The Films of Roman Polanski

My boyfriend had no interest in scaring me until I began working with the Devil Boy. After that, he—my boyfriend, not the Devil Boy—paid careful attention to me, planning and executing little jolts. Frightening me became a sort of art. He started small, with silly, generic gestures at first, anything that would elicit a reaction: a rubber roach inside the box of my favorite cereal, a lizard with red plastic eyes waiting as I stepped out of the shower, a relentless series of breathy voice mails from a blocked number. The pranks of a child. Later, of course, he progressed.

He was sweet and timid, this boyfriend of mine, having grown up with terrible asthma and an overbearing father, the combination of which had resulted in him missing months of school at a time, growing quiet and withdrawn, developing all the requisite habits of a future computer programmer. His shyness was one of the things that had drawn me to him. He had the auburn hair of a Red Setter, and the slow, doleful gaze of an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher. He told me of long hours spent as a boy in his sickbed listening to voices moving beneath him and the slow drumming of his own heart.

I found gummy worms burrowed deep in my container of yogurt: my boyfriend’s doing. I spooned them out and smiled. His efforts were a form of attention, a way of noticing what attracted or repelled me. I’ll admit: Whether I should have been or not, I was flattered. This electricity between us now, it seemed to mean that something was happening.

We did not talk about it, but I knew. My boyfriend knew I knew. It was one of those things that went without saying. Like the fact that calling him “my boyfriend” was ridiculous. At his age. At mine. I’d considered adopting “beau” or “gentleman-friend,” but this made me sound arch, like I was speaking ironically. I’ve always been a plainspoken woman of no-iron shirts and comfortable undergarments, so archness did not suit me. I’d tried using “partner,” but this made me sound stilted, like I’d joined a law firm of very meek and hesitant attorneys.

At night, he’d begun stroking my hair again, a thing I liked for him to do before I fell asleep. He hadn’t done this in ages, so it felt as if I had earned something. We’d grown more affectionate with one another, more demonstrative.

“You know I’ll always take care of you,” he said when we fell silent. “You don’t have to work with those kids. Juvenile delinquents.”

“I have to,” I said. “You know I have to.”

I had to because it was my job. But what I also meant was that I wanted to—I wanted to see all those children, most especially the Devil Boy. I could not stop thinking about him. The Devil Boy followed me in my thoughts after I’d left the clinic, haunting me like something I’d birthed and abandoned. This haunting left me harrowed, wrung out, compliant.

“You don’t have to,” my boyfriend responded. He went quiet, his hand frozen just above the pulse in my throat, curled like a snake watching its prey. Our breathing slowed, and we lapsed into the hush of two people drifting toward sleep. Then he hugged me ferociously, with such suddenness I startled.

He laughed and kissed me.

“I’ll take care of you,” he said, kissing me again, firmly, stealing my breath away.

The clinic where I worked was on the other side of Bolton Hill, walking distance from our apartment. In good weather, I did walk, crossing the bridge and passing the train station, where grimy artists bicycled one direction, DC-bound commuters in suits marched briskly in the other. I picked my way over the uneven sidewalks, where the houses were shaded and beautiful, although often in need of renovation. I’d once dreamed of being the kind of person who owned one of those houses, working throughout the weekdays in order to devote myself on the weekends to the loving repair of my Victorian home. Families lived in Bolton Hill, and I thought of them as families of style and intellect, families unafraid of a little petty theft or of the late-night shenanigans of the nearby art students. I had given up on the idea of forming such a family myself. My boyfriend and I had met one another later in life, and he did not want children. In truth, neither of us had proven very good at taking on long-term projects.

At the far side of the neighborhood, in an area that became plain old West Baltimore, was the clinic where I worked. It was a new site. Our office sat in a repurposed storefront, sad and slumping, with blacked-out front windows for privacy. A falsely cheerful sign with jaunty stick figures promised child and family services. The people who came to see us, our clients, were there under duress—referred, often, by a concerned school guidance counselor or the court system.

My supervisor was a cheerful woman in her sixties named Tawny. Tawny had short, chic steel-gray hair and wore brightly patterned scarves. She had the air of someone who would be good in any number of hypothetical crises, able to staunch wounds or oversee a precipitous labor in the back seat of a taxi. She was warm and practical and fast-talking. She did not attempt to disarm reluctant clients but rather wore them down with her relentless competence.

“There’s no magic to this,” she’d tell me. “Our clients need bus tokens. Our clients need canned soup. Our clients need structure.”

A lot of what Tawny did was reinforce positive parenting strategies. No one questioned her advice because she spoke with a hard-won authority. When I offered input, on the other hand, people looked skeptical.

“Have you ever raised a child?” one woman had scoffed, although her question was not actually in quest of any answer. “You don’t know the first thing.”

She grabbed her little boy by the arm then, jerking him roughly from the bookshelf he’d been trying to climb. He yelped, his eyes seeking mine, waiting for me to reprimand his mother, perhaps—to assert myself as the one true adult authority in the room. I felt chastened under his child’s gaze, the brutal wisdom of it. I said nothing.

Tawny was quick to emphasize, however, that we had authority. We had knowledge, credentials—just look at the certificates on our wall! Having a baby did not automatically imbue one with parenting skills! Not having had a baby did not diminish one’s professional acumen! She’d speak in this vein from time to time, and I knew she was doing it for my own benefit, to bolster me. Tawny herself had raised two children, neither of whom had landed in jail yet, she was quick to add with a laugh.

“They say we’re getting a tough one,” she told me one fine Friday in autumn. It was warm outside still, but with an edge of the cool weather to come, sunlight filtering golden through the ruddy leaves. Even the grimy parts of the city seemed beautiful. Someone had finally addressed the thriving mischief of rats that had threatened to overtake the alley by our building, catching and hauling away the most vicious. A few mean, fat holdouts still grappled in our dumpster over empty bottles of grape Fanta and the fiery crumbs at the bottom of spent Takis bags, so we were careful to avoid taking our clients out the side door.

I smiled at Tawny and nodded. Fall was my favorite season. My boyfriend and I would sit outside under an umbrella at our favorite café, each reading a book while we ate sandwiches in pleasant, almost telepathic communion. I looked forward to this. I’ve never minded the smallness of my pleasures.

“James Hadley,” Tawny said, and I noticed this time that there was a slight twitch in her eyelid, which meant she was tired, or had had too much coffee, or both. What she would not be was nervous. Tawny was unflappable. She had been bitten by boys just out of juvenile detention, had been punched in the face once by a three-hundred-pound pregnant sixteen-year-old, bore the claw marks of shrieking twelve-year-old girls. After such instances, she’d merely looked at me, unfazed, and asked for an ice pack. The most troubled of troubled children, the wounded, the feral—she’d look them all right in the eye without wavering.

“History of violence?”

She shook her head.

“Not officially.” She was frowning, flipping through some of her paper work. “But one of the homes he lived in burned down. Suspected arson. Eventually, one of the other boys confessed he did it by accident. With another family, one of his foster sisters kept showing up to school with unexplained bruises. No placement has kept him longer than a couple months.”

“Psych history?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “He’s been evaluated. Didn’t meet criteria for ADHD. Oppositional defiant, but isn’t that all of them these days?” Tawny shrugged, handing me the boy’s intake file to skim.

When James arrived a little later, he appeared undernourished, swallowed by a large blue jacket. He did not look up at us. His foster mother had a harried look, a flightiness to her gestures that suggested she was overdue for a cigarette. I watched Tawny exhale when she saw the boy, surely having imagined someone larger and more imposing. These days there are eleven-year-olds with the heft of full-grown men.

Tawny and James were in the conference room for a long time. I sat at the desk outside gazing into our small lobby, the blue plastic chairs that looked like they belonged in a school cafeteria, fine shafts of dust suspended like glitter in the sun that filtered through the blinds. Usually, I could expect raised voices, a child yelling at his or her parent, the parent’s voice rising in frustration, and then Tawny, cool and practical, soothing everyone back down. Today, I heard nothing.

At a certain point, the foster mother walked out of the conference room, shutting the door gently behind her as one would if whoever was inside had fallen asleep. She proceeded, tiptoeing almost, to the waiting room, where she seated herself in one of our too-small chairs, clutching her bag in her lap like a shield. I watched as she closed her eyes, breathing—resting, I thought at first. Only then I saw she was softly crying.

It seemed a long time later that Tawny and the boy finally exited the meeting room. The foster mother thanked Tawny quietly, and she and the boy were gone.

Tawny turned to me. Something unintelligible passed across her face. She gazed at me steadily, impassive.

“How was he?”

She exhaled slowly and did not answer at first.

“Fine,” she said. “Perfectly polite.” She rubbed her temples with both hands. “I’m just getting one of my headaches.”

“Sit down,” I told her. “Let me get you some tea.”

She obeyed me, suddenly childlike herself, docile. I handed her a cup, and she closed her eyes and drank.

You will certainly think it’s too perfect when I tell you that my boyfriend and I went to see Rosemary’s Baby on our first date. There’d been a weekend-long retrospective on Roman Polanski at The Charles. My boyfriend, although he was not yet my boyfriend at the time, had suggested it. I called my sister to tell her I was finally getting out into the world, dangling myself like a piece of less-than-fresh meat in front of mangy lions.

“Good for you,” she said to me. “Finally.”

When I told her about him—a computer programmer, forty-something, never married, loved pumpernickel bagels and vintage radio repair and the films of Roman Polanski—she stopped me.

“He actually said that?”

I was puzzled. I wasn’t sure which part she meant. He’d sounded nice enough to me. I was pleased with myself, my efforts, and wanted my bravery honored, like a cat dragging back a bloody mouse to its owner. Maybe he was the less-than-fresh meat and I the weary lion.

“Said what?”

“The films of Roman Polanski.”

“So?”

“First of all, you don’t say films,” my sister said. “It’s pretentious. And secondly, you’re allowed to like some Polanski movies, fine, but it’s not a thing you advertise. It’s not something you include in a dating profile. There are implications.”

“He probably wasn’t thinking about implications. Just what he likes,” I said, knowing this would placate my sister, who had made it very apparent that she believed I too lack subtlety or guile.

My sister was silent then, which I interpreted as grudging approval. She was surely glad for me to be seeing anyone. My last breakup had been, unbelievably, eight years earlier. I’d been chopped and gutted like a fish. With my ex, I’d planned beautiful futures: overfull hanging baskets of lobelias, thrifted porch furniture and redone wood floors, a pair of quirkily bright children who wore their old-fashioned names like horn-rimmed glasses. Instead, I’d been left lonely to rot.

And so I found myself meeting for the first time the man who would become my boyfriend. I could tell by the way he shifted his weight, the way his pale cheeks turned as rosy as a little boy’s, that he was nervous. He was one of those people who managed to be simultaneously too skinny and yet soft in the middle, his body an unevenly squeezed tube of toothpaste. In his nervousness, he excitedly recounted little facts to me. Did I know that Mia Farrow had been filmed stumbling through actual Manhattan traffic? That this was Polanski’s American film debut? Or that the film was supposedly cursed, and that Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, had been murdered not long after the release?

I nodded. It was all very interesting, if decidedly inauspicious.

I could sense by the way my boyfriend settled into his seat beside me that he was a person who detested distractions, even if this was a movie he’d seen more than twenty times. His breathing slowed, and I could feel an animal warmth emanating from him, absorbed as he was there in the darkness. His perfect stillness struck me as uncanny, so I was surprised when his hand found mine, just before the Satan rape scene. Like I’d already surmised, he had no sense of implications.

“I really enjoyed meeting you,” my soon-to-be boyfriend said to me afterward when we emerged from the theater, blinking like moles in a blaze of afternoon sunlight.

We had hardly spoken to one another, yet it felt like we had survived something quite trying together, a high-camp ordeal. Poor Rosemary, with those glowering Castevets, that black bassinet and the baby with its horrible eyes.

I understood then that my boyfriend was establishing something from the outset, offering me an implicit contract of sorts. There would be things I might expect if I went along, and other things I might not. I could bid farewell once and for all to my Bolton Hill house with its sets of big and little rain boots in the mudroom, all its busy clamor and bright decrepitude. What my boyfriend would offer me was not a compromised vision of something I’d once wished for, but the acknowledgment that such a vision was a false promise from the start.

“I enjoyed meeting you too,” I said, and my boyfriend kissed me, bold and abrupt, with more appetite than I’d imagined any computer programmer might possess.

When I arrived at work one morning, I noticed that Tawny had transferred the new boy’s file to my desk.

“This will be a good case for you,” she said. “He’s not so bad.”

“What about the fire?” I asked her. “The bruises?”

She shrugged and moved toward our kitchenette, pouring grounds into the coffee maker. “You know how some of these placements are,” she said, her back still to me. There was a tightness to Tawny’s shoulders I’d never noticed before. It would be unlike her to disparage the foster parents we worked with, but she was right: There was huge variability in the quality of the placements. That was merely a fact.

James Hadley was due back that day. I felt more curiosity, more anticipation, than I ordinarily did. Already, I’d sensed that James and I were brethren somehow, both of us castoffs, already tossed into the markdown bin.

The boy’s foster mother shuffled in like she’d just finished a long shift somewhere. She looked at me bleakly, and I understood she expected me to fix nothing.

“Come along, James,” I said to him. “I’m Miss Beth Ann.”

The woman, his foster mother, clawed at my arm, pulling me toward her. Her breath was hot and sour at my ear, and she spoke like the bad fairy at the christening.

“Watch out,” she whispered. “He’s sly, that devil boy.”

I shook off her grasp, hoping James hadn’t heard her, and she released my arm.

He followed me, obedient, and took his seat at the table in the conference room. I had a plastic tub of toys and stickers. Even the older children were usually curious about my rewards, but James just sat there at the table, swinging his legs, disinterested. His dark hair covered his eyes.

“I’d like to get to know you a little bit, James,” I said.

He nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How are you getting along in your house right now?”

He shrugged.

“You’re getting along with Miss Nancy?”

“I dunno,” he said, and now he looked at me. I saw for the first time that he had marvelous features. His eyes were burnt gold, a translucent amber, like polished agate. He was beautiful, his boy’s face perfect in its symmetry, with full pouting lips and dark lashes. Exotic was a word I’d been trained not to use, as it implied something colonialist about my own gaze, something that only reinforced certain hierarchies. Exotic was a word that othered people—I knew this, but that was the word that kept coming to mind. This little boy seemed both beautiful and rare, like a precious metal, something surfacing from deep within the folds of the earth.

He smiled at me, and I realized, flushing, that I’d been struck dumb gazing at him.

“I miss my mom,” he said to me, and suddenly his lower lip quivered. “You remind me of her.”

A sound rippled deep in my throat, but I swallowed it. I knew from his chart that he was thirteen, but his cheeks had a baby-fullness. A little boy. That was all he was. I recalled from his chart that his mother had lost custody of him because of neglect. She’d had a history of opioid dependence and unstable housing.

“I’m sorry,” I said, collecting myself. “That must be hard.”

He nodded. Then he reached one hand toward mine, grabbing it. His hand was soft still, a little boy’s hand, sticky-warm.

“You’ll help me find her, Miss Beth Ann?”

He was holding my gaze with those golden eyes and nodding so intently that I found myself nodding back reflexively, Of course, of course—until I registered what he’d just asked.

“Oh, James,” I told him. “I wish I could. I wish it were that simple.”

I wanted to promise him that he would see his mother again, that she would get herself together and find a suitable home and take him back, but if I’ve learned nothing else over the years, I’ve learned never to promise that.

He jerked his hand away from mine.

“Please?” he said, fastening me again with his steady gaze, standing. “Tell me what you want, I’ll give it to you.”

“James, sit back down.”

The room where we met was too small and poorly ventilated, windowless. There were times like this where I felt overheated, sickly, like my head was too full of mucus, my brain bobbing in a viscous soup. It seemed that my glasses were too strong for my eyes. James was very close to me, his hot little hands on my wrist, and I had the sick urge I associate with my migraines.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice sounding smooth, knowing, that of a man who can make things happen. “I’ll give you anything. I can do that. Anything you want.”

I stood up. I was sweating. I might have imagined those words, I think now. I felt unwell. The papers in my lap spilled, drifting to the floor.

“Stop it, James,” I said very loudly, speaking as if the loudness of a few unvarnished words would clear my head. “Stop it. Sit back down, please.”

He is thirteen years old, I reminded myself: a child. Thirteen, an unlucky number, trouble’s precipice.

Now he was curled and crying, tucked against my ankle like a cat, the delicate bones in his wrists and arms visible beneath the skin.

“Miss Nancy hurts me,” he said, his voice young once more—help- less, pitiable. “Please. You have to help me.”

And what could I do but kneel and comfort him, because he was a child, and one ought to take a child at his word?

When we began dating one another, part of what I liked about my boyfriend was his odd self-assurance. My boyfriend very quickly began to treat me like a clock or an appliance, something reliable and small. I mean this in a good way. After my relationship with my ex, I’d learned there is such a thing as too much hot blood. My boyfriend had very specific ideas, his mind moving in a rigid and orderly way—cool, impervious to argument.

I mentioned James to my boyfriend one day, although not by name. I called him the Devil Boy, because that was how I thought of him. The title was not pejorative—if anything, I marveled at James. I wanted to talk about him.

“There’s a child I work with,” I told my boyfriend, who was sitting at his computer, sipping at a cup of coffee. “I worry he’s being abused.” I mentioned the house that burned down, along with a series of other troubling, inexplicable incidents Tawny and I had since uncovered. I told him about the boy’s current foster mother, who was under CPS investigation. I’d made a confidential report after what James had said to me that first day.

My boyfriend’s hands froze on his keyboard as he listened. He frowned. Although he did not speak of it, there had been other difficulties in his childhood, so he took an interest in the hardships of children. This was one of the reasons, he’d explained to me, that he hesitated to be a father himself: He worried about replicating a pattern.

My boyfriend closed his laptop and sighed. “I’ve told you so many times,” he said, patiently, the way a good teacher might reprimand a student. “You don’t have to keep working there. I’m here now. To take care of you.”

It moved me to have someone worry over me, but I shook my head. “I like working there.”

“There are other options,” he said. “Something part-time, maybe. Less stressful.”

“I don’t want something part-time. I want to do this.”

“Beth Ann,” my boyfriend said, still speaking to me like I was much younger than he was. “You’re too trusting. It’s dangerous.”

I shook my head again. My boyfriend and his computers, his chat rooms and Reddit threads—he had many notions, I thought, but he had no idea.

“It’s fine,” I said, laughing hoarsely. “I have good instincts.”

My boyfriend also made a laughing sound, a hollow one, like someone choking on a bone, and drew me toward him, his hands against my waist in a way that made me feel valuable. A beautiful woman, a person who mattered. Both the subject and the object of desire.

He kissed me.

“A kid like that . . . unhinged. He could start following you home. Stalking you. It could get scary.”

“That’s the nature of my job,” I said. I heard my own stubbornness rise like the blood vivid in my cheeks, my words an official challenge. “I don’t mind being scared.”

My boyfriend grinned at me as if I’d just delivered a flirty dare, pressing himself against me and pinning me to the bed. His face hovered near mine, and I could hear him breathing more rapidly. Holding both my wrists above my head, he kissed the scoop of my throat like he knew he was both the cause of and the solution to my shivering.

Looking back, I realize this was what started things.

“No one listens to me like you do,” James told me the third or fourth time we met. He blinked his yellow eyes, contented, feline.

We sat together there in the conference room while he chewed the eraser end of a number two pencil. His school papers were spread out on the table, covered now in little crumbs and granulated sugar. The last time James saw his mother, she’d taken him to a Dunkin’ Donuts. She got a huge cup of coffee for herself and an enormous blueberry muffin for him. His favorite. This was the last time he saw her, he’d told me, and so this brief moment had now become heavy with meaning.

How paltry, I’d thought when he told me, what can be counted as affection. How little it can take: mere crumbs. A muffin.

So I’d started bringing him little treats. Nothing at all, really. I told myself these were but small kindnesses. With my offerings, it felt like I was breaking through to him, accessing parts of him that were honest and true: the hurt motherless boy beneath the supposed villain.

That day, as I followed James out to the waiting area, I handed him back the essay he’d brought to show me, and our hands met, his still sticky from the muffin. For a few seconds, my hand lingered on his. We stood, looking at one another without speaking. Were we holding hands? Maybe. But it felt like more—an exchange of something, a vital energy. Then it ended. He turned from me, rejoining his foster mother. She stood, her eyes skittering away from mine, and started walking briskly. Nervous, I thought, as she exited with James. Hiding something, perhaps. Guilty.

It was only after they left that I realized Tawny had been standing behind me, watching.

“Everything okay?” she asked, her voice practiced, no-nonsense. “I can always take back over.”

“No, no,” I said, flustered. My cheeks were hot, like I’d been caught mooning over a crush, although of course it was not like that. It was not like that at all. “It’s fine. I feel . . . very invested in him.”

Tawny laughed. She had a rich, layered former smoker’s laugh.

“Don’t,” she said. “That’s the first rule in this business. Do what you can, but don’t let that happen. I can always take over. There are plenty more.”

I nodded, careful to make my face neutral again, a mask of professionalism. But I knew Tawny was wrong: There weren’t any more, not for me. At a certain point, you realize that life is a series of doors closing, the world narrowing down, until there is always, ever, only one.

Once they’d begun, my boyfriend’s pranks afforded me a means of demonstrating my good instincts, proving that I was not naïve. I became familiar with the sensation of someone watching me. I plucked odd, threatening notes from the front seat of my car with an air of boredom. I knew my boyfriend’s handwriting—he didn’t even bother to disguise it. I grew accustomed to hearing a knock on the door and finding no one there whenever I was home alone. My keys would go missing and then turn up in strange places: behind the refrigerator or buried in the soil of the ficus in our living room.

When I began to notice things missing from my drawers, items of jewelry replaced with others that were similar yet not the same, photos moved from one spot on the wall to another, I thought to myself not There’s a name for this behavior but rather This is our weirdo love.

“Did the Devil Boy follow you home today?” my boyfriend would ask in the evening.

“I think so,” I’d answer, my voice cocktail-party light, as if we were chatting over finger foods. The truth, however, was that I was out of sorts, pale and tired. I craved sleep. My digestion was off. I awoke in the wee hours burping acid. “Someone’s been watching me.”

“Be careful. Don’t let any bad guys in.”

We talked like this, like we were winking at one another, using poor James as a lever on which to hoist our relationship.

My boyfriend took things to the next level gradually: a dead mouse nestled in my work bag, a bat pinioned against my pillow with two earrings I no longer wore. Strangely, fear worked a sort of magic. We did not speak of these pranks, but a closeness grew once more between us. I could feel my boyfriend watching me, sensed his excitement whenever I drew closer to one of his surprises. It was for him, I suppose, titillating.

And indeed, our intimacy had increased in frequency. I am not a woman who talks openly of such things, but my boyfriend seemed to be overcoming an inherent awkwardness, growing more confident. I won’t reduce my boyfriend’s actions to a mere bedroom game. But there was this—a side effect, an unintended benefit of our bizarre triangle.

At work, I continued to see James.

“I feel like I’ve always known you,” he said to me one day. We were going through some of his school assignments, and he’d paused, looking up at me with those large amber eyes. “I wish I could live at your house, Miss Beth Ann. I wish I could live with you.”

He nuzzled his head against my arm, and I let him, even though I’d been trained to avoid such contact. It seemed only natural to allow for such basic human warmth.

James sighed, shifting against me. I’ll admit: I’d begun to fantasize about bringing him into our household. A son. I imagined the three of us eating quiet breakfasts together on Saturday mornings or walking down to the farmers market under the big overpass—although so far in the investigation of James’s current foster placement, there’d been no evidence of any problems.

“Please? Miss Beth Ann?”

We were in the windowless conference room that smelled like cheap pine cleaning fluid and cheese puffs. I allowed myself the luxury of kissing his dark head ever so lightly.

“We can’t,” I whispered. “It’s not allowed.”

This was an oversimplification, but it made things easier.

“Why?” he wheedled.

I sighed. “Miss Tawny makes us follow the rules here,” I said. A coward’s move.

“I hate her,” he said, his voice turning to a whimper. “Miss Nancy, too.”

“No, no,” I said, shushing him. I drew him close to me. Even at thirteen, he was still such a baby that I could hold him on my lap like I did my four-year-old nephew. His breath was feathery against my neck, ticklish. We had room in our apartment. We hardly used our study; it could become a child’s bedroom. James twisted against me, one of his fingers tracing a small circle on my forearm.

“I love you, Miss Beth Ann,” he whispered. “I love you.”

I cannot tell you the thrill those words gave me. My boy, my own little boy. There was a surge of something, something so pure that even now I don’t believe it was sullied by what came afterward. I believe that, however brief, this moment was real.

I held James, letting him cry quietly against me. I held him until his crying slowed, and I felt him going still in my arms. I rocked him gently, shushing him. This, I thought, was how mothers felt when their baby calmed. I dared not move so as not to disturb him. Overcome with exhaustion, I let myself close my own eyes, feeling his warm weight relaxed fully in my arms. We would both take a short rest, I told myself.

When I opened my eyes again, I was aware of something not right: a very specific pressure and suction, new yet also deeply familiar to the primitive part of my brain. My skin felt cool. My shirt was unbuttoned. There was James, his warm lamprey-mouth at work on my nipple. With one hand he tugged my breast downward. I felt his tongue, his teeth careful against my tender skin: a perfect latch. Nursing. A cruel parody. Mammalian and grotesque.

“James!”

He released my nipple with a pop and looked up at me with a malicious little smile.

I was aware now of a wiriness to him, a strength that went beyond his baby softness and reminded me he was on the brink of adolescence. He squirmed in my lap, and I felt the sharp bones of his pelvis pressing against me like a threat. He batted my breast away, almost playfully. I yanked my shirt up, covering myself, and shoved him off.

He looked at me, amused, sneering. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make him weep also. He had ruined it all. He had ruined everything.

The flat of my hand flew toward him, smacking him, hard.

He stepped back, eyes widened, momentarily surprised. And then he grinned again.

I was on him then, all over him, my fists pummeling his face, his thin boy’s chest, my fingernails scraping his arms. I slapped his face again so hard there was a red welt on his cheek. My hand stung. He stumbled back, still laughing, mocking me. Egging me on.

A raw feeling like a scream tore through me. Maybe I did scream. What I know is that my hands were operating outside my control— demonic things, fists and claws and talons, and then I was squeezing him, my hands around his neck, and I swear to God, even then he was grinning at me. Like evil. Like the devil himself.

The door opened.

“What in the world.”

Tawny stood there, a look on her face I’d never seen before. I released James, my arms falling limply to my sides. I could feel my whole self melting, sweat moving in rivulets beneath my arms. My breathing was ragged, like someone finishing a long run. James looked at Tawny blandly.

The light in his amber eyes seemed to have dulled, but he smirked again—mean and knowing. Two of the buttons of my shirt were still undone, my mouth too dry to speak. I could see the red marks from where I’d dug my nails into his neck.

“What in the world,” Tawny repeated.

It wasn’t a question, and no one responded for several long seconds.

James eventually sighed like he was bored.

“Miss Beth Ann hurt me,” he announced to Tawny. He stood there, staring at her, before making what appeared to be a slight bow and turning to leave the conference room. We followed him wordlessly to the reception.

Tawny and I watched James leave with Miss Nancy. The Devil Boy and his foster mother. She moved like someone much older, stooped, as if bracing against a great gale. He walked, docile, beside her. I’d only ever seen him obey her, although she told us what she believed he did to the other children at home. There were bite marks on his foster sister, a ring of bruises like a mauve collar along his younger foster brother’s shoulders.

“I never catch him doing it,” Miss Nancy had told me once, a few weeks earlier, shaking her head. “And I think the other children are too afraid of him to tell me. That’s the devil for you.”

After James and his foster mother had left, Tawny turned to me. She looked stricken, her skin the grayed-out color of an old movie.

“I should have taken his case myself.” She rubbed her forehead, frowning. “What were you thinking. What the hell were you thinking.” Again, she delivered this not like a question but like a bleak fact.

I’d thought I might explain myself, explain everything to her. But looking at her, I did not.

“I’ll pack my stuff,” I said instead. “I’ll go.”

She nodded, turning from me and going to her office, the door clicking shut behind her.

By the time I walked home, past the old train tracks, crunching through a layer of brown leaves, the sun was beginning to set. A siren passed, and then another. That’s one thing I’ve grown used to in this city: Quiet is never quiet. The sounds of sirens are always there, becoming a sort of persistent, forgettable background noise. If one is on high alert for long enough, one learns to tune things out. The body becomes numbed to fear, adapted to a constant state of stress.

Stress can also affect a woman’s menstrual cycle, causing her to skip a period or be very late. This is a fact, one that I’d been repeating to myself for the past three weeks. Because at my age. Because what were the odds, really. Because in all likelihood it was nothing.

I remembered that early on in our relationship, my boyfriend and I were eating tapas together at a restaurant when he’d mentioned something, a moment from his own boyhood involving a dog and a piece of rope. It shamed him.

“There are certain things you just don’t want to pass on. Like a sickness you carry,” he said, shaking his head and prodding his fork into the plate of calamari. Like a savage, I’d thought briefly, before softening toward him. He was trying to do the very best he could.

At home, our apartment was eerily cool and still. My boyfriend was not yet home from his office, but one window was open, letting in a waft of car fumes and garbage from the street below. My phone rang. It was my boyfriend, checking to make sure I was home.

“I lost my job,” I told him. For the first time that day, I could feel tears welling up. I was not one to cry, not ordinarily. “I got fired.”

“It’s okay,” my boyfriend said into the phone, so calm he was nearly triumphant. “I’ll take care of you. I’ve said that all along.”

“I messed up,” I said, my voice finally breaking.

“I’ll be home soon,” he said, and then, fondly, a singsonginess to his words: “Home to my girl. Don’t let any bad guys in.”

I hung up the phone, needing a glass of water. In the kitchen, a plastic spider inside the water pitcher greeted me like an old friend, a joke told so many times it had worn thin. All the bland whites of the kitchen—refrigerator, countertops, curling linoleum floor—blurred into a hazy nothingness, a shapeless expanse looming in front of me like a long series of blank boxes on a calendar. Endless days, all the same.

I gulped the water so fast my throat burned cold.

Then: a knocking at my door, tentative at first, but growing louder, more insistent, as if the person knew I was inside, expectant, alone. Shave and a haircut . . . two bits. Another little joke, the knock of someone who already had a key.

I knew it must be my boyfriend. I knew that he would hold me in his arms and comfort me, surround me with himself until I could see nothing else—not the bad, rough edges of the world, not anything. Only us, our private jokes, our little intimacies. But for a moment, I pretended I did not know who it was. I pretended I had not already welcomed this stranger, had not already invited him in.

Read more from Issue 16.1.