Martha Kessler

Adam

     Maryanne looks over to Adam but he isn't there. She drives around. He likes riding in the car. She turns the radio on and knocks her hand against a small yellow star hanging from the rearview mirror.

     * * *

     Maryanne finds a box of her brother's old toys in the attic. He bit her on the shoulder whenever they played together, when he didn't get his way. Orange plastic-car tracks. She hit him with these, and she remembers the sound of the plastic switching through the air.

     Adam asks, What are you doing with my toys?
     Nothing.
     You're not going to throw them away are you?
     No.

     Maryanne takes the box down toher room and empties it out on her bed. Match box cars. Army men. She makes room on her dresser and sets the cars and men into a scene; all the cars run over the men and they lie sprawled on the wood surface.

     Put them in a row, make a pyramid, Adam says.
     They can't stand on each other to make a pyramid.
     Yes they can. I did it once. See the ones with more plastic on their feet? You can balance them on the guys who hold their guns to their shoulders.

     Maryanne shrugs, but does what Adam suggested. She uses her jewelry box as a support.

     Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?
     About what?
     That you found my box of toys.
     It's my box now.
     Geez, Maran, are you going t otell them?
     Nope.
     What if Mom comes in and sees them?
     I'll put them under my bed.

     Maryanne finishes the pyramid and listens for Adam to say something, but he is quiet. She goes to her bed and puts the toys back in the box. Among them there are plastic water wings, deflated now and dusty. Adam never got a chance to learn how to swim.

     * * *

     Adam climbs the ladder of the slide carefully. Blue afternoon, clouds lazy and fat in the sky, small child perched among them, a silhouette against the sun. He pulls his legs up, one knee at a time, the process repeated again and again, deliberate,his hands and knees reddening where the rough surface of the steps rubs against them. At the top he sits cautiously and swings his legs around to dangle above the long wide expanse of curved, blueplastic: a slide that spills eagerly out over the water. He grips its sides with small pudgy hands.

     Maryanne watches him let go andskim down the slide, watches him as he hits the water. The surface closes over him as he sinks to the bottom and waits patiently for rescue.

     Adam sits quietly at the bottom ofthe pool, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees. His brown curls float lazily above his head, air bubbles mixing in with his hair. She pulls him up from the bottom of the pool and drags him back over to the shallow end,where, after he catches his breath, he begins to giggle.

     * * *

     Adam sits in the backseat of the car while his mother goes shopping. The doors are locked and he has instructions to open the doors for no one except the neighbor's children. These children never come, but Adam likes to think that they might one day.

     He plays with his favorite toy,the red and blue plastic ball that is hollow and comes apart in the middle. Its surface is like the round cookie cutters that his mother uses to make a lot ofthe same cookies, but here the shapes cut into the plastic are all different. There are stars and circles, squares and rectangles, pentagons and triangles. He pulls the ball apart and all the little yellow shapes from inside fall on his lap. He finds that sometimes the circle will go through the space made for the square. One day he takes the rectangle and slips it carefully through the space made for the star.

     * * *

     Maryanne runs through the house and Adam chases her. Shewaves his truck behind her, teasing him. She had stood holding the truck above her head where he could not reach it. She had begun running when he started to kick her in the shins.

     She runs through the front door and out to the corner beforeshe realizes that he isn't behind her anymore. She looks back and sees him lying on the ground crying.

     * * *

     Maryanne can still hear this sobbing as she drives her car. There are scuff marks on the passenger side part of the dash, dirty tennis shoes. Adam always has to put his feet up. His favorite song plays on the radio, Magic Carpet Ride.

     * * *

     "Maryanne, honey, I don't know what you mean. I don't remember that. Which pool? Listen to your mother. It just didn'thappen. Dear, you were always with him. Maybe you pretended." Her mother's tone is always gentle and kind, coaxing.

     She doesn't argue with her parents anymore. They say they don't remember times at the pool. They say Adam never ran down the street naked. They say he was a loud, talkative, child, when Maryanne knows that he was quiet and reserved. They say his favorite food was ice-cream, when Maryanne knows that it wasn't. It was the spaceship popsicle, the one you could get only from the ice-cream truck when the bells rang in the neighborhood streets andAdam and Maryanne would try to lick the blue part with only one side of their tongue, so that their tongue would be striped.

     These things, the memories that her parents say never happened, make lazy circles in Maryanne's mind. They are warm and sweaty as if held tight in the palm of a child's hand.

     * * *

     At the baggage carousel Adam watches luggage come through the hanging pieces of heavy fabric, fulfill their half circle journey on the conveyor belt and disappear. The same piece may come out and disappear many times before suddenly it isn't there anymore.

     Once when the baggage area was empty but the conveyor belt was still moving, he climbed up onto it and went through the flapping fabric. He pretended he was being gently cleaned. He sat with his legs crossed and traveled the length of the conveyor belt several times, through the semi-darkness of the holding room and back into the brightness of the baggage area. He saw now where the pieces of luggage went to when they never reappeared, stacked lonely on metal shelves in shadows that looked like the shapes from his red and blue ball.

     On car trips he lines up these shapes carefully on the seat and tells Maryanne they are people's lost bags. Maryanne pretends to throw them out the window. Adam says he's taking care of them, leave them alone.

     * * *

     Adam puts his feet up on the dash. Maryanne turns to look athim, sees him in profile, his face still round and slightly pudgy.

     Don't do that anymore, she says.
     Do what?
     Put your feet up on the dash.

     * * *

     Maryanne drives and thinks aboutAdam's first birthday when he fell head first into the cake.

     That's an old one Maran, Adam says.
     Then you tell me one, tell me your memories.

     * * *

     Maryanne holds Adam against the water fountain, trying to hoist him high enough so he can get a drink. His mouth touches the metal where the water comes out and he catches hepatitis. The whites of his eyes begin to yellow and he becomes cranky and irritable, leashed to the sofa, crying for her. There are more hospitals. There are more doctors. Be kind to him. Be patient.

     * * *

     Adam follows Maryanne outside and stumbles a bit as he tries to catch up to her. She waits for him at the gate and then turns him around and gives him a little shove back in the direction of the house. He doesn't go. She takes his hand and drags him back to the house, sits him on the steps. He shakes his head from side to side and gets up to follow her again, this time misjudging the gate opening and hitting his head on the post before Maryanne turns and comes back. She picks him up when he refuses to walk. He squirms in her arms and she holds tight and waddles slightly as she walks,trying not to drop him. His feet kick at her knees. He bites her on the shoulder through her shirt, and she lets him go. He runs, half blind with crying, into the street and lies sprawled on the pavement. Maryanne is angry and watches from inside the yard as he slowly gets up and steps further into the road. A car comes around the corner too fast and Adam looks at Maryanne right before the car swerves to miss him. But it hits him anyway, and she hears the whine of the car breaking to a stop.

     * * *

     Maryanne dreams of pieces of lost luggage, geometric shadows that writhe and change shape, that become figures of a boy in the different stages of growing up, whispering, confidential.

     * * *

     He would be thirteen.
     She would catch him looking at a dirty magazine in the alley behind Baskin-Robbins: a small crowd of oily boys snickering. The alley smells of sour milk. She herds them all back out to the street. She sends his friends kicking and screaming, pushes them away.
     She would take the magazine, roll it up. Swat them.
     She would learn how to fight.
     She would take Adam's hand, sweaty little fist, stubborn, resisting, tug him along beside her. Drive him home.

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