These razor blades are no good.

She rakes through the drawer again. They’re all the same, dull blades rusting in a dusty junk drawer for too long.

“He’ll be home any minute and this apartment is a stinking mess,” she says to the empty kitchen, as if justifying her plight to an invisible mother.

Can’t have Buddy cutting himself on old razors so she grinds them up in the garbage disposal. She ignores the clattering in the sink as she slaps together a small paper plate of generic saltine crackers and off-brand peanut butter. It’s cheap, all she can afford, and it’s Buddy’s favorite after-school snack.

She is still trying to unclog the broken disposal when, a half-hour later than usual, Buddy shuffles into the kitchen, soiled bruises and white bloody scrapes all over his body. He goes straight to his room without a word, his eyes never leaving the floor. When he comes home like this her heart breaks, her stomach flutters, nauseating. Sometimes Buddy is like this after a beating, silent and brooding, licking his injuries in the quiet solitude of dark, but sometimes he walks directly to his mother and wraps his arms around her to hold her as if to keep her from flying away. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes a heart-wrenching smile of strength which says, “I’m okay.” Other times, nothing. She detests the way the other boys treat him at school. She’s tried talking to his teachers, the principal, but they all say the same things: “He needs to be with kids more his own…you know, type.” Like hell, she tells them, my boy’s normal. He’s special.

She pads down the hall to Buddy’s room. The door is shut. For a moment, her motherly instinct urges her to reach for the knob, but she stops herself. I’ll give him a moment alone, she decides. Back in the kitchen, she drizzles small swirls of honey on each peanut buttered cracker, then gingerly slides the whole plate into the fridge for later, along with a note that reads: MY BUDDY.

#

“Ain’t that the way it is,” replied Shanon, a single mother. “You bear ‘em for nine months and they come out lookin’ like daddy. That son of a bitch.” The two women shook their heads in mutual commiseration and continued down the aisle in search of the perfect solution to an ice cream craving. Their bellies swollen and pregnant, they waddled more than walked, with their backs arched for support. She was six months pregnant with Buddy at the time and scared to tears of motherhood. Shanon told her raising a kid “was like nothin’, ‘cause as soon as they pop out your instinct takes over for you. It’s like running on autopilot.” She was seven months pregnant with her second, no daddy in sight.

For weeks she worried herself sick that her motherly instincts wouldn’t kick in. What if my instincts are bad?

She wondered if little Buddy would be a doppelganger of his father. She couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t seen the man who gave his chromosomes since the night he was conceived. Only which night was that? With Jimmy the conversation went something like this:

“I’m pregnant.”

“Why’s that?”

“Strong swimmers, I guess.”

“Mine?”

“Not sure. I think so.”

“You think so, huh?”

Maybe he was the father, maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Jimmy then gave a small nod, grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked right out the door and never came back. Not for his jacket, not for his guitar, not for his lucky trucker hat, and not for her, and certainly not for little Buddy. She cried on the linoleum, arms over the toilet and retching from her aching gut until morning.

By the time her exhaustion and shock had subsided into a blunted calm she had made her decision—she would do what she had to for this baby and raise him on her own. No man would be good enough for her and her baby anyway, after what they’d been through. And if it was a girl, she prayed her daughter would never meet a man like her father, whoever he was. She focused her mind on the goal before her, the first step of which was to remove the rest of the beer from the refrigerator and toss it in the dumpster from her second-story window, where the cans exploded with a metallic splat of cans and foam all over the pavement.

In the months that followed she came to understand Jimmy a little more. The fears. The worries. I can’t raise a child. My life is over. It’s too much responsibility. Uncountable others. She forgave him for those feelings, for his humanness, but not for walking out on her. Never for that. Sometimes she wished she could be more like Jimmy but she knew, unlike him, she couldn’t escape her obligation to this child. She was its mother. If she walked out on the child, the child would still be with her.

There were days when she thought he might return to beg for forgiveness. He never did. Gradually, she admitted to herself that some people were like that, able to keep looking forward like they’re wearing horse blinders and never look back to see what they missed. After that she was able to stop expecting him to walk through the door at any minute. Later, at times of desperation (and there were times of desperation), she would tell herself that if he’d known Buddy even for a second, seen that bright smile of his, his small goofy belly laugh, he would’ve known what he was missing and come back. In the end, she had to remind herself his type was no good anyhow.

#

All she can find is yellow plastic rope. Dirty, bristling rope that smells like an old basement but is long enough for her to knot around the ceiling pipes with a short dangle, which she tucks into the adjacent ceiling tiles. She sees no need to replace the tile over the pipe and rope. Buddy won’t come in if the door is closed. He’s good about giving his momma some privacy when I need it. He’s a good boy.

Still, she grabs a sheet of wide-rule paper and scrawls a note in pencil. Halfway through she crumples the note and starts over, this time carefully writing it in clear block letters, using simpler words. Don’t come in. Momma is sleeping and needs her private time. Then she writes a phone number, a few annotations. For the first time, she hopes her son won’t understand, that he won’t put the pieces together. She can’t let her baby see her this way.

#

It was two a.m. and her son had been crying for nearly five hours without a break. She held her red-faced, colicky child, played with him, dangling brightly-colored toys before his eyes, changed his diaper, walked with him, rocked him, talked and read to him, with each new task hoping the wailing infant would wear himself out enough to fall asleep. She had to leave for work in a few hours, and a nine-hour shift at the phones was difficult enough without her willpower eroded to a nub by exhaustion.

There would be no chance to catch up on lost sleep, either. After a week of overtime her stress levels were maxed out, and she could barely sleep as it was. Her baby’s crying went on and on with no end in sight. With no one to share the burden, no one to relieve her frayed and throbbing nerves, the last of her strength was devoted to not throttling the nearest human being or smashing all the windows with her bare, white-knuckled fists. When he was like this she couldn’t find the usual place of calm that washed over when she held her child. She loved him more than herself, more than the world and the sum of its love for anything and everything on the planet. She would sooner throw herself in front of a bus than cause him any pain. He was only four months old.

Finally, magically, his cries subsided into a periodic whine. His eyes lost focus, the pupils constricting to fine black points, darting in four directions as if tracing an invisible quadrangle before rolling to the right, back, and finally disappearing beneath closed eyelids. She carried the gently snoring infant to his bedroom, careful to angle his body limp body through the opening of the nursery door, partly ajar.

She couldn’t be sure how it happened. Somehow her hold slipped and his rubber-like body, doll-like, flipped end-over-end between the crib and her arms. His head bounced off the front rail and landed face-down on the floor. Confused, frightened, slammed by pain, the child began wailing anew with ferocious amplitude. There was a moment of shock, of disbelief, where she couldn’t bring herself to understand what had happened. The pain was too acute, too bewildering, too surreal. Her brain did its best to block access to reality with a sheet of blackness, a forgetting so solid, so sheer it was as if that part of her memory had been erased. Suddenly her instinct thrust forward to grab the helm and she snatched him up and held him as close as a mother could hold her child without smothering it.

She dabbed the blood from his nose and inspected his head for the point of impact. There was a red strip (where soon there would be a bruise) but otherwise he seemed okay. The nosebleed proved superficial and stopped after a minute or so. Buddy squealed for a while but gradually became calm again with a little coaxing, and was soon fast asleep. She cried and cried and cried and cried. And then cried again. It took the last of her will not to scream until her lungs exploded out of her throat and then throw herself through the window.

How could she have done it? How could she have miscalculated so grossly, suffered such a catastrophic lapse in judgment? This was her child—that which she prized above all. And she was always careful. So careful.

#

         There’s a creaking, the twisting of a doorknob and soon Buddy is clomping out to the kitchen in search of a snack. She follows, shutting the door to her room behind her as quietly as possible. When she arrives in the kitchen, he beelines for her and wraps his arms around his mama, hugging her tightly around the waist.

“I love you, mom,” he says with his blunted pronunciation. She sees the plate on the table, several crackers already devoured, another half destroyed, and smiles.

         “I love you too, baby,” she says to him. “More than you will ever know.”

#

It wasn’t easy raising Buddy by herself and working to support them, but she did it. Everyone always said Buddy was a good baby. He was. But he was a baby, and babies are hard work. She worked long, brutal hours in a call center where the employees were abused by phone per minute, the red-faced managers fired folks for as little as two tardies, and everyone smoked themselves into an early grave on each five-minute break. All of her coworkers were either grossly obese or drug-addict thin college dropouts. She had little in common with them except for Shanon. Shanon’s caustic wit dropped a brilliant raindrop into that deathtrap.

She took overtime when she could. There was daycare to pay for, which cost her more because she was working so much, creating a compounding spiral that grew heavier week after week, not a weekend to herself, which is what she really needed. She needed time to rest, regroup and recoup, just her and her baby. Maybe sleep in one morning. Watch a movie. Get away for a weekend, just her.

#

She had Buddy on the changing mat but she wasn’t changing his diaper. No, he was looking up at her with his naïve baby smile. His limbs pop off one by one, like frog legs delicately bound to his body by a layer of outer skin, until only his body remained. She ate the limbs like rare steaks. Buddy didn’t seem to mind, but his torso writhed, mutilated, helpless, trying desperately to flail the limbs she had taken from him.

When she awoke, she felt claws raking at the inside of her stomach. Her bowels throbbed and swirled until she nearly puked in her bed. Every strand of her body wanted to break out of her skin and burn at the slightest flickering thought of the nightmare. They were a frequent occurrence while Buddy was growing up.

The next morning she would sneak over to Buddy’s crib and just watch him. He had all his limbs. He always did. He was always normal, peaceful, perfect. Those days she held him with extra tenderness, played with him a little longer. She bathed him, cooed with him, and read to him like she hadn’t seen him in a week.

One night, when Buddy was only three months old, she clipped his razor-sharp fingernails as she normally did, a lesser of two evils, for it made her skin crawl to do it, for fear of cutting too close and hurting her child. But leaving his nails uncut was like letting him wield ten tiny blades, which he would wield erratically with his underdeveloped gross motor skills until he grabbed something, like flesh, and squeezed. This time she cut far too close, pinching off the skin at the tip of the tiny, fragile finger. Blood seeped out seemingly without end, staining hands, carpet, clothes. Buddy screamed for what felt like hours. Though he eventually forgot the incident, she didn’t. Couldn’t.

That night she considered slitting her wrists. She went to the kitchen, took out the sharpest knife she owned, and pressed it to her skin. She thought of her little boy. Put the knife back.

#

“Kids are remarkably resilient with these sorts of things,” the E.R. doctor told her, as he pointed a tiny flashlight into each of Buddy’s eyes. One, then the other, before clicking it off. There doesn’t appear to be any immediate signs of permanent damage, but if you want to be sure, we could run a few tests.”

“I don’t have insurance,” she replied, relieved that her baby was okay, at least for now.

“In that case, the tests will run a few thousand bucks, but since there appears to be no physical signs…”

She’d walked two hours in the city cold to get to the E.R. She didn’t have money for a cab and didn’t own a car. Since she couldn’t afford to get Buddy a proper winter coat (he was so young then, and he would outgrow it so fast), so she wrapped him in all the blankets she could find and held him close to her chest, shielding his fragile skin and ruddy cheeks from the cutting city wind. By the time Dr. Chozai saw her, the sun was already radiated across the morning traffic and she was late for work.

The nurse who checked her in said: “Remember, you don’t have to treat your baby like he’s fragile. He won’t break. Their bones are practically made of rubber.”

As she made the long and weary trek home, she reasoned back and forth over her choice. The tests, they were—it wasn’t because she didn’t love him, because she did. More than anything in the world and to a depth much greater than her brain could tangibly grasp or even put into words, for the instinct emanated from the fabric of her being, from the source of its very essence. So did she not press for further testing out of denial? Out of fear of discovering, being told, that she had harmed her only earthly treasure? Had she cast her hope on a frail string, on a tenuous, blind faith which seemed to yank her stubbornly forward instead of lingering behind?

When she arrived home, she put Buddy to bed and called in sick. Her supervisor gave her an earful about respect, teamwork, and responsibility, which she accepted humbly and dutifully, and then collapsed on the couch. She couldn’t sleep.

#

“No big deal,” Shanon said as she dumped ten value packs of macaroni and cheese in her shopping cart, sucking down the last of her diet coke. She didn’t mind that Shanon liked to dole out advice just to hear herself talk. “Babies bump their heads on stuff all the time—little bumps, y’know. Most of the time they don’t even notice. They just keep smiling up at you like you just gave ‘em the world. But they always forget, lord love ‘em. By the time they’re running around the playground they won’t remember nothin’.”

Then her young daughter chimed in with her own tidbit: “Mommy’s carrying my baby brother in her belly.”

“Sometimes it feels like an alien’s growing in there,” replied her mother, now sorting through layers of snack crackers.

“Am I a’ alien?” asked her daughter. She was nearly three.

“Don’t look like it to me,” replied her mother. “You got two arms and two legs and eyes in all the right places. At least, so far.” Shanon tossed another bag of chips into her cart.

So far, she thought. So many years for something to happen to this defenseless, innocent little thing. And Shanon handles it like it’s nothing.

#

Buddy loosens his grip and gazes up into his mother’s eyes. “Thank you for making me my favorite,” he says, his speech slurred and almost grunt-like. The familiar symptoms of the affected speech centers in his brain. A ring of bruised black is forming around one eye, a red bulb swelling over one of his cheeks, and there are dirt and scrapes all over his face. A dot of blood has dried on his chin. “I’ll wash dishes,” he adds. His wet brown eyes are filled with genuine affection, appreciation, a blaze no torment could quench.

From her own memories of childhood, she knows Buddy is reaching the age where he may begin to realize that she, as his parent, is only human, a fallible being capable of mistakes and error, susceptible to misfortune and pain, prone to weakness, and not an invincible guardian, immortal and untouchable by the world. What he perceives as his mother’s superpowers will give way to realizations of fault, habit, eccentricity, failure. Or maybe he hasn’t begun to realize these things yet. Or ever will. He’s not always as quick as other boys his age. But she pushes the thought aside.

“Don’t worry about that. You just eat your crackers,” she tells him. Buddy responds with a wide, toothy grin, and sets to work on the crackers. Watching him, brooding on shadow thoughts, she forces herself to push through her protective instinct and say what she means to say in a way he will understand.

“Fourteen years old,” she says.

“Yeah,” he replies. He chews with his mouth open, like a grazing cow, content in his ignorance.

“You’re a man now. You’re at the age where you can take care of yourself.”

“Okay.” He bites into another cracker.

“And you’re just like everybody else—a smart boy. Don’t let anyone else tell you different.”

“Okay.” Buddy smiles, sucks sticky honey from his fingertips.

#

Buddy was a baby again as she poured a cup of lukewarm water over Buddy’s little bulb of hair. She had filled the bathtub too full this time, although she didn’t remember doing so. The water level was rising. Suddenly the bath was so deep the water was swelling around the child’s neck. He opened his mouth to taste the water but soon it climbed over his face, his nose. For some reason she couldn’t help him. As the water covered his eyes he looked up at her with a desperate, questioning look—Why? Why mommy? What is happening? Why can’t you save me? She tried desperately to get up from the side of the tub and pull him out of the water. The angle wasn’t right and with his soapy skin he was just too damn slippery, too heavy. Bubbles poured out of his mouth like a stream of smoke as his fragile lungs began to fill with water.

She wakes to a muffled sound coming from Buddy’s room. Sobs. A stirring. A sheet of sickness passes over her body. When her child hurt, she felt his pain as her own and her own hurt on top of that, like her child’s amplified. It was an empathy—an instinct—so powerful, so deep, that she couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t ignore it. It was driven by primordial motherhood, an inherent need to protect her child and raise him on a pedestal. She felt powerless.

She held him in her arms the entire day, putting him down only to use the bathroom. For weeks she refused to give him a real bath, instead gently sponging down his plump infant body while he sat on a towel, all the while wiping sporadic tears of fear and relief from her face. It took a month for her to shake the horror of that nightmare but it never truly left her, not all the way.

#

She breathed a sigh of relief when little Buddy woke up the next morning with those bright almond-colored eyes sparkling alongside his toothless smile. He was always a happy baby when he first woke up, and seeing that joy burned away the world, leaving only a baby boy and his mother, her blood. Her clenched muscles dropped their grasp all at once as an overwhelming affection for her child burst through her like a warm ember that eclipsed the week’s fatigue. That day she called in sick again, devoting herself wholeheartedly to her son. That day Buddy giggled for the first time. Together, they laughed until bedtime.

It wasn’t until Buddy entered school that she knew something was wrong.

“Your son…” the teacher began, her lips curled inward as she chewed on her next words very carefully. After a sigh, she continued: “He’s having trouble in class.”

“What kind of trouble?” she asked, her arsenal of accusations and justifications ready for reprisal.

“He has trouble keeping up. He’s showing signs.”

“Signs? What do mean signs?”

“Buddy might be…slower…than the other students.”

Immediately, she cut in: “My boy is smart. Smart I tell you. Maybe he’s so smart he’s just getting bored in your class ‘cause you move slow.”

The teacher shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“I’d like to recommend Buddy for the special class.”

Buddy’s mother refused to listen to another word. She grabbed her son by the hand and marched the curious-eyed little boy out the room, out of the conference, out of the school, out out out.

In the coming weeks, representatives from the state came to the school to administer certain tests. With very calm voices and a violet file folder of evidence, they announced their decision to move Buddy to special ed “for his own good.” She threw her glass of water in their faces. When they insisted, she threw a fit. She screamed. She cried. They brought in sharp-jawed lawyers with expensive leather briefcases. Unwieldy, hysterical, she invoked her rights as a human being—and mother. Eventually, they left her and her son alone.

Sharon’s advice: “He’s a sweet kid, but sweet don’t make him normal.” After sifting around in her cart, she tossed in a package of ground beef. “Maybe you should’ve listened to ‘em. But then again, what do I know. I’d’ve probably done the same.”

When a social worker came knocking at her door three weeks later, she slammed the door in his face and then locked it. No one was going to tell her what to do with her child and how to raise him. They don’t love him like I do, so how could they know what’s good for him better than me? I just want what’s best for him. They don’t know.

He struggled in school, in classes, with homework, making friends. He did his honest best, she knew that. She still insisted on regular classes, even if her son brought home straight Ds. She celebrated every one. She dedicated her whole existence to her boy. In evenings she helped him with his homework (a struggle for both of them), then they watched 80s sitcom reruns on TV or played board games or drew dinosaurs, and talked, laughed. She relished every moment. His laugh made her heart glow like a furious red coal that burned so brightly she felt she would burst into ashes. In him she found a profound joy, a torch which illuminated the pitch darkness.

But as Buddy grew, the impact of his disability became more apparent. He started coming home from school with bruises on his arms, scrapes on his knees, a black eye or a bloody nose. When she asked about them his response was sullen and mute. He didn’t have to say. She knew. Bullies. Buddy’s disability drew a bright neon bullseye on his forehead. He was so good-natured, defenseless.

“I’m not dumb, am I mommy?” His eyes were alight and eager for encouragement.

“’Course not, baby,” she told him. As they hugged, squeezed tightly, she wondered if she knew what she was doing. What if this is because of something I did? If only I hadn’t… Her body smoldered with shame, the pit of her stomach growing heavy, sore with the knowledge that she may have caused him this pain through her clumsiness and ignorance. She pulled him closer.

“I love you, mommy,” he said, doing the same.

As she felt the fleshy warmth of his body creep into her skin she couldn’t help but admire his strength, his optimism, his resilience. Then she felt sick, an infected sore festering within her, afraid that her mistake was why he hurt.

#

“That boy loves you more than anything in the world. That’s obvious as camel spit,” Shanon would say.

“And I love him ten times more than that,” she would reply. And then, unspoken: But…

#

Sometimes, she found herself standing precariously close to the curb, letting the traffic rocket past like a decapitating whip. One step forward and she’d be free. Her gut stabbed at her with sickness at the thought of Buddy coming home to find his momma gone. She imagined him sitting in his room until he starved to death, waiting for her like a dumb loyal dog. No, I can’t say that—he’s not a burden, he’s not dumb. He’s a blessing. My world. Then the crosswalk changed and she followed the herd across the street.

#

They celebrated his birthday by going to the zoo with some money she’d painstakingly saved by walking instead of taking the bus twice a week. She bought him an ice cream and a stuffed elephant. Melting strands of chocolate oozed over his sticky fingers as he tried to catch each one with his creamy tongue. Who would have taken him to the zoo, if not her? Who would celebrate every year of his life with something he would remember for the rest of his life? The state would find foster parents for him, she was sure of that, but it wasn’t the same. They wouldn’t have the patience, the intimate, intuitive comprehension of his loves, his virtues, his quirks—not like her. How he liked nuts, but only in other foods and not by themselves. How his when they sat down for a meal he always offered her his best and most generous portion before taking a bite himself? Or how as a baby his favorite game was to try to combine her face with one of his stuffed animals, and the perplexed expression on his face when he smushed the two together but nothing came of the experiment. Who would know these things but her? But then again, maybe they would take him to a place where he would find friends, where he would be protected from uppity teachers and bullies and the taunts of cruel children. She wanted what was best for him—but what was best for him? She honestly didn’t know. So she bought him another ice cream.

But as his tongue eagerly dived into the second cone, she realized with sudden clarity that she did know. While she could give her son kisses and crackers and ice cream in plenty, they were palliative band-aids for what was hidden beneath. Buddy would never enjoy a normal life—and it was her fault.

#

“You pack your backpack like I asked you to?” she asks him, finishing up his last cracker.

“Not yet,” he says.

“I’ll have a list of chores for you when you’re done.” He takes a long swig of milk from the carton before going upstairs with a loud thud, thud, thud. She puts the milk back in the refrigerator. Shreds of salt dangle on her jaw before she wipes them clean.

Upstairs, Buddy is busy hunting down items on a scavenger list she gave him that morning. She knows it will take him over an hour to reach the last item on the list, ultimately leading him to the note she is now posting on the outside of her door. After kissing the note and leaving the glistening imprint of her lipstick on it, she locks herself inside the room. Her heart thunders like fleeing horses. Her breath is shallow, fast. Electricity runs through her blood, the reverberating fire of anticipation, fear, a passage with no return. She double-checks the lock on the door one last time.

“He don’t need mamma making things worse for him,” she mutters to no one, the invisible mother, as she drags a scratched, white-lacquered chair across the room. Only a vague awareness of her life bubbles inside her without actually breaking the surface. She mounts the chair and pulls the rope taut around her throat.