Christy English

Tiger’s Eye

Monday, July 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Once more, I disappeared from my own website for the better part of a year. I am a terrible blogger, but when I am not  online, which is most of the time, I am working to become a better writer. While most of my fiction is historical in nature, concerning the Plantagenets of England and France in the late part of the twelfth century, I also write some modern fiction. The following story is one that has never been published, but that I am fond of, in spite of its many faults. It is called Tiger’s Eye. It’s a story I wrote years ago, before moving away from Wilmington and finding greater joy in New York.

                                           Tiger’s Eye
        I drank my coffee and watched my son hang by his knees from the monkey bars. He waved. I waved back, and he smiled at me with his father’s smile.
       He swung down and landed with his tennis shoes unlaced in the dirt. We had not had rain in over a week, and the dust of the playground rose under his feet in a cloud of sand. I gave him a thumbs’ up. He laughed, his eyes triumphant, and ran away from me.
       My son climbed to the top of the highest slide. He waved to me again. When I waved back once more, he slid down in a flurry of limbs, screaming, ending on his feet at the bottom. He did not look toward me then, but raced away, heading back to the ladder. Before long, he would stop looking for me altogether. He would ascend ladders without my vigilance, and would no longer listen for my applause.
       I sat with my coffee in my hands, the newspaper I had bought lying on the bench beside me. I felt the weight of that paper press against my thigh. The wind blew its pages, and I set a rock on top to anchor it.
       I bought that paper every Sunday, and every Sunday it went unread. I bought it as penance, to remind myself of all I was missing in the world outside. Of all I had left behind when I exiled myself for the sake of the man I loved, and for the sake of our child.
       The man was gone, and I was left in the shadow of his passing. The price I paid for betraying myself was the burden of living in exile, in a town where the people were polite, but only on the surface. I could always see in their eyes the question, “And when are you going home?”
       Ryan ran up to me. I wiped the sorrow from my face, but this child knew me. I pulled Ryan close and listened as he caught his breath. He had had a bath that morning, but already he was dirty, with sand on his jeans and the sharp sweet smell of little boy sweat in his hair.
       I kissed him, and he let me. This was one of the many ways he offered comfort, by allowing me to touch him even in front of his friends, even when he would rather stand alone. I smoothed his sweaty hair back from his forehead.
       “Mom,” he said. “Can I play at Bobby’s this afternoon?”
       He pointed at the boy he had been running with, who was now hanging upside down from the monkey bars. I pressed my face into my little boy’s neck. I felt him tense, the same way his father always had, and I loosened my grip. I ran my hand down his arm, and let him go.
       “I don’t know, sweetheart. You’ll have to ask Daddy when he comes.”
       His face clouded then, before he shielded the look from me. I felt his pain as if it were my own. I would cut out my own heart rather than see that pain on my child’s face.
       “Okay, Mom.”
       I squeezed his hand. “Daddy will be here soon,” I said. “We’ll ask him then.”
       Ryan ran away before I could comfort him with another touch. I watched as he shook his sorrow off, and buried it, the way his father always buried pain, to be locked away and never looked at again.
       Ryan’s eyes were a tawny brown, like the tiger’s eye stone I wore around my neck, a gift from my early courtship with his father. When Robert gave me that stone on a gold chain, I thought that I would love him forever. I thought that I had found a love like those in fairy stories. Where the world falls under an enchantment and is never the same again.
       I fingered the stone where it lay hidden under my sweater. I had not known that the enchantment would bind only one way. I had thought that true love lasted forever. It did, but only for me.
       I saw my husband across the park, the tilt of his head, the certainty of his stride that I would know anywhere. I smiled at him, and waved. I saw the shutters close over his eyes. His gaze stayed cool until he saw our son, and then the shutters flew open as they once had opened for me. He picked our little boy up, and held him.
       I stood, crumpling my empty coffee cup in one hand. My husband crossed the park to me with Ryan on his arm.
       “Hello, Deborah.”
       “Robert.”
       He smiled in gratitude to find my voice even, devoid of accusation or appeal. As my husband set him down, Ryan looked at me cautiously, for he knew me better. I smiled for him, and he turned to his father, assured that I was well.  
       “Daddy, can I play at Bobby’s this afternoon?”
       Ryan pointed the child out, and I stood listening to their talk. This was not a decision I was involved in. I picked up my paper, and tucked it under my arm.
       “Well, I’m headed home.”
       I held out my arms to my son. He ran into them, heedless of the other children on the playground, heedless of the pain on his father’s face. This was the worst moment of the week, the moment when I left him.
       I made myself think of Thursday, when I would have him back again. I pretended that he would be back to stay, that a miracle would happen. His father would suddenly love me, and we would all go home.
       “I love you, Mom.”
       His voice was muffled in my sweater.  I knew that if I stayed a moment longer, he would cry.
       I met my husband’s eyes over our son’s head, and I saw enough pain there to make me feel stronger. I was not alone in this.
       I pulled away from our son. Robert stepped forward to take his hand. Ryan allowed himself be transferred from one parent to the other.
       “I love you, Ryan. I’ll call you tonight and read you the next chapter in our book.”
       Ryan nodded, trying valiantly not to cry. “Okay.”
       I cursed myself that I had not been clever enough to make his father love me, or desperate enough to find a way to make him stay, so that now my son looked at me with a pain for which I had no cure.
       I lifted my hand in a wave. I waited until Ryan lifted his hand to me, and then I walked away.
       “Let’s go meet Bobby,” I heard my husband say.
       “Okay.”
       I walked faster. Tears burned my eyes, and I was sick of tears. I blinked them away, and drew the city paper close against my chest.
       Today, for the first time, I would read it, every line. There was a world outside the town I was living in, places untouched by the pain I lived with. People with different pain, with worse pain, lived in the pages of that paper. I would embrace them all. I would separate myself from the silence of my house. It was always as silent as death when my son was away.