November Exclusive - "Trust" - Part 3

Leo the lion wakes up when Aria pokes him in the eye.

“Owww.”

Leo doesn’t want to wake up because he was having an excellent dream. The wordless kind, where he’s flying but not in a scary way. Where he ends and the rest of the world begins doesn’t matter. Because he’s pure energy, he’s complete delight. And there’s the brightest light in front of him, a kaleidoscope of colors, where it’s warm. Where it’s love.

And then Aria the toddler has to poke him in the eye.

“Wake. Up!”

“Ow. Stop.” Thop. He opens his eyes, bats at Aria. “Thoppid.”

Aria stops poking, but she stays hovering over him, her blonde hair tickling his face. “Gotta wake up,” she says. Because there’s news. There have been developments since they last spoke.

But as Leo runs his tongue around his mouth and counts less than a handful of teeth, when he brings his hands to his face and stares at his chubby, bunched fingers, he doesn’t need to hear the headlines.

“Mommy made you real small,” Aria says, delivering the news anyway. “Mommy made you a little baby.”

They’re inside the pack-and-play in the living room. Leo turns his head and looks past a soft toy, a blue pacifier and the folded ends of a blanket to see through the mesh walls. The couch is unoccupied.

“Where’s Mommy?” he asks. Or rather, weh moh-ee? But Aria understands. She whispers in his ear, a stage-whisper that makes him wince, “Mommy’s in the kitchen.” Mommy in da kissin. Good information, and Leo can hardly criticize his sister’s diction.

“She makin’ dinner,” Arai adds, also good information. But what do they do with this time?

Already tired of lying on his back, Leo struggles to sit up. He manages to do it, but doesn’t like how much effort it takes. He doesn’t like his weak arms, and he really doesn’t like how his balance has shifted, his big head threatening to have lurching to the side. Learning to sit, learning to not fall over; this is all far too real.

“You can’t walk,” says Aria, looking at him critically. “Mommy says. But you can crawl.”

Leo looks down at his legs. He’s wearing a blue onesie, the image of a smiling bear on the front. He can see as well as feel the telltale bulge of a diaper.

Most significant of all, he is tiny. Less than a year old, Leo guesses. He doesn’t know much about babies, but he is an expert in the here and now. Aria, in the same striped dress as before but without the hairband, with the untidy hair of a toddler who has recently woken up from a nap, is much bigger.

And this should all be terrifying.

But Leo is aware of something essential. Thanks to what happened before, his reading of Aria’s mental state.

Leo’s memories, his knowledge of his time before Mom regressed him, is filtered through a baby’s brain. And so as he looks around the confines of the pack-and-play, he isn’t furious at the unfairness, he doesn’t feel like a prisoner. Instead, he finds himself pondering the utility of the Binky beside him. Is that for him? Is that for sucking on? Part of him is sure that it is, murmuring in the affirmative. He should suck on the pacifier. Baby suck on Binky.

Stop.

He looks away, but only as far as the stuffie. A gray something…what is it? He reaches for it, feels better for the fuzzy material between his fingers. He pets the toy absent-mindedly, a smile curling his lips.

“You like Whaley,” Aria declares with satisfaction. “Mommy says he’s your fav’rite.”

Leo cringes, drops the gray whale. But he’s glad that the stuffie is close. Because baby loves his whaley.

He shake his head, his stupidly-heavy and distracted head. He stares at Aria, who is a cheerful, fidgeting distraction of her own.

“What do we do?” asks Leo, forgiving himself for his infantile voice. It’s the best he can do right now. And of course, he’s actually speaking very well, for a baby. For a itty-bitty baby…

“What we do?” Leo says again, and this time he can feel the emotion rise in his chest. Because Aria won’t know, she’s pretty much a baby as well. And so Leo should cry, he should wail, so Mommy comes. Mommy can fix everything.

“Easy,” Aria replies. “We pretend we’re silly.” She twists her head to look towards the kitchen and then looks back at her brother, a mischievous smile on her face. “We’re gonna trick Mommy.”

Leo furrows his brow. “Huh?”

Aria beams at him. “Like before.” Wike befoh. “We pretend we’re silly, and then we call the police.” She looks at him importantly. “I remember the number and everything.”

Does Leo? He considers the idea of numbers. He groans. It’s too hard to think of numbers without seeing them. He’s sure that if he could see an actual phone, he’d be okay. Then he’d remember. And he thinks of a toy phone, the one toddlers pull behind them, the phone with the cheerful face on the front. He smiles, and he nods. “Call the police.”

And then what? He takes a deep breath. The grown-ups can work out the rest. He just needs to get ahold of Mommy’s phone. He smiles. That won’t be hard, surely. Babies are always asking to play with phones. Because phones are fun! They light up and make noises and baby can hold it and talk to it and suck on it…

No. He shouldn’t suck on a phone. That’s silly. He looks down to his right. He should suck on his Binky instead.

Aria leans forward, presses on his crotch. “Did you do a stinky?”

Leo blinks, shifts around on his bottom. He shakes his head. He hasn’t used his diaper. Probably not. Although, maybe it’s a little damp. Just a little bit. Mommy will have to change him. And the idea manages to strike Leo as humiliating and completely natural at the same time.

Isn’t that Mommy’s job, after all? Isn’t it always Mommy who cleans up messes?

Leo sniffs the air, the smell of cooking from the kitchen. His stomach gurgles.

“That’s mac ‘n’ cheese,” says Aria, evidently enjoying that she has the inside scoop on tonight’s menu. “But you don’t…” She looks as though she’s trying to remember something. And then her face brightens. “You get baby food!” She smiles angelically. “I eat mac ‘n’ cheese ‘cause I’m a big girl.”

Leo doesn’t care. Even though the food smells good. Even though he wants to big, just like Aria. Which leads to a question he should have been asking as soon as he woke up.

“Why Mommy make me a baby?”

It’s rhetorical. Aria won’t know the answer. And Leo’s anxiety over this question, the tingling sense of injustice, feels distinctly grown-up. And he glares at his sister as if this might be her fault entirely.

Why would she want to regress me too? I mean, you were the mess-up. I was doing just fine!

“You work to hard,” says Aria. She has the answer after all. “Mommy says you’re…” Her button nose wrinkles, and then she nods. “You burnin’ out!”

Leo shuts his eyes, clenches his little fists. Seriously? After helping Mommy fix Aria  - wasn’t that why he needed to visit the doctor, who pricked his arm and took some blood and put it in the little tube? Wasn’t all that so his sister could get her fresh start?

He opens his eyes, looks guiltily at Aria. He had helped Mommy, but as it turns out, he had surely helped Mommy regress him as well. So there’s no need to confess to Aria about the blood, no need to reveal the part he’s played in all of this. He’s a victim as well!

But why?

It made sense for Mommy to regress dumpster-fire Aria, but what did Leo do wrong?

You burnin’ out.

Because he works too hard? Because he’s doing too well? He thinks of a story from a long time ago, about the little girl and the bears and the porridge. Most things weren’t good enough for the fussy little girl, only the most special, perfect things were good enough.

Leo opens his eyes as he understands; Mommy is like the little girl. Aria with her bad influences and terrible grades isn’t good enough, but neither is Leo, who crushed college and is firing on all cylinders at Broadcom.

He’s ready to tell Mommy this accordingly when she comes back to the living room. He’ll tell her what a silly, fussy Mommy she’s being!

Mommy looks down at her reduced children. “Look who’s awake,” she says sweetly. “Did you have happy dreams?”

Leo opens his mouth to protest, and he remembers Aria’s plan. To pretend, wait it out until they can get a hold of Mommy’s phone.

But it’s not his sister’s plan that stops Leo from accusing his mother. It’s the understanding that he no longer has the words to argue. In fact, when Leo thinks of his job, he’s sure that he has been successful, but he can’t imagine what he actually does. There’s something called ‘scrum’ and something called ‘slack’. For all Leo can remember, those two things might as well be characters in a kids TV show. The fabulous adventures of Scrum and Slack. Dogs, probably, with special powers.

And that’s all Leo can think about as Mommy picks him up and carries him through to the kitchen. “Chunky monkey," she calls him, patting his rear. “Are you Mommy’s chunky monkey?”

There’s something in Mommy’s tone that appeals to Leo. He smiles at her, reaches for her face. He’s not sure he can stay made at his wonderful mommy She secures him in a high chair. “Don’t go anywhere,” she says, winking, and then goes back to fetch Aria.

Over dinner, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that Leo’s baby food isn’t that different from Aria’s big girl food. It’s still pasta, just not covered in yellow cheese. Leo chases the pasta twirls around his tray with fingers that are determined to catch their prey, and he gets praise from Mommy every time he’s successful. Even better, the flavors of what would seem at first glance the blandest of foods is actually a taste sensation on Leo’s tongue.

And he’s hungry. Leo gobbles up the pasta, and Aria does the same with her mac ‘n’ cheese, and both of them are full by the end. Both of them get their hands and faces wiped clean by Mommy.

So that’s all good news. Good food and full bellies. It’s okay that Leo can’t decipher the lettering on his sister’s bib. And there’s something so fun about eating at the table, about Leo showing what a big boy he is and Aria being such a big girl too.

The bad news comes when Mommy deposits the children on the living room rug, Aria grins toothily at her brother and says, “We fooled Mommy! She thinks we’re babies!”

Leo blinks. He groans. Because he hadn’t been pretending. Not since Mommy had picked him up and called him a chunky monkey. He had been entirely under Mommy’s spell, lost in an infantile haze of silliness when he had actually felt proud about being able to eat pasta with his fingers!

Aria’s eyes widen, and perhaps she’s able to surmise that Leo hadn’t really been pretending. Leo feels his face redden with embarrassment. He’s too far gone, he can’t hold the scraps of his adult mind together for more than a few seconds.

But there’s another reason for Aria’s expression.

“Look,” she says. Wook.

Leo follows Aria’s lead, but from his viewpoint on the rug, he’s none the wiser.

Aria laughs. “Silly!” She gets to her feet, toddlers over to the couch and returns with a black object.

“Mommy’s phone,” she whispers, no more quietly than she had managed before dinner. She sits down across from Leo and beams at him. “We can call the police!”

Leo looks blankly at the little girl in the striped dress. Do what?

Aria gives him a sympathetic smile. “It’s okay, silly. I know you’re thinking like a baby. I got the plan. We gonna call the police and tell them Mommy’s been naughty. ‘Member?”

Leo nods slowly. “Uh-huh.’ He looks down at the phone. “How call?”

Aria giggles. “Silly baby.” She pats his leg. “I got it.” She grins at him. “Trust me.” Twuss me.

And in that moment, Leo is utterly grateful for his sister. Aria must be just old enough to keep the plan, rudimentary as it is, intact. Call the police. Let the grown-ups sort this out.

Leo drums his fuzzy feet against the rug, feeling a heaviness in his bladder, a weight in his bowels. Aria’s so smart! Maybe they’re going to get out of this mess after all.

To be concluded...