303 days before his suicide, Judge Halliday meets a rising starlet.

It starts with a Christmas party.

No.

It starts with Zooey Deschanel, with your sons on a plane from Scottsdale for Christmas vacation, their hands folded in a flight attendant’s grasp when they meet you at Baggage Claim 4, with Oscar flying chipped plastic wings through the crisp of the air like a fighter jet. No, he tells you, like a chubby duck.

It starts with a mirror, with the mash of crushed velvet and crinoline while he gawps, open mouth and appraising, at his face. He regards a half-dozen pairs of false eyelashes on the bathroom counter like rare insects, fingers the plastic that shields them from the blunt and dirt of his nails, and tells you he wants to look like Zooey Deschanel. The lashes give no indication as to where she falls on the spectrum between Pert and Plump Ingénue™ and Eyeluring Vamp™, so you tell him you trust him to choose. He is careful, holds his lip in the gap where he cut his first adult tooth.

You’ve never done this before, but that’s probably fine, and while you squeeze a line of adhesive across the lashes’ black belly, you can’t help but think of the way your mother’s eyeglass repair kit never felt right in your hand, the screws too small, their threads insubstantial as salmon bone. See, you tell him, see? It’ll be so simple. I’ll practice on me so yours will be perfect, just a quick line here and press and fuck, something is wrong, too much glue, maybe, and you look at your reflection over his shoulder, to You’re doing a great job! on pink Post-It and your gruesome, watery wink. It starts with a wink, with the year the boys caught pinkeye from some kid on the bus so bad their eyes glued shut, with the way Oscar wouldn’t wait for the reprieve of warm rag, just tugged his crusty lashes until his lids parted through tears. But it doesn’t matter where it started, because this is where it’s going to end, you prying your lid open while you bark out a laugh and try to tell him it’s fine, while the weight in your gut turns to stone and you add applying false lashes to a list of things you’ll never teach your sons, after swimming breast stroke and tipping hotel staff, after looking grocery store clerks in the eye and avoiding the phase where they’ll eat anything for a dollar, after how to skip every other monkey bar, after avoiding detection to stay up late and watch Nick at Nite reruns. After how to cheat at Scrabble. After falling safely in and out of love.

His breath is hot and his fingers are sticky from a mystery in the pockets of his party dress when he takes your lid between his thumb and forefinger and tells you to pull. Your left eye creaks open and his silhouette swims and bends like the glass bottom of a boat. He shrugs and says now do me but be careful with the glue, his bare feet thump-thumping against your thighs, his back faithful and steady as stone.

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226 days before his suicide, Judge Halliday has second thoughts

In a moment of eerie silence on a Sunday afternoon, Oscar cut his own bangs. You ought to have known better when the hush of his dump truck on your kitchen tile went still, but it’s been a long time since you had to remember these things, so when he crawled from beneath the table, kitchen shears in one hand, fistful of brown strands in the other, and told you plainly that the hair kept getting trapped behind his glasses, you could do nothing but agree and try to set things right. Together, you tried to unwobble the line he gouged across his forehead, but he has your cowlick, and the damage was done. Without the weight to hold it down, a half-inch of hair above his left eye shoots up like toadflax, springs back against your palm despite water, despite sweat and gel.

So tonight, you are here, crumpled without ceremony on a trundle bed while he curls, fresh-bathed, against your waist like an eel. He sucks on the neckline of spaceman jammies grown tight in the wrist and shoulders while you read, the ineffable smell of his spit muddled with fresh linen and the cloying, fruity tang of tear-free shampoo. That smell will linger long after he falls asleep, trapped in the wet spot where his head rests against your shoulder. His blunt finger, bitten to the quick, follows the lines as you speak them, his voice folded into your armpit as he whispers along. This is his favorite part: Wanda Petronski’s one hundred dresses papering Room 13’s every window and wall, miracles in taffeta and charmeuse. When he begins to nod off, his cowlick—your cowlick—brushes against the bob in your throat, and you realize all at once you won’t watch him turn eight. How many more times will he carve into the hairline that looks just like yours before you’re gone? And once you are, how long will it take him to learn that Halliday men’s hands are too big, too clumsy to account for unpredictable growth, that it’s always better to trust a woman with strong thumbs? For the first time since last year, you remember that October twentieth is not a foregone conclusion, and you allow yourself to consider what might be waiting for you on the twenty-first. Ricardo the Vampire hasn’t come back since you banished him a few weeks ago, and the boys came to visit so shortly after, you haven’t had time to feel the weight of his absence. Instead, the weight of this body, all slung limb and drool, presses you into pilled dinosaur sheets, and you imagine the way he would jolt awake if you just disappeared, whether his dreams would correct for your absence and push him from some great height.