Shena McAuliffe, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Tricycle

1.

Patrick suggested a balance bike as Logan’s Christmas present, but by the time Laura went to buy one, they were sold out. It was Christmas Eve, too late to order one online, and she didn’t want to go all over town just to find that they were out everywhere. There were three tricycles on the shelf, and one of them was red with yellow lightning bolts and a bucket seat. Laura figured Logan wouldn’t know what he was missing.

Patrick grumbled when she brought the trike home, but Laura asked if he wanted to be the one who drove all over town looking for a Strider, so he shut up and saluted her. After Logan went to bed, she tied a big red bow to the handlebars, and parked the trike next to the tree. She and Patrick ate the cookies Logan had arranged on a plate for Santa. Patrick drank the milk and gave himself a moustache, Laura licked it off, and they went up to bed together for the first time in a month.

In the morning, Logan woke them up when it was still dark, so Patrick told him to go feed the cat. Don’t you even think of looking at it the Christmas tree, Patrick said. I’ll know if you do! If you look, the presents might just up and disappear! Poof!

Laura thought of that famous experiment with the marshmallows when the scientists put a kid in a room with a marshmallow on a plate and told them not to eat it. The scientists promised the kid that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow, they could have loads of marshmallows when the scientists returned. It was supposed to test the kid’s self-control, their understanding of delayed gratification, but personally, Laura saw an upside to just eating the marshmallow right then and there, scientists be damned. If you ate it, you could escape their creepy surveillance more quickly, and anyway, one marshmallow was plenty, thank you very much. But Laura knew that Logan would wait. If they told him not to look at the tree, he wouldn’t look at the tree. She never understood where he got his self-control. 

We should have told him not to get out of bed until it was light, Laura said. Patrick groaned and nuzzled into her, but she was already getting up. She pulled on a ratty sweatshirt and hoped that one of the boxes under the tree contained a new hoodie or a bathrobe.

Logan loved the trike. He tried to pedal it around the living room, but it was tough to ride on carpet, so they took him outside to give it a try. The snow was late that year, and the sidewalks were dry. Logan’s breath came out in clouds. He was nearly four, almost ready for a regular bike, but the trike would last him for a little while. Patrick gave him a good push and he pedaled as fast as he could before pulling on the brake to make the trike skid. His laugh was like a million bubbles of joy. It was a good Christmas, a good day together, one of their best, but then the winter settled in, and Logan didn’t ride the trike again until spring.

On an April afternoon, Laura left the car at home and walked with the trike to pick Logan up from preschool. On the way home, he pedaled alongside her for a bit, then sprinted off, yelling back at her to hurry up, calling her “Poky Little Puppy.” She didn’t feel like running to catch up. She called after him to slow down for the hill. She thought for sure he’d crash, but she could hear him giggling. The sky was so blue, and there were little furry buds on the tips of the tree branches and any day now there would be flowers. She closed her eyes and walked along blind to everything, enjoying the warmth on her face, feeling the wintery hunch of her shoulders melting away. And then she turned the corner onto their street and saw Logan slumped down in the seat of the tricycle. She knew immediately that it was real, that he wasn’t playing, because of the way his head was hanging off to the side, like a dandelion on a broken stem.

She ran to him and pulled his small body out of the bucket seat and kicked the trike away and he fell heavy across her lap, his head back. Her heart was beating too fast, too hard. She had no idea what to do. She called out for help, but it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Everyone was at work or school. Then Logan woke up. His eyes were fuzzy and unfocused, but he was alive.

Laura didn’t cry, not then. She lifted Logan up and told him to hold on. His arms felt weak around her neck, but she carried him to corner store, where Arthur, the store owner, said he should go to the emergency room and called an ambulance.

A seizure, the doctor said. It had nothing to do with the trike. There was no telling why it had happened then or there. Later, Laura was amazed that she hadn’t seen it, not any of it, just the aftermath. Logan hadn’t been out of her sight for more than a minute or two, but the shaking had started and stopped all while she was busy sauntering along with her eyes closed.

She didn’t cry until after all the scans and tests, after Patrick was there with them, and Logan was finally sleeping in a crinkly white hospital bed. She was tired and scared and relieved that Logan was alive, and that he was sleeping. He looked again like the boy she knew, her little boy. In the uncomfortable chairs beside Logan’s hospital bed, Laura leaned her head on Patrick’s shoulder and felt grateful it was all over, although it turned out that it was only the beginning. She didn’t yet know how the seizures would become familiar. She didn’t yet know about making space around Logan’s body when a seizure came, about timing the length of the shaking, about clearing his mouth and turning him on his side afterward, about Tegretol and Dilantin, and how she’d worry about what it was doing to his brain. But in that moment, Logan was asleep, and Patrick stroked her hair, and she cried.

2.

A hot blue September evening. AC units chugging in windowsills, dripping puddles onto the sidewalks. It still felt like summer to Jamie, even though school had started a week ago. He and his buddy Frank were sixteen years old and drunk on Colt 45.

A tricycle was overturned in a scrubby front yard on the east side of the railroad bridge, where the houses were more ramshackle than on the west side, where Jamie lived. Through the open window came the voice of a kid howling that he didn’t want to go to bed while it was still light out, and then a woman’s voice promising him a story if he would just choose a book already.

Frank looked up and down the street, then picked up the trike and ran with it to the end of the block and disappeared around the corner. Jamie didn’t bother running to keep up. No one was around, and he was enjoying a cherry cigarillo that was probably gumming up his lungs with nicotine and tar, but he liked the flavor of candy and burning leaves. Cigarillos made him feel connected to old men he saw in photographs, and to the living men that hung out at the bodega, squatting on crates and badmouthing the president, while Arthur, the bodega owner, sorted through onions and dented green peppers, deciding which were saleable and which were past the point of no return.

Jamie had never seen a woman smoke a cigarillo, but a year later he would have a girlfriend whose grandma loved cigars, and he would love that old woman even more than he loved his girlfriend, Luisa. A self-described “old bat,” she didn’t care if Jamie and Lu closed the bedroom door as long as they promised they were using protection. She made killer hash browns, too, puffing away on her cigar the whole time she was standing at the stove. Some afternoons when Jamie and Lu came into her kitchen after school, she made them sit down at the table and write postcards to the mayor or the governor or the senator, imploring that they do something about the state of the roads in their town, or the river water that flowed with foul-smelling suds every Tuesday morning after the textile factory purged its tanks. She went to meetings at City Hall twice a month.

But on the night that Frank stole the trike, all that was still in the future.

Jamie rounded the corner chewing on his cigarillo, and there was Frank, squeezed onto the trike, peddling like a goddamned toddler, his knees ramming his shoulders. Finally got me some wheels, Frank said, deadpan. I just need a little help to get going. Give me a push!

Jamie put his hands on Frank’s shoulders and pushed until Frank pedaled away from him, weaving in wild arcs until he reached the place where the sidewalk curved down under the bridge and merged into the bike path where Jamie’s mom walked their dog every morning, counting her steps as the sun glared off the river. Mist rose from the water sometimes. It was pretty on days that the air wasn’t fouled with the smell of the factory tanks.

Frank got going pretty good on the downhill. He took his feet off the pedals and held them in the air, laughing maniacally. Jamie dropped his cigarillo and ran after his friend, shoes slapping. Frank careened into the metal guardrail that separated the sidewalk from the scrub that grew along the riverbank, his shoulder against the rail the only thing that kept him from tipping over. When Jamie got there, Frank showed him a patch of raw skin where the rail had rubbed through his t-shirt, but he was laughing. He heaved the trike over the guardrail into the weeds, then stepped over after it.

The grass was tall and dry, and the milkweed pods were spilling their fluffy seeds. All of it was probably teeming with ticks. Warning signs were posted at all the parks around town, with enlarged photos of the type of ticks that could give you Lyme, and instructions for how to check yourself for them, and how to remove it if you found one, how to save them in a baggie and take them to the doctor so a lab could check if they were infected, how to watch yourself for a rash. Lyme disease can be treated, the signs said, but everyone knew someone with Lyme, or someone who maybe had Lyme, or someone with mysterious aches and wildness in their eyes, someone who had become skeletal seemingly overnight, and it did not seem that their ailments had been treated.

Looking at the dry grass, Jamie thought of Vicky, a girl at school who had recently begun to walk with a cane, but he followed Frank anyway. He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a tallboy, cracked it open and held it away from himself, knowing it was ready to burst from all the shaking when he ran. A third of the beer sprayed out across the weeds toward the river, then Jamie took a long pull and handed it to Frank. He sat down in the dirt beside his friend.

In November, Jamie’s mom would go to the ER for her first severe asthma attack, and Jamie would have to walk the dog every day for a week (and the trike would still be there, where they would leave it). In two more years, Frank would be a father, and Jamie’s mom would be seriously sick. And then Jamie would move out of the old neighborhood, taking the Amtrak three hours south to the city, wondering how long it would be before he returned to this upstate town, and if, when he came back, he’d finally be a man.

But for now, he watched the river slide past while the sun sank into treetops and the twilight turned to darkness, and the guidelights under the bridge blinked on, red and green, shining for boats that never came, warning them to stay to the middle of the channel.

3.

Erin called her sister on the drive home from the courthouse, and then sat in her car in front of her apartment, promising that she’d start swiping right just as soon as she reached her weight-loss goal, ten pounds from now. But after she hung up, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror and shook her head in disgust. Who even was she? A middle-aged divorcee who counted calories and downloaded dating apps? And with winter coming, it was a hard time of year to eat a lot of salad. She slammed the car door extra hard when she got out.

Inside, she changed into her running clothes, pausing again to inspect herself in the mirror: noting her lumpy thighs, her too-small breasts, the scar where she had a carcinoma removed from her chest in July. But she liked her shoulders well enough, and her face was still smooth for someone in her forties. She imagined how she’d look in another decade or three, did not like what she saw, then put on her running shoes, jabbed her earpods into her ears, and cranked up the volume on the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” If she was going to be a goddamned cliché, she’d would at least do it to a good beat. She spoke aloud to her knees, thanking them for sticking with her, and set out on her first run as an officially divorced woman.

In the place where the bike path curved down to the river and passed under the bridge, someone had abandoned a tricycle in a tangle of weeds. It was positioned as if to admire the river and the bridge pilons, where mismatched rectangles of gray paint had been hastily applied to cover graffiti. Erin thought of a William Eggleston photograph of a tricycle from the 1970s that had always been one of her favorites. He had positioned his camera low to the ground so that the trike looked monumental on the cracked concrete. That trike had been navy and white with slightly rusty chrome, while this one was red and yellow plastic with a bucket seat and chopper-style handlebars, but she stopped running to look at the thing for a minute. She was out of breath anyway.

Erin had studied photography in college, before she got married and moved from Denver to upstate New York with her husband. She had worked mostly in black and white, and no digital at all, but there had been one semester of color photography. All that stuff seemed so useless now that everyone just took pictures with their phones and never even printed anything out. What had happened to all those old enlargers and red lights and developer trays now that hardly anyone used darkrooms?

Color photo paper, she recalled, was sensitive to every color of light, so the color darkroom had been a tiny, pitch-black room where one had to work alone. You adjusted the filters in the enlarger and exposed the paper through the colored gels, and then, once again in total darkness, you loaded the exposed paper into the developing cylinder. It was in photography classes that she had learned that the colors of the world are rarely what we think they are. That sodium vapor streetlights skew yellow, and mercury vapor streetlights skew cyan. Before that, she had taken it for granted that both lamplight and sunlight were white. But light comes in every color, and color is a phenomenon of perception.           

It was in that class that she had seen the work of William Eggleston. The local history museum where Erin worked now would never host an exhibit of Eggleston’s photographs. Even though Eggleston’s work was important to the history of photography, her museum couldn’t afford it, and they didn’t care about photographs unless they were from old newspapers, tintypes, or faded sepia portraits from the nineteenth century. And anyway, the people in her town wouldn’t care about red vinyl diner booths and glass Coke bottles that looked an awful lot like the litter they so often flung out their car windows.

Erin could never pinpoint why Eggleston’s photographs always made her want to simultaneously cry and sing. His hotel rooms with beige telephones were the loneliest hotel rooms in the world. His skinny old woman in a floral dress was the brightest, most exuberant old woman Erin had ever seen—those gangly legs and knobby knees. The casual dangle of her cigarette. Erin loved her, this unknown old woman in a photograph, and so she loved the strangers she saw on the street. Eggleston’s photographs made her see differently. They suggested that everyday life was worth inspecting, that nothing was beneath notice, that even—or especially—the unloved and unlovely could be captivating.

Erin stood for a long time, looking at the trike, feeling her heart rate settle back to its normal rhythm. Then she took her phone out of the Velcro band around her arm and climbed over the guardrail.

Chances were the person who left it there had never seen Eggleston’s famous photograph. It wasn’t as if they had left the trike there on purpose, and it certainly wasn’t meant for her. But Erin squatted as low as she could, positioning her phone on the ground to frame the trike so it would look monumental. And it was monumental to her, this tricycle now in her camera’s lens, dwarfing the distant power lines, lost in the weeds, abandoned or forgotten beneath the flat gray sky.

Shena McAuliffe on “Tricycle“:

It was a tricycle, abandoned in some weeds along the river, that prompted this story. In my first draft, I began with section 2, the theft of the trike, and concluded with section 1, the chronological beginning of the tricycle’s history and the saddest of the three sections. I suppose the current order, which is chronological, simplifies things, and since the story is already disjunct, simplifying the chronology seemed like the right choice. Plus, it’s nice to move beyond the sad beginning, rather than end there.

Recently, I’ve been writing stories that center nonhuman objects—a pair of gloves, a sinking cargo ship—and in a way, this is one such story. But a friend pointed out that it is also a story about parenting, and that’s true, and it’s important to me that there are multiple types of parenting here, and that it’s a story about a community, too. Like a trike, I think of it as a story rolling on multiple wheels.

William Eggleston’s photograph, Memphis, that Erin recalls when she sees the tricycle in section 3.

Shena McAuliffe is the author of We Are a Teeming Wilderness: Stories (2023), Glass Light Electricity: Essays (2020), and The Good Echo: A Novel (2018). She is an Associate Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York.