Five(50)

And he did, for a while. Yet they have ended up here again, like they always do. She pushes him away, he pulls her in, the game they’ve played for years. He wants to fix this. It’s what he’s best at. Taking care of people. He’s done it all his life.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be taken care of?” he whispers to her. She closes her eyes. Yes.

But Emma is so tired of men. The one who hired her to do this deal, the one she chose to be the father of her child, the one her son is on the torturous road to becoming.

And she will take care of herself.

She deftly pulls at the straps of her dress and tears the stitches, unzips the side of the bodice. In a moment, in a motion, her gown falls to the floor, freeing her, pooling in a black puddle around her feet. Liam stands impotently with the satin of her train still in his hand, when she steps out of the dress to face him, barefoot, clad only in a black lace slip, the violent road map of her skin unveiled. It is not an invitation, it is not a flirtation. It is a statement of fact.

He sees the bruise on her left thigh, the size of an apple. A long burn mark on the inside of her slim calf. A thin red line, a scratch, extending down the inside of her arm. She is so pale, her blue veins, her bruises, her scars illuminated on exposure to the air. Her skin looks like a battlefield against the dainty luxury of the expensive lingerie. She is like two different women standing in one flesh. The waif and the mistress. He cannot picture her as someone’s mother. As the mother of his son.

“Are you sure you want to take care of us, Liam?” Emma asks, coolly, as his eyes run over her.

“God, Emma,” he gasps, “did the boy do this?” urgency catching in his voice as he steps toward her. He wants to pull her into him, cover her, shield her, make her part of him. But it is Gideon, part of him, that has done this to her.

“You haven’t seen what I’ve done to the boy,” she says steady, unflinching. He’s not going to fix her. She won’t let him.

“What do you mean? What are you saying?” Liam says, appalled. “Where is he?”

“I’d think twice before you make offers you’ll regret, Liam,” Emma says, ignoring the question, as she turns away from him and he watches the luminescent angles of her delicate shoulder blades reflect the light. He thinks of butterfly wings. And knives.



* * *





Had Danny and Liam been born today, technology would have detected Danny’s heartbeat and shown his compromised position in Doreen’s uterus. It would have given medical professionals the evidence to make appropriate suggestions for interventions resulting in the healthy birth of both boys. Doreen would have had a planned cesarean section, and Danny would not have been left in the back of her womb on his own fighting to begin his life.

But Liam and his brother were born in 1970, and so Danny’s heartbeat was missed under the roaring thump of Liam’s in the midwife’s stethoscope. Only Doreen’s body knew of his existence, and so it inflated her lungs and made her scream, and it contracted to push him out, tiny and blue, while everyone was still distracted by the chaos and the miracle that was the birth of the wailing, robust, Liam.

In the end, despite the confusion and shock of finding a second baby where they had not known there would be one, despite Doreen’s plunge into paralyzing terror when she learned she had two boys and that one of them was almost dead, despite God not giving the infant Danny any grace, they had managed to save him, although not all of him survived.

There were parts of him that could have been but that never would be, and so they would become something else. The parts of Danny that were meant to run and jump and bounce and bound like his brother did not remain after his birth. The parts of him that were meant to fasten buttons and tie shoelaces and write in cursive did not make it. It was the absence of those parts that he understood caused his father to name him “Cripple,” which he used to mutter at Danny before he left for work in the morning. Until one day his father said nothing at all, just closed the door to the flat behind him and never came back.

Little Danny didn’t mind their father’s leaving, though little Liam did, because Danny understood that their father had named Liam “My boy,” and after he was gone there was no one left to call him that. Doreen just used the names she gave them.

Doreen only used the words that were necessary. She was a good mother and a loving mother. In the times in between her shifts as cashier at Sainsbury’s and cleaner at Marks and Spencer, just before she’d leave for work when Liam came home from school to look after Danny, she’d say things like “I mended the holes in your socks” or “There’s cottage pie but it’s mostly carrots,” which her boys knew meant “I love you.”

Sometimes she’d come home, worn and frayed, like the dreary curtains left by the previous tenant in the living room of their tiny flat that she had never had the time to wash, and she’d take sugar packets out of her pockets that she secreted from the employee break room at work. She’d pour a whole packet each into their cups of warm milk, and all she’d say was “The drink of kings,” and she’d hold Danny’s cup of milk still for him while he drank it with a straw, and she’d ruffle Liam’s hair while he downed his in one gulp.

When she said these four words, Liam, a literal thinker, remembered the word kings and held on to it, and kept it close, and believed it was meant for him. But Danny heard a lesson—nothing is ordinary if you don’t want it to be—and this was the real difference between the boys as they grew into men.