Everything Changes

other, secret feelings. For a moment I can fantasize about living in a world where it would make sense that Tamara accompany me to the doctor. She has always been highly discerning, stingy even, in the doling out of her affections, which makes it doubly sweet to make it over the walls and through the gates into the fortress of her concern. But, of course, she can’t come with me because of Hope. I love Hope and Hope loves me, and when I’m not in Riverdale, that arrangement suits me just fine. That’s my reality. So what the hell is it about Tamara that challenges it all every time I see her?
    “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing I really want an audience for.”
    “I understand,” she says.
    Here’s an interesting thing: by some tacit agreement, neither of us ever mentions Hope. No matter what the topic, we will phrase things in such a way so as to keep any trace of her out of our conversation. As far as Tamara knows, Hope may not even be aware of my weekly visits to her. And she’s fine with that. It’s as if we exist in our own little world, and we’re reluctant to allow anyone else with any claim on either one of us into the circle. So we never mention Hope. Rael, who, being dead, is only slightly less of a threat, is most often referred to in the pronoun form. “Him” or “he.” I know why I do it: because I’m a sick bastard who, for the brief moments I’m with Tamara, is preserving a fantasy that is highly inappropriate, at best. But why is she doing it? What secret agenda is she protecting?
    For some reason this line of reasoning, obtuse and flawed though it may be, sends an exhilarated shiver up my spine. We sit there watching Sophie sleep, and I take in Tamara’s scents, the slightly fruity bouquet of her shampoo and the scented moisturizer she uses. I imagine pulling back her wild dark hair and burying my face in the hollow of her neck, my lips on her skin, engulfing myself in her scents. Probably, it wouldn’t go over too well.
    “Look at her,” Tamara says, staring lovingly at Sophie. “She looks like such an angel when she sleeps. You’d never know what a demon she is.”
    “She does have a lot of energy,” I say.
    “She’s so demanding now. If she doesn’t get her way, she cries in this really loud voice and just doesn’t stop. I can understand those mothers who get arrested for throwing their babies against the wall.” I give her a look. “I’m not saying I would do it. I’m just saying I understand the impulse. You just want to stop that damn noise.”
    “Maybe don’t repeat that to anyone else,” I say.
    She laughs. “I know. I’m just thinking out loud.”
    My leg is our rudder, rocking us gently back and forth on the swing. “I get so mad at him sometimes,” she says, “him” being Rael. “It’s just so typical of him, to have this baby and then leave me with the mess. I mean, I love her to death, but how the hell am I supposed to get on with my life when I’ve got her? You know, if you’re going to die on someone, you ought to leave her with no strings attached, so she can move on, start something new. Instead, I’ve got a daughter to take care of, and I’ve got his parents on my back every day checking up on me because they don’t think I’m fit to be a mother. It’s like he locked me into his world and then he got the hell out. And so I hate him, and then I feel guilty for hating him and I freak out about that for a while.”
    “You’re doing okay,” I say.
    “I’m a shitty mother.”
    “It’s pronounced ‘single.’ You’re a single mother.”
    “I curse too much, I don’t give her a schedule, I don’t change her diaper nearly as often as I should, she eats whatever she wants, and I resent her for tying me down. What’s going to happen when I start to date again?”
    Alarm bells go off in my head. Warnings lights spin.
    “Did someone ask you out?”
    “Come on,” she says. “Look at me. Who’s going to want to date this?”
    A powerful sense of relief courses through me when she says this, and with it the guilty realization that my own misdirected possessive feelings and Tamara’s needs will soon be at cross-purposes.
    “Who wouldn’t?” I say, forcing myself to play the role that until recently I thought I’d been doing for real. I’m not really a concerned, platonic friend, but I play one on TV. “When the word gets out, you’ll have more guys than you know what to do