Always with Us

          Elliott refuses to look at the balloon I swat his way, let alone stop it from hitting the carpet. It flutters in front of his face before bouncing lightly off the carpet, dancing and then settling uneasily on its side.

          I remain on the chair. Elliott sits with my wife Kara, their hands clasped.

          A moment later, she shrugs her shoulders, and they head into the kitchen. Though he’s big for a three-year-old, Elliott clings to her like he is back in diapers.

          I grab the fat yellow balloon and bat it again and again, not letting it touch the carpet. When it finally does, I squeeze it, sure the pop will send Elliott running in. Instead, it contorts, hideously, before slowly returning to its shape.

          I jam it behind the couch, trapping it against the wall, as far down as I can push.

                                         *  *  *

          The three of us exit Dr. Sullivan’s office. I trail after Elliott and Kara, still absorbing the good doctor’s private suggestion that I consider individual sessions.

          When we arrive home, I hunch next to the rear passenger tire. When they are out of the garage, I peer into Elliott’s window, at that fucking booster seat.

          The image of Elliott clawing for help that almost never came sends me fleeing into the house.

                                           *  *  *

          “I hate monsters, Mommy.” Elliott says this, chewing his hot dog.

          Kara nods. “They are the worst.”

          “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I say quietly. “You’ll choke.”

          Elliott makes a sad face at Kara and runs to his room.

          In both types of upcoming sessions, Dr. Sullivan will undoubtedly view this as a setback

                                           *  *  *

          I lay on the basement’s spare bed. Hours after footsteps have ceased, I head upstairs and quietly enter Elliott's room.

          I lie on the floor and nearly fall asleep listening to his quiet little snores.

                                           *  *  *

          Seven weeks have passed. Dr. Sullivan and I now see one another four times a week, twice solo. Any more often and I may take to calling him Sully.

          I remain obsessed with the man who reported “trapped screaming boy in a green Camry, JSK 639” to the conductor nearly 240 minutes after my train departed. The conductor remembered very little: “not a regular, taller than most, probably sweating, hot as it was.”

          While I am becoming a bit more comfortable accepting the fact that I nearly killed my boy, Kara and Elliott are not quite there yet.

                                           *  *  *

          Elliott wakes up when I sneeze. “Mommy, Mommy!”

          I can’t help beaming: his first words to me in more than two months.

          I want to grab his shoulders and bore into him the memories of us playing and hugging and reading and chasing and hiding and building and giggling and interrupting and tearing and, of course, swatting balloons.

          He stares up at me with dead eyes, not unlike those of a great white severing a femoral artery.

          No matter what else I do, this will always be with us.

          I leave his door ajar.

          Before heading to the basement, I yank the couch away from the wall. The balloon, while still yellow, bears no other resemblance to its formerly plump, trapped self. It has sunk to the floor, littered with dust, a bubble blown by a child.

          I imagine bringing it into Elliott’s room, laughing about its demise, declaring from here on out that any balloon touching the carpet will meet such a fate.

          Even before I hit the first step, I realize I don’t have the stomach to face his locked door.

          In the spare bed, I cradle the little turd of a balloon and eventually drift off.

                                           *  *  *

          Even after I’m back in Kara’s bed and Elliott tells me that he loves me too, I often find myself slipping down to the basement late at night.

          I like to rub the balloon through my hands for a few minutes and then put it back in its hiding place. Even after several vigorous, soapy scrubs, I can sniff deeply into my cupped hands and find that its stench persists, even pervades.

David Erlewine's fiction has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Dogzplot, Drunk and Lonely Men, Elimae, Foliate Oak, Hobart, In Posse Review, Literal Latte, Pindeldyboz, Right Hand Pointing, Six Sentences, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot, and the anthology What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years? He lives outside Washington, D.C. with his wife and two children.