could say. If you want something, ask your father.

            I pictured him fastening the scarf around his neck, stepping off the chair.

            I love that one, I said. I appreciate it so much when you explain things to me. The Mandate of Heaven, for instance. I hoped he wouldn’t mind going over that again, because I didn’t understand it.

            “Of course, Mommy. I’ll explain it as many times as you want.”  

             The next week, though I didn’t know it then, we’d have a meeting with the principal and Tad’s teacher. Tad claimed he had no idea why they wanted to talk to us.

            When we were in the car on the way to the school he took his shoes off, refused to put them back on when we got to the school. “You go,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

            I opened his car door, knelt to put his right shoe on. He used the left one to hit me in the back of the head. For a moment I thought I’d vomit and I moved away from the car. “Put your shoes on,” I heard Jon say from the front seat.

            “This is between me and Mom,” Tad said. “Stay out of it.”

            “Oh, honey,” Jon said. “Don’t be that way.”

            Tad put on his other shoe, got out of the car. “I’m doing this for Dad,” he told me.

            Jon said he’d thought he could come in with us but it was all too much. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I just can’t.”

            Why did you let me think you would, I wanted to ask.

            “Then you can’t.”

            Tad took hold of my hand as Jon drove away, said he was sorry he hadn’t told us what he’d done.

            There was no time. We were late because of the struggle with his shoes. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it’ll be okay.”

            My face didn’t hurt as much but it looked worse because more bruises had surfaced. Sometimes I forgot about it, until I got a reaction from someone who hadn’t seen it before. At work, no one believed I’d fallen against my bureau when the phone rang during the night and I’d jumped up. Get a restraining order, they said. Get a gun.

            The teacher and the principal stared, said nothing. I guessed they thought it was Jon, since he wasn’t there, and I was sorry about that, but if I said anything I would make it worse.

            The teacher, Mrs, Maynard, didn’t seem to want to say anything bad about Tad. At the parent-teacher conference the month before she’d said he was a joy to have in class. Tad attended the conference too and she smiled at him when she told me he tested at the post-college level in vocabulary. “That’s better than I can do.”

            “I’m sure it isn’t,” Tad had said.

            The principal prompted her today. “Tell them what you told me.”

            Tad’s class had been making origami for their unit on Japan. When it was time for math Tad continued to fold, didn’t open his workbook. She came to see what was going on and he shoved his desk at her.

            We’d met in the classroom so I could see Tad’s desk from the front of the room where we sat. A piece of blue construction paper with his name and a dragon he’d drawn in green felt tip was taped to its metal front.

            There was a buzzing in my head then and I’m not sure I expressed enough concern.

            The principal said he’d had good talks with Tad. About India, for instance. “I enjoyed them very much. I just can’t understand why a fine young man like you would do something like this.”

            Tad didn’t answer. I apologized, wished Tad would second me when I said I hoped the teacher wasn’t hurt, but he didn’t, didn’t look relieved when she said she wasn’t.

            “What I was, was scared.”

            Tad didn’t say anything.

            I didn’t understand either, I told them, but we’d talked to Tad’s doctor, who said irritability was a possible side effect from the medication he was taking and he was making changes he thought would be helpful.

            “A psychiatrist?”

            We hadn’t told the school Tad was receiving treatment, believed we’d be judged. 

            “Now why,” the principal asked Tad, “would a bright young fellow like you need to see a psychiatrist?”

            “My mom made me.”

            Because he was depressed. But they’d think whatever they wanted.

            Well, the principal said, we know you can do better than this. The school district had zero tolerance for violence and a two-week in-school suspension was required. Tad would attend class but he couldn’t participate in field trips or class parties.

            “We don’t have any of those planned,” Mrs. Maynard said and I wondered if she thought the punishment was adequate.

            In his Second Grade class, I remembered, if a child was disruptive or inattentive, the teacher would “flip” their name over on a chart at the front of the room. Four flips in one day and you had to stay behind for five minutes after school dismissal.

            Tad had been flipped only once all year. He and a few other boys were flipped when they were supposed to be working on a group project, and gotten silly, laughing at a joke they liked. Why did the chicken cross the road? To eat your guts.

            “We weren’t on task,” he said. I’d heard him crying after I’d tucked him in, gone into his room.

            He’d put his head down on the desk and cried at school too, I heard from the teacher later. “I told him it wasn’t a big deal. They were just being kids.”

            On the walk home, Tad asked me if I knew why he’d hit me.

            I didn’t answer.

            “Because you’re ugly,” he said.

            Inside and out, I thought, but I was tired of being angry.

            It’s going to be fine, I told him when he cried. Everything’s going to be okay.

            I’m still saying it.

– Jane Snyder