I looked down at the sound of Haim’s wail. For a moment he wasn’t even crying yet, just looking up at me in shock and betrayal.
“For Christ’s sake,” Charlie said, picking him up and looking at me. “Really? Really?”
Sometime around the middle of Haim’s second year, something had changed. He would only let Charlie help him with his food, only let Charlie put him to bed at night. He began to follow her around the house, and screamed and screamed when she left for work. As she cooked dinner, he would stand, leaning against the side of her leg, turning the thick pages of one of the picture books silently, occasionally glancing up at her, as if to make sure she had not disappeared when he was not looking.
This was also around the time we began to understand his mind, what gifts he had inherited straight from Charlie. The only thing he would do with me (and then only if I faux-pleaded) was to let me watch him turn the pages of one of his books. Charlie and I had also begun noticing right about this time that Haim seemed to have, without any real help from us, intuited the alphabet, and was beginning to read. It was small words at first, but then when he added larger ones they were all the words that were supposed to be the hardest, the ones not spelled phonetically. He loved books, and would carry stacks of them around to wherever he was playing in the house. Charlie had worked with number cards when she was little and so she decided to try this with him, and by the time we were planning his third birthday party he could do simple addition operations with single-digit numbers. Our daycare reported that Haim cried from the moment I dropped him off until the moment Charlie picked him up, with only a few breaks for sips of water in between. His face became red, dry, and chafed. Charlie decided to cut back on her hours at the law firm in order to stay home with him more. She couldn’t stand the thought of him toddling around ready to learn with no one there willing to teach him.
On the night after his fourth birthday party Haim had woken up crying, and wouldn’t stop until Charlie came in, even though I’d gotten up to see to him, and wouldn’t calm down enough to tell her what happened until I left the room. I stood in the hallway while Charlie talked him down. He’d had a nightmare.
“Daddy’s gonna, daddy’s gonna leave me all alone,” he said, with barely enough breath. “He’s gonna leave me and replace me with a different boy.”
“Why would you say that? Don’t say that honey,” Charlie said, rubbing tiny circles on his back. “Daddy loves you very, very much. Daddy would never, ever leave you.”
“I dreamed it,” Haim insisted. “It’s gonna be true.”
“Well, I’ve known Daddy a really, really long time, and he’s never left anybody,” my wife said. “So I know he won’t leave you. You’re his favorite. What kind of boy could ever replace you?”
“It was, it was a robot boy,” Haim sniffled. “Except it — except you can’t tell, because they look, they look like — they look the same.”
“No, baby,” Charlie said. “Robot boys aren’t real, and Daddy wouldn’t trade anything for you.”
Haim shook his head.
“You watch,” he said. “You watch.”
After that we’d made a deal with Haim, made a goal of one whole day with no crying. We would try to make sure we were doing things where he felt comfortable, things that didn’t make him feel afraid or anxious, and he would try to be a little calmer. Charlie even took him to work one day at the office, and he wrote quietly on papers spread out on the floor behind her desk, filling page after page with the scrawled numbers he was just learning. The homecoming parade had been the closest we’d come to a cry-free day.
In the car on the way to the restaurant after the parade was over, I was thinking about the way the whole world seemed to be on the verge of great change — the fields into the winter anonymity of snow, Haim into a prodigy, premature school-goer with an acute self-awareness, a separate person from us, the qualities currently in concentrated miniature ready to swell, gain volume like one of his tiny plastic dinosaurs that, left for an hour in water, was suddenly too big for the bowl; its terrible, squishy body somehow all contained there in its condensed beginning. I was thinking about how strange it is that you can’t really see even two or three years into the future. That you go through each of your days having no idea toward which sadness you are headed.
“Why should I have to guess at what you’re upset about?” Charlie was saying in the passenger seat. We were continuing the argument that had begun in the parking garage after the parade, in which we’d cursed at each other in the few seconds when Haim was settled in his car seat in the back and we’d closed the doors before getting in the front. (“We should talk about this,” I said. “Why, so you can go on telling me why it’s OK that you’re such an asshole?” Charlie had hissed over the top of the car. “You can go fuck yourself,” I’d hissed back, and grabbed open the driver’s side door.) Now she said, “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“What I’m upset about,” I said, “is that you have to ask. That’s the whole thing you’re failing at; that’s what empathy is. You’re supposed to imagine yourself in my emotional position in a real enough way to not only know what it is I’m upset about, but to anticipate it. And I shouldn’t be having to explain this to you.”
“Oh, is that what empathy is?” Charlie said, and sighed.
“Jeddey, jetty, jedi,” Haim said. He was just getting into the Star Wars movies, and liked to try to say the harder words over and over again to himself. Despite his intelligence, it seemed his speech development had been skipped over in the hurry, and he often had trouble.
We were quiet for a minute.
We slowed to a stop in a long line of traffic, and Charlie put her hand over mine on the knob of the gearshift. “I don’t want to be angry,” she said.
And isn’t this what we wanted? Hadn’t this been the plan? We’d talked and talked about having a baby those first months in Iowa. It had seemed like a crazy idea at the time, but then at the end of one long argument about it, Charlie had sat down on the couch and cried, her shoulders heaving, trying to turn in on themselves. When she calmed down enough to speak she talked about her various failures: in being the concert pianist her early instructors had wanted her to be; in finding the mathematical proofs whose moving pieces she could no longer all hold in her head at the same time; in being a happy, well-adjusted wife. At the time, she’d just gotten the job at the law firm, which handled only family law, and spent most of her day filing, copying, and talking on the phone to confused, enraged women and men who had just been served divorce papers, or watched their children be taken from their own home.
“And maybe I’m just not one of those people who can find in a career the kind of meaning that can sustain a life,” she said that night of the decision, her face drawn from crying. “I just think, I just really think that maybe I’m supposed to find meaning in something else — that maybe what I’ll be really good at will be loving our little kid. I can feel that. I just know it’s true in my heart.”
For weeks I said I didn’t know; I talked about how we didn’t have any money, how if we had a kid now we’d have to take money from my mother for a long time. I talked about how much we fought, how we weren’t quite ready, and Charlie listened but then she said, “I think this is one of those things where you’re never quite ready. Where the only way you learn how to have a kid is by having one. You figure it out as you go, I think. For instance, I think we’d fight less if I was pregnant. I think we wouldn’t want to fight. I think we’d be better people because that is what our lives would require of us.”