Fifteen #2
Those afternoons in Ferry’s room were as close to her as yesterday was, as dropping him off in college, as searching for a dog in Georgia.
When she was younger, newly married, people had sometimes asked her if she wanted a child of her own, a “piece of real estate” someone had once described it, “that’s just yours and Judd’s.
” She knew why they wondered—clearly she had a maternal streak, and clearly Ferry wasn’t entirely hers in the traditional sense.
But she knew, in her bones, that she would never once want more than him, and in all these years she never had, because with this child and this child alone, she could be both his mother and more than his mother, someone bonded to him by the shared experience of complicated mothers, and because she understood him more clearly and loved him more dearly because she knew he needed her so deeply, and she knew that she could meet that need for him. She always did; she always would.
HE’D STARTED KINDERGARTEN on a beautiful fall Tuesday in 2009: new sneakers and a new backpack and had a new haircut and freckles across his nose.
She and Judd walked him to school, hand in hand, and stayed with him for the first fifteen minutes taking pictures and feeling weepy until his teacher finally shooed them out.
Judd had to go into Le Coin that afternoon, so Amy had stood alone at three p.m. with the other mothers and nannies by the school’s elaborate wrought iron gate.
“Here they come!”
As though attending to a group of celebrities, the crowd of mothers hovered and fluttered as their children emerged through the gate, and Amy felt heartened by this exuberant display of parental affection, and then positively dazzled at the sight of her very own Ferry, walking out of the school with his overstuffed backpack and a shy grin on his face.
He was still wearing a nametag on his shirt that identified him as FERRIS , which made him seem like a little businessman, both the nametag and the name itself (it was Uno’s last name, a sop to her father, who disowned her anyway).
“How was it?” she asked, grabbing him and smooching him on both cheeks.
Of course he had been to preschool and of course he’d had nannies and of course she’d rarely spent the entire day with him before but still she felt like she hadn’t seen him in a million years, she’d missed him that much, and somehow he’d also gotten older.
“It was good!”
“What did you do?”
“Could you put me down? You’re squishing me.”
She planted him back on the sidewalk and together they walked, holding hands, around the corner and down Second Avenue, past the grocery store and the bakery and the drugstore. “You know you’re going to learn to read this year.”
“I already read!”
“But I mean really read. Long words, the newspaper, whatever you want.”
“I don’t think I want to read the newspaper, Mama.”
“One day you might.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can I get a boba?”
They were half a block away from the boba place they both liked; Amy pretended to think about it. “Have you been a good boy?”
“I’ve been medium-good?” Ferry said. “I forgot to put the seat up when I peed.”
“Did you remember to wash your hands?”
He nodded.
“Good enough, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
But as they were leaving the boba shop, a shadowy figure, like something out of a horror movie, grabbed at her boy with a clawlike hand.
While they had been in the boba shop the sky had turned cloudy and as the figure grabbed at Ferry, Amy suddenly had the feeling of being whisked into a nightmare.
“No!” she shrieked, grabbing him backward, but it was New York and no one noticed.
“ He is mine ,” the woman said. Uno, eyes bloodshot, her long hair in her face, her voice crackling, but Ferry stood still, holding tight to his boba.
She was wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up so you could see the track marks, smelling like death and God knows what she was on, and Amy realized she’d been waiting for this day to come for years without realizing she’d been waiting for it.
“Amy, stop it, you’re frightening him.”
But Uno wouldn’t let go. She had tears running down her face now, and she held on to Ferry’s arm but her grasp was weak, and Amy wasn’t sure what to do here; she picked him up, Uno still clutching his arm.
Could she run like this, Uno just hanging on?
And then, like a hallucination, like a waking nightmare, Amy saw Uno grab a folding knife from her pocket—was she fucking kidding?
—and open the knife with a shaking hand.
“If you don’t give him to me I will kill myself. ”
“Amy, Jesus—” She held Ferry to herself, mashed his face into her chest so he wouldn’t see what his mother was doing. He dropped the boba and wailed.
“I swear to fucking God I will kill myself right here if you don’t give me my child.”
“Amy, come on, please—”
“ Give me my child ,” she hissed, and the knife was steely in front of her; Amy’s whole line of vision seemed to dwindle to the blade of the knife, and slowly, slowly, Amy felt her grip on Ferry loosen.
“Put down the knife,” Amy said.
“Give me my child.”
“Mom?” Ferry had turned his head, he saw his mother, he saw his boba on the sidewalk, but still, he stopped crying. Amy took her hands off the boy. “Mom?” It wasn’t clear who he was talking to.
Uno had the knife back in her pocket and her hands on Ferry’s shoulders and then she was hurrying him away like she was capturing a hostage and Amy had no idea what to do; with shaking hands she grabbed her phone and dialed Judd as she tailed them down Second Avenue and then Uno hailed a cab and pushed Ferry in it and Amy couldn’t believe it as she hailed another cab and screamed “Follow that one! Follow that one!” like she was in some kind of crazy cop movie.
The cabby turned to her and looked at her like she was insane—which one did he want her to follow?
—and when Judd picked up the phone (she had to dial and redial to get him to pick up) she was sobbing, Please, please, she took Ferry, please—
And Judd knew what she was talking about, thank God, she didn’t have to explain, and she realized her cab hadn’t gone anywhere, was still stalled out on the corner of Second and Seventh.
“What’s her address? Judd what’s her address?”
Uno’s townhouse was in Gramercy, just twenty or so blocks north. Amy gave the cabby the address. She tried to control her breathing but she could not.
What was happening to them? Was she hurting him?
She wouldn’t—she would hurt herself a million times over but she would never dare hurt him, would she?
She wouldn’t. She said she loved him more than life itself and they had always believed her.
Uno had never been violent before. She had been distracted, asleep, sometimes almost vegetative, she had been careless, she had been anguished, she had been vacant or truant or almost dead.
But she had never caused him physical pain.
If she had, they would have cut her out of his life entirely (Amy would have insisted on it, biology be damned, she would have fucking insisted).
When they reached Uno’s block, she threw two twenties at the cabby and slammed the door and she realized she was shaking as she raced up the townhouse stairs.
She wasn’t sure if she should call the police to meet her—would that make Uno act more rashly?
—or if she should just wait for Judd on the steps or if she should try the doors herself.
She tried the doors; they opened.
“Ferry?”
The townhouse had a double-height entryway; her voice echoed. “Amy? Ferry?” She could hear the tremble in her voice: please please please.
She followed the hallway toward the low voices she heard, toward a kitchen.
Marble, stainless steel, modernist lighting fixtures, light streaming in from the huge north-facing windows, and Uno and Ferry, their heads bent in the same exact way, their hair the same exact color, leaning together at the kitchen table looking at something.
Amy could feel her hands shaking.
Neither one of them looked up. She had no idea what to do; if she startled them, if she said something to them, would Uno—
“Dos?” Ferry said, looking up. “Why are you here?”
She felt the tears rush to her eyes. Her baby.
“I just—I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m good,” he said. “I’m showing Mom the pictures we drew of our pets at school. Some kids didn’t have pets though so they had to draw pictures of their stuffed animals.”
Uno did not look up.
“Okay,” Amy said.
“But I drew Leo and Heidi and William and Junebug and Shawarma.”
“That’s great, sweetie.”
“You want to see?”
“Of course I want to see,” Amy said, and came over to where they were sitting and thought how easy it would be to take Uno by the thin neck and just crunch her bones.
She was still shaking— still!— the adrenaline refusing to abate.
Uno still smelled like whatever she smelled like, whatever she cooked with.
It was a travesty to smell this way around a child.
“Those are great, honey.”
“Can you tell who’s who?”
“Well, this is Leo, of course,” Amy said, pointing to the doggiest-looking drawing. “And then I guess this one is William, and this is Heidi?”
“Mom, no! Heidi is this one!”
“Of course,” Amy said. “Silly me.” She was so fragile, she could kill her with a strong slap. “Well, I guess I’ll wait here for you two to finish up?”
“You don’t have to,” Uno said. “You don’t have to wait.”
“I think I do,” Amy said, and Uno did not respond.
So she sat down at the table, breathing in and out and waiting for Judd to arrive, and when he finally did (ten minutes? A million years?) he stormed into the kitchen and Ferry shouted “Daddy!” And he carried him out in his arms.
And Amy went back into the kitchen to say something to Uno ( don’t you ever, ever pull a stunt like that again or I’ll throw you in jail) , but Uno was fast asleep on the kitchen table, drool pooling out of her mouth, and anyway none of it mattered, they had their boy, there was nothing else they needed.