Take Your Turn, Teddy Read online

  “Maybe you should find a friend to help you relax. Someone like Daddy’s friend.”

  She brought her head up so fast she startled Teddy. Another tear slid down her freckled cheek.

  “Daddy’s friend?”

  “Yeah. She comes here and helps him relax, so he doesn’t yell anymore. It’s been so nice. Hasn’t it? Not having him yell and be so mad when he gets home?”

  Her eyes shot to the wine cabinet and then fell to the floor, avoiding Teddy.

  “Yes, Teddy. That has been nice.” Her voice was off. Shaky, almost hollow sounding. “Yes, it has.”

  She grabbed Teddy’s hands and brought him to his feet with her. She turned off the stove and, in a quick swipe, slid all the carrots and vegetables of the wild rice soup, yet to be cut, into the trash.

  “How about you and I go out for pizza. Maybe Benji’s after? We can stop by the Marshes’ and see if Pete wants to tag along too.”

  Teddy hesitated. Was he supposed to be excited? Normally he would be. But that afternoon left a weight in his gut—one that seemed moments away from rupturing and making an even further mess of things.

  “Just let me change out of these shorts.”

  She pulled her hair down from the ponytail and released a more controlled exhale with it. Teddy watched as his mother’s shadow followed her down the hall and paused at the doorway of his parents’ bedroom. She hesitated for a moment before going inside and closing the door. The sound of glass hitting the floor followed.

  3

  After the outburst from his mother and the strange encounter with his father he was still trying to process, Teddy lay in bed with a belly full of pepperoni pizza and Benji’s vanilla soft serve, smiling. Even though he had to lie to Pete about what his father said about the Hammerin’ Hank card, he had fun with his friend. For the time being, Teddy was able to push the unfortunate events of the afternoon to the back of his mind.

  Still, his mother seemed off throughout the evening. It was like she was lost in thought as her green eyes looked beyond the pizza place, past Benji’s, and into another dimension. And as the night went on, Teddy swore the orange rim in her eyes ignited to a fuller brightness. When Pete asked Teddy if his mother was okay, Teddy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Probably just tired from work.”

  Pete didn’t push Teddy for more, and Teddy was thankful for that.

  On his nightstand, next to his Jetsons bedding, was a baseball-shaped alarm clock. His grandparents had sent it to him from Indiana as a gift for his birthday last year. The clock illuminated a red brightness that read 10:30. How had it gotten so late? Teddy wondered what time his dad would come home. When they got back from the pizza place, Lila didn’t call Arthur’s name. She opened the front door, walked through the kitchen, and peeked into the garage. She nodded to herself and headed for her room.

  “I’m going to do some cleaning, Teddy Bear.”

  Teddy began to groan, but his mother interrupted, smiled, and said, “You go read or something.”

  He didn’t have to help clean, and he got pizza and ice cream—what a night. Teddy couldn’t believe his dad had missed it. The only thing missing was going to dinner together and coming home to play catch while his mother sat on the back porch with a glass of wine, smiling as she watched.

  The thought of wine stung as he thought of his mother getting so upset that afternoon. When his father did come home, he wondered if the booming of an argument between his parents would suffocate the giddy feeling he had after such a great night.

  He heard movement across the hall in his parents’ bedroom. It sounded like the shriek of duct tape being stretched out. Teddy got up and crept to the door of his bedroom. He opened it slightly, allowing just a line of vision. Then, the door flew open, and a box slid out, marked with thick lettering that said, “WORK CLOTHES.”

  Teddy’s mother stomped into the hall and grabbed the box. A moment later, he heard the front door open. It was only a few minutes before the door opened again. This happened several times in a matter of minutes. What was his mother doing going in and out of the house like that? Was she taking boxes to Goodwill this late?

  The thought made Teddy anxious, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He tiptoed back across his room, pulled open the drawer on his nightstand, and flipped through the stack of books inside. At the bottom was one his parents read to him when he was younger, The Little Prince.

  The first page had a drawing of a boa constrictor tightening around a fearful little creature. The author described his experience reading a book called True Stories from Nature, where he learned about the primeval forest. He went on to share that boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing, and then are unable to move. Then, they sleep for nearly six months to allow digestion.

  Teddy carried the book to his bed and climbed back under the Jetsons cover. He couldn’t play catch with his dad, but maybe reading a story that his parents used to read to him would give him that same feeling.

  He sank beneath the comforter and allowed its warmth to wrap around him. Just as he began to read on to the part about the man drawing what the boa constrictor with a full belly may look like, only for grown-ups to say it was a hat, Teddy’s door swung open.

  Teddy’s mother was still wearing her jeans and British Invasion shirt. She hadn’t changed into her pajamas yet. She held a purple plastic tub that used to have all of his father’s old baseball jerseys inside.

  “Teddy Bear, I need you to get your things and put them in here. Get as many clothes as you can. I’ll fold your bedding up. You can use it in the car on the drive. Leave whatever you can’t get into the tub.”

  Teddy was confused. “Leave my stuff? Mom, what’s going on?”

  His mother shook her head. “I can’t explain now, Teddy. We have to go. Please, get up and get your things?”

  “What about Dad?”

  He wasn’t quite sure why, but Teddy began to cry. Not sobbing, but just a simple, mysterious tear rolled down his freckled cheek. It was as if the tear carried some undisclosed sadness that Teddy hadn’t yet fully felt himself.

  His mother took a deep breath and softened her voice, allowing panic to slither away momentarily.

  “We are going to see Grandma and Grandpa. We’re going to stay for a little bit, so I just want to make sure you have everything. I want to get on the road, so we need to be quick.”

  They had never decided to see Grandma and Grandpa this late. They always left early on Saturday mornings.

  He listened to his mother, feeling as though he were in a trance, and went to his closet and began taking clothes off hangers. He grabbed a sweatshirt from the bin and threw it back on the bed.

  “No, Teddy. You’ll need long-sleeves too.”

  “It’s hot in Florida, Mom.”

  His mother shook her head. “We’re going to their old house in Indiana.”

  Teddy had only seen his grandparents in Florida, where they moved after retirement. If Teddy had ever been to the Indiana house, it was a dream of a dream now.

  He wasn’t sure what to call the way he felt. It was a sinking feeling. One that fell to the pit of his stomach and sat heavily—as if he swallowed the pizza from dinner whole without chewing it. And like the boa constrictor in the story, Teddy felt like he couldn’t move. Part of him wondered if he wasn’t the boa constrictor at all, but instead the unfortunate prey who was being squeezed tighter and tighter by this big thing circling him, ready to be swallowed whole and digested over the next long, six months.

  Teddy’s mother, trying to stay calm, was frustrated with his pace. “Here, you take the bedding to the car, and I’ll grab your clothes. Deal?”

  Teddy nodded. He stripped his bedding, tucking The Little Prince in the wadded sheets for safe-keeping, and shuffled down the hall and out the front door. The interior lights of the Beige Chrysler wagon lit up the leather seats inside. Boxes were stacked to the ceiling of
the car. He opened the passenger door, the only seat other than the driver’s that wasn’t hidden by mounds of plastic tubs and cardboard boxes. He threw the bedding inside. He tucked his head in and examined the boxes.

  Just then, rocks on the asphalt churned underneath a car coming down the street. The car’s headlights spotlighted Teddy, and he jumped. Then, the car picked up speed and zoomed down the street. It braked hard at the station wagon, its trunk door still hanging freely above the car.

  It was his father. Teddy could see his shoulder jerk as he cranked the window down.

  “Teddy? What the hell are you doing? Where’s Mom?”

  Teddy didn’t answer, and his father didn’t wait for him. He took one look at the contents of the station wagon and pulled into the drive, not wasting the couple of seconds it would’ve taken to pull into his usual spot in the garage.

  Teddy’s father went straight to the front door and threw the door open. He stood there, paralyzed by confusion and fear. He looked at the darkness of the pewter house next to his own, the Marshes’. Teddy couldn’t help but think of Pete waiting for him at the bus stop tomorrow morning, waiting to show Teddy his new cards. Part of him wanted to go to Pete’s window and knock until he let him in. Teddy could spend the rest of the school year hiding out there.

  Teddy’s thought was interrupted by the sight of his parents through the glass screen door. The front door was still ajar. His mother was pointing in his father’s face. She stepped closer each time his father took a step back.

  Then, when they stepped behind the blinds’ invisibility, Teddy could hear the roar of his father’s booming shouts. He didn’t want to go in, but Teddy hoped they would stop fighting if he did.

  Teddy trudged through the damp grass and to the screen door. It was his mom’s turn again, and she had plenty of ammo to light his father up.

  “Get the fuck out, Arthur. You don’t get to come home and fuck her in our bed, stay out with her all night, and then come back to our son and me. Get the fuck out!”

  His father took a deep breath. Defusing a bomb took patience, tact. Teddy was surprised. With his father’s anger, thinking clearly in moments like this wasn’t something he typically did well.

  His father’s voice was low and calm. “I just needed to blow off steam. You were working so much. You were stressed.”

  Teddy looked to his mother and could instantly tell his father had cut the wrong wire. His mother exploded. “It wasn’t just her, Arthur! You fucking know that. You can say I’m uptight. You can say I spend too much time at work. But it’s always been the same problem.”

  His mother stepped closer to his father, their noses nearly touching.

  “You’ve never been able to stick with me when things get hard. Instead, you go shopping for someone else to fuck and then parade her through our house.”

  She looked at Teddy. His stomach somersaulted. Don’t say it, Mom. Please don’t say it. Don’t tell him I told.

  “And in front of our son, for fuck’s sake.”

  The tension beat into his head and sent splitting aches throughout. He couldn’t help it. The dense knot in his throat grew and poked harder and harder at him until he began to sob.

  But his cries were drowned out. As if proving a point that he was his father’s son, he and his dad seemed to snap simultaneously.

  “If you don’t want me here, that’s all you have to fucking say!”

  Teddy’s mother began to sob as she fired back. “It’s not about not wanting you! It’s never been about that. It’s about needing to know you love me. You’ve chosen someone else so many goddamn times, Arthur. Everything we should go through together, I do alone, and then when I’ve pulled myself out of that mess, I’m stuck cleaning up whatever the hell you’ve done in the meantime.”

  His mother’s energy surge seemed to have melted from the burning red in her freckled cheeks, down her chest, and to the floor. Her tears were soft and slow. And the anger in her eyes seemed to have left too. She looked at his father and whispered, “I won’t share you, Arthur. I can’t.”

  Thinking this was his cue to give them a moment, Teddy took a step toward the hall, putting one foot out of the war zone.

  His parents didn’t seem to notice, so he took another step. Teddy’s father raised his hands to the top of his head and then slammed them to his thighs. The sound made Teddy stop.

  “What are you asking me to do then, Lila?”

  Teddy waited. If she could give him the roadmap for how to fix things, maybe he really could. But instead, his mother wiped her tears and, with an unyielding tone of confidence, said, “Leave. Leave so we don’t have to.”

  She said it with unbreakable determination, spoken from a place of pain and exhaustion, one without faith and too tired to carry on. A place that his father himself had set fire to. Teddy looked to his mother to piece the foundation together from the ashes, as she always had.

  When his father didn’t answer, his mother pushed past him.

  “Teddy, go get the rest of your things. I just need to grab something else.”

  Looking for an escape route all along, Teddy ran down the hall. Tears beat down his face as he bypassed the tub of clothes and dove onto his bare mattress. Teddy threw his fists at it without a clear understanding of where all this anger came from. There was so much he still didn’t understand. He threw his fists in uncontrollable energy that misguided his aim. His fist beat from the mattress into his own face.

  Teddy cried as he held his face. Then he sat up and smacked both sides of his head. “It’s your fault, you… you… stupid fuck!”

  Teddy threw his legs off his bed and yelled it again, “You stupid fuck!”

  He waited for his parents to come storming down the hall, pulled from their own argument, because of Teddy’s cursing.

  But the yelling from the living room went on. It became white noise in the background while Teddy floated above it.

  His eyes and throat ached from his outburst. As Teddy tried to slow his breathing, he looked to his moonlight-created shadow and whispered aloud, “I didn’t mean to mess it up. I didn’t mean to tell.”

  The volume from the living room was moving closer, as his parents stormed down the hall. Teddy’s mother came into his room and picked up the purple tub of his clothes.

  “Teddy, get the rest of your things. Now.”

  She never got stern with him like this. She never had to. And before this afternoon, she had never cussed like that in front of Teddy. Or even really raised her voice. It was never her style. She wasn’t submissive but rather showed her anger in silence. The kind that made the person on the other side yell louder to compensate for the absence of volume from their counterpart. Is that why his dad yelled the way he did? It couldn’t be. It wasn’t her fault. He knew what his mother did to try to help keep his father’s yelling at bay.

  Even though Teddy didn’t understand, with the certainty she carried, he knew she was beyond talking to his father. She said they were leaving, and she meant it.

  “Lila, you’re being irrational.”

  The anger was building in his father’s voice. Teddy wished he had an escape pod—one he could tuck in and fly away to the moon, where maybe parents didn’t yell and fathers didn’t need friends to make them feel better because they were just happy when they came home.

  Maybe on the moon, he wouldn’t have any secrets to keep from his mother or from anyone. It would be the end of trying to understand why adults did the things they did. Maybe there wouldn’t be any adults at all—just Teddy, the stars, and his shadow.

  The roaring around him continued as his father yelled at his mother. Her determination infuriated him. He jumped around her, bursting with a fury that was ready to tip and spill.

  Teddy’s father grabbed his mother’s wrist and pulled her toward him, making the tub spill on the floor.

  “You listen to me,” his father spat in his mother�
��s face. “You’re not taking our son. No one is going anywhere!”

  Teddy trembled, not knowing what to do or how to move. Part of him wanted to take his chances of zipping past them and running for the trees where he’d climb until he reached the moon, away from it all.

  His mother jerked her wrist free. “Teddy, grab the last box here and get in the car. My keys are on the counter.”

  Teddy didn’t move.

  “Now, Teddy.”

  Teddy grabbed the tub, scooped his clothes inside, and did as his mother said. His father grabbed his shoulder with a tight grip that made Teddy’s knees bend underneath him. His father’s hand was strong and made Teddy let out a mumble of pain.

  His mother shoved his father away from Teddy. “Don’t touch him! Don’t you ever touch him like that! Do you think yelling over everyone and grabbing your son like that makes you a man? It doesn’t, Arthur!”

  The words sank in like acid into the skin—burning as it seared through the layers.

  “You don’t have the strength of a man, of a husband, or a father. You’re a fragile little bitch.”

  His father charged his mother and smacked her across the face repeatedly. She fell into the hallway and against the wall. She brought her fists to the outside of her face. She was trying to lessen the whipping pain of the strong hands flying at her. Teddy’s father didn’t let up on the intensity of his strikes.

  “Stop! Stop! Please, you’re hurting her!”

  Teddy sobbed through his pleas. But his father went on and on, ignoring the cries of pain from both his son and wife. His father’s anger caught fire and was burning them alive. Teddy knew he had to put out the flames before his father killed his mother. He had to save her even though he was more afraid than he had ever been in his entire life.

  He shot to his closet and grabbed the baseball bat his father had gotten him for his ninth birthday. He got up on his tippy toes and raised the bat above his head, the way a knight would wield a sword, rather than a ballplayer in the batter’s box. Through tears, Teddy brought it down against his father, hitting him square in the back of the head. When he fell to the floor, Teddy hit him once more. His father convulsed in pain and fell unconscious.