26. Rhodes #2
Twenty minutes later, I’ve learned the following: Rowan thinks the moon is “okay but boring,” rockets are “the best because zoom,” black holes are “scary but cool,” and the little far-off planets, he calls them “the dot ones” are “too small.”
I’ve also learned that he interrupts himself constantly, jumping from rockets to a cartoon he watched yesterday to his friend Oliver’s obsession with garbage trucks (“Oliver’s weird,” he informs me solemnly) to a detailed account of the time he found a worm in the backyard and named it Steve.
“Steve lives in the dirt now,” he concludes.
“Does he visit?”
“No. He’s busy.”
“Doing what?”
Rowan looks at me like I’ve asked the stupidest question in human history. “Being a worm.”
I want to laugh. I bite it back.
“Do you want a snack?” Maren calls from the kitchen. “I have crackers.”
Rowan brightens. “Yeah!”
She brings out a small plate with crackers arranged on it. Rowan takes one look and his entire face falls.
“Those are the wrong crackers.”
Maren sighs. “Rowan.”
“I want the rocket ones.”
“We’re out of the rocket ones. These are the fish ones.”
“Fish aren’t rockets.”
“They’re still crackers.”
“No.”
Maren and Rowan stare at each other in a standoff I recognize. I’ve seen that stubborn set of the jaw before. In the mirror.
“Rowan,” Maren says, her voice patient but firm, “these are the crackers we have. You can eat them or you can wait until lunch.”
“Rockets are better than fish.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Yes it is.”
They’re at an impasse. Maren glances at me, not asking for help, just aware of my presence, and I stay absolutely silent. This isn’t my battle. I don’t know the rules, don’t know the history, don’t get to step in like I belong here when I don’t.
Finally, Rowan huffs dramatically and grabs a fish cracker. “Fine. But I don’t like it.”
“Noted,” Maren says, and retreats back to the kitchen.
Rowan eats three more fish crackers in quick succession, apparently having made peace with his lot in life, and then turns to me with crumbs on his chin.
“Did you have timeout?”
The question comes out of nowhere. I blink.
“What?”
“Timeout,” he repeats. “When you’re bad, you have to sit. Did you have timeout?”
I think about the past four years. The empty apartment, the work that never stopped, the way I drove everyone away, including the woman now standing in her kitchen pretending not to listen.
“I probably needed one,” I say.
“Three minutes?”
I look at Maren. She’s watching us from the kitchen doorway, her expression unreadable.
“I think mine was longer.”
She looks away. Her jaw tightens, and for a second I think she might be fighting a laugh, but she doesn’t let it out. She just turns back to the counter and busies herself with something I can’t see.
Rowan has already moved on. “Why don’t you live here?”
My chest tightens.
“I live in California,” I say carefully. “Far away.”
“Oliver’s grandma lives far away. She sends presents.”
“I see.”
“Do you send presents?”
“I-” I stop. Because no. I haven’t. I didn’t know he existed. But how do you explain that to a three-year-old? “I didn’t know where to send them.”
Rowan considers this. “You could ask Mommy.”
“You’re right. I should have asked.”
He accepts this with a nod and goes back to the book.
A few pages later, he finds a black hole illustration and launches into a detailed explanation of how they swallow whole planets, information I’m fairly certain he got from a movie, and I listen to every word like it’s the most important thing I’ve ever heard.
Because it is.
An hour passes. Then another.
Rowan shows me his toy box, which is mostly rockets and trucks and a single stuffed elephant he claims to hate but also won’t let me touch.
He shows me the castle he built out of blocks last week, though it’s mostly collapsed now.
He shows me his room, the moon nightlight glowing softly in the corner, the rocket sheets on his small bed, the artwork taped to every available surface.
“I drew that,” he says, pointing at what might be a mountain or might be a blob. “It’s a volcano.”
“Very impressive.”
“Lava comes out.”
“I can see that.”
He beams. The left-side dimple appears, and something in my chest cracks wide open.
This is my son. This weird, stubborn, space-obsessed kid who thinks fish crackers are inferior and names worms Steve and has my eyes and my frown and my stubbornness and his mother’s warmth.
This is my son, and I missed three and a half years of him, and I’ll never get them back, and I have to keep myself together because he’s watching me and I can’t fall apart in front of him.
“This is Mr. Zorp,” Rowan says, holding up the battered green alien from earlier. “He’s my best.”
“Your best?”
“My best alien. I sleep with him.”
“He looks very fierce.”
“He is.” Rowan hesitates. Then, slowly, carefully, he holds Mr. Zorp out toward me. “You can hold him. But don’t squeeze too hard.”
I take the stuffed alien like it’s made of glass.
“I’ll be careful,” I promise.
Rowan nods seriously. Then he climbs up onto his bed and sits beside me, close, not touching, but closer than he’s been all afternoon, and points at Mr. Zorp’s worn spots.
“That’s where his eye fell off. Mommy sewed it.”
I look at the mismatched thread holding the button eye in place. Evidence of Maren’s care. Evidence of midnight repairs and small disasters and a life I wasn’t part of.
“She did a good job,” I say, and the words come out gruffer than I planned.
“Yeah.” Rowan yawns. “I’m tired.”
“That’s okay.”
“Mommy?”
Maren appears in the doorway. She’s been hovering nearby the whole time, never quite leaving us alone but never intruding either. Watching, assessing, protecting.
“Yeah, baby?”
“I’m tired.”
“It’s almost lunchtime. How about a rest on the couch while I make food?”
Rowan nods and slides off the bed. He takes Mr. Zorp back from me with a solemn “thank you” and heads for the living room without looking back.
I stay sitting on his small bed, surrounded by rocket sheets and crayon drawings, and I can’t move.
Maren finds me there a minute later.
“He does that,” she says quietly. “Gets tired and just announces it and leaves.”
“He’s something.”
“Yeah.”
She’s leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me the way she’s been watching me all afternoon. Not hostile, exactly. But wary, ready.
“I should go,” I say. “Let him rest.”
“Okay.”
I stand. My legs feel unsteady. I walk past her into the hallway, toward the front door, and I stop with my hand on the knob.
“Can I come back?”
It costs me something to ask. I don’t ask for things. I acquire them, earn them, make them happen through sheer will.
But this, him, I can’t take. I can only be given.
“Yes,” Maren says. “Tomorrow, if you want.”
“I want.”
She nods, no smile, nothing softening in her face. But she nods.
“Rhodes?”
I turn.
Rowan is standing at the end of the hallway, Mr. Zorp dangling from his hand, his dark eyes, my eyes, fixed on me.
“Yeah?”
“You can come back,” he says. “But bring the rocket crackers.”
Something hot presses behind my eyes. I blink it away.
“I will.”
He nods once, satisfied, and disappears into the living room.
I leave before I fall apart.
The car is silent.
I sit in the driver’s seat and stare at the steering wheel and I don’t move. I can’t. The bags of toys I didn’t bring are still in the trunk, useless, and the space book is upstairs with my son, and my son…
My son.
He called his stuffed alien “my best.”
He showed me his room.
He let me hold something precious to him.
And then he said I could come back.
I press my palms against my eyes and breathe through the tightness in my chest. I don’t cry. I haven’t in years. But something is cracking open inside me, something that’s been sealed shut since long before Maren left, and I don’t know how to stop it.
He has my eyes and my frown, my stubbornness wrapped in Maren’s warmth.
He’s mine, and I didn’t know, and I can never get those years back, but I can…
What? What can I do?
Show up. That’s all - just show up.
Bring the rocket crackers.
Learn his favorite colors and his bedtime fears and the names of his friends and the way he likes his sandwiches cut. Learn him. Not buy him, not fix him. Just learn him.
I start the car.
I barely make it out of the lot before I have to pull over, my hands shaking too hard to steer.
And there, parked on a quiet side street in Jamaica Plain, I let myself feel the full weight of what I lost.
Three and a half years.
Gone.
Because she didn’t tell me.
Because I gave her reasons not to.
Because we broke each other, and our son grew up in the wreckage, and now I’m sitting in a rental car crying for the first time in a decade over a stuffed alien named Mr. Zorp.
My phone buzzes.
A text from Maren: He asked if you’re coming back tomorrow. I told him yes.
I stare at the screen.
Then, before I can think better of it, I type back: What kind of rocket crackers?
Her response comes thirty seconds later: The purple box. Any grocery store.
Tomorrow.
I can do tomorrow.
I wipe my face. I pull back onto the road.
And I drive to find the purple box.