Gathering Dark

weeks.”
“It’s fine. I’ll have to tell Henry something. Perhaps I won’t mention the robbery. We need to make a time to discuss the custody arrangement and I don’t know how something like this will sound to him,” she said, going to her handbag, on a chair by the windows. She started extracting notes from her pocketbook. “He’s hardly ever here at the moment anyway. Work has got him run ragged.”
A sparkle of terror hit my brain. The “talk” Sasha was going to have with Henry, about my having shared custody of Jamie, had been mentioned but not executed three times already. I wondered if this was going to blow it all out of the water. I wasn’t asking for fifty-fifty. I just wanted days, not hours, with my son. I’d met all my parole conditions. I was being visited and interviewed once a month by Child Protective Services agents, two prim and stiff-backed women who sat together on my couch and looked down their noses at my scuffed secondhand coffee table and the worn industrial carpet in my apartment. I was doing everything I could.
I pushed down the ache in my chest as the boy re-emerged from his bedroom, a smile full of effort and strain on his face. Sasha gave him the Nintendo pat-down and kissed him goodbye.
“Let’s go!” I chirped, like a cartoon adventurer about to set off on a treacherous mountain climb. I squeezed his shoulder on the way to the door, maybe too hard.
The Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel carriages swung gently as the machinery clunked between stops. Jamie bumped into me at one of the intervals, shifted by the movement of the carriage, and then slid across the seat away from me, awkward. It always took him a long time to warm up.
“So, what’s so great about this Benny kid and his party?” I asked.
“Someone said they were going to have a magician,” Jamie said. “Or an acrobat. I don’t know. Me and the guys have been trying to learn how to do backflips and I thought he might teach us.”
“I like how you say ‘me and the guys’ like you’re a bunch of twenty-year-olds.”
“We’re kind of half twenty-year-olds,” he mused.
“I knew a chick in prison who could do backflips,” I said. “She could do a handstand on one hand too.”
“Why was she in prison if she was so cool?”
“Drugs. Theft,” I said. “In fact, I saw her yesterday morning, out of the blue.” I shoved away the sudden wave of anxiety that rose at the thought of Sneak and her child. “Hey, guess what?” I said.
“What?”
“I love you with all my heart and soul.”
“Oh, god.” He clapped a hand over his eyes. “You’ve said that, like, a million times before, you know that?”
The sun was sparkling in Jamie’s hair. I wanted to stroke it so badly that I had to turn away.
“What was your jail friend visiting for?” he asked. “Was she just saying hello? Do you ever, like, hang out with all the people you knew in there?”
“No. Actually, we’re not allowed to hang out.”
“Well, that’s pretty stupid.”
“It’s the law,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“Were there any other murderers in jail or was it just you?”
I flinched at the question.
“Sure,” I said. “There were plenty.”
“I didn’t know girls could be murderers before Mom told me about you.”
“They can.”
“Were they scary? The ones in prison?”
“Some of them were,” I said. “Most of them were just like me. I’m not scary.” I waited for a response. There was none. “Am I?”
He thought for a moment. “Nah,” he replied eventually. I took a chance and patted the back of his head.
“So, get this,” he said suddenly. “We’ve got a new neighbor at our house.”
“Oh yeah?”
“At the back. I met her last night.”
“You like her?”
“She seems pretty cool,” he said thoughtfully. “But she smokes a lot. Smoking’s bad for you. Gives you cancer. That’s what happened to Mr. Beauvoir. He got cancer. Maybe everybody who moves in to that house will smoke and get cancer and die.”
I watched my child, wondering how he could turn something as exciting as the arrival of a friendly new neighbor into something so dark. I supposed it seemed to Jamie as though there was murder and unexpected death all around him, stories of it happening in a past he was not a part of, events that permeated his present reality. No matter what I did, I would not be able to protect Jamie from what I had done while he was curled, unborn, inside my body. I fiddled with my phone, and a desire to indulge my addiction rose and fell. I thought about Dayly’s blood on the wall of her apartment, the upturned chair. I saw the desperate young woman behind the gun in the Pump’n’Jump, the way her arm shook with a terror that radiated from deep within. Sneak’s child, out there somewhere, dead or alive. Our carriage was almost at the bottom of the wheel.
“Can we get ice cream now?” Jamie asked.
“Anything you want,” I told him.
It was about three weeks after I gave birth to Jamie in the prison infirmary. The hazy, dense mental fugue I’d fallen into, complete with alien overlords and space battles for Earth, had complete control of my waking minutes. I was lying on my bed looking at nothing when she came by.
“Bitch,” she said, putting an elbow on the bed beside me, leaning in. “I gotta ask you. How long you planning to lie there pretending you’re dead?”
I blinked myself back into reality, looked at her.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“No way. You know why?” She turned and pointed. “Because that’s my bunk over there. The one in the corner. I sleep on my left side, which means every morning and every night for the past month I’ve gone to sleep and woken up looking at your bugged-out, drooling face. I’m tired of it. It’s bothering me. It’s offending me now. If slapping the shit out of you is going to bring