Free That Night by Alice McDermott Page B

said in our kitchen the next morning, what made her turn) to see Jake in his pajamas, standing in the middle of the street, the sharkish nose of a car headed toward him. Somehow, she found his arm and pulled it hard, so hard the child screamed and something cracked (although, she said, it may have been a bone in her own jaw). On the sidewalk, she slapped him so fiercely his teeth were bloodied, so savagely that the faint bruise mark of her hand was still there the next morning when I came downstairs and found them both in our kitchen.
    Jake was on her lap, a piece of bread crust in his hand. He was grinning and chirping, but she jiggled him on her knee as if he were still wailing. She held a cigarette in one hand and his shoulder with the other. Her nose was running and her eyes were filled with tears. When she saw me, she wiped at her cheek with the heel of her palm.
    My mother reached across the table to touch Jake’s fist. “But he’s fine now,” she said, thinking, I’m sure, just as I was thinking, that the child had never been fine.
    Their friendship was already beginning to wane. In another week or two, Mrs. Carpenter would have briefly moved into my mother’s affections and Leela and Jake once more returned to their own end of the street. I saw her a final time just before my parents’ house was sold, and she told me that she, of course, could not leave the neighborhood as nearly everyone else was doing. Jake had a job at the mall and knew how to take the bus there and back. If she or her husband met him at the boulevard each evening, it was safe enough for him to walk home. “If we moved,” she’d said, “he’d be losing his whole world.”
    I saw her raise her eyes to the cloud of smoke that hovered under the light fixture. She sniffed loudly, rubbing her son’s shoulder. “If I lost him,” she began to whisper. “If I’d lost him.”
    My mother was stroking the child’s hand, her eyes, too, filled with tears. “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Don’t even imagine it.”
    But Leela wanted to complete her thought. “If I lost him,” she said, “I’d end up with nothing. I only have this one baby. What will I end up with if I lose him?”
    My mother glanced at me and I knew for the first time that it was not our perfection, my brother’s and mine, that she’d been hoping to duplicate. It was insurance she’d been looking for, and any living child would have sufficed.
    Sheryl called hi to me from the sidewalk in front of our house and then to my surprise and delight walked up our driveway. She carried her looseleaf binder and a small paperback book. There was a dark, pilly sweater thrown over her arm.
    This was in the early spring, four months or so before that night. It had been a warm day, perhaps the first warm day of the season, and although it was now growing cool, there was still the lingering odor of bright sunlight, the spring smell of fresh dirt. I had brought my Barbie doll out to the front porch, probably because my brother and his friends were somewhere in the house and this was my way of showing my disdain. I had the black doll case opened at the top of the steps and was choosing a dinner outfit.
    Sheryl said as she approached, “How are you?” as if she asked quite regularly. I must have said something like “Fine.”
    “This your Barbie?” she asked.
    I said yes.
    “It’s nice.” She suddenly sat on the step just below mine and placed her books on her lap. I could see the initials she had written all over her looseleaf binder with black magic marker, hers and Rick’s. I noticed how the ink had bled a little into the fabric. I could have been glimpsing her garter belt, her diary, the initials seemed so adult and exotic, so indicative of everything I didn’t know.
    Turning a little, she reached back to my doll case and gently touched all the tiny dresses and skirts that were hanging there. Her fingers were thin and short and the edges of her nails pressed