Ten

“Well, I suppose I’d have to blow your brains out.” I grunt and shift my weight from side to side in a futile effort to get comfortable. The thing about sitting with your back against a tree, is that you can never get truly comfortable. You just have to sit there with bits of bark poking in your back, and fake it for the pleasure of the nature freaks.

I wave at the park keeper who drives by on his scooter spreading seed. He waves back with his straw hat in hand. All friendly. I’d normally be much too reclusive for even this minimal contact… but hey, I’ve got to set an example.

“Oh Really?” Jacob asks, not at all comforted by this response. I can hear him moving his feet from branch to branch in the tree above me. I’d yell at him to get down from there and tell grim stories about people falling to their deaths, but I don’t because it would only make him climb higher. That and you can’t go through life afraid.

“Oh yeah… I mean, I’d have to go through the motions before I pulled the trigger. I’d probably kill all the henchmen in your mansion, free some prisoners. Then I’d get you out on a roof… probably raining now that I think about it.” I brush a bug off my arm.

I really wish we could just gene engineer nature to be more amenable to sitting down in its midst. I’d like to just lay down in a field of grass if it weren’t for all the bugs crawling on me.

“Yeah, definitely raining.” I murmur once the bug leaves.

“Why is it raining?” Jacob asks, climbing down a little bit from the tops of the tree where he had “run away” to not more than fifteen minutes ago. I have no idea what it was that made him so pissed off at the world, and it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is the way I react to it, and the way he sees me react. If I get angry, he’ll bunker down and get defensive. If I stay calm, I can make it all a game.

“Well, it’s raining to increase the drama. It’s one of the rules.”

“Is one of the rules that you have to shoot me?” Jacob sounds doubtful, and I imagine his little eyebrows going down and his little frown making his dimples disappear. Oh honey, I think, if you only knew how much I love you, but I can’t look up, not yet. You still need to laugh over how silly I’m being. You need to giggle, and when you see that being angry won’t get you my attention, I’ll give you all the hugs in the world.

I sigh, because sometimes being ridiculous is hard. “Buddy, you haven’t been paying attention at all. I said I would have go through the motions first. You can’t just kill someone. What’s the fun in that? Where’s the story? If you ever became an evil dictator, the military would of course approach me to take you out… we can cover all that in the first thirty minutes of the movie… but it’s not as simple as just shooting you. There’s a whole bunch of stuff we’d have to go through first. Like me killing everyone in your evil mansion and me getting you alone on the roof.”

“While it’s raining?” He reminds me, sounding very glum.

“Yes.” Good, honey. Play along with the silly game. You can’t be angry if you play a silly little game.

“I don’t believe this. Who made up these rules?” Not a question you would have asked before you turned ten, I think. Nope. Questions like “who made up these rules?” are the first sign that you’re not a child anymore.

“Michael Bay,” I reply.

“Who’s Michael Bay?”

“The greatest story-teller since Shakespeare.”

“Well why does he get to make the rules?” Another question he would never have asked when he was three, and I had to tell him not to stick his hand on the stove top.

“Because when Michael Bay was born he did a shoulder roll out of his mother and was immediately followed by a column of fire and a time distortion that caused the whole thing to happen in slow motion.”

“What? That’s made up!”

“It’s true. I read it on io9. Did you want to hear the rest of the scenario or not?”

“No!” He emphatically responds. He’s climbing back up in the tree again. He’s angry at himself now for playing along. He probably feels like he’s betraying his principles. Anger is “true.” Happiness is not. I’ll have to make him unlearn that. Stubborn boy.

“Well, okay. So I’ve got you on the roof, and it’s raining. Let’s see… you’ve probably just killed somebody that I love… not romantically though. Hmmm… yeah if you’re my little brother in the film it would be inappropriate for it to be a romantic interest.” Buddy starts saying “la la la” over and over again with ever increasing volume. “Let’s say we have a zazzy cousin that flies the chopper that brings me into your Southeast Asian country. Okay, you’ve just killed her.”

“BC, you’re a big fat liar!” I’ve been called worse names, but never by the kids. Usually I don’t care what anyone says, but coming from him it hurts more than a little. Not that I’d show it.

“Thank you. Okay, so you’ve just killed her, and then I’ve got the gun on you, and then you beg me to shoot you. You tell me I don’t have the guts yada yada yada. And I want to shoot, even though it’s breaking my heart, but at the last minute I decide it would make me no better than you. Then I turn my back, you go for a gun, and I turn around… and then it’s lights out. After the fade to black we see that I’m the only one standing, and then we do a boom shot way up in the sky and realize how alone I am in the great big world. Roll credits!”

“See, I told you! You don’t love me!” Buddy would climb higher up in the tree, but I can feel it swaying and I know he’s too scared to go up where the branches thin out.

“Well, you asked me what it would take for me to kill you and I told you. You’d have to become an evil dictator in Southeast Asia, repress a community of honest farm folk, and kill a zazzy helicopter flying cousin that we don’t have.”

I look up at Jacob and smile, now or never. He’s frowning down at me. Again, I sigh. Ten is a tough age. All those boundaries that you’ve got to figure out, and everybody snaps at you for testing them. There’s no temperance to the procedure, or at least now when I was young. He’s itching for a fight because with every ounce of his little body he needs to be to know his limits and be prepared for when he crosses them.

“You don’t love me.” Heresy, I think.

I followed you on your mile long hissy fit from the house and I have spent the last fifteen minutes under this tree that you’ve climbed talking to you. Why do you think I did that? The complete and total lack of love?

Instead, I say “You want to see Transformers tonight? Michael Bay directed it.”

“Well then it’s probably terrible!” and he gives me a raspberry.

“Yes, but I’m sure it will be very entertaining. It’s important not to thumb your noise at entertainment. You only get the one life, and it’s a good idea not to get world weary before you’ve had some fun.” Of course I am the worst of all possible messengers for this sentiment, but when I am with either of the kids I believe it whole-heartedly.

“I’m not coming home! I’m going to live here!” He announces.

“Good idea. You’ve got plenty of leaves for a roof, least-wise till winter comes. Shame it makes you a monkey though. Did you know everybody used to be a monkey way back?”

Buddy now plays the game where he’s going to say “No!” to everything I say. Better than the silent treatment, but not by much.

“It’s true.”

“No it isn’t.”

“A guy named Darwin figured it all out. Called it Evolution. We’ve talked about this before.” We have. Several times.

“No.”

“Well, a long time ago we lived up in trees, and then some of the other monkeys kicked us out of trees. Or maybe it was climate change and all the trees we lived in died. Who knows? Anyway, we got kicked out of the trees and we had to figure out how to walk upright, probably because we had to move somewhere with lots of tall grasses.”

He keeps saying “no no no” over and over again.

“Well I don’t think Buddy’s a butt face.”

“No!”

Then it’s like his tongue has tied itself in a sudden knot. Yes, Buddy, I know a trick worth two of that. I was a boy once too.

“And I don’t think Buddy’s a doo doo head either.”

“You’re not fair.” Yes, that’s a boyish sentiment. Fairness. I mean to see you keep that for the rest of your days.

“What are the parts of a tree?”

“No no no no!”

“Sounds about right. I thought that was it. You’ve up and become a monkey and that’s why you’re up in the tree. No wonder you don’t know the parts of a tree what with being a monkey an all.” It’s time to stand up now, and I make a quick circuit of the tree, talking about cambium, xylem, and phloem. Apical meristems, chlorophyll, and how branches grow and why they grow some places but not others. I keep talking like he’s not even there, and he’s stopped saying no.

I hold a leaf for inspection not too far from his foot. I talk about how plants take in carbon dioxide, how they combine it with sunlight and water to make sugars and how they exhale oxygen. I tell him that the oxygen actually comes from the water, not the carbon dioxide. A lot of people don’t know that, so he should remember just in case someone asks. I invite him to inspect it, and I’ve been talking for long enough without anger that he forgets the whole reason he ran up in the tree is because he was angry at the world and he bends down and stares at the leaf.

I could reach out and scoop him up so easily.

If my mother or step-father were in my shoes they’d probably take the opportunity to grab him and drag him back home. Destroy all the trust just like that. But I’m not stupid. So I just keep talking about why chlorophyll is green, and about where colors come from. And when he goes to put his foot on a dead branch that would snap, I grab his ankle and guide it to a safe place. Building our trust back up from square one. Touch first, talk, and then maybe a hug later. I invite him to investigate the dead branch.

I ask him why he thinks it died. I give him a couple of reasons it might be. Then he asks me why, and I tell him I don’t know either. I’m no botanist. It’s okay not to know everything, but you should always be curious.

“Are you curious?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Do your feet hurt?” He left the house without shoes, walked across some hot pavement and I bet that tree-climbing wasn’t too good for them either.

“Yeah,” he admits. I pick him up and sit him on his butt on a low hanging branch. He gets to keep his dignity, but he gets to be off his feet.

“BC, what happens to people when they die?”

That is perhaps the least child-like question he could possibly ask.

“Where did you get a question like that?”

I’m taken aback, because for all my cynicism the only people I can never imagine dying are the children.

“I was just thinking about it today.”

“Is that why you wanted to run away?”

“No.”

But it’s probably part of the reason. He’s asking the big questions now, trying to find answers, and that means pushing boundaries again. That means running away from home to experience the way the world feels when you have no place for safety. That means wondering about death.

And I’ll have to be honest with him now, that’s going to hurt. No more “Well, you were somewhere before you were born so it makes sense you go back there when you die.” Just the honest: No one has any idea.

“Well, no one knows. Except the dead, and they aren’t saying much about it. It’s good that you’re curious though. It’s good to ask questions.”

“BC, Dennis said you didn’t believe in God.” I can see that this has been troubling him.

“I don’t. People are allowed not to believe in God. You can believe in God if you want. Or you can not believe. I’ll love you either way.”

“But if there’s no God what happens when you die?”

“I don’t know, Buddy. Maybe nothing. Maybe something else. Nobody knows.”

“I don’t want there to be nothing.”

And that is the fear of the adult. The fear of oblivion. My little boy. My darling little boy, would that I could take such terrors from you.

“What do you want?”

“I want to come back. Someone at school said that when you die you get to come back and be someone else.”

“Then believe that, honey.” I scratch his hair. Such big scary ideas for his little mind, and there’s not a single thing I can do but help him think about them. Can’t protect him from ideas no matter how hard I try. Best just to help him grow along and face them.

“Do people who believe in God believe that you get to be reborn?”

“People who believe in God believe in a bunch of different things.” His little eyes are closing. He’s tired. I pick Buddy up and put him on my shoulders, and oh Christ is he heavy. I may not believe Jesus is divine, but he’ll always be the man I curse by.

I take a few steps, and am surprised to find I’m not going to be able to carry him like this for much longer. I’ll be surprised if I can carry him all the way back to the house. Just when the hell did that happen?

“BC, what religion are we?”

“Mom’s Lutheran, but you can be whatever religion you want.”

“But Dennis is Mormon because his parents are Mormon.”

“No he’s not. Dennis is Mormon because he chooses to be Mormon. If he wants he could be something else. His parents may not like it, but it’s up to Dennis.”

“Like what?”

“Like a Buddhist.”

“What do they believe?”

“Reincarnation. That’s what you were talking about earlier. Dying and coming back as someone else. They also believe in something called Karma, and that’s when you…” I have to pause to take a breath. It’s hot, and god damn do my shoulders burn. “Sorry, Buddy. Karma is when you do good things and good things happen to you.”

“What about bad things?”

“Works the same way.” And I pause for a while because I’m huffing and puffing, but I power through and we make it home. I put him down in the grass.

“Would you really shoot me, BC? If I did something really bad.” He asks this when we’re back in the house, because the house is safe. Maybe he could believe I would shoot him in the outside world, but not inside the house. No, not in the home place. The safe place.

I give him a hug. My little boundary tester. My little path-finder.

“Who is my little guy?” I ask, our ritual.

“Me.”

“Who loves you?”

“You.”

“How much?”

“Infinity and beyond.”

“Then if all that’s true, how could I ever possibly shoot you?” I give him a kiss on the top of his head and tell him he’s not too old for naps. But first we eat some watermelon, and Buddy is surprised to find that the seeds are the plant’s children. Yes, they have babies too. Everything has babies Buddy.

And he snuggles up on the couch and sleeps, and I wonder for how much longer he will still listen when I speak. And I bend over and touch his head, and wonder how long I can protect him.

Oh my little boy. My little boy, how much longer will you be small enough to keep? And when will you outgrow your cage?