Page 18 of Thicker Than Water
The semiformal. I completely forgot. And only a week ago, I had Aiden try on his suit to make sure it fit.
“You still want to go?” I ask.
“It’ll probably be stupid, but”—he shrugs—“all my friends are going.”
“Yeah, but—honey, are you sure you’re up for it?”
His eyes spring to my face. “Why wouldn’t I be up for it?”
I sit on the edge of the bed, prompting a groan from the mattress, one I hear at night whenever Jason rolls over.
“Because of Dad?” I say, and I don’t know why it comes out as a question. I guess I expected something different from him tonight—more distress, more need. At the very least, I assumed he’d ask me about Jason: Did he wake up? Is he still a suspect? I knew not to picture him throwing his arms around me, but I still thought this week, these astonishing troubles, might be a bridge between us.
When he was a baby, Aiden’s innate neediness clawed at me, leaving me shredded. My nipples felt like spigots, nothing more than a mechanism of my breasts, even as they stung from Aiden’s tiny, gnawing mouth. Sleep came only in snatches, the slippery pauses between Aiden’s endless cries. In my worst moments, I resented him. I was barely out of college; I should have been sleepless by choice, from staying out too late, from talking to men I’d later gossip about with friends. But then I’d nuzzle into Aiden’s neck, inhaling his milky smell until my annoyance softened into awe.
Now I wish his needs were as simple as they were back then: food,comfort, love. But this—his forced coolness—signals a darker, more nuanced need, one I don’t know how to approach, let alone fulfill.
Still, I try: “Do you want to talk about any of this? We haven’t really discussed it much, and I know it’s really upsetting. Or”—I pivot at his visible apprehension—“if you don’t feel comfortable talking to me, I could always find someone else for you to speak to.”
Aiden’s eyes narrow. “Someone else like who?”
“Like… a doctor.”
“A shrink?” His voice spikes in pitch. He stuffs his fists into his pockets, backing away as he shakes his head. “No. No, Mom, stop. Can’t you just—let me pretend this isn’t happening?”
My heart contracts. My arms ache to hold him. “I don’t know that that’s the healthiest idea, sweetie.”
“Why not?Youdo it all the time.”
His words land a punch. I stare up at him from the bed, struggling to absorb the blow.
“What does that mean?”
He answers my question with one of his own. “Did Dad do something bad?”
“What? No. He didn’t kill Gavin, honey, the police just—”
“Beforethat,” he interrupts. “Like a week before Christmas. I heard you argue about something. And since then, you’ve been weird and distant with Dad.”
My stomach drops.
“So, what did he do?” Aiden asks. “Did he cheat on you?”
“Oh—god, no.” I stand up, cup his shoulder with my palm. “No.”
He pulls away so my arm drifts back to my side. “Then what?”
I sink onto the bed again, the same place I perched, gut-punched and stunned, that December night. Jason knelt down in front of me then, hands on either side of my body, as I asked how he could do this. And when I saw that he didn’t have an answer, only a promiseto make it right, fear tornadoed inside me—how well do you know this man?—buckling the foundation of what I believed.
It was so unlike him, this secrecy, disloyalty. Because loyalty is as much a feature of Jason as his blue eyes, his dark hair. It’s one of the qualities that made him so easy to love, back when I was newly pregnant, when I’d decided to commit to him and needed that love to follow. Jason still sees the same dentist he did when he was a kid, despite the tremors in Dr. Tatro’s hands. He still buys a dozen bagels a week from the bakery in town because it was something his mother did, and when she died, he didn’t want the shop to lose the sale. Every time it snows, he rushes out to shovel our elderly neighbor’s driveway, even though she’s offered to hire a service to do it. But gambling away ten thousand dollars of our money, money we’d saved, together, for an experience I’d been dreaming of my whole life—where was the loyalty there?
As Aiden waits for my response, dread covers me like a lead blanket. It’s a familiar feeling, one I get whenever I have to—or should—say something important, something that might make waves, might expose a painful, unchangeable truth. And now I can’t bear to burden Aiden with another thing. His father’s in a coma, a suspect in a murder; he doesn’t need my own hurt to be heaped onto his plate, doesn’t need a reason to reexamine who he thought Jason was. I want Aiden to always see Jason the way he did as a kid, when he’d follow him around the house, dubbing him “President of Everything!” or would vault into his arms, eyes glittering with delight, as soon as Jason got home. Even after Jason missed Aiden’s fifth birthday party—choosing, instead, to stay at the hospital with the woman whose hit-and-run he witnessed—Aiden welcomed his dad home with the widest grin, the widest arms.
“It was nothing,” I say. “I was just— I overreacted about something.”
Aiden crosses his arms. “Overreacted,” he repeats, voice coiled with contempt.
I nod, then pick at my thumbnail, expecting him to push it, to demand to know what thatsomethingwas I overreacted to. Instead, he chews the inside of his cheek, eyes avoiding mine as he shakes his head, and in his silence, I hear the grumble of his stomach.
