Alison Weaver

I. Parallel Universe
II. About Alison

Parallel Universe

     The boy is pissed off because his Dawn Simulation clock is malfunctioning. It didn’t wake him properly and now his body chemistry is going to be thrown off for the entire day because the scientifically calculated gradual rise of the light will not have alleviated the boy’s symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Usually he wakes feeling refreshed, but not this morning. This morning he feels like he is treading water with cement blocks on his feet, his eyes fog and sting when he blinks, and his mind feels sort of diluted.
     The boy is tall and lanky with cotton soft, hay-colored hair, watery blue eyes and a sweet impish smile. He lives in a loft apartment on the sixty-seventh floor of a New York City high rise in lower Manhattan. Three of the four apartment walls are constructed out of powder blue paneled glass, and you can see the Empire State building, the Chrysler building, Lady Liberty as the boy calls her, and the Brooklyn Bridge on a clear night, not to mention the boundless skyline of twinkling buildings he sometimes imagines have been built for his pleasure. In the mornings he stands in front of the glass window that faces east and soaks it all in. Sometimes, he cracks the window for a slight breeze and smokes a cigarette. He likes the wind blowing through his hair, says it reminds him of his days as a sailor, but he really only spent one July sailing a sunfish on his Uncle’s pond when he was eight.
     A few words about the boy’s financial status -- he’s been a millionaire since age nine when his grandfather, inventor of the silent Vacuum Cleaner, mysteriously died while scuba diving in the depths of the Red Sea. He was feeding black and white tipped reef sharks and just as the sharks began their feeding frenzy, arching their backs and pulling their pectoral fins close into their sides, and ripping apart bloody fish heads, the grandfather’s body momentarily froze as if it had been cartoon-electrocuted. Then it descended past hundreds of swaying sea plants and black coral reefs, down and down into the abysmal depths of the sea, that the boy pointed out was not red when flipping through the rolls of film his grand father had taken on the days leading up to his death. His body was never recovered. But it was assumed to be a heart attack. After the man died, the boy, who had been an angelic little creature up until that point, turned into a quiet and frightening thing.
     The boy didn’t have a father, not an identifiable one, and the mother shipped him off to a boarding school in northern New England at nine years old with the belief that tall sapping pine trees and fresh mountain air would do him well. Over the next twelve years he attended six schools. His mother never invited him home for the holidays, instead he spent Christmas’ with various headmaster’s and their families of child prodigies who tortured the boy for having chicken legs, abnormally long pinky toes and singing Carpenters songs in the shower. At eighteen he graduated, was given full control over his millions and moved to the big apple.

***

     A year after he moves to the city the boy goes to a pound and purchases a stray dog for forty dollars. The boy says it is the best forty dollars he ever spent. He loves the black puppy with its disproportionately large grey spotted paws and droopy Labrador ears and he names it Dagger because it makes him feel like a man to walk around with a dog named Dagger. The boy owns over ten hundred DVDs and he watches them on the 96- inch plasma television screen that slides in and out of the wall. All day long he lies on an ovular, red crush velvet sofa he purchased from a fancy modern design store in Soho and smokes Marijuana out of a glass pipe with swirling pastel colors. He has lots of other sofas and chairs too. A glass bubble with feather-filled leather pillows inside it that hangs from the ceiling and swings, a sofa made of zebra hide, a plastic orange double-decker chair with a detachable ladder, and his favorite -- a sofa made out of his beloved childhood superhero –      The Thunder Cats. He commissioned a German designer to sew together hundreds of limited edition Thundercat dolls: Vultureman, Grune, the Destroyer, Stinger, Captain Cracker, Lion – 0, Bengali and more. On the walls are brightly colored three dimensional sculptures: purple horns, a pink and green cuckoo clock, an Indian chief built out of light bulbs that glows a psychedelic orange. The boy’s interior decorator told him that the relationship between a man and his furniture is very intimate, filled with lyricism and profound expression and an essential component to the happiness of his life.
     If the boy is not watching movies than he is playing his favorite video game called Search and Destroy in which his face is superimposed upon an Iraqi soldiers and his entire living room is transformed into the city of Baghdad with holograms of fellow U.S. soldiers, blown-up mosques, tanks and a statue of Saddam Hussein that the boy’s hologram gets to topple with a metal chain noose and a crane. Then a jubilant Iraqi crowd goes wild and does the wave and America, the Beautiful blasts from the Bose sound system, and the boy’s eyes glint like pop rocks on your tongue and he gets to feel like he’s saved an entire country.

     The boy rarely leaves his apartment during the day except to visit his psychiatrist. The doctor’s office is uptown and the boy drives his Audi TT convertible up to see her and parks it on the street oblivious to any parking restrictions. On the way there he nearly kills three to five innocent pedestrians trying to cross the street on a green light. The psychiatrist is young, maybe in her thirties and she wears a navy silk scarf around her neck and cleavage-friendly suits and plaits her thick, brown hair into a stunning and elegant braid. During some sessions the doctor removes her black pump and rubs her high arch along the chair leg to alleviate an itch, and the smell of moist leather and perspiring, panty-hoe foot wafts up from under the desk. The boy has to close his eyes tightly and imagine the psychiatrist naked with a wild, unkempt crotch of pubic hair springing out in messy curls, and four prominent black hairs on her left nipple, and cheap peach scented sample perfume dabbed behind her ears in order to prevent himself from ejaculating on the spot.
     On weekends the boy blows thick, white lines off bathroom sinks in clubs named Loft 99 or Destination and picks up South American girls that he takes to The Hudson Hotel and fucks. He likes girls who can’t speak much English because than he doesn’t have to talk much, and let’s face it, the boy doesn’t have much to say. Dagger is left home all alone during weekend nights, left without a walk or food for twelve to sixteen hours depending on the quality of the drugs.
     But I should interject for a moment to say that the boy is not all together a bad person, he has a soft heart when he thinks to use it. Once at his third boarding school he saved a girl with down-syndrome from drowning during a charitable Special Olympics function, and at his most recent school he protected a bald boy with an over-bite, a stutter and pimply shoulders from being tar and feathered by a gang of eight seniors. The boy has a few close friends from these boarding schools though none of them can stand him much anymore, not because he’s a bad person but because he doesn’t speak the same language as them. He seems to live in some distant bubble untethered to any sort of reality, unaware that things like logic or responsibility exist.   

     One summer the boy is included on a picnic with the old friends. Often they include him out of pity – if it’s a big group it won’t be that bad, they say. The lilac bushes are in bloom across Central Park and the children are out sailing their electronic boats on the water or buying giant clown-faced ice creams with bubble gum noses from the hot dog vendors. Nannies in white uniforms and nurse-like shoes trail after the Fifth Avenue youngsters who are dressed to the nines in ruffled French Canterbury pinafores and Aberdeen trousers and shiny red school shoes. The boy plays Frisbee with Dagger until he is bored and then plops himself down alongside of the checkered blanket and pours some water from an Evian bottle into the cup of his hand. Dagger laps it up. Then the boy stretches out across the grass, his head resting on a friend’s knee as he pats his chest to signal that Dagger should lie across him. It is moments like these when the friends remember why they love the boy.
     Then he says, “I have something to tell you guys,” and their ears perk up.
      “Yes,” they say.
     “I’m going to be a father,” he says.
     And now the boy is a father. The child’s eyes are large and bright and her smile is serene but not specified, not directed at this or that but just there like it was painted across her mildly eczema-rashed face. She is cute and pudgy and beatific and rocks herself to sleep in a slightly autistic manner, but the boy doesn’t realize this, and the friends don’t say a thing. The mother of the baby speaks only Spanish and doesn’t trust the boy. She only lets him see their little girl in the company of a babysitter, so three days a week the boy takes the L train to Brooklyn and visits with his daughter from 10am to 12pm. He usually over sleeps and on those days he forgets to feed Dagger before he leaves.
     To kill time the boy takes trapeze lessons in the Hudson River Park. He wears white leotards and rubs his perpetually sweaty palms in chalk and hangs like a bat from bars above the river that gurgles and ripples with force, and glints in silver half-bubbles. He makes Dagger sit obediently below him on the green turf beside the congested West Side Highway traffic.
     The boy takes pictures of his baby daughter with his slick new cell-phone called the razor, and he shows people in bars saying – hey, want to see my kid. Sometimes when he talks about her he starts crying. His big, blue eyes turn pink and well-up like fish bowls and he pulls out the tissues he has in his coat pocket for the cocaine drip and dabs his eyes. He begins taking Spanish lessons so he can speak to the little girl, and practices his Spanish with his Puerto Rican drug dealers named Ishmeal or Papa who have children too. They convince the boy to buy their cocaine in large quantities because it is more economical. He agrees.
     It gets bad, the drug use, really bad, and his old friends have secret meetings and talk about what to do. An intervention is scheduled. They call his mother, a practicing Catholic, and she flies in from Mississippi decked out in religious artifacts and wearing a wool sweater with giant nuns knitted into it. She hasn’t seen the boy since he was nine years old. The father is nowhere to be found. The psychiatrist is called too.
     They sit in a circle in his enormous loft and wait for him to return from Trapeze class. The mother stares at the furniture as if it is from another solar system, something so outside our realm of understanding that it requires hours of deep, long gazing. She won’t go within five feet of the windows, and she crosses her legs and places both hands on top of her panty-hoed knee. The friends can tell she thinks everything is infected, believes if she lets too much of her saintly body touch this deviant home she’ll plummet into the depths of Hell the moment her heart stops. And maybe she’s right.
     “I don’t understand,” she finally says. “He’s taking trapeze lessons?”
     “He gets bored,” one friend says.
     “He always has some new hobby but he only sticks with them for a month or two,” another says.
     “Yeah”, a third says. “Last year it was kite sailing and the year before it was tap dancing.”
     “Oh,” the mother says, nodding.
     For a second the friends feel bad for her. She seems to be somberly parting from them, from the gigantic windowed loft, neon furniture and flashing militant buildings below, from the bags of pot labeled Maui Wowie, Skunk Haze or Blue Moonshine on his coffee table, and the cigarette buts piled in the train-shaped ashtray that chugs on tracks along the edge of the coffee table. And then she looks up and says, “He was a smart little boy, you know. He could put a 500-piece train track together in an afternoon, and puzzles, he was great at puzzles and building sandcastles too. I thought he was going to be an architect. He’d build them up and then break them down, but not all at once, he’d break them slowly and carefully, knocking down a tower here or filling in a mote there. He built them with his grandfather. When he died, when my father died, my son just lost it, but he lost it quietly and slowly. He didn’t run away, didn’t throw snowballs with rocks in them or stab me with toothpicks or defecate on my bed. Piece by piece, he lost it.” The mother looks down and large heavy tears drop from her eyes creating a circle on her plaid wool skirt.
     The friends stare with long faces, and they know they should feel some sort of deep sympathy for her, but they really don’t because it’s such an old story -- the estranged mother recounting the softness of her now monstered child.
     “Do you want to see a few pictures of him when he was young?” She asks.
     “Sure,” the friends say.
     And she pulls from her purse two strips of mall photographs. In one series the boy is on the mother’s shoulders where he seems to be clawing at her eyes with his tiny hands. And another series of the boy with his grandfather where they’re both beaming 500-watt grins and giving the camera a thumbs-up. These pictures make the entire scene even bleaker because his poor mother doesn’t even have a real photograph of her son. No, she has mall photographs, photographs taken in a metal booth with motel-blue curtains as the backdrop, motel-blue curtains that thousands of other people have behind their silly throw-away, laugh-out-loud mall photographs that they wouldn’t even consider putting into their family album let alone existing as the only proof of their children’s existence.
     “Oh,” the mother says, tears now falling in a steady stream from her eyes, “and there’s this one.”
     And she pulls out a larger one that seems to be a school picture from one of his boarding schools. In it he is wearing a white collared shirt, a plaid tie and a jacket with a gold crest of some sort. He is smiling impishly and in the reflection of a small piece of television screen behind the boy they can see his little hand flicking off whomever is standing to the right of him.
     “I think he has a picture of you on his dresser,” one friend says.
     “Really,” the mother says, “could I see it?”
     So they all stand up and walk toward his bedroom, down the long corridor that echoes their footsteps into the other wing of the three thousand foot loft -- major real-estate, as the boy says when describing his apartment. On one side of the room is a huge closet with a sliding mirrored door half-open. The mother stares into the closet, her eyes trace the row of pressed shirts and the shoe racks of Puma sneakers and Gucci loafers and Paul Smith sandals, some bright yellow or white, others a pastel pink.
     “Here, this is you – right?” one friend says, lifting a silver frame from the dresser.
     “Yes, when I was much younger, before my hair was grey,” she says and sort of runs her hand through her hair in embarrassment.
     Next to the picture frame are hundreds of colognes set in rows like soldiers. She picks one up and smells it.
     “Is my son a homosexual?” she asks.
     “No,” one friends says. “He just likes nice things.”
     “He’s a metrosexual,” another friend says.
     “A what?” the mother asks.
     “It just means he likes nice things.”
     “Oh,” the mother says, still holding the bottle of cologne that she now realizes is in the shape of a man’s torso.
     Suddenly the front door swings open and the boy comes skating down the hallway wearing his white leotard and stretch pants and black Velcro Prada sneakers with retractable wheels. He is munching on a large candy bar and has three chocolate crumbs on his chin. Dagger is following loyally behind him. He has a limp, maybe a cut on his paw but the boy doesn’t notice. The mother and the friends extract themselves from the bedroom and join the psychiatrist in the living room. Suddenly aware of the circle of people in his apartment he breaks, retracts the wheels with a button on the toe of the shoe and lets his jaw drop. The therapist tries to explain what is going on but all the boy can say is, what the fuck, man, what the fuck? And he stumbles backwards but is stymied by the shiny blue sliding wall dividing the living room from his fancy state of the art kitchen. He wanted to be a chef once, even graduated culinary school. His back slides down the slick blue wall and lifts the shoulders of his yellow windbreaker so he appears to be neckless. His head goes into his hands, and his purposely-shaggy mop of high-lighted hair spills out over his forehead. Dagger begins licking the boy’s hand. His mother stands up and walks gracefully over to him, squatting down as if she’s never squatted before. She strokes his hair. The boy looks up.
     “Who is this woman?” he says.
     “It’s your mother,” they say.
     And he looks at her again and cries into his hands. He hasn’t seen her since the morning he left for boarding school.
     “Your friends called me. They’re worried about you, They say you’re using too many drugs,” she says.
     This seems to make sense to the boy and he nods. After everyone says a few tearful words he agrees to go into a rehabilitation program called Seven Wings of Clarity. Dagger will be shipped to the mother in Mississippi. The sky outside the windows is smoke-like and thick with heavy Cumulonimbus clouds. It looks like the kind of sky that might foreshadow a natural disaster.
     Twenty-eight days later the boy returns as a born again Christian. He carries around a tiny book called – Open Your Mind, Open Your Life and he calls it his little mind book.
     “Let go of anger – it is an acid that burns away the delicate layers of your happiness,” he tells one friend.
     “Everything you need to break unhealthy cycles of behavior is within you,” he tells another.
     “Refuse to lower yourself to the level of your antagonist,” he tells a third and then he says, “what’s an antagonist?”
     His friends are skeptical about the boy’s transformation. They wait. They encourage this new lifestyle of prayer and yoga and juicing kale and swallowing vitamins called Pycnogenol and Alpha Lipoic Acid and L-Carnitine and drinking Bentonite clay because it is meant to eliminate toxins in your intestinal system. The boy visits his little girl every morning for three hours and he never over sleeps. His eyes are always lucid and awake and he speaks clearly to the mother of his child, the one night stand, talks about his life-style change and his love for his daughter and his promise to do it right and he means it, she can tell. That afternoon his daughter falls asleep in his arms for the first time. Dagger is shipped back to the boy via American Airlines cargo. He is healthy and playful again and he wears a white collar that says Jesus loves this dog.
     Three months after the boy gets out of rehab he starts smoking Marijuana again, just a little is all right, he says. But soon he’s high all day, high and lying on the red plush velvet couch watching DVD’s. One night the boy is bored and he picks up the phone and calls Ishmeal. They get high and exchange anecdotal stories about their kids.

     The friends know the boy is using again and they confront him. They take him out to brunch at one of his favorite restaurants.
     “We know you’re using again,” they say.
     “I am not,” he says defensively.
     “We know you are,” they say, “don’t lie to us.”
     “Well, you know it’s a disease,” he says.
     “Yes,” they say.
     “So, I can’t help it. It’s not my fault,” he says.
     “Are you going to meetings?” They say.
     “No,” he says.
     “Go to meetings. You can’t fight the disease alone,” they say.
     “Okay,” he says. “I’ll go to meetings.”
     “You could have a good life,” they say “you have so much. You’re so lucky.”
     “I know,” he says, “I am very fortuitous.”
     “Fortunate,” they say.
     “Yeah, that too.” He says.
     The boy’s mother calls like clockwork on the third Sunday of every month and tells him that she is praying for him. He thanks her, says he’s fine and hangs up soon after. One spring afternoon while the boy practices his trapeze after blowing through six eight balls of cocaine, Dagger is hit by a speeding taxi. He hadn’t been fed for two days and when he saw the squirrels scurrying around the tree on the other side of the highway he instinctually darted for them. The boy hears the screeching rubber tires below and falls from the tight rope landing in the cushy net as Dagger squeals. At the hospital Dagger’s back legs, both broken in three places, are placed in casts and metal wheels are attached to the dog’s backside.
     Due to years of excessive drug abuse the boy becomes a little bit dense. He’s never been much of an Einstein but now he’s really a complete dud. He pronounces remember – renember and supposedly – supposibly and spells could – koud and says you know between every other word, but the problem is his friends don’t know, they’ve never known but nod politely anyway. The thing about the boy is that below all his ridiculous, unforgivable behavior lies a layer of crippling sadness that maybe only they can see. And sometimes they really wonder if he isn’t capable of anything better.
     “He’s like an octopus,” one friend says. “Even with all seven of his eight tentacles having hurt and offended you there is still one crippled tentacle holding you, wrapping your waste tightly, the one with the big blue, fish tank eyes.”
     Once every few months the boy has a breakdown and calls one of the friends hysterically crying with a vague understanding that really, when it comes down to it, he is totally alone in this world, and has never made a single redeemable contribution to it. He is a taker, and he knows it, and that is all he’ll ever be - a conspicuous consumer. But still the friends comfort him. They tell him that he’s a good person, that he just needs to focus and stop doing drugs, but secretly they are thinking about all the people in the world who work four jobs and wear thrift shop clothes three sizes too big, and sew Halloween costumes for their children out of household garbage bags, because they can’t afford to buy real ones, not even the plastic K-mart $4.99 ones. But they never complain, even when their feet are blistered and bloody and their backs ache and the rusted handle bars of their children’s hand-me-down bikes get nicked with bullets on their way home from school because they live in a neighborhood with the second highest crime rate in the United States.     

***

     In the summer of 2004, at five years old, the boy’s daughter is finally diagnosed with Autism. She can’t speak but communicates through animal calls. The Spanish speaking one-night stand mother suddenly decides she trusts the boy and high tails it home to Uruguay leaving him an address of 0ne Montevideo Road, Montevideo, Uruguay. The boy puts his daughter in the children’s wing of a hospital specializing in Autism and continues to visit her three times a week though he is often late but never on drugs, he has limits. The hospital is shiny and smells of alcohol swabs and it is noisy in the way that it is trying not to be noisy and sad in the way that is trying not to be sad. The colorful playroom is filled with couples doting over their special children, some without limbs or with only part of a limb, some with deformed limbs that look like flippers or fly traps, others with down-syndrome or Cerebral Palsy. The boy’s little girl squeals when he walks into the room and wobbles around on the balls of her feet in her little orange Prada sneakers and velour sweat suit that he bought her last Christmas.
     “Mi Papa,” he says, “comprende”. His Spanish is coming along.
     But his little girl just stares blankly passed him and barks out the side of her mouth, so he shrugs, smiles at the nurse in her pressed and starchy uniform who is staring at him with a look of quizzical disapproval, and barks back. When he barks the little girl lights up like a bingo winner and throws her perfectly intact little arms around his neck bouncing up and down. All through the visit they communicate with animal calls and when the little girl looks at the boy he feels like she can see inside of him, like she knows him in a way uncluttered by actually knowing him in the context of real life. And he doesn’t know it but for a brief and fleeting second he experiences love for the first time in his life.
     A week later the boy is called into the office of his little girl’s doctor. He feels like he is nine years old again and in trouble for sticking gum on the principal’s doorknob, but he reminds himself over and over again that he is not nine years old, that he is twenty-six years old and that he is a father and that he must act like a man. He repeats the mantra his therapist taught him – I am capable. I am strong. I am confident. I can succeed – as he walks through the hospital hallway and the electronic doors to the children’s ward open playing the tune of Puff, The Magic Dragon. The doctor is stiff and rigid and talks down to the boy.
     “This hospital is a highly structured environment and it is necessary for it to stay that way for the well-being of your child. The doctors and nurses are working very hard to help your child by teaching her how to comprehend and communicate language and when you come here and let her communicate through animal calls you are negating all our hard work. You are becoming a detriment to your own child. Can you understand this?” she says.
     “Yes, Ma’am,” the boy says, just like he used to say to the principle at nine years old.
     “Good,” she said. “Also, you should know that your little girl is having some behavioral problems such as aggressive and defiant behavior, anxiety and self-induced injury and we, the doctors and nurses of this hospital, believe that psychopharmacotherapy will ameliorate these problems. We are going to go ahead with this procedure and we thought you should know.”
     The boy nods unsure what psychopharmacotherapy is but assumes it has to do with drugs and since he knows drugs save lives he says, “Okay, do whatever you have to to help my little girl.”
     “Oh, we will,” the doctor says, “and it is recommended that the parents stay away for a little while so that the child has no distractions and can really focus on therapy and allow the drugs to kick in.”
     “If it will help her,” he says.
     “It will help her,” the doctor says.

     The boy goes to Miami for two weeks and returns to the city with conch shells and starfish for his daughter, but when he enters the children’s ward of the hospital she doesn’t wobble or squeal or bark. Instead, she is lying on her back under a yellow slide rocking back and forth with a thick stream of gelatinous drool falling from the side of her mouth and heavy blue half-moons hanging below her eyes. Two nurses still in crisply ironed white uniforms stand in front of a gigantic finger painting with clipboards and crossed arms in the midst of a chat. When they see the boy they straighten their shoulders and lift their chins as if he’d called them to attention. He walks toward them.
     “What’s wrong with my girl?” He asks.
     “Oh, she’s doing wonderfully. All behavioral problems have ceased and she responds to hi when given a spoonful of sugar and says I love you for a pound of Gummi Bears,” they say nodding profusely.
     “But she doesn’t even recognize me,” he says.
     “She’s just tired today. It’s hard work joining us here in the human world when you’re so faraway,” they say, grinning.

***

    The following week the boy purchases a piece of property one hour outside the city called Happy Gables Farm. It has horses and cows and ponds and ducks and chickens. He hires a tall, white-haired architect with broad, beefy shoulders and explains the urgency of this project. Within two months his house is built, modeled partly after a floor model of a Legos at FAO Schwartz and partly after the Swiss Family Robinson’s home. One side is built out of life-sized Lego blocks made from white stucco and the other side is a mirage of thatch huts and rope bridges and hammocks. The heart-shaped lego is his little girls’ room and he’s had the entire interior padded with colorful gymnasium mats, and outside her window is a gigantic pool meant to simulate the relaxing undulation of ocean waves complete with singing mechanical dolphins because the boy read somewhere about this new dolphin therapy meant to cure Autism.
     The moment the house is complete the boy marches into the children’s ward of the too-noisy hospital and finds his daughter stuck inside a configurable play maze still drooling profusely, only now the drool seems more like beige foam, and in her little fisted hands are empty sugar packets crunched into a ball. Dragging her out he imagines that he is a fireman saving a child from a burning tenement building and then he imagines himself being interviewed by Larry King and his face across buses throughout the city with the caption below reading – Our Hero!
     “What are you doing?” A nurse asks the boy.
     “I’m taking my daughter home,” he says.
     “This is her home,” the nurse says.
     “Not anymore,” he says. “I’m checking her out.”
     “But she just learned say goodbye for a liter of Jolt!!!” The nurse screams after the boy who is dashing out the door with his drugged up, docile daughter under his arm in an intentionally dramatic exit, imagining the Rocky theme song playing in the background.
     And so the boy and Dagger and the little girl all live at Happy Gables Farm, which the boy points out isn’t exactly a farm because farms don’t have pools or mechanical dolphins or trapeze centers or Iraqi war simulation hologram video rooms. The boy takes care of the little girl all week and hires a clairvoyant, Reiki certified babysitter to stay with her on Friday and Saturday nights when the boy heads into the city to snort Cocaine off bathroom counters and screw South American women. Every night he gives her a bath in her padded bathtub with starfish and angelfish and stingrays hand painted across the wall of hexagonal tiles, and she wears her orange swimming wings and miniature wind-up dolphins swim around her, and occasionally she cries because he gets the Johnson’s baby shampoo in her eyes which he’d like to point out is clearly not tear-free, but usually she makes quiet whistle-like dolphin calls as she gazes listlessly at the colorful fish around her tub, almost as if she is looking through this world deep into the solar system, maybe pricing real-estate on Jupiter, and in these moments the boy is absolutely certain that wherever she lives is a much better place than this earth. And for a few seconds he is almost grateful that she was born the way she was.
     During the summer the friends visit the boy. They lather themselves up with Coppertone and tan their white, knobby city bodies on his cushy lounge chairs under the upstate sunshine. They think she seems happy. She loves the undulating pool water, lets it rock her back and forth as she floats in a plastic ring tube and splashes her head into the crisp blue sheet of water. When she’s not in the water she runs around the padded pool deck on the balls of her feet, barking and cockadoodledooing, and leaving faint and steaming five-toe prints that shrink on the hot red plastic and disappear. Sometimes the boy plays a version of Marco Polo with her except no one’s eyes are closed and he is always it, and the actual words Marco and Polo are never said, instead he barks and she caws, and occasionally he dives under the water and tickles the arches of her little feet and she slaps the surface of the pool in unabashed joy. When she gets tired he wraps her up in a yellow terrycloth robe with a hood and little orange ears, and holds her in his lap on the lounge chair until she falls asleep.
     The boy and his daughter visit his mother in Mississippi every Christmas. His daughter loves to fly on the airplane and spreads her arms like the wings of a seagull every time they take off, flapping them madly about and beaming with elation, as if she believes she’s the reason the enormous 747 is lifting off the ground. The friends call the boy once every few months to check in. They know it’s not a perfect situation but it’s better than it could have ended up, and at least the boy and the little girl have each other, and two people have a little less sadness in their life, and the world is a little more right because of it.
                                        

Alison Weaver recently graduated from the New School University with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She is the co-editor of the literary journal Pindeldyboz and volunteers as a mentor at The PEN American Center Prison Writing Program. She is currently working on a memoir titled, Talking Out Of Turn, and lives in New York City.