Sparks and Spares

Four: The First Time

The tooth had not been the first time, but it was the first time they could remember with any clarity. It was the first time they had made a plan. And it was the first time—but not the last—they'd been caught.

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Houses shone through the trees with expectant warmth. The entire cul-de-sac answered the dusk with the same golden glow. We were no more than fifty yards from home. Nothing could stop us from stomping our snow-shoed feet over the brittle bittersweet and yarrow clotted on the forest floor, breaking through into the back yard, and staggering in the back door. It was almost tempting.

I don't think this'll work.

It'll work. It's just a matter of getting the right angle. Now help me move this log.

We rolled it with our feet until it bisected the trail. I moved in a hunched shuffle, arm clamped to my side in forced paralysis. My breaths came fast and clipped, and I wobbled slightly on one foot.

Keep it together. Don't fall down again.

Screw you.

Independently, in unison, we eyed the imprint in the snow, retracing the skid, the impact. The overall effect was something of an aborted snow angel. Little divots pocked the snow under nearby hemlock boughs, where the thud had dislodged needles and ice. An innocent enough accident—yet still demanding of atonement.

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Similarities had, of course, been abundant from the beginning. The first eighteen months of Ely's life played out like an extended case of déjà vu for Mr. and Mrs. Anselm, who might've made different directorial decisions had the affair felt more like a reshoot and less like a rewind. Perhaps it was the material, or perhaps it was merely their own range, an incapacity to improvise. Either way, their cues rarely forced them to. Both babies favored the same formula, fussed at the same time of day, shied away from one neighbor's Chihuahua but cooed at the other's Plott hound. Both did the same straight-legged flutter kick when tired of being held and tugged at their left ear when confused.

Then there were those little, ineffable moments that, as parents, they'd thought irreplicable—first smile, first steps, first word. It wasn't so much that Ely's milestones mapped perfectly onto Jake's, but rather that the Anselms couldn't distinguish them once they'd happened, as though the process converting moment to memory were somehow corrupted, snippets jumbling like scenes on the cutting room floor, crossing like wily chromosomes in meiosis. Ely walked two days before his first birthday, but Jake didn't walk till a week after his—or was it the other way around? Jake laughed and laughed when we took him to see that movie with the rabbits—or was that Ely? Doesn't matter. They both laugh at it now, when we play it at home.

Only when déjà vu became double vision did Mrs. Anselm feel the blood return to her fingers. She was changed; she was awake. Her husband might've been happy to stay the course—minus a couple grams of rat poison—but she saw that the universe was naught but scripts, prompts, and incantations, glitches and patches and enzymes swimming in soup, searching for reactions to catalyze. Or, rather, she wished she saw these things. In reality, the most she could discern of the pattern was those white-washed precepts of secularized mysticism: that shiitakes kinda taste like beef if you add enough paprika, that karma goes down easier when your ass looks great in yoga pants, and that ritual is the best damn substitute for control shy of striking a deal with the devil in exchange for your firstborn son.