The Boy by Lara Santoro Page A

Ree.
    “Oh shit is right.”
    “It’s like something out of Aristotle.”
    “Sophocles.”
    “Aristotle.”
    “Aristotle’s the philosopher.”
    Ree lifted a chopstick against the light, measuring out a corner of heaven with it. “Whatever,” she said.
      
    Summer advanced with the subtle power of amnesia, and soon no covenant was safe. Every day Esperanza complained about some item she hadn’t seen before. A baseball cap. A new iPod. Handfuls of change. Spectacularly, one day, a bong.
    “You should see it,” Anna told Dr. Roemer. “The thing’s on wheels.”
    “Are you happy?”
    “I can’t tell.”
    The doctor picked something off his shirt. “I’m not surprised.”
    “No?”
    He shook his head. “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “No one can make you happy.”
    Truth reveals itself through absence, absence through truth. Sitting in the doctor’s office, pierced by a stare so ancient there was no placing it in time, Anna felt herself crash into a zero moment of total certainty. It lasted only a second but the outlines remained, lingering in the form of a slow suspicion, a pale doubt.
    “What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re married. You’ve been married twenty years.”
    “Yes, but the minute I start depending on my wife for my happiness, I’m screwed. The minute I wake up and think, I hope my wife is in a good mood otherwise I’m screwed, I’m screwed. No one can make you happy. Only the thinking in your head can make you happy.”
    Anna checked her nails; they were disgusting. She always checked her nails, and they were always disgusting.
    “Why do you feel the need to get so dogmatic with me all the time?”
    “Dogmatic?”
    “Dogmatic, imperial. What’s the problem here? You’re married, I’ve got a boy staying at my house, no one’s upset, it’s all good, but you’re lecturing me. Why are you lecturing me?”
    “Because you keep coming in here all fucked up.”
    “You’d be out of a job if I didn’t keep coming in here all fucked up. You should thank me, you should make your gratitude felt.”
    “Tell me what happens when Eva comes back.”
    “When Eva comes back?”
    The doctor gave her his mandarin look.
    “He leaves.”
    “Just like that?”
    Anna looked away.
    “He picks up all his stuff and leaves?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Come on. Can we be serious for once?”
    Anna shot to her feet. “What do you want from me? Tell me what you want from me.”
    Seconds ticked past, silence thickening around them like a shroud.
    “Why do you pay me?” said the doctor.
    “Who knows? Who knows why I pay you.”
    “You’re free to leave, Anna. Door’s right there.”
    “Look,” she said, sitting back down. “All I want is a break. I have led the life of an indentured servant. I have been reduced in every possible, conceivable way to the role of a caregiver. What about me? Who takes care of me? I’m tired, Doctor Roemer. I have been constrained beyond all reasonable parameters, I have been enslaved, shackled like some goddamned convict and I’m tired. I need this. I need it more than words could possibly begin to express.”
    “Well,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair, touching his fingertips together, “you’ve got it.”
      
    Strangely, it rained, and to placate Esperanza, who hated the rain and the boy with total impartiality, Anna left the boy at home and drove them to Las Vegas, where she sat for three days with a magazine she never opened by a pool without a deep end. Esperanza raged like a brushfire past her on a couple occasions, and when they finally hooked up in the lobby for the trip back home, she had the breath of a dragon, the eyes of an assassin.
    “What did you steal?” said Anna as soon as they were in the car. “You must have stolen something to keep going like that.”
    Wasted beyond speech, Esperanza produced a sound between a grunt and a chuckle and passed out cold. When she came to, hours later, Anna had catalogued