Constantine’s throat grew harder. This was his only son. At five, he had a scrawny neck and a squeaky, pleading voice.
“Back to bed,” Constantine said. Billy looked at him with an expression at once craven and defiant.
“I want to see” he said again, as if his parents didn’t comprehend the simplicity and logic of his demand.
Constantine rose. The look of fear that crossed Billy’s face further tightened the constriction in his throat. Mary took Billy’s scrawny shoulders in her hand, saying, “Come on, sweetie. This is just a dream you’re having, you won’t even remember it in the morning.”
“No,” Billy screeched, and then Constantine was on him. He lifted him up, amazed at how little he weighed. Billy was like a sack of sticks.
uBed,” Constantine told him. He might have conquered his own anger if Billy had remained defiant. But Billy began to cry, and without quite having decided to, Constantine was shaking him, saying, “Shut up. Shut up and go back to bed.”
“Con, stop,” Mary said. “Stop it. Give him to me.”
Her voice was distant. Constantine had lost himself in his own fury, and with ferocious clarity he shook Billy until Billy’s face grew twisted and blurred.
“Oh, God,” Mary said. “Con, stop. Please.”
“Bed,” Constantine shouted. He set Billy roughly onto the floor, where he collapsed as if his bones had dissolved. Mary reached for him but Constantine blocked her. He pulled Billy to his feet, held him upright, and aimed him toward the stairs. “Go,” he shouted, and he slapped his son’s bottom hard enough to send him stumbling halfway into the living room before he fell again, howling, gasping for breath. Constantine’s hip bumped against the table and one of Mary’s colored eggs, a limpid blue one, rolled unsteadily across the polished wood. Mary paused. He saw the shadow on her face. Then she ran to Billy and covered his body with her own. The egg hesitated at the table’s edge. It fell.
“Stop,” Mary screamed. “Oh, please. Just leave him alone.”
Constantine was in a passion now, a crackling white glory. Delirious, he knocked the baskets off the table. Jelly beans sprayed like stones against the walls. Chocolate lambs broke on the floor, plastic eggs cracked open and spilled out the trinkets Mary had hidden inside. He started to ram his fist into the cake. He raised his arm over it—the insipid features made of candy, the jaunty ears. Then he stopped, his arm still raised. He might have brought his fist down into the fluffy round whiteness. He might have torn out handfuls and stuffed them into his mouth. He might have eaten the cake, gobbets of icing smeared over his face and shirtfront, and wept, begging with a full mouth to be forgiven. What he did was lower his arm, slowly, and stand beside the cake. He went to his wife and son and knelt beside them. “Don’t touch me,” Mary sobbed. “Oh, just leave us alone.”
He picked up the baskets and placed them, gently, on the tabletop. He retrieved the straw, the foil-wrapped eggs.
“What happens to you?” Mary asked in a clotted voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“One minute you’re fine and the next you’re—”
He’nestled a chocolate egg on the straw, then went and knelt beside his wife and son. Billy was huddled against Mary. Constantine put his hand, timidly, on his son’s neck. The hall clock ticked.
“Please,” he said. He wasn’t sure what he was asking for. “I’ll learn,” he added. “Everything can change.” He put his other hand on her shoulders. She neither welcomed nor recoiled from his touch. “I’d do anything for you,” he said. When she did not respond he rose again, unsteadily, to pick up the rest of the candy. He returned the chicks to their straw, and put the little prizes back inside the eggs.
“Delicious,” Mary’s brother, Joey, said, patting his stomach. His stomach made a solid, beefy sound under the palm of his hand. Mary thought of his flesh, its hairy density and sour, bristling humors. She glanced at Joey’s wife, Eleanor.
“Good,” Mary said. “We aim to please.”
She added Joey’s plate to the stack she held, and looked quickly over the wreckage of the dinner. The food had been good enough, though she regretted the woody asparagus. She regretted the yellow napkins, which had looked bright and colorful in the store but somehow, on her table, had taken on a pallid, hospital quality. Her lungs tightened and she yawned, gulping air,