Monday, November 30, 2015

Continuation of Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Continuation and revision based on an idea of where it should actually go!
 
When my beautiful baby boy turned three, I stopped going to play group, swim at the Y, and "Mommy-n-Me" yoga.  Cutting off his grandmother was harder, but not impossible.  I packed away most of the toys in our apartment and all of the diapers as well as the training toilet.  If anybody who cared to know me cared at all, they would have been seriously concerned.  It was far worse than they could have imagined.

 Raising Calvin alone was not easy, and I abused myself every day with thoughts of how stupid I was when I had slept with his father.  I barely even remembered the man, and he was a man.  He wore a suit and everything.  I was old enough to know better, and this guy was so professional, so pulled-together, I thought he was okay.  He wasn't.  Luckily, he never tried to contact us.  He had to have found out I had a baby, but not so much as a peep.  I say I was lucky, though I really could have used the money from child support.  Calvin and I lived in an attic apartment in the city, and even though we didn't have a lot it was cramped.  I couldn't imagine how women and girls who weren't educated managed when I could barely make it through social services application processes.  I was persistent, though, which is why Calvin was enrolled in so many great programs.  Not anymore, though.

 It was the morning of Calvin's third birthday, and spring finally seemed to be around for good.  I was up extra early to decorate and set out his presents (a real vintage Speak & Spell I found at a thrift store and fixed up, a stuffed dog that had to have been donated new, and some clothes--sorry, kid.)  In the morning, Calvin usually woke himself and called me from his bedroom, "Mommy!" he'd call in a sing-song voice.  "I'm a-way-ake!"  Bustling about, taping up streamers, I didn't notice he hadn't called yet, and it was after eight.  I wasn't a nervous mother, but of course I worried.  I pictured him, smothered in his pillow.  I pictured having a doctor explaining "sudden infant death" could happen to toddlers, too.  I pictured him kidnapped by his absent father, whom I might not even recognize if I saw him on the street.

 Calvin, however, was awake.  I found him sitting up in his bed, staring at his hands.  He turned them over and looked at the backs, then again to the palms.  The look on his face frightened me because it was so intense.  "Calvin?" I asked from the door.  "You okay, buddy?"  My voice startled him, and my toddler looked up at me, stared for what seemed like a very long time, put his hands to his mouth and burst into tears.

 I ran to his bed and held his shaking body.  What in the world had scared my baby so badly?  "It's okay, it's okay," I crooned over and over, rocking him.  Finally, Calvin was down to sniffles, and he said something he had never said before, "Mom?"

 "Mom?" I repeated, sitting back to look at him.  I smiled, thinking that suddenly my baby at age three now thought himself old enough to graduate from "Mommy".  My smile faded when I saw his glistening blue eyes searching my face so intently.  "What is it, Calvin?  What's the matter, buddy?"

 "Mom... I can't believe it's you.  I'm really here."
 

I am ashamed by how long it took me to believe my little boy, but you must understand shock makes rational thought very difficult, and rational thought was difficult enough in this situation.  I ran through every weird possibility, including the idea that a grown man had undergone plastic surgery and replaced my little boy overnight, that he was a hologram, and, the one I kept returning to, that I was dreaming.

Calvin, my little three-year-old boy, sat in his toddler bed and explained to me that he was a research scientist at a university so prestigious I giggled, thinking he was joking.  When he excused himself to go change out of his diaper--by himself!--I started to come around.  I heard the bathroom cabinet open and close when he threw out his diaper, and I heard him laugh as he pulled out the little step stool I had gotten him in anticipation of his completion of toilet training.  I heard him pee, flush the toilet, move the stool, and wash his hands before he returned to explain to his stunned mother why her toddler suddenly become so worldly.

"Calvin," I stopped him.  "It's your birthday today.  You're three."

 "Mom," he smiled.  "I'm thirty-five."

 "Kiddo, let's have breakfast.  I decorated."

A little frown I'd never seen appeared between his faint eyebrows and he opened his mouth, but the crease disappeared when he smiled and held out his hand.  "I'd love breakfast, Mom."

Bemused, I led Calvin out to the table where he laughed at the "rockets and robots" theme for the day.  He always loved space and robots, and it made me feel self-conscious that he was laughing at my efforts instead of the awestruck wonder I had expected.  He must have noticed because he pulled on my hand.  "Mom, it's just what I would have loved."

"It is what you love."  I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

Calvin led me to my kitchen table chair, and tried to soothe me, which made me cry harder.  I didn't know what had gotten into me, except, of course, my baby was gone!

"Mom.  Mom, please.  It's okay!  I'm still Calvin!  It's still me!  Please, Mom, don't cry.  I'm okay because I'm here, aren't I?  I came out fine, and you have no need to worry.  You raised me well.  It all works out for me, and I'm here to be sure it works out for you, too."  He walked off in a straighter, more purposeful way than I'd ever seen, and came back with the box of tissues from the bathroom.  After that brought a new burst of tears, I finally pulled myself together.  "You okay, Mom?"  I nodded.  "What were we going to have for breakfast?  I'm starving!"

I laughed and managed to stop before it became hysterical, and said, "Silver dollar pancakes."

His excitement was genuine, "My favorite!  I haven't had those since...  For a long time."  I noticed the pause, but ignored it to make my little boy's favorite breakfast.  I realized Calvin, at thirty-five, was older than me.

After breakfast, I had planned on having Calvin tear into his presents.  I had planned on taking a million pictures, as I usually did, but it wasn't right anymore.  Calvin sat back in his booster seat and sighed in satisfaction.  "I always loved your pancakes, Mom."  I cleared the table in silence.  I didn't know what to say.  I realized I was starting to feel angry, and it felt irrational.  When I returned, Calvin looked more focused and serious than I had even seen him, and I thought I could see the man he would become.  I fought the urge to cry again.

"Mom," he spoke without a trace of the sweet, little boy impediment he had, "I need to talk to you."

I was avoiding his gaze.  I wiped the cleared table.  "Your presents don't seem appropriate for you anymore."

He smiled sadly, "That's okay, Mom.  I need to talk to you about why I'm here."

I couldn't help the anger, "Why are you here?  Why did you take away my little boy?  Why did you invade his little body and take away all the years he has with me?  Why?"

"Mom," he said, surprised by my sudden vehemence, "it's important, and, besides, it is me.  I'm still your little boy."  He smiled crookedly, in a way that flashed me back to a deep-voiced man in a suit with a good job and a lack of empathy.  Calvin leaned forward onto the table, "Mother, it's very important.  I wouldn't have tried this...this insane experiment if it wasn't.  Mom," his fat little hand gestured passionately, "I came back to save you."
If I already hadn't experienced an incredible shock, my toddler telling me I died from breast cancer would have hit me harder.  I thought I took it in stride, but Calvin kept patting my hands and staring away from me to pull himself together.  I guess my death was terrible for him.  He didn't say so, exactly, but I think he felt responsible.  From what he told me, I was so busy working my jobs (I would, apparently, add a third) to take care of him, that I neglected the warning signs too long and my cancer had spread throughout my body.  Inoperable.  Untreatable.  Calvin came back to this particular year because he thought the cancer wouldn't have taken hold, and yet he'd still have the ability to speak.

The next days were a whirlwind.  I stopped taking Calvin anywhere.  I stopped calling in favors to get a babysitter; after all, I could leave my baby at home alone.  I made an emergency appointment for a mammogram, and when it came back negative, I insisted on the sonogram follow-up.  The sonogram found a lump.

The doctors and nurses kept saying how lucky I was and how small it was and how contained it was and how relatively simple treatment would be, and they were surprised at my insistence to have the most radical surgery they could do, to both breasts.  It really packed a wallop, not only for me, but for Calvin.  Although this treatment was to make me better, the symptoms and pain were like reliving my death for him.  I felt like death, but I knew why I was doing it: my little boy, even at thirty-five, needed me.  So I was brave.

Calvin was mightily brave, too, having to behave like the toddler he appeared to be when my mother came to watch him as I went through my treatment.  He was alternately amused and frustrated, and his Nonna was alternately befuddled and a little scared.  I understood.  The look in Calvin's eyes these days was not the look of a toddler, and he would say the most outrageous things, like, "I wish I had my computer," and "Can we have sushi for dinner?"  Nonna's coffee mug would often mysteriously drain itself of liquid.

It took me weeks and weeks to feel like I could actually recover.  I had my doubts along the way, but Calvin was so strong, and his little, warm body sleeping next to me kept me going through dark nights.  When he slept, I had my little boy.  When he was awake, while I still had Calvin, he was not the same, and he was becoming increasingly irritable.

 One morning, it was nearly afternoon.  I had finally slept in, and I found I was also famished.  I had become a shadow of myself, and I hoped this was my turning point.  Calvin was already up, and I found him at the kitchen table pouring over his papers.  Early in my treatment, before I wondered if death would be preferable, he had asked for some very specific notebooks, pens, pencils, and a book that hadn't been written yet.  That had angered him.  I had seen Calvin throw a tantrum--after all, he was only just three to me--but this was tremendous.  He was mad at himself for a miscalculation.  When he was calmer, he tried to explain it to me, but my brain was focused on my scraped-out body and I couldn't follow.  Here he was now, one chubby little hand pushing up his fine hair, the other holding one of the mechanical pencils I had bought him, hovering over the paper.

"Calvin, sweetie?"  His shoulders slumped and he sighed, gaze locked on his papers.  "Is there anything I can do to help?"

He laughed, "No, Mom.  I don't think you'd understand."  I felt a twinge of shame that made me recall my baby's father.  If Calvin had looked up, he would have seen color in my cheeks which had been pallid for more than a month.  He nodded at his papers, "This is all physics.  My calculations for returning to my own body."  Calvin didn't hear my quiet objection that he was in his own body.  He slapped the table.  "I wish I could have brought my notes with me!  How stupid of me not to realize Bernmann wouldn't have written his papers yet.  Why was I so dumb?"  He looked up with the eyes of a nearly middle-aged man.  "I know you always told me that my father was brilliant, but there's got to be a run of stupid in my genes, too."  Calvin couldn't miss my look this time, and he tried to backpedal.  "No, Mom, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it the way it sounded."

I breathed slowly, the way they taught me at the hospital to conquer the pain.  He did mean it.  "Beginning to regret coming back?  You didn't have to.  I know my biggest achievement was having you, and that was done, so why?  Why save me?"

"Because they said I couldn't."

I folded my arms across my missing chest, "A personal challenge?"

Calvin was ignoring every physical and emotional cue I gave.  "Yes," he said.  "My trip here proves that I was right!  I told them that Bernmann's theories could be supported by my additional calculations and an individual could travel along his time stream."  He took my silence as additional proof I couldn't follow and waved one chubby toddler hand.  "It's not important, Mom.  What's important is that I get back to being me, and you will have your Calvin back.  I'll be able to see what happened in the future because of my changes here."

"You'll write your own papers, I imagine."

"Of course!  This is the discovery of the century; the millennium!"  He patted a pile of his notes, "I'm glad you mentioned it.  I need you to open a safety deposit box for me.  These papers will be some of the proof I will need when I get back."  Calvin's gaze faded from my shabby apartment and looked at his glory, "Can you see the reporters accompanying me to the vault and the bank trustees assuring them that it hadn't been opened in more than thirty years?  Seeing the looks on their faces when I produce this work, written impossibly when I was only three, and tucked away for removal at my journey's end?"

Calvin's dream had sailed past my financial reality.  "How am I going to pay for thirty years of safety deposit box rental?  I can keep your papers safe here."

He laughed, "You mean here?  In the box with my birth certificate and the rental agreement for this crappy apartment?  No, thanks, Mom.  This is important."

"I know it's important."  I made myself unclench my teeth.  "I can keep it safe, and I can't afford a safety deposit box."  I went to make toast, just so I didn't have to watch Calvin seethe in his booster seat.

"No, Mother.  You don't understand.  You don't have to worry, anyway.  You get a job cleaning house when I'm four.  It's for the Gallisano family, and they keep you on and pay you very well, until you... well, you won't be leaving them the same way this time!"

"Calvin," my hands shook when I tried to unwind the twist-tie on our discount store bread, and not just from the weakness of my treatment, "I'm not doing any work the way I am now, much less a cleaning lady's job."  Tears welled up unwanted in my eyes, "How can I work when I am tired just from trying to make toast?"

"Mother..." he began, trying to be patient.

"And don't call me 'Mother'!  You never called me 'Mother' and it makes it sound like you think I'm an idiot!"

Calvin sighed, "I don't think you're an idiot."

I couldn't help it, he sounded more and more of what I remembered of his father who had used and abandoned us.  "There!  That sigh.  It tells me all I need to know."

Calvin's temper rose to match and exceed, "I do not think you're an idiot; I think you're smart enough, Mom.  Smart enough for who you are.  You don't need to be more.  I'm the one who needs to be brilliant for the two of us."

"Yes?" I barreled on, angry at my little boy for pointing out the futility of my life, "Then why didn't you brilliantly memorize Lottery numbers or something, to make us rich?"  I was so angry with being talked down to, poisoned by doctors, and used by men, I added, "Why didn't you research and find the cure for cancer so I didn't have to go through all this!" 
My baby slid out of his booster seat, never taking his eerily old eyes off of me, his sobbing shadow of a mother.  I thought he was going to give me the hug he always did when I was feeling blue, but this was not my little Calvin.  My Calvin sensed when I was sad and tired and threw his arms around my neck to cry with me.  This Calvin's eyes were cold, and they saw me start to bend when he came near.  He stopped, his mouth tight.  "Mother," he began, "pull yourself together."
"I can't, remember?"  I indicated my wasted chest, "I don't have all of me anymore."
His eyes narrowed, "This is what you're mad about?  That I saved your life?  You'd be dead by the time I'm ten if it weren't for me."
"At least I would have my Calvin."
He grabbed his hair and growled, "I am your Calvin!"
"No, you're not!  My Calvin wouldn't yell at his mother.  My Calvin would have hugged me when I'm sad.  My Calvin wouldn't call his mother 'smart enough'!"
"And my mother was an angel!" he screamed.
I shook my head, "Because she's dead, Calvin.  She's dead and you made her into an angel, but you disdain the real, live woman before you who is your mother."
"My mother would have given her life for me!"
My voice was quiet, but steady, "I did."  I knew he wouldn't understand the future I had before my unplanned pregnancy.  I knew he couldn't fathom that I had a life for myself that ended once he came along.  He thought I was stupid because I let his father get away.  He thought I was stupid because I didn't get my degree or have a prestigious job or a nice house.  He probably thought I had been stupid to ignore my own body and get cancer.  I realized now that Calvin, the thirty-five year old Calvin of the future, was using me just as much as his father had; he wanted to prove his theory, and saving my life was secondary.  He thought of me as much as his father had.
Calvin looked up at me, his small chest heaving, his little fists clenched.  I could practically read his mind: How dare you get in the way of my discovery?  I wondered if he could read mine: Where did I go wrong in raising you?
"I'm done."  Calvin's sudden dismissal of our argument was stunning.  He started gathering up his papers.  "I need a backpack."  I couldn't imagine at that moment why, but just then he was straining to reach the middle of the table, so, of course, I helped him stack the papers he couldn't get to.  He wouldn't look at me.  "A backpack.  Please.  Now."
I moved to get my old pack from the closet, even while wondering why.  My deluded mind forced his actions to fit what I thought was best; he was gathering his papers into the backpack for my safekeeping here, like I said.  But it wasn't true.  Calvin had gone into his room and was already zipping up his baseball-themed windbreaker.  I had always had to help him with zippers, but, of course, his fingers were as clever as his mind these days.
"What are you doing, Calvin?"  I shivered.
"Leaving."
I laughed, which made him turn his narrowed eyes in my direction.  I explained, "But, you can't leave.  You're only three!  Where can you go?"

"I'm going to the university and I will find Dr. Bernmann and I will explain what happened.  I don't think it matters now that it would be a paradox..." he froze in the act of zipping the backpack closed and a slow smile illuminated his face.  Calvin turned to me, "My, God!  It was me!  It was me the whole time!"

I didn't understand, but my baby was looking at me and smiling, so I knelt and smiled, too, "What was you, Calvin?"

"I'm the one who inspires Bernmann to write his paper.  I invented the entirety of time travel myself!  It was me!  Me!"  As Calvin laughed, I realized he wasn't looking at me at all, but rather at his genius.  He hefted the pack to his small shoulder; it was nearly as big as he was and I imagined seeing him as he would be on his first day of school in two years.  He turned to me, smiling with his angel's face at his own glory, "Goodbye, Mother.  I'll have Dr. Bernmann return my three-year-old self when I'm gone, and, I guess, I'll see you now and later."  Calvin went to the door put his hand on the knob above his head and said over his shoulder, "By the way, Mother, why don't you buy me some more advanced books?  If you work a little harder raising me, maybe I can reach my full potential despite your...circumstances."

I couldn't move.  It was like I was kicked in my ruined chest, and I could only watch my baby leave, walking down the stairs to our apartment one at a time.  I heard his little feet in their second-hand sneakers take each step, one foot then the other, one foot then the other, because his legs were so short.  I faintly heard the door to the outside open and slam shut, and I pictured Calvin shoving it with both hands, the triumphant smile still on his face as he planned out how to convince this Dr. Bernmann to listen to a toddler.

Despite his words, Calvin was my baby, and I ran to the window the overlooked the front sidewalk and threw it open to call to him, ask him to wait for me and I would do whatever he wanted.  Simultaneously, traitorously, I felt like as big a sucker as I did when I cried to his father's back when he walked away.

I saw Calvin on the sidewalk.  I saw a group of local college students breeze past him, ignoring the toddler on his own because what did they care?  They had tests to take.  Calvin walked to the curb between the parked cars.  I opened my mouth to shout before he got too far to hear me, but he had already stepped out into the street.  It was another college student, hurrying on his way to class, worried about finding a parking space, not thinking that a toddler would walk out into traffic in the middle of the block.

My baby is gone.  He came back to save me, and I lost him.  I'm in classes now, fulfilling one of the dreams I had before I made the foolish mistake of sleeping with a man I thought cared.  I'm majoring in physics, and I'm a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Bernmann.  He likes me a lot, and I've inspired him to so many breakthrough ideas.  What keeps me up at night now is wondering: how far back do I go?
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