was.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.
“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”
Connell nodded.
“Good.”
And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.
The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.
“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”
“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.
Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.
“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.
“Yes, but they’re in New York.”
“They have to win two.”
“They’ll do it.”
“It’s Roger Clemens.”
“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.
“‘Ya gotta believe,’” Connell answered.
“Well, then.”
It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.
At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.
She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.
“I almost died,” Connell said.
“You’re fine,” Ed said.
“I was scared. I’m still scared.”
Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”
“I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.
“Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”
“You really think they’re going to win?”
“The Mets? Yes.”
“Both games?”
“Both. You’ll see.”
“You’re sure?”
“Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”
As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.
She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched
