Cutting Teeth(47)

“I didn’t!” Noelle is already crying because Noelle cries as a reflex, never the tough one.

“You did and now it’s not working and that’s your fault!” Angeline whirls on her sister and points like a prosecutor in the Salem witch trials. You. People did warn her what it would be like to raise two girls. “Mom! NoNo used my charger to plug in her tablet and now the charger doesn’t remember my tablet and now it won’t work and my tablet is dead and I can’t practice my reading.”

Mary Beth tries to recall whatever invisible protective layer she often musters to make herself impermeable to the girls’ antics.

“I didn’t touch it.” Noelle shrinks into the wall.

Doug peels open his eyelids and drags himself off the cushions to investigate.

“Then how come your tablet is plugged into my charger?” Angeline’s hands are on her hips. She has serious big-sister energy. Mary Beth can relate. She once had it, too. Maybe still does. “Your case is purple. Mine is lime green.”

“I said I didn’t do it!” Noelle sticks out her tongue.

“Noelle,” Mary Beth warns. “We don’t make ugly faces.”

“Noelle.” Detective Dad returns. “I have to say that it looks like you’ve been caught red-handed.” He holds up Angeline’s charger connected to a purple tablet. Aha! “What do you have to say for yourself?” He’s teasing. Sort of.

Noelle takes the tablet from her dad and sinks down to the ground with it hugged tightly to her chest. Here we go. “My hands aren’t red, Daddy, they’re pink,” she screams.

“Then I’m taking yours.” Angeline snatches the top edge of the tablet cover and pulls, but Noelle clings to it. “Let go, NoNo. It’s not fair.”

“It’s mine.” Noelle yanks back.

“Let goooo.” Angeline goes for her sister’s fingers and tries to bend them backward.

“Hey!” Mary Beth or Doug says this. She really can’t tell anymore; they’ve been here before and everyone knows the drill. “Hey!” The girls do not care if their parents have had a hard week, if their parents are exhausted to their brittle, calcium-deprived bones. It’s not their job to.

“Stop it!” Noelle shrieks.

“You stop it!”

“You’re going to break it. It’s mine!”

“Ahhhhh!! Ahhhh!!!”

“Ahhhhhhh!”

“You bit me!” Angeline howls.

Mary Beth rockets up. “Noelle! No! No, Noelle!” She streaks across the room and yanks her youngest by the elbow so hard her adult fingers leave red welts on the skin. “What are you thinking?”

Her heart pounds. A bite. Blood. Red blooms behind her eyes. The picture of Noelle’s tongue bright red and how quickly this can all get out of hand.

Angeline’s big blue eyes are round saucers. Mary Beth turns her daughter’s arms over and back, over and back. “Are you okay?” she demands like she’s angry, which she’s not.

A slick of saliva smears across her forearm, which Angeline wipes across her cotton dress. But that’s it. Nothing else. Just spit.

Mary Beth kneads the spot between her eyebrows, letting her pulse calm. She feels the familiar swelling inside her skull.

“Are you okay, Mary Beth?” Doug is watching her like she’s lost her mind.

“Did Noelle bite you?” Mary Beth ignores him.

“Her teeth were on me. I felt it. She was biting down. Grrr.” Angeline demonstrates by baring her own teeth; she’s missing three.

Noelle doesn’t deny it, which is telling given that she denies virtually everything.

Doug kneels in front of Noelle, brushing his thumbs gently over the red marks Mary Beth left, which makes her feel sick with guilt. “We can’t bite unless Mommy or Daddy says it’s okay, do you understand?” He sounds so reasonable in comparison.

But Noelle’s face is already a storm of rain. She scampers off, barefoot, and slams the door. The sound ricochets in Mary Beth’s fragile skull. She clutches her head, praying it won’t trigger another episode. It’s not Noelle’s fault. She’s a perfectionist, every teacher has said so. Criticism is her kryptonite.

“Suppose we should go in there,” Doug says.

Mary Beth sighs. On her worst days, parenting feels like one big “supposed to.”

Together, they find Noelle rolling around on the pink gingham bedspread, her cries sputtering like an engine running out of gas. Fat tears dribble down the sides of her face. Noelle’s room looks like a French countryside picnic moments after a cargo plane carrying a shipment of toys crashed into it.

She sits down on the bed. “Enough of that.” Not her best pep talk, but she’s not really at her best. She forces herself to recite the fruits of the spirit: kindness, patience, self-control …

But Noelle bicycles her legs against the comforter and arches her back.

Annoyance walks a ladder up the knobs of Mary Beth’s spine. She keeps it to herself, perhaps the only thing of hers—her bed, her privacy, her dinner, her ice cream—that the family is perfectly fine with her not sharing. “It’s okay. Mommy is sorry for overreacting. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Noelle is, as a point of fact, very cute, like cute enough that Mary Beth worries on a regular basis that she’ll attract child predators.