Dario
FOURTEEN
Fifteen minutes after Opal gets home from school, she asks, “Are you coming to Parent-Teacher Night?”
The question sounds like a threat. “What was that?”
She sets her backpack down and looks at me.
“My teacher said parents and guardians can come to Parent-Teacher Night and see my portfolio, and there’s also a bake sale, and I think you should come.
” Brief pause. “Also, I made a drawing of our apartment for the portfolio, and that’s the only way for you to see it. ”
Lena, who’s in the kitchen doorway with a glass of water, opens her mouth. “He doesn’t need to do that,” she says, and her voice has the careful, managing tone she uses when she’s trying to protect me from an imposition. “He’s busy, baby. It’s a school night thing.”
Opal doesn’t argue with her mother. She just looks at me with those eyes that are Lena’s eyes exactly. There’s the patient, waiting expression of a child who has asked something she means and is giving the person she asked the opportunity to answer for themselves.
“What night?”
“Tuesday.”
“I’ll be there.”
Lena looks at me. Something moves through her expression—surprise, and something she doesn’t entirely manage to keep contained before she looks away.
Opal, for her part, breaks into the full-body grin that means she’s genuinely pleased, and she picks up her backpack from the floor she just set it on and takes it to her room, and I can hear her humming as she goes.
I sit with what just happened for a moment. I said yes because Opal wanted me there. That’s the complete reason. I said yes because she looked at me and asked, and I wanted to say yes.
Because I knew it would make her happy.
Tuesday evening is mild and clear, the kind of night that makes the city feel like a set design for something pleasant. Lena is in a dark green dress that does something wicked to my ability to concentrate, and Opal is in her good shoes she saves for special nights.
The school smells like industrial cleaner, crayon wax, and the staleness of a building that contains several hundred children for six hours a day and has absorbed it over many years.
The hallways are lined with artwork—laminated drawings, watercolor paintings, and collages that range from the impressively representational to the gloriously abstract.
In an art gallery, the latter would pull in thousands of dollars.
Opal yanks me by the hand from piece to piece and tells me which ones are hers, which ones are Bea’s, and which ones belong to a boy named Marcus. He draws rockets very accurately because his dad works at an aeronautics company.
I’ve never been to anything like this. I’m aware of this in the anthropological sense that I’m sometimes aware of ordinary things I’ve missed.
It’s the way someone might notice they’ve never been to a county fair or a Fourth of July parade, things that exist in the general background of a normal life that mine has not been.
I follow Opal through the corridor, let her narrate, and try to calibrate my responses to the appropriate register, which I estimate to be somewhere between genuinely interested and not alarmingly so.
Don’t want to give the other adults the impression that I’m with this little girl for nefarious purposes.
I’m used to being assessed with those eyes. The ones who expect the worst from me at all times.
But no one here seems to think anything of the fact that I, Dario Spinelli, am here with a little girl I am not related to. That I’m examining children’s art with a careful eye. That I’m not hunting someone here.
These people don’t know me. That’s probably why they’re not glaring.
Lena appears at my elbow at some point and says, quietly and without looking at me, “You’re doing fine.”
I didn’t ask. She knew anyway. She always does.
Opal’s classroom is at the end of the second-floor hall, decorated for the occasion with additional artwork and a small table of baked goods that Opal steers us to before we’ve even located her teacher.
She selects a brownie with the seriousness of a sommelier and hands me one without asking if I want it.
It’s very sweet and not particularly good, and I eat the whole thing.
Her teacher is a young woman named Ms. Callahan. She’s too chirpy. She is fundamentally cheerful energy personified. She shakes my hand and tells me Opal is one of her most creative students and also one of the most emphatic. A diplomatic way of saying Opal has a lot of opinions.
“We know,” Lena says, with a smile that she’s wearing for the teacher but that reaches me at a different frequency. She’s mildly annoyed. But if I didn’t know her, I’d never see it.
The portfolio is on a small table at the back of the room, labeled with Opal’s name in her handwriting—large, careful, still learning the loops.
Inside are drawings, small written assignments, a smattering of doodles, and a page of arithmetic done in pencil with the corrections in a different color.
In the middle of the portfolio, on a page she’s decorated with a border of stars, is a drawing of the apartment.
She’s drawn the living room, identifiable by the couch and the bookshelves.
Three figures. One small one on the couch—Opal, I can tell because she’s drawn herself with her pencils in her lap.
One on the couch next to her, honey-blonde hair, which is Lena.
And one in the armchair by the window: tall, dark-haired, a book in his hands.
Under the drawing, in her careful handwriting: My family.
My family. I am in her picture of her family.
I’m vaguely dizzy.
She drew me in the armchair with a book, which is where I sit when I’m in the living room in the evenings, which apparently she noticed and thought worth including in the picture of her family.
Something in my ribs pulses hard.
Lena, standing beside me, goes quiet. I can feel her reading the drawing and reading me reading it, and I don’t look at her because I’m not sure what’s on my face right now, and I need another moment before I’m willing to find out.
Opal appears at my elbow and takes my hand. “That’s you,” she says, pointing to the tall figure in the armchair, in case I missed it.
“I see that.” My voice comes out even, much to my surprise.
“You always have a book, so I put a book.” She considers the drawing for a moment, critically. “I was going to put your doctor bag, but it didn’t fit.”
“The book is better. Good call.”
She squeezes my hand once and then releases it to go find Bea, who has arrived with her parents across the room.
I watch her go. This five-year-old has decided, without asking anyone’s permission, that I am part of her family.
She stands across a classroom next to her best friend and grabs her arm and starts talking immediately.
Happy as she can be. Healthy, thanks to me.
I said yes because she wanted me here. And standing here with a mediocre brownie in my stomach and a child’s drawing in my hands, I understand that was the right answer.
On the walk home, Opal is between us, holding both our hands, and talking a mile a minute the way she does when she’s excited but tired. She will crash out when we get home.
It’s not the observant doctor in me who knows that. It’s the other guy.
I feel odd in a way I don’t have existing language for. Not dizzy anymore. Not uncomfortable. Just—outside of my usual experience of myself. It is peculiar to be centered in a child’s life.
As a doctor, I’m important to my patients. I’ve saved lives. I matter to the people who need my services. Opal has been one of those people. So, it’s rational that she’d think of me as important.
But I know it’s more than that.
Lena glances at me over Opal’s head. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
When we get home, Lena takes Opal straight to bed. She stays in there longer than I expect, much to my disappointment. I had hoped we’d have some time alone after all that confusing wholesomeness.
Stripping down for bed, I hope she joins me soon. But she might stay with Opal for all I know. Sometimes she still does that. If Opal had a long day—she has—or if she has nightmares.
Just to check in, I text: “All good?”
It takes a while, but then she sends back: “No.”
“What’s wrong? Need me?”
No response at first. And then she sends me a picture from the hall bathroom. Her reflection.
Her naked reflection. Tits out, lights low. Fingers delicately plucking at her nipple.
Then another text: “I need you right now.”
The urge to meet her there is almost a force of nature. But I’m going to make her wait. If she wants to play games, let’s play.
I text: “Put your hand on your pussy and send me a pic.”
A moment later, there it is. “Well done, pet. Now play with your clit for me. Do it until you’re very, very wet. Do not come yet.”
“I’m wet now.”
“Do it.” I lie back, thinking of her touching herself in the other room simply because I ordered her to. It’s a heady sense of power. My hand is on my cock without a thought.
I’ve killed… a number of men. Never kept track of the total. Taking a life can be a thrill, especially if they deserve it. Same with saving a life or tormenting someone. All afford their own kind of elation. A similar sense of power.
This is something else. Something truly intoxicating. Lena’s small hand, working her clit for me. Riding close to the edge. Trembling, breathless, sweat gathering on her lip.
Bringing Lena pleasure is the most addictive thrill I have ever known.
I imagine her getting weak in the knees, leaning on the sink as her body takes over. Aching to come. Aching for me.
My body goes rigid from the thought of her wet pussy throbbing for me. I’m right—
A beep. I reach over in a rush and almost miss my phone. There’s a pic of her glossy fingers. “Oops. Guess you’ll have to punish me.”
I laugh and come at the same time, which is new for me. The sensations aren’t supposed to line up. My hands are too sticky to text back fast—that got messy.
I’m still cleaning my hands when she walks in, wearing a robe.
She closes the door. “You came too?”
“Seems we were both due for it.”
“Does that mean we’re not going to—”
“Take off that robe and lie down.”
She gets a mischievous look that could launch a thousand ships. Then she peels the robe away and joins me in the sheets. “Now what?”
I turn out the lights, roll her onto her side, and spoon her from behind. “Now, we sleep.”
“You serious?”
“It has been a long and strange day, pet. I require sleep.”
She sighs in my arms, and it’s less than a minute later that I hear her breathing shift from normal to long, low breaths.
There are tough men in this city who cross the street if they see me coming. They know I’m nuts. They know I’m dangerous.
But this single mom of a sickly little girl, the woman who has nothing but her daughter in this world, finds absolute peace in my arms.
Maybe she’s the crazy one.