Chapter Text
It starts at age three.
He is slow to learn how to walk. He stumbles excessively, catching himself on the coffee table and bookshelves. His mother takes him to a pediatrician, who reassures her that it’s a delay, but delays aren’t impossibilities. She takes extra care watching over him, constantly at his side. She makes rare trips to the rickety plastic playground four and a half blocks away from their complex and watches him struggle up the steps to the slide. She counts them. Six little steps. She unwillingly pictures him slipping and plummeting every time he drags himself up them.
He is a bright child. She knows that. He chirps back in little sentences when she speaks, solves the block puzzles and toddler toys she gets from charity shops faster than she can keep him entertained. He smiles up at her so sweetly, so trusting. He’s a happy baby. A happy toddler. He smiles at strangers in church pews and never cries. She is told to count her blessings. She forces herself to. She can’t afford to let any tragedy seep into their lives like raindrops through the apartment’s moldering ceiling.
He has 20 milk teeth. It’s perfectly on track for a child his age. She lets him sit in the living room unattended while she makes dinner, once she knows he won’t run off. Grainy cartoon reruns play on the television to keep him occupied. She takes her eyes off of him for a minute, two, three—and then she hears the slam and the scream. She drops the spoon she’d been using to stir and runs to him. His face is bloodied, tiny hands clutching at the table leg as he sobs. He’s fallen, she realizes, and managed to catch his nose on the corner of the wood. Even as she holds him, consoles him and promises that it won’t happen again, he’s alright, he shakes. It’s every bit as stained as her intrusive thoughts, every bit as wrenching. He sobs into her collar. She shakes as much as he does.
She’s afraid it’ll set his progress back, that he’ll refuse to even try. She’s heard plenty from the pediatrician about anxieties and regression, how a child facing developmental difficulties can make progress and then suddenly fall backward. She fears the worst—this will set back months, it’ll make him so scared that he’ll lose any sense of confidence and cling to her. She doesn’t hate his dependence on her, she swears the opposite, really, but she’s afraid for his wellbeing.
He meets her anxious silence with the opposite. He doesn’t lean into her, doesn’t cling to the furniture to guide himself around the apartment. She’s too caught up in the euphoria of it all and the return of his smiles to notice the smaller things.
It starts at age three—the babbles to thin air, the toddles with arms outstretched to nothing the same way he does to her.
It starts at age three. He’s too small for anyone to notice.