The Marks Upon Him
He and the boy were on their way home now. Getting him in the car had been an ordeal, what with the truncated school day and the unexpected pickup. Steven Timothy counted on routines the way Jeremiah and Maddie counted on paychecks. It had taken two teachers to coax him out to the car and one to hold him in the seat while Jeremiah strapped him in. He’d taken a hit or two in the process, one knocking his glasses off into the accumulating snow; when Jeremiah picked them up again, one of the arms was splayed out.
Now the boy was pacified, chatting with himself in the back seat while his tablet chirped. It was the game Jeremiah had downloaded for him last week, the one where frogs wearing numbers, like marathoners, hopped around eating each other while their number value grew by addition. He liked that it taught the boy math. Maddie said it was just another thing to rot his brain.
Traffic had come to a standstill. The snow had started falling a few hours earlier, closing down his son’s preschool at lunchtime. Maddie, who usually dropped Steven Timothy off and picked him up around her shift at the hospital, had called Jeremiah and told him he needed to step up, even though the preschool was right around the corner from the hospital, while the office where Jeremiah worked as an actuary was forty-five minutes away. He wasn’t saving lives, she reminded him, just insuring them. She made it sound like he was propping up human traffickers, compensating them whenever one of their investments didn’t make it to market.
She wasn’t saving lives either, but Jeremiah didn’t say that. Didn’t say that her phone calls scheduling appointments in the hospital’s urology office were almost entirely matters of pride and priapism rather than life and death. Didn’t say that his work consulting matrices and calculating the cost of any given lifestyle was what kept Steven Timothy in the private preschool that Maddie liked instead of the public program in the trailers attached to Marksburg Elementary.
Their marriage had acquired this dynamic—her telling him what she thought about most things, him not—soon after they’d become parents. He’d assumed it was a phase. But the typical stresses and sleeplessness of a newborn grew into a gnawing suspicion that something was off—the tantrums louder, the road to potty training longer, the milestones slower than what other families at the daycare and the playground and the pediatrician’s office seemed to face.
He’d tried to talk to Maddie about it, back when it seemed like they should be emerging from the terrible twos and headed towards something like normal relations again. One night, as they lay in their bedroom, he’d sounded off about the day’s struggles, giving vent to a rage that had been building inside him for who knows how long. He hadn’t intended to go off, and to this day he couldn’t remember anything he said except the word that crossed his lips and sucked the air out of the room.
For a moment she let him hang in the abyss, cold and heavy and breathless as a deep-sea diver.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she hissed, as if Steven Timothy might have heard him from where he slept down the hall.
He didn’t know. He hadn’t used the word in years, didn’t regularly hang out with people who did. But somewhere in his tantrum another version of him surfaced, one he thought he’d put away soon after middle school.
“Don’t be so fucking ignorant,” she said, her voice like a corkscrew. He didn’t know what he was talking about, she said. Every child was different. Everybody matured in his own time. Averages and bell curves were all well and good in his office, she said, but he shouldn’t expect to raise a child according to a formula.
Parenting wasn’t a job for the weak, she said. And then she turned out the light.
She began to schedule well-child appointments during Jeremiah’s monthly staff meeting. She told him not to bother coming across town for parent-teacher conferences when she could simply run over on her lunch break. He resented the implication that he had nothing to offer, but by the time he realized he’d been sidelined, it seemed too late to protest. Besides, Maddie was probably right: He didn’t know what he was talking about, and he’d likely fuck up whatever she asked him to do.
Emergency vehicles blared their sirens behind him. The other drivers moved to the shoulder, bunching up and leaving no room for him to maneuver likewise. The ambulance sounded its horn in his back window and Steven Timothy began to cry.
“Shit.”
The only option was through the gap between the other cars and into the snow-covered lot of an old auto body shop that now held a tattoo parlor. His tires spun and the boy wailed, but he managed to avoid scraping the cars on either side.
He pulled into a spot in front of the parlor window. An LED sign flashed TATTOO so bright that it took Jeremiah a moment to make out a weathered logo underneath it: “Dark Horse.” A woman behind the counter was looking out at him looking in. He tried not to make eye contact.
“What are we doing?” Steven Timothy asked.
“Waiting until the accident clears. It shouldn’t be too much longer.” He pushed the bent arm of his glasses back over his ear and prayed the tablet battery would last until they got home.
Several cars were attempting a U-turn, having given up on getting through any time soon. But this road was the only one that would take Jeremiah across the river towards home, unless he wanted to add a fifteen-mile detour, which might be equally blocked or treacherous in the snow.
“I have to go pee,” Steven Timothy said.
“Shit.”
He was swearing more often in front of the boy. He’d been better about it at the beginning, back when every day wasn’t a battle and every evening wasn’t spent cleaning up its casualties. When he didn’t routinely question who he was and how he’d gotten himself into this unrecognizable life.
These days, he felt glad for the respite of Monday morning, where the demands of the office were at least predictable. Three times a week, he took a nap in his car at lunch time. His anticipation of that thirty minutes of peace felt as licentious as an affair.
There was nothing else for it. They would have to go inside, or Steven Timothy would have to pee where the entire line of traffic could watch him. Jeremiah got out and unstrapped the boy, who began bouncing and turning around to see his footprints.
“Stop jumping, you’ll make us both fall,” Jeremiah said, holding his hand and trying to keep his balance. His office shoes were shit for snow.
“I have to go bad!” Steven Timothy cried.
The door opened into the small, dark waiting room that smelled of pachouli. A lamp behind the counter gave off an amber glow that mixed with the sickly light coming in through the windows, like fire and smoke. The woman behind the counter looked first at Steven Timothy and then at Jeremiah.
“He needs a bathroom,” Jeremiah said apologetically. “We got stuck in that mess out there, and now it’s an emergency.”
She considered a minute. Then she said, “It’s in the back.”
She led them through a door into the old auto service bay. It had been converted into a studio of sorts, with all the old equipment stripped out. The concrete floor had been polished, and against the far wall was a pony-walled cove with two chairs that reminded Jeremiah of the ones at his dentist’s office. It was cold.
She pointed at the back corner of the room. Jeremiah strained his eyes and finally made out the thin outline of a door, painted black, set into a black wall that was built out from the rest of the building. Barely noticeable. Clearly an afterthought.
The smells of petroleum and chemical cleaners hung in the bathroom like chronic illness. Jeremiah tried not to touch the walls, which were also painted black and lined with hundreds of photographs of tattoos.
Steven Timothy handed him the tablet and put up the toilet seat as Maddie had trained. He pulled his pants and dinosaur underwear around his ankles and let out a torrent immediately. Jeremiah looked away. At what age would the boy learn to pee without exposing his ass to the whole world? It felt like one more way he was falling behind. Most nights Steven Timothy still slept with his butt in the air like an overgrown frog. It was cute, but he wasn’t a baby anymore.
“Daddy, what’s up there?” The boy was staring at the ceiling, his stream of urine drifting over the rim.
“Jesus, Steven Timothy, pay attention! How many times have I told you?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
He’d been asking questions like this since Maddie’s grandfather had died last summer. He’d never met the man who lived halfway across the country, but Maddie felt it was a useful way to introduce the boy to the concept of death. She bought books that explained it in bizarre metaphors, and she tried to explain to him about heaven, but succeeded only in convincing Steven Timothy that his great grandfather was now inhabiting their attic. They tried to clarify that up there didn’t mean specifically on the other side of the ceiling, but Steven Timothy took to asking his teachers and strangers at the mall and anyone else captured by his precociousness if they knew what was up there. As it turned out, most didn’t.
“Just wash your hands,” Jeremiah said, “like we practiced at home.”
He stepped out into the studio space while the boy did as he was told. The area with the dentist chairs had the feel of an island of color in a sea of concrete. The walls within the enclosure were hung with prints and designs. Jeremiah stepped into the area, feeling as he did when his high school class had visited Notre Dame in Paris.
Pictures of animals, crucifixes, shrines to mothers or girlfriends intermixed with bawdier images of cartoon characters fucking and reclining women. He tried to imagine what kinds of people chose these images as permanent features. It seemed like something one did at nineteen and regretted by thirty.
“You shall not make any gashes in your flesh or tattoo any marks upon you, for I am the Lord,” Jeremiah remembered his mother proclaiming at the TV when a gameshow contestant revealed her “sleeve,” as he would later learn they were called. It was the same scripture she quoted when explaining why it was wrong for men to wear earrings. “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you. You are not your own; you were bought with a price,” she concluded, having proven her point from both testaments. Jeremiah nodded. She waved her empty sherry glass at him for a refill and dismissed the image with a change of the channel, but it came back to him that night in bed. He still saw it sometimes as he lay awake long after Maddie had drifted off.
He studied one of the girlfriend designs. Whose name might he have inscribed there: Evie from his junior year at Penn State, or Jenny from his senior? By the time he met Maddie, he’d earned his actuarial certificate and felt he was past the age of wearing his heart on his sleeve. A flower design caught his eye, magenta layered against twisting rings of cyan and royal blue. He tried to imagine it on Maddie. On the back of her shoulder. The inside of her thigh. The space between her pubic hair and her navel.
“Daddy?”
Steven Timothy was behind him.
“Pull your shirt out of your underwear.”
The boy looked down and pulled at the fabric of his shirt, worn thin by frequent use; the puppies on the front were currently his favorite show. They walked back into the lobby.
The snow was falling hard now. The idea of trying to wedge their way into the line of traffic and spend the next hour or two crawling home felt like a special kind of hell.
Steven Timothy ran to a corner where magazines were stacked by a chair. The employee (perhaps artist was what she preferred to be called) looked at Jeremiah expectantly.
“Whoa, Daddy, look at this!” Steven Timothy held up a magazine with a motorcycle flying across the cover.
“Doesn’t look like it’s gonna let up,” Jeremiah said to the woman.
“Nope.” She was on her phone; the glow underlit her face and made her look younger.
“Is it usually this quiet in here?”
“Depends. Sometimes you’re with one person all day — if they want something big or complicated.” Her voice was warm and rough, like one of his favorite country singers. “Sometimes it’s a few people who want small things. Size matters.”
He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh.
“You got any?” she said.
“Uh … no.”
“Ever thought about it?” An unexpected musicality ran through the question, making him flush.
“Not really.” The lobby was hot, and he unbuttoned his sleeves and pushed them up to his elbows, realizing as he did so that it looked like he was showing off his uninked flesh. “Maybe when I was young.”
“You’re never too old for a tattoo,” she said. “My mom got her fifth last weekend. She’s forty-five.”
Just two years ahead of him. That put this woman in her early twenties. Her mother had raised a whole child and was probably now sunning herself on a beach somewhere, showing off her daughter’s latest work to anyone she could find.
“Did you do it?” Jeremiah asked.
“Obviously.”
“How many do you have?”
“Depends on how you count. Some of them I’ve added onto over the years.”
“Any you regret?”
She glanced at her arm where the tail of some creature curled out from under her cuff. “I got ones I changed. Ones I wouldn’t do again. But I had a reason when I did them. You do it right, and you’ll never truly regret it.”
“What’s that mean, do it right?”
“Right design. Right size. Right place. Right artist. The right artist can get a sense of the customer. Knows what’ll look good, what’ll fit with the overall aesthetic.” She said the word like it was a certificate. “Take you, for example.”
A tingle traveled through his extremities without stopping long enough to be located in any of them.
“Nice clothes, clearly an office job. Good car, not fancy. Sensible. A family man, responsible.” She looked at him sideways and a hint of a smile crept up her cheek. “Maybe too responsible sometimes, for someone who’s still young,” she said quietly.
It had been so long since anyone had flirted with him that he briefly forgot the word for it. His mouth went dry. Steven Timothy was suddenly beside him trying to free the tablet from his grasp. He told his fingers to release, and the child retreated to the corner of the room.
“For a guy like you,” she said, “it’s gotta be something discreet.” She pulled a three-ring binder from the shelf behind her and opened it without taking her eyes off him. “Something tasteful.” She slid the binder towards him and pointed at the open page of quarter-sized designs: Celtic knots, anchors, compasses, a snake eating its tail, a bird taking flight, a scorpion ready to strike, crosses and crowns, skulls and stars, angels and aliens. On the next page were words and phrases—bits of Shakespeare and scripture, a few romantic gestures, tributes to mothers. At the bottom of the page were letters he recognized from college.
“What’re these? Frat mottos?”
She leaned over the binder to look at the fine print below the designs. He could smell incense and spice in her hair. She had a small star tattooed behind her left earlobe.
“Eighty-six A, B, and C,” she said as she flipped to the end of the binder and scanned an index.
“‘Know thyself,’” she said, pointing at the first bit. “‘Nothing to excess,’” was the second. “‘Certainty brings ruin.’ From the … Oracle at Delphi,” she read. She shut the index and stared at the maxims with him.
“Ah. Odysseus,” he said, doubting himself as soon as he said it.
“Size, design, placement,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “For you, somewhere private, somewhere you don’t have to show it unless you want to. To the right person.”
He could feel the heat in his face, and knew she saw it when she said, “It doesn’t have to be anywhere risqué. Some people do the wrist, right under your sleeve. Some do the back of the shoulder. Maybe the rib, under your arm. There’s always the lower back or the back or your hip, but then you can’t see it without a mirror.”
“Kind of ironic to get ‘Know thyself’ tattooed where you can’t see it.”
“Is that the one you’re thinking of?”
It was an absurd idea. There were things to do, routines to follow—or there would have been, on a normal day. He tried to imagine himself with a tattoo in any of the places she’d mentioned. It would be easy enough to hide from most people. His mother was dead, despite Jeremiah’s efforts to make her comfortable—physically, emotionally, spiritually—from his earliest days to her last. He rarely saw his father for more than a few hours a month. The man complained constantly that Jeremiah didn’t come over more often, then spent most of his visits dispensing unsolicited advice from underneath some new wreck he was rebuilding in the garage.
Maddie would disapprove. She had a low tolerance for nonsense, especially his. Then again, she might not even notice. She went to bed early and got up while it was still dark. She usually slept in an oversized night shirt, he in gym shorts and a tee. On the rare occasions when their bodies found each other, as if by accident, it was in the dark. Quick. Quiet. They never spoke afterward. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing left to say, aside from parenting updates. When was the last time they had talked about sex? Had he ever asked her what she liked? How often did she actually come?
Hiding in plain sight — that idea appealed to him. He wanted to plant something and see if she was curious enough to notice it. He wanted her to see it when he was toweling off, instead of avoiding the bathroom while he was in there. Perhaps he would turn the light on the next time their hands found each other in bed. She would see it and ask him what it meant and why he got it. Maybe she’d realize that there was more to him than what she’d picked up in the first three years of being together, before she began to see him as a fixture in the house, as predictable as a faucet.
“So, like, here?” he asked, pointing to where his elbow fell along his side. He felt, in the gesture, like he was stepping over a precipice. It was a rush. He liked it.
“A little higher.” She leaned toward him and placed her finger on the spot under his armpit, almost in line with his nipple. “You want it high enough avoid bone, but not in the tender part. Here ….” She pulled out a small sheet of plastic film, like the transparencies his teachers used to project in high school. With a black marker she traced the words γνῶθι σεαυτόν from the binder, then handed him the design. “The actual tattoo will look sharper,” she said. “It’ll be perfect. The needle is a lot more precise than a marker. Take it in the back and hold it up against yourself in the mirror.”
He looked at Steven Timothy. His legs were folded under him on the arm chair. He was narrating whatever was happening on his tablet.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” she said.
Outside, the snow was squalling. It would take a while for the plows to clear the streets that were already choked with cars.
“I’ll be right back, okay, buddy?”
“Okay.”
Jeremiah walked into the old service bay. His shoes echoed off the concrete and he tried to soften his step. In the studio area, he looked at himself in a full-length mirror leaned against one of the pony walls. His hair was mussed and the front of his shirt was coming untucked. He pulled in his belly, then let it out again. He looked like an actuary. A parent. Not someone about to get inked.
He undid the buttons of his shirt and untucked his undershirt. He just wanted to see how it looked. So he’d know. His belly flashed, its hair obscene, his navel a perfect little o of shock. He turned and placed the film on his ribs, sliding it up and down a bit until he settled about where she had touched him a moment earlier.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He whirled around and dropped the design on the floor, pulling his shirt down over his exposed skin. She was coming towards him. He glanced at the door to the lobby.
“He’s fine,” she said, jerking her head in the boy’s direction. “Whatever’s on that screen, he is in it. Didn’t even notice I was gone.” She bent and picked up the film. “How old is he?”
“Four.”
“He’s got your smile.”
He didn’t call out her lie. Didn’t say the boy was nothing like him or Maddie, in looks or any other way. Didn’t tell her that they’d tried to get pregnant for years, that treatments and testing had cost them thousands and given them nothing. That they had raided his retirement account to pay for the private adoption. That they hadn’t yet told the boy himself.
“Can I see?” she asked, handing the design back to him and looking at the mirror.
He obliged, conscious of the way his love handles jutted out from his khakis, the waistband of his Hanes folded over on itself in embarrassment. He tried to stand straighter as he placed the words again.
“Can I …? she said.
He nodded and swallowed.
She took off his glasses and placed them on top of his shirt.
“I’m Erin, by the way.”
“Jeremiah.”
She lifted his undershirt and held up the film.
He felt, like a draft from another room, the pressure of his dick pressing against his fly.
“I would do it a bit higher, otherwise it’s gonna catch this rib and make it more painful.” Her finger traced the bone and he got goosebumps. “Right under the arm here, you could do it straight across or slant it so that it paralleled the curve of the ribs and the line of your pec here. What do you think?”
He couldn’t think. He could only feel the heat of her fingers coming through the film.
“It wouldn’t take very long,” she said. “An hour, tops. The design is simple. It’s just prepping the skin and then inking it.”
An hour of her touching him. An hour in a chair in a quiet room with another adult who was closer and more attentive to his body than he’d had in years.
“And then?” He swallowed.
“A few days of careful washing. A couple weeks of keeping it moisturized. It’s easy.”
He looked at himself in the mirror again. He put his fingers on the film, felt them brush hers as she let go. He repositioned it where she’d suggested, directly under where his bicep fell against his side.
“Want me to prep you?”
He pulled down his shirt. “Give me a minute.”
Back in the lobby, Steven Timothy was still immersed in his game. The snow was falling in heavy clumps on the window behind him.
Jeremiah thought of the empty house and of Maddie. She’d get home around seven if the roads cleared, huffing and puffing at all the people missing their appointments because of the weather. She’d wonder aloud why he hadn’t thought to get dinner, then pull a pizza out of the freezer. They’d eat in front of the TV, then he would put Steven Timothy to bed while she showered. By the time he undressed, her light would be out and her ear plugs in.
“When are we going home?” Steven Timothy asked without looking up.
“We have to wait for the snow to stop and the roads to clear. You relax and play your game. I’ll be right over there.”
“Why?”
“That lady’s showing me some of the pictures she draws sometimes. Just play your game and watch the snow. See if you can tell me how many snowflakes you can count in an hour.”
The boy looked out to assess the challenge. “Okay,” he murmured, but his attention was already back on his game.
In the studio, Erin had turned on a space heater and angled it towards a chair by the wall. Now she was arranging a tray of tools, gauze, and alcohol. Everything was sheathed in plastic wrap.
“Take off your shirt and sit backwards, arms over the back,” she said as she put on a pair of disposable gloves. Jeremiah felt something sink in him as he realized he wouldn’t feel her skin on his.
The chair had been warmed by the heater, but it didn’t stop his shivering.
“Here.” She handed him a tiny paper cup like the ones in Steven Timothy’s bathroom. The contents smelled like cheap alcohol.
He looked at it. “So, I just pour it on the spot, or what?”
“Drink it,” she said.
“Drink it?”
“It’s vodka,” she laughed. “For your nerves.”
He smiled at his mistake. “Does everybody get this?”
She leaned in, put her hand on his shoulder, and whispered, “Only the ones who need it.”
The liquid went down, the fumes came up. He coughed and shuddered, but it did the trick. His shivering stopped and he felt his torso relax against the back of the chair.
She wet a cotton ball with isopropyl and swabbed at his side. “So you’re married?”
He touched his ring automatically. “Yeah.” He felt he should say something else, perhaps compliment his wife or make a joke. “She works at the hospital.”
She spread a thin layer of shaving cream. The pressure of her fingers made him lightheaded.
“And you?” she asked.
“Guess.” He felt clever for a change.
The razor slid along his side. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about what was happening between his thighs.
“You work with money.”
“Sort of. I’m an actuary. So it’s insurance money. Hypothetical money.”
“That must be exciting,” she said, wiping his skin clean and rubbing it dry. “Seeing those big numbers flying around.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Still. It’s more than I’ll ever see.”
“Me too.”
He tried to think of something that wouldn’t sound sad. He didn’t want to talk about regrets or missed chances.
She positioned a piece of thin paper with his design in purple ink, smoothed the wrinkles, and pressed it into his side. His flesh compressed under her hand. He wanted to go home and pull out the dumbbells he’d tossed in the garage when they converted his office to Steven Timothy’s room.
“You ready? This is where it gets permanent.”
“Will it hurt?”
She nodded and picked up the tool — he didn’t know whether it was called a pen or a needle, and he didn’t want to ask her while she was about to stick him with it. She flipped a switch and it buzzed to life. “Focus on gripping the back of the chair until you get used to the feeling.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He felt her hand on his skin, now tense and alive with vibration. And then the needle entered him. He fought the impulse to pull away, focusing on the wood grain of the chair back under his fingers until he forgot about what has happening under his armpit.
“You’re doing good.” The sound of her voice brought him back. The pain was less terrible than the anticipation of it, but he still wished he had another shot of vodka.
“Thanks.” He swallowed. “You too.”
She laughed, and the sound of it warmed him. “How do you know?”
“I haven’t bled out yet. Unless I’m bleeding out now, in which case, please don’t tell me.”
“You’re hilarious,” she said playfully. “How’s a funny guy like you get to be an actuary?”
All the responses that came to mind sounded like dried-out dreams. The needle bit harder and he squeezed his eyes shut until flashes of color started to appear.
“It’s looking great,” she said. “I’d never know this was your first time.”
There was a fire coming alive somewhere in him — spreading in the flirtation, burning in the needle, flickering in his peripheral vision. It felt like it had been smoldering as long as he could remember, but now the flames were catching within him. Through the smoke, the figures of his mother and his wife emerged, their fear and fury burning hotter as the flames approached them. They looked not at all surprised to see him here.
Then Steven Timothy appeared. The boy’s eyes were fixed on something else, completely innocent of the fire approaching him. Jeremiah wanted to shout, to rescue him from the flames, but the closer he got, the more the boy suffered, for Jeremiah himself was the fire.
“The more you tense up the worse it’ll be,” Erin said. “Try to think about something besides the needle.”
But the needle was the safest thing he could think of. At least its heat was turned on him. He tried to put everything else out of his mind. He was not hurting anyone. He was doing what millions of people had done for thousands of years before him. In a few minutes the marks upon him would be hidden from the world and his life would go on as if he had never spent this hour pretending to live someone else’s life. The pressure of Erin’s hand on his side. The rush of his exposed flesh filling her vision. They were things beyond his imagination only this morning.
For this one afternoon he was not himself. He’d given air to things long smothered. When the needle clicked off in a few minutes, the vacuum would return and the fires within him would retreat. He would be himself, and the people he cared about would be safe and none the wiser. He felt relief and sadness at the thought of it, like the waking realization that a beautiful but disturbing dream has just ended. His life would continue on its predetermined curve, and the self he’d indulged would veer off like a tangent into oblivion.
“You wanna see it before I wrap it?”
“Done already?” He tried to make it come off as a joke but it caught in his throat. He hated to leave the warm corner of the studio. Even the bite of the needle had grown almost pleasurable. Outside there was only the gnawing wind and the slow grind back to a cold house.
“Not so bad, was it?”
He stood, holding his arm away from his torso, feeling like a penguin as he went to the mirror. The skin looked angry. The design was bold and black. “It’s darker than I thought.”
“Take care of it right and it’ll stay like that. It’s not likely to fade there, unless you fall asleep in the sun with your arm over your head.” She pushed his arm in front of his face until it bumped his nose. He was a marionette. There was nothing she might ask that he wouldn’t do.
“Sit down again for a minute.” She held a towel under the site and squirted it with a fluid; where he expected a sting there was only cold. She patted it dry and pulled a bandage from its wrapper. “Leave this on for two or three hours. No more. Then wash it gently with antibacterial soap and warm water. Only your fingers, no washcloths, no loofahs, or whatever fancy stuff you got in that apothecary house.”
He opened his mouth to correct her but stopped short. Something had shifted in her tone, and he had the sensation of sliding away from where he wanted to be. He felt a draft across his torso and saw that she had shut the heater off.
“Let it air dry.” She spoke quickly now. “Put some unscented lotion on it two or three times a day for two weeks. No swimming, no direct sun. Any questions, call me.” It reminded him of the disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials.
“I don’t have your number.” Could she hear the desperation in his voice?
She handed him a business card from the holder on the shelf: Dark Horse Tattoo, with the studio’s address and phone number.
“So, that’s it?”
He wanted her to keep talking about tattoos or apothecaries or her mother or whatever else might prolong this moment. The idea of asking for another tattoo on the spot, maybe even the full Delphic trio, flashed across his mind.
“All except the money, Money Man.” She smiled, but the flirtation was gone. He was now just a client whose remittance was due. “Give me a minute to clean up and we’ll settle up out front.”
“I gotta use the bathroom.” Now that he was out of the chair, he realized how badly he had to pee. He closed the door, threw his shirt over his shoulder and unzipped, the relief flooding through him and bringing him back to his body.
In the vanity, the same man looked out at him, ostensibly unchanged. The same husband and father would tuck his boy in and lie down next to a woman who was already asleep or pretending to be. But under the covers, there would be a sign of his transformation.
Would he look like someone who should have a tattoo if he lost fifteen pounds? Maybe it wasn’t too late to get back in shape. Lots of parents managed to carve out time to take care of themselves. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed ridiculous that he hadn’t done something for himself before now. He could talk to Maddie about it tonight. They could work out a weekly schedule so he could go to the gym. It might even breathe new life into their desire for each other. Years from now, he would recognize this moment in the chair as his turning point. And he’d have the tattoo to remind him.
He pulled in his stomach, tried to flex, and turned to see himself in profile. In the dim light, he could almost imagine it was someone else’s body, a bit more like the men on the covers of the magazines in the check-out line. His mother had caught him flexing in the bathroom mirror once, inspecting the emerging muscle tone in his chest and arms. If he had so much free time to fawn over his appearance, she said, he could take a bit more responsibility around the house. “Like a man observing himself in a mirror,” she quoted at him, “who goes away and immediately forgets what kind of man he is.” Had her words been indictment or prophecy? Jeremiah went from his mother’s shroud to a gloomy marriage into the shadowland of parenting. Somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten what he looked like.
If his mother could see him now. Jeremiah stared at the black ceiling. Up there, Steven Timothy would say. Well. The woman hadn’t lived without leaving a few marks of her own. It felt good to wear one of his choosing.
He got dressed and tried to adjust his cockeyed glasses. He fingered the business card in his pocket. He almost hoped he might get home to discover some problem with the image, just to have a reason to call her. He could come back and take his shirt off and let her touch him again. Maybe she would tidy up the edges, or clean it, or simply laugh at him and tell him he was being too much of an actuary. That art was not a bit of data frozen in a spreadsheet cell. It would move and shift with him as his body changed. It would be unique to him — even the same design would look different on another body.
The studio already looked bare again, almost sterile, as Erin finished putting away the equipment. She turned to him and he realized he was staring. “I’ll wait for you up front,” he said.
The lobby was dark now in the muted afternoon light and the snow sticking to the windows.
Steven Timothy’s tablet lay face-up on one of the chairs. The gray light from the window behind it reflected in its dark screen.
The boy was gone.
Jeremiah called his name and moved around the counter that separated the waiting area from the back office, a congested space of files, binders, magazines, and old computer equipment. There were no places to hide.
Erin came back in from the studio as he was coming out of the office. “What are you doing?” There was accusation in her look.
“Where’s Steven Timothy?”
“Who?”
“My son! He was right here!” Why was she playing stupid?
“How should I know where your kid is? I was with you!”
Jeremiah pushed the front door open. There were three inches of snow on the ground and more coming down. He looked for tracks, but the flakes were fat and might have obscured anything within the past half hour. He slipped across the lot to his car, pulled at the locked doors, swept the snow from the glass in hopes that the boy had somehow gotten inside. He peered across the line of traffic snaking along the road.
Someone would have stopped a four-year-old crossing the street by himself in a blizzard, he told himself. The alternatives were unthinkable.
Jeremiah came back inside. The snow got into his shoes, soaking his thin socks. He felt like a tragic clown, absurd as an owl suddenly plunged under water.
“He’s not outside?” Erin asked.
“No, he’s not outside. Don’t you think I’d’ve brought him in if he was outside?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Is there any other part of this building? A basement? Annex?”
“No, this is it. This room, office, studio, bathroom.”
He sat and rubbed his hands on his temples.
“Do you want me to call the police?”
“Shut up and let me think.”
He hated his meanness towards her, just as he hated her because she was a mysterious but significant part of the whole mess.
It was inevitable that he would do something like this. His mother and his wife were right. He was always going to be the idiot who forgot the child sleeping in the back seat on a hot day or left the car running while the child climbed up front and pretended to drive. He was selfish, and a fuck-up. Unfit to be a father. In all the pain and the waiting of the childless years, there had at least been the consolation that he might avoid this moment: when he would be tested and found tragically, criminally wanting.
He had to call Maddie.
He couldn’t call Maddie.
She was good at this sort of thing. When Steven Timothy flipped over the handlebars of his tricycle, Jeremiah froze while the blood streamed down the boy’s chin. Maddie stripped off her fleece and held it to the boy’s face. She had to call Jeremiah’s name four times before he went to get the car so they could take the boy for stitches. She drove.
Jeremiah ran back to the bathroom and flung the door open, briefly registering the thud of the handle making a crater in the drywall — the very thing he’d yelled at Steven Timothy for during one of his tantrums two days earlier. But the tiny bathroom was empty.
He went outside again and traipsed along the perimeter of the building, looking for footprints from any of the other exits. He felt crazy, double- and triple-checking his buried car, scanning the ground until his own slushy footprints made it pointless to search for the boy’s. He called for him, shouting toward the empty lot and the traffic which was now beginning to move again. From the safety of those warm cars, they probably thought he’d had a psychotic break. They might be right.
He couldn’t accept that the boy was gone. He’d simply snuck off like he did sometimes, exploring until he found something fascinating, then hiding until they came to find him.
If not, it meant that he was out there somewhere. Maybe in the snow. Maybe in someone else’s car.
He came back inside. Erin watched him warily from behind the desk.
“Call the police,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. The dim light gave the room the unreality of a dream; maybe he could will himself awake, back into the safety of his bed in the early winter darkness and starting another day in which he would review revenues and adjust liabilities until everything felt balanced and he could return home to put their son in bed and climb in next to his snoring wife who asked so little of him.
It was enough. It would be enough, if only he could get back to them. He would scrub the stupid stain off his torso and spend the rest of his life driving dutifully to work and back without any detours.
He pulled out his phone, dropped it, his fingers missing as he tried to enter his passcode once, twice. If he failed the third time, he’d have to wait another minute before trying again, and he’d already waited too many minutes. Finally he succeeded and tried to find the right icon. It was like he was breaking into someone else’s phone, the menus and arrangement suddenly foreign to him.
He found her and tapped her name. Waited. Landed in voicemail.
He hung up, tried again, and it rang through.
She would be furious, but there was no time for her fury.
It rang and rang.
She would have questions, but he could tell her nothing about the past hour that would make sense.
It rang.
She would wonder why he was calling her instead of looking for their son, and he would try to tell her in words she wouldn’t understand that he couldn’t do it alone. Any of it.
“Hey, what’s up, I’m working,” she said so fast and so quietly he could barely hear her over the pounding of blood in his ears.
“I need you.” His voice broke against his will.
Silence swelled in the abyss between them. It was the loudest, truest thing they knew how to say to each other. She had said it when he proposed. He had said it in his hesitating I do on their wedding day. Their silences were a language unto themselves, opaque and powerful.
Finally her breath came through the phone like an air line from the surface of the deep. In an instant it might be sliced through by her anger, and his lungs would fill with his failure and her resentment. He waited for it all to break upon him.
“Okay,” she said at last.
It was not the sound of a knife in the dark. It was like two bits of pottery rubbing against each other. The scrape of like upon like. Rough and right.
“Send me your location. I’ll call you from the car.”
He felt unsteady as he walked inside, like there were pockets of hydrogen in his knees that bounced when he stepped and might ignite at any moment. In the office, Erin was giving the address to the police dispatcher.
There must be something he was missing.
Back in the studio, the air was chilling fast. He got on his hands and knees and started crawling around where the floor met the walls, running his hand along the rough cinderblock in hopes of finding a duct or some tiny space where the boy might have wedged himself. The seam of his shirt rubbed against the fresh tattoo as he crawled and felt, crawled and felt. He scuttled inside the pony walls, hoping for an equipment cabinet or some other cubby he hadn’t noticed. He could hear a siren approaching, but he didn’t know whether it was for him or some other miserable fuck who’d put his life in a ditch today.
He came to the bathroom bump out where the cinderblock changed to drywall. He tried not to think about how many decades of grime he was running his fingers through as he crawled and felt his way along the wall. When he swung the door closed, a sprinkle of dust fell from the dent the door handle had made in the wall.
And behind the door was a ladder. Painted black and mounted to the black wall behind it.
He looked up and tried to understand what he was seeing, how he had missed what had been there the whole time.
What’s up there? the boy had asked.
“What’s up there?” Jeremiah whispered.
He stood and tested the ladder. The teeth of the rungs bit into his hands as he climbed, his limbs shaking. As his head cleared the ceiling, he saw that at the back of the bump-out, where it met the wall of the larger room, there was a small opening in the cinderblocks. He moved cautiously, not trusting the frame of the bathroom under his hands and knees.
“Steven Timothy?” he called softly, afraid to hope, afraid to be wrong. He pushed his head into the dark opening. The air was warm and smelled of old rubber and oil.
“Son?” he whispered.
A faint glow came in from a skylight that had been covered in snow hours ago. The small space was crammed with car parts — oil filters, bottles of transmission fluid, belts, and stack upon stack of the kinds of rags his father used to clean his hands when he’d finished in the garage.
Curled up on one of the piles was Steven Timothy, asleep in his favorite position, his head turned so that Jeremiah could just hear his breath through his half-open mouth.
Jeremiah’s breath caught in his throat and his eyes went watery. He took off his glasses and tried to wipe at them, but he only managed to smear a layer of dust into them.
He pulled himself alongside Steven Timothy, easing his body amongst the rags that cradled the boy. “Hey,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice from breaking, trying not to drown the boy in his distress and relief. He hugged him close, feeling and cherishing the burn where the pressure met his wound.
“Daddy?” His eyes fluttered open.
“You’re safe. We’re safe.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I missed you. It’s a happy cry. Why did you leave your chair?”
“My battery died.”
“And you wanted to see what was up here, huh?”
“Yeah. But nobody’s here.”
“You are. I am.”
They lay in quiet for another minute. Through the snow-muffled roof Jeremiah could hear plows grinding across the asphalt. Whatever was about to happen must happen. The police would arrive soon, then Maddie. There would be questions and anger. Eventually he and Maddie would take Steven Timothy home and put him to bed, and then there would be nothing left but to face each other. Would she ask to see the tattoo? How could he explain what it meant, or how it was not really the cause of the day’s trouble but a fruition of something that had been with them since the beginning? It was unlikely that he would say anything she wanted to hear. But it would be the truth. It had to be the truth.
She would have her own set of truths, he knew, hard things she had decided not to tell him years ago, things she carried around like festering wounds. He would hear them. While their son slept down the hall, they would inflict on one another the injuries of honesty too long delayed. He would take hers and add them to the marks upon his side, a raw record of things done and not done. He would tattoo the boy on his heart, the complement to his own monument to self-knowledge.
Steven Timothy stretched his limbs. “Can we go home now?” In this moment, Jeremiah thought, he was as big as he ever had been, and as small as he ever would be again.
“Yes, my little frog. We can go home now.” The boy rolled and wrapped his arms around Jeremiah’s neck, making it impossible to get up, so they lay for another moment, Jeremiah counting the boy’s little breaths, loud in his ear.
Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge lives and writes on the shores of the Delaware Bay with his husband and son. He is a founding editor at Oyster River Pages and is represented by Chris Kepner (The Kepner Agency).