Five(10)

“Ow, you’re hurting me,” he whines as he squirms out of her grasp. She lets him go, and he runs upstairs, crying, or imitating crying. She hears the TV flick on in his bedroom, the volume turned high, the crying over as soon as his show comes on. He likes cartoons after violence.

She tastes the blood that has dribbled in a tiny stream from her eyebrow to her lip. “Meet him with love no matter how hard that may be,” she hears the child psychologist saying—the second, the third, or the fourth psychologist. She takes a scatter cushion from the sofa, puts it over her face, and screams.

Then she gets up. She goes to the kitchen. She opens the cupboard to get a teabag but moves deftly sideways and steps back as she opens the door in case he’s rigged it, a new trick he has. The rolling pin comes crashing down onto the kitchen counter, intended to knock her in the head or crush her fingers.

She picks it up, feels the weight of it in her hand. She bought it at the upscale kitchen shop outside the clinic after her twelve-week scan. She had pictured herself rolling out dough with a cherubic child by her side standing on a stool, flour dusting his curly hair, and posting a video of the scene, sending it to her family WhatsApp group, showing them how good she was at this. A fleeting thought she did not allow that they might even be proud of her.

You’re such a stupid bitch, she thinks now, pouring hot water and regret over the teabag in her cup. She has thought this every day of Gideon’s life. From the very first one.

It was a torturous, terrifying birth that left her with a ragged scar across a numb, gelatinous field of flesh, left her sitting in a haze of grief and outrage and pain unable to hold her baby boy, who was underweight and fragile, lying in a heated, plastic box, oblivious to her presence. He came too early. And Emma, who had never lost control over anything ever, stubbornly refused to understand the signs of his distress in her pulsing abdomen. She took the pain because she arrogantly insisted that life and death were her decisions to make, until she lay in a pool of blood on her bathroom floor, alone, until it was almost too late and she finally understood that she had made a terrible mistake. She’d thought she could never feel what other people did, until now. And what she felt was fear.

Then there were other feelings too—worry when Gideon rejected her milk; disappointment that he never smiled when he saw her; heartbreak when she left him with the day nanny on her first day back at work; and worse heartbreak when she came home and he didn’t reach for her. Dismay that nothing was within her control anymore.

And another feeling, one she had been ignoring, although she knew its name. Or his name—Liam. Her offer to him had been simple: Have fun with her, get her pregnant, no strings attached after that. She would have the baby, he would relinquish his parental rights, a clean break. She didn’t need his money; she had her own. He obliged. It sounded like a great deal to him, so he gave her what she wanted, but now she wished he hadn’t. Because now she wished he was here. And he wasn’t. She had to put that feeling away, though, for another time and place. She had to put her son before herself now, and she would for the foreseeable future out of love for her child. Or terror. It was hard for her to tell the difference.

“How often does he do this?” the doctor asked her when Gideon was seventeen months old.

“I try to catch him whenever I hear the thumping, but sometimes he’s done it and I won’t know until he’s crying or I see the bump,” she said, worried about how often—how hard—Gideon banged his head against the bars of his crib.

“Or it will wake the night nanny,” she said.

“Night nanny?” the doctor asked with naked judgment as she checked Gideon’s pupils with the tiny flashlight.

“I’m a single mum, I work, I can’t stay up all night with him,” Emma said, a faint glimmer of her former self in her voice.

“No, it’s not that, it’s that he shouldn’t be up all night, he should be well past that by now,” the doctor said. “Have you tried…”

But Emma stopped listening. She had tried everything.

In the car on the way home Gideon mimicked the doctor: “Have you tried change his naps?”

“Very good, Gideon,” Emma said. He was an early talker, speaking in full sentences by the time he was thirteen months old. An expert impressionist, he copied adult speech and had an unusually advanced vocabulary. He was already deciphering basic written words.

“What a clever boy,” she said, absently. But being smart didn’t help this, whatever this was. His intelligence only made it worse as time went on and Gideon grew and grew but did not outgrow the thing she knew was inside him.

“But, Michelle, you can’t just not show up. I have to get to work, you can’t just—” Emma pleaded with the day nanny as she scrubbed Gideon’s feces off the kitchen wall where he’d thrown them after breakfast.

“Look, I know, but it’s just a phase, and it’s hard for some kids, especially boys, he’s only three,” she said, trying to sound level and patient so that Michelle wouldn’t quit. She had threatened to leave many times, but Gideon’s toilet training had pushed her beyond her limits. Michelle was the only nanny who had stayed more than a few weeks. Who had actually tried to help Emma. She couldn’t lose her.

“He needs professional help, Emma,” Michelle said, firmly, honestly.

“But you’re a professional,” Emma tried not to beg.