Flashback

Mommy and Val and Val’s four-year-old best friend Samuel from two houses down the street and Samuel’s grandmother—his playmate lives with only his grandmother for some reason—are all in the kitchen of the house where, less than seven years later, people in black will come to drink coffee and eat cake and other food after his mother’s funeral. But the now-Val shuts that memory of the then-future out of his mind as he surrenders himself to the flashback moment—slowly, deliberately, deliciously—as if lowering himself into a bathtub filled with very, very hot water.

Val is in the tall wooden chair that his mommy bought at the unpainted furniture place and decorated with painted flowers and animals just for him after he’d outgrown his high chair. Even though he’s a grown-up four today, he loves the tall chair that allows him to look across the table almost eye to eye with his daddy.

When his daddy is there. Which he’s not for this birthday dinner. Not yet.

He’d heard his mommy on the phone earlier: “But you promised, Nick. No, we can’t delay it any longer… Val’s sleepy after his long day and Samuel will have to go home soon. Yes, you’d better try. He’s depending on you today and so am I.”

She is smiling when she comes back to the kitchen table, but Val feels his four-year-old self sense the tension in his mother. Her smile is too wide, her eyes a little red.

“Why don’t you open a couple of your presents while we wait for Daddy?” his mother says.

“Oh, what a good idea!” says Samuel’s grandmother. It’s strange to see an old woman clap her hands in excitement as if she were a little girl.

Val watches his stubby fingers open his wrapped presents. A toy boat from Samuel, although his playmate is as surprised as Val at what was in the wrapped package. A pop-up picture book of skyscrapers from Samuel’s mother. Little Val can’t read most of the words in the book but sixteen-year-old Val peering out of Little Val’s eyes can.

“Let’s have your cake now and open presents from Mommy and Daddy after you blow out your candles,” says his mommy.

Val’s and Samuel’s eyes grow wide after Samuel’s grandmother turns out the kitchen lights. There’s enough September evening light coming through the mostly closed blinds to keep it from being totally scary, but Val feels his younger self’s heart pounding with excitement and anticipation.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” His mommy and Samuel’s grandmother are both singing. The candlelight is magical.

Val blows out the candles, getting some help from his mommy on the last one, and he points to each candle as he counts. “One… two… three… FOUR!”

Everyone applauds. His mommy turns the lights back on and there standing in the kitchen in his gray suit and red tie is Daddy.

Val raises his arms and his daddy sweeps him up into the air. “Happy birthday, big guy,” Daddy says and hands him a clumsily wrapped package. Whatever’s inside is soft. “Go ahead, open it,” says his daddy.

It’s a baseball mitt. Kid-size but real. Val tugs it on his left hand, his daddy helping him get it right, and then buries his face in the cupped and oiled palm of the mitt, smelling the leather.

His mommy hugs him and Daddy at the same time while his daddy is still holding him high against his chest and for a moment Val is almost squashed as everyone hugs everyone, but he keeps the sweet-smelling leather glove over his face—because for some reason he doesn’t understand he’s crying like a little baby—and Samuel is shouting something and…

Val came up out of the twenty-minute flash to the sound of sirens, helicopters, and gunshots somewhere in the neighborhood. The air coming in through his bedroom screen smelled of garbage.

You are such a total pussy, he told himself. Sixteen years old and flashing on crap like this. You are a total pussy.

Still, he wished he’d used a thirty-minute vial.

Val rolled over in bed and reached behind his old dresser to the hiding place behind the loose board in the wainscoting.

He removed the two items there and rolled onto his back.

The leather mitt—darker and tattered, the leather laces replaced and rewoven a dozen times and the webbing torn—smelled almost the same. The leather had a deeper, more knowledgeable smell now. He held the glove, too small to get his hand fully into, over his face.

Total pussy, he told himself. This was one of the reasons he kept his bedroom door locked. And, truth be told, he felt the same guilt with these two talismans as he did when he downloaded porn from a stroke site. But different… different.

He set the old mitt next to him on the pillow.

The other object was an old blue phone. His mother’s. He’d taken it and hidden it away the day after her funeral and although his old man had eventually gotten around to searching for the thing, he hadn’t searched very hard.