Everything Changes

“I’ve missed you so much, and I just decided that if you hadn’t chosen me, you never would have made such a mess of things.”
    I stare at her incredulously. “If you felt that way, why didn’t you call me?”
    She shakes her head, leaning in to hug me again. “I knew that if I was right, you’d come on your own.”
    “There’s so much I have to tell you,” I say, my chest quivering, my voice soft and unsteady. She pulls back to look at me, smiling as she turns up to kiss me. “Later,” she whispers, pulling me toward the stairs.

    Afterward, I lie between her legs, still ensconced firmly inside her, as we hold whispered conversations that she punctuates with soft, lingering kisses on my chin and lower lip. “I have an idea,” I say.
    “Tell me.”
    “Let’s skip the part where we have to feel each other out, trying to determine where the boundaries are, and who’s feeling it more than the other and all that. Let’s just agree that we’re in love and take it on faith that there are no trapdoors.”
    Tamara runs a lone finger down my spine, and I shiver against her, moving my hands to where her breasts merge into my chest. “That’s probably easier said than done,” she murmurs, tickling the sweat off my neck with the tip of her tongue.
    “Nothing has been easy for us yet,” I point out even as I feel myself growing aroused inside of her again. “I figure we’re due.”
    Tamara closes her eyes, arching her back up beneath me, chin to the ceiling, eyes at half-mast as she pulls me farther inside her. Her expression is one of pleasurable effort, and even though this is the first time we’ve been here like this, I know it’s the expression that I’ll forever associate with our lovemaking, that will appear unbidden behind my closed eyes whenever we’re apart. “So, what do you say?” I whisper, stretching out over her.
    “I say we give it a shot,” she says in the last instant before her lips part to devour mine.

    While Tamara sleeps, I tiptoe into Sophie’s room to kiss her in her crib. She rolls over as I do, opening her eyes to stare up at me, instantly awake. “Zap here,” she whispers, her voice hoarse with sleep.
    “I missed you, Sophie,” I say.
    “Zap came back.”
    “That’s right. Zap came back.”
    “The
Annie
DVD broke,” she informs me.
    “Should we go to the store and buy you a new one?”
    “Yes, buy you a new one,” she says, rolling sleepily onto her side. “Where I going tomorrow?”
    “I don’t know,” I whisper to her. “Wherever you want.”
    “Where Zap going?”
    I rub her back softly. “Zap’s not going anywhere,” I say.

    As much as I’d like to, I can’t spend the night. Henry has been waking up crying in the early-morning hours, tearing down the stairs to find me, terrified that I’ve left him. No matter how much I reassure him during his waking hours, his subconscious remains unconvinced. I’m hoping that it’s just a matter of time, that unlike the rest of us, Henry is young enough to have escaped any lasting psychological damage from Norm’s particular brand of neglect. I think about maybe getting him some professional help, but I don’t want to be one of those people who send their kids to a different therapist for every little ailment. On the other hand, I don’t want to be the kind of person who denies his child the benefits of therapy on principle, either. I discussed it briefly with Lela, who certainly knows a thing or two about screwed-up kids, but she just said welcome to parenthood, where the only certainty is uncertainty. Maybe so, but when I see the terror swimming in Henry’s wide, red-rimmed eyes, his mouth opened in a petrified scream as I wipe the tears off his face, I’m fairly certain that I hate Norm with a passion that threatens to overwhelm.
    But at other times, when Henry’s playing peacefully with his trains or sitting on my lap as I read to him, his fingers absently, possessively pulling at the hairs on my wrist, I find myself thinking wistfully about Norm, grateful for his having brought Henry to me, and I wonder whether we’ll ever hear from him again. In the short while he was here, his presence was so overpowering that it seems impossible that he’s gone, that he was ever really gone. I realize that while I thought I understood him, he was more of a stranger than I’d ever imagined. To have wormed his way back into the relatively good graces of his family, only to abscond with our forgiveness