At the Bottom of Everything(6)

By December he was pushing in front of Maria to meet me at the door, tugging my hand to get me up the stairs. He had blond-brown hair that went halfway down his neck and he wore long-sleeved T-shirts, little boy jeans, sneakers with lights in the soles; by high school he’d probably be an athlete. His problems turned out to be ADD, hyperactivity, ordinary private school stuff. We spent most of our time in his bedroom. Barbara didn’t like her tutors working in bedrooms (“Even though I know, of course, that absolutely none of my tutors would ever …”), but with Nicholas I had no choice, because the downstairs was so dark and because his bedroom was where he kept his backpack and his supplies. So we worked side by side on our stomachs across his bed, chatting between problems like kids at a sleepover. He asked me if I’d ever killed anything and told me how, at his grandmother’s in Florida, he’d once dropped a slug off a fifth-floor balcony. He asked me whether plants were immortal (meaning, he said, if there’s ivy on the side of a building, is it the same ivy that was there a hundred years ago?). He told me how he was pretty sure that if people ever moved to space, he’d want to live on either Neptune or Pluto, since he hated hot weather. “Do you think we’re kind of like best friends?” he said once. “I think the good thing about us is that we’re cool but we’re also smart.”

There seemed to be no limit to the number of hours his parents, or at least his mother, were willing to hire me. I had my own key to their house by December, and they bought food I liked—Orange Milanos, Fruit Leathers—for the nights I babysat (even though babysitting was another thing that Barbara forbade her tutors to do, and even though I hadn’t felt truly hungry since breaking up with Claire).

Nicholas and Teddy didn’t notice or didn’t care that I was suffering, which may have been part of what made me suffer so much less around them. I would sit next to the two of them at the piano in their giant dark living room while they played “Heart and Soul,” and though I couldn’t quite bring myself to join them in stomping their feet, at some point I would think: Hey, I haven’t felt bad in minutes. (Teddy, who was seven, had the personality of an aging Las Vegas diva. He’d come into the room wearing his mom’s sunglasses and scarf and say, “Hello, sexies!” and then giggle and run down the hall while Nicholas chased him with a ruler.) For dinner we ate microwave pizza, which Nicholas and I would watch spin and bubble behind the dotted yellow window. We’d play Spy, sneaking around corners and pretending to shoot blowgun darts at each other. I felt like a father in a movie who has a terminal disease and doesn’t tell his kids, so they can all just enjoy a few final weeks of happiness.

On one of these nights—the three of us were sitting cross-legged in a circle, playing Crazy Eights (this was the winter of card games)—Nicholas said, “I think my dad has a girlfriend now.”

He said it in the clear, not-particularly-urgent way that someone who’s just woken up from a nap on the beach might say, “We should go in or we’re going to get burned.”

“Really?” I said. “Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know, he just talks about her a lot. And my mom says he does.”

After that I started noticing that Anna was calling him “the boys’ father” instead of Peter, and that more and more when she called me to babysit it was because she was going out for a girls’ night. On her bedside table (I could see their room as I passed on the way up the stairs) there was a book called Making the Transition: How to Survive (and Thrive) After a Separation.

Peter had always looked to me like the kind of guy who, under his expensive watch and camel-hair trench coat, would be capable of real nastiness, maybe even violence. He made me think of a hyena. He’d hand me checks without looking at me, he’d drop the boys off without getting out of the car.

Anna was tall and pale with long dark hair that looked like it had never been cut, and apparently she worked for a nonprofit that had something to do with transportation alternatives. It was harder to imagine her in an office than in a club somewhere playing folk guitar—she was pretty, especially for someone close to forty, but it was the kind of prettiness that sometimes comes with a hint of BO or a streak of craziness (crystals, horses). She said to me, after one of those girls’ nights when we were standing in the front hall, “You’ve lost someone, haven’t you?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you lose someone? You’ve had that kind of … smashed look. How about a cup of tea?”