Unfinished Equations

I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or a specter.

You’re supposed to find children charming—I’d learned that lesson early. Oh, other mothers would say, looking fondly at their boys, don’t you hate to send them off to school? I’m a blade that cuts—sharp, and kids are tender things, better that my boys were in classrooms or sports practices or running wild through the neighborhood with a pack of others.

It’s an unkindness now, some cosmic karma that in this new house I’d bought precisely because it suited just me, that I should have to put up with someone else’s kid. His little pit-pats sound as he moves around the place at all hours, energetic as a Tasmanian Devil, flicking on lights and devices, chattering, and peeping around corners as if I were more entertaining to watch than any nature program.

A hundred mental orreries of our orbits, but none of my calculations can predict when or for how long our worlds would pull far enough apart for there to be only pure and creamy quiet, only to spin into conjunction again so that we are shadows to each other. There is no calculus to solve the gravity that crashes us together, clear, solid souls in the same space.

I could say something now about the mechanics of how birds fly, and he’d hear me. He’d drink it, gulp it down like ice on a hot day. His eyes are their own creatures. They are alive in his face. They tremble. They are braced for a boo! The whole of him is braced.

His mother had called from the kitchen, “What’s that goddamn song you’re humming?”

I’d glimpsed his mother, too. Late at night alone at the kitchen table, hunched-back and hair loosening from a ponytail, or tying on aprons early morning as someone outside honks for her to hurry up. She is spilled gasoline. She is the slick-black of his life, the lung-searing choke, and the shimmer of fumes that begs for the tiniest sparkle to ignite.

I do not understand the physics that binds me here. What purpose do I serve if I cannot snatch his words from the air to stop her from hearing his reply, “It’s the song the lady in my room sings.”

She is at his doorway, a scribbled face of rage, “Don’t you fucking talk about her. She’s not real!” 

She’s looked right at me in the hall, she’s locked eyes with me entering the bedroom that used to be mine, she’s heard my humming, too.

“You’re humming, again,” he says, at my elbow. “What is that song?”

The impulse to maintain the charade of distance rises up in me, a tsunami. But we are not separate. I cannot save him from his mother—worse, I was the reason for her conflagration. So, I say, “I am contemplating elliptic curves, L-series, infinite numbers, and fixed points. I am thinking the art of solving the unsolved and dedicating your life to that which only exists in theory. Is the unfished work what keeps me here?”

He’s not like either of my boys, who would not have stood still for my philosophizing. He’s careful to be neutral and quiet, but the animals of his eyes have softened, delighted to finally hear me.

His joy at something so simple is unbearable to witness. I look away.   

“What difference it would make if I solved anything unsolvable. Who would even know? Nobody but a little boy. I am watching birds and trees through glass because I can no longer be amongst them. And I am humming Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Because it is beautiful. But I don’t think you should hum it anymore where your mother can hear.”

He absorbs all of that with a tiny nod and turns closer to the window, strains to stand at the same eyeline as me, seeking the birds who have already fled, as I am the shadow bound to this house. Or is to the boy? A tender, trembling thing, who makes me wish for a body and warmth and presence again so that he might feel my hand brush the top of his head, down his shoulder to soothe every part of him that is burned and trembling and alive.