When It Happens to You (7 page)

When she returned to the porch, Phillip was sitting on the bench. She handed him the beer and a glass and sat cross-legged beside him with a mug of peppermint tea.

“You probably don't want the glass,” she said.

“Straight-from-the-bottle kind of guy,” he said. He took a swig and leaned back against the wall of the house. “It's nice to hang out at night for once.”

“Yeah, we're really branching out,” Marina said. “Sitting on a completely different bench.”

Phillip laughed. He looked at her sideways. “I like your hair like that. It's funny, I always thought I would marry a redhead.”

Marina touched her hair, piled up on top of her head and casually fastened with a pin.

“I'm sorry I had to keep postponing,” Marina said. “It's like Ollie has this sixth sense . . .”

“I'm the one who wanted to apologize,” Phillip said, sitting forward and touching her knee. “I was a jerk today, when the kids—”

“Oh, that,” she said. “I figured you were just stressed about your . . .”

“Wife. She's still my wife,” he said slowly, as if he was telling himself as much as her.

“Right. Okay. I didn't know what was going on with that. . . .” She felt a shock of embarrassment, suddenly realizing that perhaps this attraction she felt was entirely one-sided. “Well, apology accepted,” she said, trying to sound bright and carefree. “I know it's late and if you need to—”

“Marina, I really like you,” he interrupted. “A lot. Probably too much, considering that I'm a mess right now.”

“It's okay,” she said, feeling somehow both relieved and anxious at the same time. “Listen, you don't have to explain anything. I know. I mean, I
don't
know, but I can just imagine how messy these things are.”

“I fucked up,” he said. “I fucked up in the most monumental, bastardly way.”

“Is that even a word, ‘bastardly'?” she said.

He ignored her and continued. It almost seemed like a recitation.

“I hurt, my wife . . . I hurt . . . well, let's just say that I have hurt and disappointed every woman that I have come into contact with—and I'm including my daughter in this—and I don't want to do it anymore. I can't do it anymore.”

Marina nodded and blew on her tea before taking a sip.

“I'm a big girl,” she said. “Well, actually I'm a size four, but . . .”

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” He looked at her without a trace of irony. “I think it's the
not
talking that got me into this shit mess I'm in now. And I
like
talking to you. I don't want to lose that.”

Marina felt dull with the loss of intrigue. He was being honest with her, and in her experience that usually didn't come until months, even years, later, if ever. Her body suddenly felt cold even while her face seemed to burn with embarrassment.

“I get that,” she said. “And thanks. You're a good guy. Don't let anyone tell you different.”

Phillip shook his head and she could see the sneer of self-loathing on his face. “Enough about me,” he said.

“Hey, I have Charlotte's dress,” she said. “And her shoes. Don't let me forget to give those to you.”

“So . . . what is going on there anyway? I've been meaning to ask you.”

“What do you mean?”

He shifted position on the bench. She could tell that he was searching for a way to broach the obvious.

“With Oliver. The, uh, switching clothes. Is this something . . . new?” he asked.

“No, I'd say this has been happening for a long time.”

“And what does his father say about it? If it's too personal, just tell me to shut up.”

“His father doesn't know. Or, more precisely, he doesn't know that Oliver exists.” Marina drew her legs out from under her. They had fallen asleep, and she stomped her feet lightly on the wooden floor of the porch to wake them. “I met him when I was on vacation. He was a surf instructor. I only saw him for the weekend. Gorgeous man. Oliver looks exactly like him.”

“Why didn't you ever tell him that he has a son?”

She sipped her tea. It had gone from hot to cold with strange swiftness.

“I almost did. When I was about eight months pregnant, I had the brilliant idea to call him. He had given me his number, and it seemed like the decent thing to do. I was pretty sure that he wouldn't be interested in moving to the States, but I thought, someone's having your kid, you never know. . . .”

Phillip set his empty beer bottle on the floor next to him.

“You want another?” she asked him

“Later,” he said. “Go on.”

“So I called the number, and this little girl answers the phone. With a high squeaky voice, and that accent? I should have just hung up right then. But like an idiot, I wasn't thinking it through. ‘May I speak to James?' I ask. The girl tells me that her father isn't there, and she puts her mother on the phone.”

“Oh Jesus,” Phillip said.

“Yeah. I don't know why, but I don't hang up. And then this woman tells me that her name is Tamsin and asks me why I want to talk to her husband.”

“What did you say?”

Marina pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“I said . . . I said that he was my teacher a few months ago and that I wanted to thank him.” Marina laughed and shook her head. “It was the only thing I could think of. So she asked me my name, and I told her.”

“You gave her your real name?” Phillip asked

“Yep. ‘Well, Marina, I will tell him,' she says. ‘But he has many students, so I doubt he will remember you.' I thanked her, and just before I hung up, I asked her how many kids she had. Three. He had three little girls.”

They were quiet for a moment and listened to a car alarm sounding in the distance. Phillip cleared his throat. “What are you going to do about the, uh, what do you call it? The wanting to be a girl? Is this okay to talk about? I don't want to if . . .”

“No,” Marina said. “God no. I
want
to talk about it. I don't know what to do. He
is
a girl.”

“Well, right now he wants to be a girl, that's clear,” Phillip said. “But who knows how he's going to feel later?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she replied, unconvinced. “Honestly, though, I'm pretty certain this is here to stay. It's just who he is. I feel like people look at me like I'm encouraging it, or somehow I'm
making
him this way. Do you know how many stupid boys' things I've bought him? How many cars and trucks and airplanes? The footballs and baseball bats? This isn't even counting the crap that my family buys him. I've told them to stop wasting their money, but every birthday and Christmas, Ollie gets a big ol' testosterone-laden present.”

Phillip laughed. “What do you do with them?”

“He throws them away,” she said. “Or he hides them.”

She and Phillip lingered on the porch together for another hour. They talked about her son, her failed relationships, his daughter, his wife, his former mistress, his job, and all of the mistakes they had made and if not vowed then at least hoped never to repeat. And before parting, against their better judgment, they shared a lonely kiss that they both knew, as soon as it was over, would be added to the long list of regrets.

 

The next Sunday morning Marina and Oliver went to the park alone. It was Charlotte's weekend with her mother, and Phillip told Marina that he would be in Chicago on an extended business trip. Marina halfheartedly attempted to scare up a playdate for her son, but this day, like so many others before it, all of his classmates were otherwise engaged. She tried not to think that it was related to Oliver's increasing insistence on passing as a girl—after all, she had specifically sought out the most progressive school possible, in a city more tolerant than most. Regardless, it seemed that the older Oliver became, the less he was invited to playdates. When Marina asked his teacher, a thirty-five-year primary-school veteran, whether Oliver was being shunned by his classmates, Mercedes reassured Marina that he had plenty of friends, boys as well as girls. She then proceeded to detail the school's mission of tolerance and diversity—a lecture that Marina had heard many times before and no longer found reassuring.

“But why doesn't anyone call us for playdates?” Marina asked. “It's like they think that he has a disease and they're afraid their kid is going to catch it.”

Mercedes clicked her tongue and insisted that there was only acceptance from his classmates. Before Marina left, however, Mercedes delicately broached the idea of Marina taking Oliver to see a “gender specialist” referred by the school counselor.

At the park, Oliver rode his purple bike beside Marina. The weather had cooled considerably, and as a compromise to Marina's insistence that he wear a hoodie over his favorite pink-striped “Wonder Bunny” T-shirt and leggings underneath his shorts, Oliver was allowed to borrow one of Marina's scarfs. He tied the long flowing scarf around his waist, knotting it on the side to lie over his shorts as a makeshift skirt.

Zipping along on his bicycle, he circled back to Marina for a third time, nudging her forward like a sheepdog. “You don't have to wait for me, honey,” she said, kissing him on top of his curly head. Then she told him she would be waiting for him on the park bench under the silver maple, and watched him pedal away, the scarf flowing behind him. For a moment, she thought of calling him back and taking the scarf away, or at least retying it, for fear of it getting caught in the spokes. But she didn't, and this reflection would later haunt her.

There was only one witness. A young girl screamed, but when Marina looked up and saw that it was not Oliver, she quickly went back to working on her layout. The girl ran to her mother, crying in Spanish, and Marina noticed that the woman looked alarmed as she cried out to her friends, mothers and nannies all around. Someone yelled “911.” It was only then that Marina realized that she couldn't see Oliver anywhere.

Joining the throng of adults and children running in the general direction of the bushes that bordered the bicycle path, she pushed her way through a small crowd that had gathered. In the center of the crowd lay her son, inert and disoriented. He was tangled in the brush, his hair matted with dirt, his clothes torn, and blood on his face. Nearby, the rear wheel of his upended bicycle spun listlessly. Marina dropped down and took him in her arms.

“Who did this to you?” she cried. “Oh God.” She looked around at the crowd of curious spectators. “Who did this to him?” she screamed.

After some prompting from her mother, the little girl explained that she saw older boys hurting him. They ran away after the girl had screamed. It was ascertained that they were around twelve years old. A couple of the fathers went off in search of the boys while the police were called. Marina held Oliver in her arms and tried to comfort him.

“Shhh,” she whispered to him, “shhhh.” It was mostly from habit, since it was actually she who couldn't stop weeping.

 

Hours later, in the dim twilight of her bedroom, Marina watched over Oliver as he lay sleeping in her bed under a mound of blankets. His breathing was calm and steady. He had been given a mild sedative, a “sleep aid” as it was called by the courteous ER doctor who had examined him. Now, after being bathed and dressed, he lay peacefully asleep, and it almost seemed like any other night. The only evidence of the brutality inflicted upon her son was a half-moon slash across his right cheek that the doctor told her, as reassuringly as possible, he was doubtful would scar. Doubtful, not certain. With all of her desperation, she willed it to disappear, knowing how the scar would serve as a constant tormenting reminder that she hadn't been there to stave off his attackers.

Until today, she had been unwavering in her belief that she was doing the right thing by her son, by letting him be who he was—even as it brought him closer to the other gender, transforming him daily, step by step, from a son into a daughter. But now, staring at the half-moon mark on his cheek, she looked ahead to the continuum of what life held for her child with dread. If a six-year-old could inspire such savagery, what would he endure at sixteen? At twenty-six? It seemed to her then that the world was a place of dark and wet menace, like some underground cave, and as a parent she had done nothing more than thrust her child into its mouth, lanternless, and wish him the best. “There is such a thing as being
too
liberal,” she had once overheard a mother sneer to her friend as she and Oliver strode past them on a school tour. Oliver had insisted on wearing his “Cinderella” slippers and crown that day, and he held on to her hand oblivious and confident even as he had teetered on the plastic heels. Before, Marina had taken these people on, challenged them to say more. But now the troubling thought occurred to her: What if they were right?

As she walked out of her bedroom, her eye caught the floral scarf hanging on the back of the door, the same one that Oliver had wrapped around his waist that afternoon. She held it in her hands for a moment, feeling the fear and anger rise up inside of her, and then she stormed into the kitchen and grabbed a giant black trash bag from under the sink. She stuffed the scarf in the bag. Then, with bag in hand, she walked upstairs to Oliver's room. Every dress, tunic, and skirt went into the bag. Sweeping through the room with grim precision, she threw away the tiny pots of lip gloss and nail polish that had been lifted from her drawers. Next came the plush unicorns, stuffed ponies, and kittens. Anything pink, purple, sparkling, glittering, or heart-shaped was taken. The last items she put in the bag were the princess dresses, the matching jeweled plastic heels, and his wand. When she was done, she sat on the floor of the barren room, breathless, feeling as her mother must have felt when her little brother's room was stripped clean after a life-threatening asthma attack. “It's for his own good,” her mother had said when Marina's little brother cried for the stuffed goose he had cuddled since birth. “Safety first.”