The Boys in the Blue Caps Run Across the Road
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Three o’clock in the morning and we’re driving a kinked rectangle around our house, all left turns: Lindberg, Klondike, Highway 52. You are flashing your brights at McDonald’s bags, thinking they’re skunks. “I’m just worried about you,” you say, and I see the way your body lurches, gasp-like, over the specimen cup, the twenty eggs hoping in the petri dish, Dr. Adaniya with his diamond-tipped syringe, waiting to ICSI. You are dying. You pause longer at the red lights, the four-way stops. I know what you want me to say: They will become blastocysts. They will hatch into breathing boys. They will wear frog mittens and argyles and bounce soccer balls on their heads. They will catch Emerald Ash Borers on their tongues. They will live in my body and out of it. But, instead, I pretend Bob Dylan is on the radio. I jingle-jangle. I hum. I spin my wedding ring around my tongue.
They are nearly thirteen. And, when they do it, dash into the cloudless asphalt, across the four black lanes, blue caps bouncing, lime green sneakers skidding, you will, for a moment, forget to brake. We will watch them together, their worried cheeks, wet eyes like moons, red skateboards tucked under their arms like blood clots, like dreams. You will say, “I fucking knew it.” You will break. I will scream, and you will brake. And then we will huddle on the shoulder together, watch the boys disappear into the grove of highway birches. Leafless birches cracking bark like hearts. We will think: We were so close, weren’t we? We were so goddamn close.
