Don’t Touch the Glass / Rebecca Kilroy

Don’t Touch the Glass

Rebecca Kilroy

Timothy came out of the bath bright blue and shrieking, tentacles flailing like hysterical snakes. I bundled him into his favorite towel–the one with the duck’s face on the hood–and hugged him to my chest.

“Shhh, it’s okay.”

We rocked on the edge of the tub. I whispered soothing words as the blue ebbed from his skin, the tentacles shrank into chubby fingers, and the beak retracted into a mouth of crooked baby teeth.

“There’s my perfect boy. It’s all done now.”

I carried him across the hall to clean pajamas and a dry bed. He was asleep before I tucked him in. I stepped back and looked at him in the golden glow of the sailboat nightlight. A clump of blond curls fell across his face. His cheeks puffed out with deep, sleepy breaths. He looked like a cherub in a Renaissance painting, divinely untroubled.

I risked waking him and pressed one last kiss to his clammy forehead. “Goodnight, my angel.”

I could’ve collapsed right there on the floor and slept the night. Instead, I dragged myself down the hall. There was a crack of light under my door. Ian was waiting up.

“How was it this time?” he asked, glancing up from his book.

“Fine.” In the dim light of the bedside lamp he couldn’t see the wet patches on my shirt or the red outline of a tentacle across my cheek. “Don’t forget you’re picking him up from daycare tomorrow. He thinks you’re going for ice cream.”

“Kim.”

“What?”

“This is crazy.”

“Babe, I don’t have the energy to argue tonight.”

“I’m not arguing. I just want to look at this logically.” Ian was always starting arguments like that. As if logic was his personal purview and I were incapable of it. I rubbed my eyes. This was what I got for marrying a data analyst.

“Can we not do this now?”

“You can’t keep arm wrestling our toddler into the bathtub. When he was a newborn we could manage, but now it’s just getting worse.”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. The terrible twos are a rough patch for everyone.”

“So that’s it? We’re just going to wait it out?”

I shrugged. “We’re doing everything we can.”

We spent the first year of Tim’s life questing after solutions. I posted dozens of queries on anonymous message boards for everyone from first-time moms to cryptozoologists. Was it caused by lunar phases? Tidal shifts? Salt deficiency? We ruled out “proximity to water” as a cause when I made us move from Manhattan to Omaha.

It didn’t help that we had no idea where it came from. None of our families had stories of cursed children or angry sea gods. As far as we knew, Ian and I hadn’t incurred the personal wrath of the Universe. And it wasn’t genetic. Ian’s one insinuation, two years ago, that I might have cheated on him had almost cost him his marriage. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

“Babe,” I said, “look on the bright side. He’s healthy. He has friends. He’s smart. He used the world ‘quell’ yesterday in a sentence. I don’t even know how to use that word correctly.”

“I’m sorry I’m not more grateful that my son is part sea monster.”

“Hey! What have I said about the ‘m’ word? You’re his dad! What will it do to his self-esteem if he hears you call him that?”

“Like he won’t already know what he is.”

“You don’t know that.”

I’d never asked Tim what happened to him during bath time. Usually he fell asleep right after and woke up the next morning as if nothing was wrong. The being he turned into, whatever it was, didn’t seem to have much of him in it.

“When he’s ready, we’ll explain it to him,” I said. “Maybe he’ll have more control over it when he’s older and he’ll be able to help us keep his secret.”

“And if he doesn’t want to?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if he wants to go in the pool? Or have a water balloon fight? Or join the swim team?”

“He’ll know that he can’t. Plenty of kids have limitations and live perfectly normal lives.”

“Normal? Really?” A look of hurt crossed Ian’s face that I’d never seen before. “Is that what you call this?”

This was my chance to give in, to tell him what he wanted to hear, to agree “yes, our kid is a Kraken and we can’t pretend otherwise so let’s just drop him off at the nearest beach and wait for high tide.” But Tim wasn’t any kid. He was mine.

Before I got pregnant, I didn’t think I wanted kids at all. Truth be told, this was Ian’s idea from the start. But the first time I held Tim, I knew I’d been wrong. He was perfect. I shook back the damp ends of my hair.

“Yes. We’ll keep him safe and make sure he has a normal life. You’ll see.” It came out sounding much more like a threat than I wanted it to.

I was nervous waiting for Ian to come home the next day. Neither of us were very good at grudges. Our fights never lasted longer than it took the other to brew an apology mug of coffee. But he’d left that morning before I got up, coffee maker empty, and hadn’t texted all day.

My worry vanished when Tim came bounding up the stairs. He trumpeted something about his teacher and a penguin and shoved a drawing in my face. His chubby cheeks were smeared with the remains of chocolate ice cream. I glanced up at Ian and grinned.

“Sounds like you two had fun! What’s this?” I took Tim’s drawing and examined it: multi-colored blobs against blue scribbles. “Is this outer space?”

“Noooo! It’s fish.”

“Oh?”

“Tim’s class is going to the aquarium on Friday,” Ian announced. “He’s very excited.”

“Daddy says I have to ask you first, Mommy. Can I go? Please…”

I kept my smile fastened in place while shooting Ian the glare that he’d once said could melt flesh. I could only hope. He was going to make me be the one to let our son down.

“All the other kids are going,” he added. “But I told Tim we’d have to see what you thought.” It was too pointed of a challenge to ignore.

“Of course you can go, sweetie!” I chirped. “In fact, I’ll go too.”

Tim’s daycare teacher was surprised that any parent would voluntarily chaperone a field trip. But no one tasked with keeping track of children under four is going to refuse an extra pair of hands.

If I’d been less worried, and less pissed off at Ian, he and I might have laughed about it. Taking our part-sea-creature son to an aquarium? It was top of the list of Scenarios We Never Thought Of But Probably Should Have, right up there with “can he eat sushi?” and “should we let him read Moby-Dick?” None of those would be disasters. I was getting way more worked up about this than I should. After all, parents took their kids to aquariums all the time.

“You okay?” his teacher asked me as the kids flooded into the cool lobby. They immediately scattered like distracted minnows. I combed the crowd to keep an eye on Tim. There, next to the gift shop, ogling a plush snake. Safe.

“I’m fine,” I assured her. “Just want to make sure they all stay together.”

“Don’t worry. Haven’t lost one yet.”

I forced a laugh. The truth was, any of those thirty other kids could’ve walked into a shark tank and I wouldn’t have cared. But I watched Tim like he was a violent criminal out on parole. The slightest twitch in any direction away from the group and I barreled down to herd him back to safety.

Like all the kids, he oohed and aahed over the swirls of colorful fish in the first tank and was bored with them by the second. An hour in, they were all whiny, tired and didn’t care about anything that didn’t have peanut butter and jelly on it. Educationally, a failure. But I was already imagining the triumph I’d get to tell Ian about.

The last obstacle was the Touch Tank. It was a shallow pool populated with lazy stingrays who’d let toddlers poke at them. The kids shrieked and swarmed around the pool, splashing and sending water down their shirts. I scanned the room, hoping to see Tim hanging back (I’d been preparing him on the ride over with stories of stingray attacks and the lethal germs in sand). But he wasn’t on the edges. In fact, he wasn’t there at all.

During our year-long search for answers, we once took Tim to a psychic who claimed that we were all part animal. This primordial self could come out in all of us, at any time. The only questions were when and why. I thought it was bullshit at the time. But I had never felt more like a threatened she-wolf than when I couldn’t find my kid. Everything slowed down and sped up and sharpened. Adrenaline kicked in like a second set of senses.

I ran around the Touch Pool, checking the face of every kid that wasn’t Tim. I darted back into the room we’d just come from and then into the one beyond that. My mind was leaping over hurdles of mental arithmetic I didn’t have the formulas for. What was the average speed of a toddler? The surface area of the room? The percentage of children abducted from aquariums each year?

I swung into a dark hallway and nearly tripped over a blond head that came up to my knees.

“Tim! Oh my God. You scared me. Don’t ever, ever run off like that again.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. He didn’t look at me. His chubby cheeks smushed against a dark tank built into the wall. His hands splayed out on the glass like pale starfish. I knelt and squinted to make out the deep sea gloom.

There, in the corner, something fleshy and bulbous and pink peeked out of a cave. A bouquet of red tentacles blossomed from its base. It blinked at me, one black, empty eye that gave me the distinct feeling I wasn’t there.

“Tim, let’s go, honey. Come on.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

I peeled his hand away and gripped it in mine. He started to howl. His fingers left a sticky imprint on the glass. On the other side, like a row of white eyes, one of the tentacles peered at us. Ignoring Tim’s cries, I dragged him away and out of the aquarium.

“It was fine,” I told Ian that night. “He wandered off at one point. I think he got bored.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t think we’ll go back.” I tried for a casual shrug. “He just wasn’t that into it.”

Ian opened his mouth like he wanted to ask more but Tim’s thin “Mommy!” carried down the hall, summoning me to tuck him in.

“Are we going to the aquarium tomorrow?” he asked.

“No, tomorrow is school, just a normal day.”

“Oh.” His tiny shoulders slumped.

“If you’d like, maybe we can go to the petting zoo this weekend,” I suggested. “It’s much more fun than a stuffy old aquarium.”

“Ok,” he replied, sounding pleased with this compromise. Good. Land animals. Those I could handle. I knelt to flick on the sailboat nightlight.

“Mommy?”

“Yeah?”

“How far away is the ocean?”

“Really far, bud.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“My new friend told me I would like it there. That’s where he’s from. He said I should go back there too.”