TREVOR’S left incisor is the first tooth to go.
He’s dreamt about losing his teeth before but this dream is different. In the mirror, his teeth are small and pointed and sticking out at odd angles, spaced far apart. Like old gravestones. He pushes one tooth with his finger and it sinks deeper into the pinkness of his gum. Deeper, deeper, gone. Now it is hiding. Then he pushes the next tooth from one side of his mouth to the other. It’s like moving a stone through murky soup.
His grin is gap-toothed and wavering, uncertain, strange. All at once his teeth tumble out of his mouth and clatter down into the sink. He stands there blinking, his smile not quite gone. The hidden tooth, still there, hums in its fleshy pocket. Mhmmm, it says. Mhmmm.
When he wakes up he raises his hand and checks—he always checks after dreams like this—and there’s a hole in his mouth where a tooth should be, a fucking hole, a wet opening that cups the tip of his finger. When he sits up and turns around he finds it there in the middle of the pillow. His tooth. The gum end of the incisor is polished and sharp. A human thumbtack.
Jeanne dreams on, oblivious. Trevor picks up the tooth and holds it against the opening in his mouth, half afraid it will stitch itself back in. Half afraid it will just disappear.
Calvin starts to cry in the nursery. After a moment Trevor draws the tooth out. He thumbs the opening in his mouth again and his hand comes away wet, glistening. Behind the wet, a whisper of oddly cool air. A draft leaking out from his brain, his teeth the only thing standing between him and the universe. A few more dreams like this, a few more fallen teeth, and he’ll dissolve into molecules and become nothing but science.
He puts the tooth on the nightstand and goes to find his son. Calvin is red-faced and sweaty, standing at the bars of his crib. A tiny prisoner. When Trevor picks him up Calvin’s hand goes to Trevor’s mouth right away—his finger finds the tooth-hole, hangs on. He stops crying.
“It’s not funny,” Trevor says, around the finger. It’th na’ fu-ee.
But Calvin isn’t laughing. He just watches Trevor, the same way he’s done since the day they brought him home.
“It’s just a tooth,” Trevor says.
Calvin pulls his hand away. “Bal,” he says.
“Yes.” Trevor pretends to bite Calvin’s hand and the baby giggles. “Val. I know.”
Eventually the baby falls asleep and Trevor puts him back to bed. Jeanne’s still snoring when he slips back into their bedroom. He flicks on the bedside lamp, and that’s when he sees the money. Five hundred-dollar bills peeking out from beneath his pillow.
No tooth, though. He can’t find it anywhere. He even checks beneath the bed—his fingers slide through dust, grasp nothing but air.
• • •
The afternoon before, the Tooth Fairy had come to his house dressed as a bag lady.
“Spare some change, sonny?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He shifted the baby on his hip and moved to close the door. “You’re mistaken—the shelter’s one house over.”
“I wasn’t asking, Trevor,” the bag lady said. She wore a purple tutu, ragged shoes, green barrettes in her scraggly white hair. The drawstring bag that dangled between her hands smelled sour and old. “I’ve come to collect.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m collecting. It’s time to pay up.”
“I don’t have any change,” he said, bewildered.
“Yes you do.” She jingled the bag. “You’ve got a whole mouthful of change right there.”
That’s when he saw the teeth. They were nestled in her little bag, molars and incisors and canines all tumbling over one another with every shake of her hand. Like little bits of Halloween candy. Yellowed, turning brown at the edges.
“What are you—the Tooth Fairy?”
She didn’t blink. “You said it, my friend. Not me.” Then she threw out a veiny hand. “Look—it’s not like I asked for this gig. Don’t you think I’d rather hand out presents once a year? Or sit in a mountain retreat and spend my days engraving tablets? Instead I zoom from house to house collecting teeth. Some deal. Anyway,” and now she straightened her shoulders, shook her head so that little flakes of something—definitely not fairy dust—drifted down past her shoulders, “I’m not staying. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ll be needing something from you fairly soon, and I thought it only polite to show my face.”
“From me?” he said. “What do you want from me?”
“Oh,” and the bag lady shook her head, “nothing much. Just the baby.”
He laughed. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Uh, okay.”
She smiled. Her own teeth, he noticed then, were blindingly white and straight. A beacon in her grubby little face. “I’m not joking.”
“Whatever.” This time he shut the door.
“The name’s Val, Trevor,” she shouted at him through the wood. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the park. Eleven a.m. Don’t be late.”
“You can go fuck yourself,” he shouted back.
Calvin stared at him, not blinking.
“Yes,” he said to the baby. “Daddy said a bad word. I’m sorry.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, again. Her voice went flat and hard. “You won’t be late. I’ll make sure of it.”
By the time Jeanne came home from work, he’d almost forgotten about it. At dinner, the baby ate mashed peas with his hands and touched his own tooth, which had made its first appearance the week before. “Bal,” he said, watching Trevor.
“Ball?” Jeanne smiled. She’d come home to a quiet house, anxiety-ridden spaghetti. Trevor pacing restless in the kitchen. “Did you just say ball, Calvin? Are you Mommy’s smart little boy?” Her own teeth were slightly yellowed because before Calvin, she’d been a smoker. She hadn’t yet lost the baby weight, thought it kind of pointless. What difference does it make if we’re just going to have another one anyway? Her hand against Trevor’s own was soft and warm. “I feel bad,” she said then. “Being away from him all day.”
“We’re okay,” Trevor said, though she hadn’t asked about him at all. “We talked about this already. You make more money—it only makes sense.” No daycare. One income. The poorer part of town.
“I know,” she said. “And anyway—it won’t be forever. Right?”
Right. Save up, Trevor. Save up, be patient, work hard while you’re young. The baby won’t remember eating peas for days on end. When your wife gets that promotion and you move to that bright new house, you’ll forget this drab apartment altogether.
• • •
The next morning he folds the money into his coat pocket before his wife wakes up. After Jeanne goes to work, he puts Calvin in the stroller and they meet Val at the park. She’s waiting for them both by the kiddie swings. She’s so small she fits right into a swing—her legs wrinkled, her knees knobbing at the breeze. She’s wearing the same purple tutu that she wore the day before. The same green barrettes in her hair.
“Hello, Trevor,” she says. She smells worse than before, if that’s even possible. “Did she like the gift, your Jeanne?”
“I liked my tooth more.” When he says tooth, the word whistles. He stops the stroller just shy of Val’s feet.
“You’ll get used to it,” Val clucks and coos at the baby. “It’s just one tooth. One tooth out of a whole mouthful of change, like I said.”
“So the dream—that was you.”
“Of course it was me. Don’t be stupid.”
“I don’t understand what you want. Is it money? Or,” he says, a sudden thought. “Are you… troubled? My wife works at the hospital. She could get you in there. Help you to talk to somebody.”
Val snaps her fingers and he feels the side of his mouth cave in, his mouth suddenly filled with pointy marbles. He spits the teeth, three of them, into his hand. “I thought you’d be reasonable,” she says.
“Reasonable?” he says. His voice edges into hysteria. No blood—just his thumbtack teeth, and that shiver of air in his head. Calvin, hearing the change, starts to whimper. “You show up on my door and say you want my goddamned son and I’m the one who’s unreasonable?”
“You can have another baby,” she says, so calm. “Don’t forget I could take him away from you just as easily. I am being polite.”
“You’re inthane,” he snaps.
“We always collect, Trevor,” she says. “You promise things, and we collect. That’s just what happens.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Val moves off of her kiddie swing and takes his hand, the one that’s still outstretched, holding his teeth. She folds his fingers inward so that the teeth press their ends into his palm. Her eyes flecked with something deeper than dust now—sorrow, or fatigue. “I’ll be good to him,” she says. “And you’ll be able to build around the loss. Maybe even strike out, and be new. Have you thought of that?”
“I love him,” he says. “I’d never do that.” The words clear like water, or the air that’s even now swirling through his head.
Val looks straight at him. “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.”
“You’re crazy.”
“And you received the promises, dear boy. ‘I’ll do anything if she marries me. Anything. Please God, let her marry me. Please.’ Isn’t that exactly what you said?”
Jeanne the elegant smoker at that first Halloween party: Audrey Hepburn in her black dress and pearls. The cigarette holder dangling from her hand.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” A gust of wind blows into his mouth and hits the hole—multiple holes now—where his teeth used to be. His jaw throbs in pain. “I just said—that’s what everybody says.”
“And everybody pays up,” she tells him. “Eventually. In one way or another.” She pats his pocket with her other hand—the bulge of paper bills is larger. Unmistakably. Trevor shoves his fist into the pocket and draws out—twenty hundred-dollar bills? Thirty? He can’t tell. He can’t still his mind enough to count.
“I’ll be a good parent,” she says, her voice soft. “I’ve seen enough of them over the years—I know how it’s done.”
“Jeanne is an excellent parent,” he says fiercely. “And tho am I.” He feels himself blushing. Goddamn. Goddamn.
Val hasn’t let go of his hand. “Two months ago you almost cracked his head against the wall.”
“I was angry. Everyone gets angry.”
“A month before that, you thought about leaving him at the grocery store.”
“I wouldn’t actually do it.”
“Every afternoon, I hear the same thing. ‘Please God—make him stop crying. Or so help me I’ll do it myself.’”
“I wouldn’t do it,” he whispers, again. “I wouldn’t.”
“No? You wouldn’t leave him strapped in his high chair, walk out of the house, board that bus out of town and just say goodbye?”
He swallows. Something hard snakes down his throat with that saliva. He watches the flash in her eyes.
“Right molar,” she says. “Your dentist filled the cavity when you were seventeen.”
His pockets bag with coins.
“No one thinks it,” Val continues, “when we come calling, but sometimes the hardest gifts are the best ones.” She lets go of his hand, finally, and bends down to grin at the baby.
“Bal,” Calvin says. His eyes crinkle. He bounces his hands on the bar of his stroller.
“You’re a sweet boy,” Val says. She kisses her wizened fingers and presses them to his cheek. “I’ll take good care of you. I promise.”
“Please go away.” Trevor flexes his fingers; the teeth stay put, don’t move. “Why don’t you go pick on someone else?”
“Ah.” Val doesn’t smile this time. “Isn’t that what everyone says when they’re visited by the gods?”
• • •
The dentist is baffled, can’t understand. “They just came out?”
Trevor has brought the teeth in a small baggie; now they sit on the dentist’s little metal tray, dull in the light from her lamp. “Yes. The first one came out after a dream.”
“I’ve never seen them fall out like that,” the dentist says. “If a tooth comes out, it’s either pushed out and broken, or we pull it, or it rots.” She smiles a little, shudders a little more. “I’ve had dreams like those.” She slides a gloved finger around the molar. “They’re supposed to be good luck in some cultures. Not all of them.”
Yes. He’d read about that last night, after Jeanne had put Calvin to bed. Dreams about losing your teeth were about power: money, the loss of it. Common fears in teeth dreams: death and aging. People who dreamed about losing their teeth were “more anxious and depressed, had less ego strength, were dissatisfied with their lives.”
Jeanne had frowned at him, not understanding, when he said that the teeth had just come out. He hadn’t said anything about Val.
“They don’t just do that,” she said. Jeanne had had six cavities before she’d turned seven; apple juice, straight from her baby’s bottle. “They don’t just fall out, Trevor. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Another theory: teeth dreams were about men, putting their faith in each other instead of in God.
“Do you floss?” the dentist continues.
“Every goddamned day.”
“How many fillings have you had up to now?”
“Just the one.”
“Are you allergic to your toothpaste?”
“Who gets allergic to toothpaste?”
She shrugs. “Not that many people. But maybe that explains it. Still—your gums are healthy.” She reaches into his mouth again and pads the pink space around where his teeth used to be. Like a jockey, readying her horse for the race. “Trevor—I honestly have no idea.”
“And you can’t re-attach them.”
“We can, actually.” The dentist keeps frowning. “But I don’t know what good it will do—usually these surgeries work best within forty-five minutes of rupture. And there’s no blood, no opening—it’s like your teeth were never there. I’d have to cut into the gums and re-attach the ligaments. It will be painful, and expensive.”
“What about implants?”
“Also painful,” she says. “And just as expensive. Does Jeanne have insurance?”
“I might be able to pay,” he says. He rests his head back and stares up into the light of her shining, sterile lamp. “I’ll have to make sure.”
“Don’t wait too long. Try and call before we close today. I could get you in tomorrow, hopefully, if it works.”
• • •
Val meets him on the way home. He sees her turn the corner ahead and hobble down the street toward him—a grotesque fairy, a shimmering god.
“Don’t think,” she says when she’s in front of him, “that I won’t just do this all again with your shiny new surgical teeth.” She lets her thumb and forefinger brush each other and he feels his mouth flood in terror.
“But I have the money,” he whispers. “If you take my teeth I’ll just get new ones.”
“It’s not the teeth I want, Trevor,” she says. Smelly, so patient. “You wanted Jeanne, and now you have her. You said you’d do anything. Well, do anything is happening right now.”
“You’re crazy!” He shouts the words so loud that someone, startled, drops their bags across the street.
Val doesn’t move. “Abraham said that, once upon a time.”
“I am not fucking Abraham!”
More stares. Ahead of them there’s a man in khaki shorts and a striped polo shirt—the kind of man that he and Jeanne would have laughed at before the baby. The man doubles back to them, holds a hesitant hand out in the air beside Trevor’s arm.
“Are you all right?” he says. He has dark blonde hair—a man with highlights, Jeanne would once have sneered—and a dark star tattooed beneath the left side of his jaw. “Can I help you, sir?”
Sir. “I’m fine,” Trevor says. He spits another tooth onto the sidewalk. Balls his shaking hands.
“Boys are so beautiful when they’re young,” Val says. Star Tattoo doesn’t seem to notice.
“Are you sure?” the other man says. “I could help you. We’re just down the street from the hospital. We could get you someplace to sleep, someplace to get cleaned up.” He reaches a hand out but Trevor jerks away.
“I’m fine!” he shouts, again.
“Don’t you think so?” Val says. Star Tattoo says nothing, does nothing, looks at no one but Trevor. “When they’re wriggling and filled with that ache for the world. Before they grow up and become smarter than you are.”
“Fuck off,” Trevor says.
“Look, man—I’m just trying to help.”
“I’m not talking to you!”
Star Tattoo flips open his cell. “I’m going to call someone, okay? We’re going to get you help.”
“I don’t need help,” Trevor says. He thinks of Calvin, and how he didn’t say goodbye. How they never said goodbye to Calvin, he and Jeanne. How it was always just see you soon. See you later!
He feels another tooth dislodge at the back of his mouth, and spits that one out too.
“Hi,” Star Tattoo says, into his phone. “Yeah—I think we need an ambulance.”
“I don’t need help!” Trevor says, again. He watches Val’s eyes flash, and then begins to walk away.
“Hey,” says Star Tattoo. “Hey!”
“I am not fucking Abraham,” Trevor says, ignoring the other voices. Val trots beside him, smiling. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“You’re the one who’s talking to himself right now, Trevor.”
“I’m not.” He speaks the words around more teeth. And now, the bright tang of blood pooling on his tongue. “Abraham didn’t give his son up, anyway.”
“Didn’t he?” Val says, once more so grave. The bag of teeth clacks at her side as they walk. “You don’t think a son might see his father in another light after being bound against that altar? You don’t think Isaac might have climbed down that mountain altogether different, even after being spared?”
He stops. He’s breathing hard. Have they been running? Is that Star Tattoo back behind them, coming up fast?
“I want to be different,” he says. His spine dips under weight of the word. “But I want Calvin to stay the same. It’s too much, and not enough.” More teeth on the ground now, his mouth a jagged hole.
“He will,” Val says. Star Tattoo comes closer but he’s not moving at all. What? “I understand, Trevor. Didn’t I tell you that already? Sometimes the hardest gifts are the best ones.” She comes closer too, close enough so he can see the lice that scurry through her hair. Except—it isn’t lice, when he looks closer. It’s tiny people, scratching furrows in her head.
He has money now. Pockets so heavy it’s a wonder the pavement doesn’t swallow him up.
Val reaches into his mouth and takes another tooth. This one shines as she draws it away. “You won’t forget,” she says. Star Tattoo stays frozen behind them, shouting. Val keeps speaking, as though he isn’t there. “But that’s okay too, Trevor. Your memories will help both you and Jeanne to heal.”
“You’ll take care of him?” He thinks of the days ahead—a car accident? An illness? A child vanished like a changeling? The fights with Jeanne, the strange freedom of their anguish. The grief pinwheels through his arms like some kind of seizure. He bites down hard, on nothing.
“I’ll give him everything you could want,” Val says. “And more than you or Jeanne could possibly dream of.”
“Maybe I don’t want Jeanne anymore.” The words are mushy. They have no edges. He’s on his knees now, mumbling true sounds that make no sense.
“I know,” Val says. Her voice is ancient, deep and sad. Her hand against his hair is the softest thing he’s ever known. “I’ve always known.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amanda Leduc's essays and stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Tampa Review Online, ELLE Canada, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, filling Station, Existere Journal, and others. She has been long listed for the 2014 CBC Canada Writes Short Story Contest, and previously shortlisted for both the 2012 TNQ Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and PRISM International's 2012 Short Fiction Contest. Her novel, THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN, was published in 2013 by Toronto's ECW Press. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she spends too much time on the Internet and is at work on her next novel.
LF #041 © Amanda Leduc. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2013. Image from The Noun Project.
