telephone

the original supernatural nephew is on the phone and he is none too pleased with us. it is the newer nephew's birthday and the whole family is together, halfway across the country, eating cake and being wild. but the original supernatural nephew detaches himself from the wildness and talks to the sweetie in a soft but accusing tone. i know it was you, he says, a fourth grade teacher trying to get a child to confess to scribbling on a bathroom wall. i know it was you pretending to be guthrie when i was little. the sweetie feigns confusion, says he doesn't know where the child would get such a ridiculous idea, doesn't know why he thinks we would be dishonest with him. parents dread eventual discussions about santa and the easter bunny. grandparents worry about the time a child feels too old to cuddle up on a lap. aunts and uncles, generally speaking, fear nothing. we have nothing, laughs the uncle, to hide.

but the child is not deterred. he has overheard his grandmother, my own treacherous mother, telling someone about the newer nephew's most recent conversation with guthrie, about how guthrie told the kid we were planning to get him a robot. the child's grandmother, in a rare but spectacular lapse of judgment, discusses how she thinks these conversations go, how she thinks the child and dog understand each other. and the child overhears. it is one thing to overhear the ugly truth and suffer. it is entirely another to overhear wicked speculation. the child thinks the sweetie and i pretended to be guthrie all those times when he'd call to visit. how could we? we barely speak the dog's language.

this story his grandmother has concocted, i tell him when it is my turn to suffer his calm but persistent accusations, is completely untrue. he tells me i better stop being coy about the whole thing, says he knows, says his grandmother told him everything. i tell him exactly what the sweetie told him, that his grandmother is a lunatic and clearly a lying one at that. i point out that she has never once talked to guthrie on any sort of phone and she wouldn't understand a thing he said even if she did. i end, like the sweetie, with the thing that always gets a scientific mind like the one driving this child. your grandmother, i tell him, has absolutely no evidence to support her claim. she has no proof.

he wants to know why she would say such things if they're not true. i come closer than i expect to accusing my own mother of being a drunk or possibly a meth head. it is her own fault and i am unapologetic about it. i consider a variety of scenarios and dismiss "pure evil" and "monstrously cruel", finally settling for "uninformed and confused". i do not tell the child that all grandmothers, especially in his family, are prone to telling the sort of tall tales that would make twain tip his hat in deference. i do not tell him his grandmother is lucky i cannot reach through the phone and shake her. i do consider explaining that not everyone really understands his supernatural abilities and sometimes folks are jealous or scared or just plain confused when they hear how a boy is talking to a dog on the phone and how the dog talks back and the two can understand each other just fine because that's simply how they are. but he is ten and this is an awkward enough time for a child that age without pointing out another thing that sets him apart.

i can hear in his voice that he's unsure, that he wants to believe what i'm telling him but he also wants to believe in the flawlessness of his grandmother. i decide to be honest with him, to come clean so he can have both. he knows it wasn't always guthrie on the other end of the line when he called. he knows. what hurts him is thinking we lied to him for meanness, thinking that we pretended to be someone we were not. i explain that sometimes, when guthrie was small and max was still around, guthrie would get too excited on the phone, too distracted and overwhelmed. those times, i explain to him, max would get on the phone and pretend to be guthrie because max was always a talker.

guthrie is curled up on my lap, eyes mostly closed, pretending to sleep. he hears everything, even what is on the other end of the line so far away. he is a dog and this is how dogs are. i do not know how he told the smaller child about the robot. i doubt dogs even have a word for robot. why would they? but he said something and the child understood it and now there is a robot. and the original nephew knows enough about superpowers, his own and those of the small child, to know sometimes there's no explaining something with just words.