On a Broken Road
Loose gravel shifts under his feet and he slips. We both freeze, check, breathe a sigh of relief. The child in his arms is still sleeping.
It is one in the morning, but we are still in the early hours of a long night. Our third in a row. Later, he will drive the same loop over and over, pull into the parking lot of the middle school where we first met, and we’ll rest our heads against the cool glass of the car windows, sleep for thirty minutes until the child begins to stir, and then start the loop again. Even later than that, I will sit in the rocking chair on the back deck, the child’s head against my shoulder, slumped body in my lap, a blanket pulled across us as the gray dawn slowly blinks awake. Tomorrow we will say we can’t possibly bear this again, pack our bags, leave without a proper goodbye, drive through the night to arrive home as a new day begins.
For now we walk, trading off carrying the child. Our child—long-legged and loquacious, shockingly heavy. I try to remember how it felt to hold his infant body but draw a blank. The memory supplanted by this weight, this heaviness, the ache creeping across my shoulders and down my spine long after I’ve passed him off into the waiting cup of his father’s arms. We have tried everything, desperate and harried as he screams, body rigid, trapped between wake and dreams long into the night. Here in the quiet of the dark streets, he sleeps against our shoulders. The soft sound of his exhalations interrupted only by the hum of cicadas, the crunch of gravel beneath our feet, the hushed pain of tears I can’t keep from flowing.
“I hate that we don’t know how to help him,” I say.
“What do you call what we’re doing right now?” he replies.
His arms burn from the weight of our boy, and I press my hand gently to his lower back to support him as we step down from a busted curb.
The roads are torn to pieces for water pipe replacement and repaving. The ground is uneven and precarious. It’s been months of this, my mother-in-law told us. With no obvious end in sight. Every step requires caution as we make our way through the neighborhood in the dark. Our movements directionless except forward, one foot in front of the other for as long as we can stand.
Side by side we shuffle over the cracked and broken pavement. All of us, awaiting repair.