1Author's Note: I have received a lot of good feedback about this story, especially regarding the opening sentences. There is a definite disconnect between the beginning of the story and the rest of it, but I'm having trouble letting those sentences go and finding a suitable replacement for them. Any advice on this topic would be highly appreciated.
At 12:54 AM, a car backfired in the alley. Several young men had been working on it for the last three days, and still, whenever they turned the key in the ignition, the whole neighborhood was shocked by the noise, which was always followed quickly by a chorus of expletives. Tom had been living in the house for seven months, on the top floor of the left side of a twin owned by his high school friends, Russell and Amy. They had an eight-month-old son, Fionn, and although the boy's paternity had been called into question, they had rushed to marry before Amy's second trimester of pregnancy. Tom's space on the top floor was directly above the nursery, and so it was not unusual for him to be stirred from sleep in the middle of the night.
Tonight had been the best sleep he'd had in seven weeks, since the evening Fionn had begun his new tradition of waking before 5:00 AM, but Tom knew that the sleep would not have lasted much longer, anyway, and so he stumbled down the spiral stairs to rock Fionn, to keep the child's familiar brown eyes closed.
Tom understood that their arrangement was peculiar. He had moved into the city a little less than a year before with his college girlfriend, for her new job. After she left him, his graduate school tuition, combined with his unpaid student loans and the spiked rent, became overwhelming, and Amy had offered him rent-free living. It had only taken him a week of rocking the boy back to sleep before he understood Amy's motive, and Amy couldn't have believed that Tom wouldn't figure it out, eventually. It had come down only to counting back through weeks and breaking into clouded memories. And then there was the matter of the eyes—Fionn's, like Tom's, were black-brown with green flecks. However, Tom knew he wasn't supposed to acknowledge Fionn as any more than an unofficial nephew, as Russell accepted Fionn without much obvious struggle.
"I know he's my son, look here," he'd say, and point to the child's indistinct temples and brow line. "His face is the same shape as mine."
The thought that Russell was protecting himself from doubt had crossed Tom's mind, since, he figured, it would be hard to miss the fact that his son's eyes were so dark while his and Amy's were light green, but Russell had always been willing to go on faith. He had believed Amy in high school when she told him that she didn't sleep with the quarterback after the prom, and he had believed her when she claimed that the other possible father had been an anonymous one-night stand. Tom knew that neither story was completely true, but it didn't seem to matter to Russell. His acceptance of Amy's flaws worked for him, affording him a happier-than-average life, and Tom didn't want to disturb the arrangement.
It was growing more difficult to treat Fionn as though he was only his friends' child, someone with whom he had no innate connection. Fionn had begun to make distinctly conversational noises, making Tom aware that the boy was a true human, pure and small, who should perhaps not be corrupted by such cruelty as a lie so early in his life.
Tom's growing guilt had instilled new fears of the night in his gut, created new compulsions in addition to his longtime obsession with syllable-counting. After half an hour of rocking Fionn to sleep and carefully returning him to what must have felt like a zoo cage, Tom would frantically check and recheck the locks on the doors and windows, arrange the seven stuffed elephant toys as a bumper around the walls of the crib, and monitor Fionn's breathing for irregularities. He would return to the third floor, sitting cold in the corner of the front half of the room. He was afraid to sever the connection between his eyes and the darkness outside of the window.
Although it was located in the city, trees (including the second-largest Sycamore in the region) surrounded the house and its yard. Collectively, the trees blocked the house from vision in the back and along the side, creating a division from the quick world outside of the stone building. The yard would be the ideal hiding place for an escaped prisoner and, although there were no jails in the area, this was a great source of worry for Tom, as was the face that the only person who could see into the yard was John, who had a roof deck and a guitar, which combined to form loud parties in the spring and summer and on unseasonably warm evenings. Even this was less than half of the days in the year, and would do little good if someone were to inconveniently decide to murder all four members of the household and the cat on a cold evening in October. The isolation must have been a familiar comfort to Amy and Russell, who had spent two years in the mountains after high school, but for Tom its omnipresence was strange, putting him on edge. It hadn't bothered him before he'd discovered that Fionn was his son, but he had decided, the night that the realization hit him, that if he could not protect Fionn from his mother's lies he would protect the child from the world.
By 7:00 AM, after two trips to hush Fionn into silence, Tom had fallen back asleep, with the bottom half of his body on the cold, hardwood floor, and his head rested on his thin, lumpy futon. Amy found him this way, asking, as though it was a real joke, "Is this an ancient method of sleep therapy that you picked up during your time in Sri Lanka?"
"I don't know how I ended up like this," Tom replied. He'd never been to Sri Lanka. Even if the joke had been funny, he wouldn't have understood it, but Amy's jokes were better than what he could expect, were she to know the two-pronged truth. He couldn't admit that he knew about Fionn, for fear it might spark a series of conversations explaining the merits of lying to the child. At the same time, Tom couldn't imagine why she would want him to be in the home if she didn't want Fionn to know about him, if she didn't have a subconscious wish to expose the whole charade. Amy had a history of self-sabotage, especially in her relationship with Russell, but Tom couldn't remember anything so stupid, anything that would ruin three lives and confuse a fourth.
Tom sat up and looked as Amy as she turned to walk away. She always hesitated at the top of the stairs, just as she reached the plastic tube railing, as if she had something stuck on her mind, like she wanted to ask him whether he knew.
"Amy."
"Yeah?" She turned and looked into the mirror by the staircase.
"Fionn is perfect. You and Russell are lucky to have him. I hope you know that."
"I do, Tom. Thank you." Amy walked down seven steps before Tom heard her pause, then take five steps much more quickly and slam the door to the bathroom. Five more steps before she reached the sink and turned the faucet. Tom closed his eyes.