When you live in a family, it's easy to stop noticing things, to quit paying attention. That's one way you know it's a family. We take things for granted. Some people call that tolerance, or laziness, or being in denial. I call it getting through the day.
I soon got used to how difficult my (unofficial) stepson was being. His bad behavior was mostly directed at me. He was always nice to Miles. They loved each other as much as before. Like brothers. If their friendship had started unraveling, I might have been quicker to bring it to Sean's attention.
Sean was making up for lost time at work. He wasn't home all that much. He'd left Nicky to me for a while. And when Sean was around, Nicky wasn't going to waste what little time he had with his dad on a display of anger or unhappiness.
Dealing with that was my job, and I took it on gladly. For Sean, for Emily, for Nicky. But I couldn't help feeling that something was going to happen, that something awful was going to shatter the calm before the looming, dangerous, unpredictable storm.
Whenever people got on the subject of dogs and how smart they are, my brother Chris used to tell a story about visiting a friend in the Southwest and going on a hike in the desert with his dogs. The dogs were barking; the birds were making bird noises; the breeze was blowing, and all of a sudden the noise just stopped. The dogs and the birds fell silent. Even the wind quit blowing.
Chris looked on the ground, and not twenty feet away was a coiled rattlesnake, hissing. I remember him saying that silence could also be a warning, louder than a siren.
I found the story compelling and sexy. Chris told it when we were with Davis, and Davis looked at him with such hatred and scorn that for a heartbeat I was sure that Davis knew about Chris and me.
All this is by way of saying that I got used to Nicky's mini-aggressions and never lost my sympathy for him—or my patience. It was when he stopped acting out that I got scared.
One afternoon Nicky came home from school and seemed to have become the best little boy in the world. Most days he hardly spoke to me and refused to answer when I asked what he'd done in class. But that afternoon he asked me how my day had been and what I'd been doing.
A child asks an adult what she did that day? Really? I didn't tell him I'd wasted hours trawling the internet for advice on how to deal with him. I said I'd spent part of the day straightening up the house, which was true.
At dinnertime, Nicky said he would eat whatever I cooked—even if it was vegetarian. He was totally unlike the angry kid he'd been just the day before. It made me happy. Time was working its healing magic. We were taking small steps forward, tiptoeing out of the darkness into the light.
And yet . . . and yet . . . I had an uncomfortable feeling. Something was wrong. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did. A mom's intuition.
It was as if the world had gone silent, and I'd heard the rattlesnake hiss.
The boys were hiding something. I knew it. I was always catching them whispering, like evil conspiratorial children in a horror film.
What weren't they telling me? Why was Nicky suddenly acting so thoughtful? When they were playing and I walked into the room, the boys looked up as if I'd interrupted a secret conversation.
One night, when both boys were staying at my house—Sean was working late in the city—Nicky padded into the living room and said he couldn't sleep. Would I read him a story? I took him back to the guest room that I'd turned into his room. I read him one book after another, as many as he wanted. I waited till he said he was tired, which kids hardly ever do. I turned off the light and tucked him in. I stroked his smooth, slightly damp forehead.
