Free The Boy by Lara Santoro

figuratively.”
    “All right, let’s strive for a degree of civility.”
    “Civility? You call what you did to my son civil? ”
    “I didn’t do anything to your son.”
    “You fucked him. You fucked him and you dumped him and you did it knowing that he was my son. How about I send somebody along to fuck your daughter up? How does that grab you?”
    Anna was off her stool before she knew it.
    “Watch what comes out of your mouth.”
    “You watch your hormones.”
    The two stood facing one another until Richard laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and said, “Just talk to him, explain to him. Don’t just drop him like some piece of trash. He’s my son. ”
    “Richard, there’s nothing to talk about. He’s twenty, I’m forty-two. End of story.”
    “End of story, my ass. You started it. You wrote the first chapter, you wrote the second chapter. Now write an ending that is respectful of who my son is and how far he’s come.”
    “How far he’s come? Richard, I don’t know your son from a hole in the ground. I have no idea how far he’s come.”
    “Well, find out, why don’t you.”
    “I can’t,” Anna said, fighting a wave of panic. “I can’t be around him, I’m sorry, but it’s not something I can do. Please don’t make me explain. It should be obvious enough.”
    Richard Strand went back to stirring. For a while no one spoke. Then Richard turned to face her. “He needs to hear that. You’re not getting involved with my son again, but he needs to hear that.”
    “Richard . . .”
    “Make sure he hears that.”
      
    She called the boy, and they agreed to meet at the southernmost coffee shop in town, past the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, where immediately after their move Anna and Eva had spent every Sunday morning between nine and ten—Eva doodling in her red notebook, bored by the priest, Anna staring up at the bruised, bleeding god wondering how someone as badly fucked up as that could lend assistance just then.
    “God will help us,” she kept telling Eva, who’d pierce her with her indigo eyes and say things like, “But if God is in the trees, how can he help us?”
    “Who told you God is in the trees?”
    “My teachers at school. They say God is in the air and in the trees. They say he’s inside me and inside you.”
    “Inside you, maybe.”
    “You too, Mom.”
    “I don’t know about that.”
    “Mom.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    “Say it.”
    “What?”
    “Inside me and inside you.”
    “Inside me and inside you.”
    “And the trees.”
    “Screw the trees. There can’t possibly be enough to go around.”
    In church, those empty mornings, Anna had the time to revisit the day her life had fallen apart. Like walking through an empty house in the dead time before dawn, she moved from moment to moment as if from room to room—past smoky mirrors, daybeds shrouded in white linen—toward a door and a bed by an open window on which two bodies lay asleep. Time and time again in her memory she stopped at the door, knowing what she would find but not knowing if her heart could take it. Time and time again she went ahead so those pale limbs entwined in sleep could catch fire in her imagination and remind her why she had put a continent plus an ocean between Eva’s father and herself—why there was no going back.
    Years slipped past without a single reference to their desperate departure until one afternoon, on the way to soccer practice, Eva said, “I want my daddy to take me to soccer.”
    Oblivious to the tempest raging in her little girl’s heart, Anna had shrugged.
    “The likelihood is small.”
    “Why?”
    “Your father lives on a different continent.”
    “He lives on a different continent because you left him! You left him and now I don’t have a dad!”
    “Your father cheated on me, Eva.”
    “No he didn’t!”
    “Yes, he did. He cheated on me.”
    “My daddy doesn’t cheat!”
    “No? Go ahead and ask him. Ask him why I left.”
    “Liar! You’re a liar!”