The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page A

injunction: “When you wake up, Kim will be here” and “Please, for the love of God, do not terrorize Kim.” Somehow the earnestness and gravity of that injunction did not reach me.
    I went to sleep that night positively giddy with the prospect of a woman being in the house upon my waking. My father was gone by six, I rose at eight, ahead of my siblings, and the first thing I did, before I even shook myself fully awake, was dress in my ninja regalia, mask and all—this was the apex of my Sho Kosugiperiod—including tabi boots and a utility belt into which I tucked my weapons, the nunchucks and shurikens I was too young and knuckleheaded to have, and yet I had them. I also owned a black grappling hook with a knotted rope I’d ordered from a catalog, and this was good news, because we had an open upstairs hallway, loftlike beneath a cathedral ceiling, a balcony that overlooked our living room. Lately I’d been practicing my crafty descent from the balcony onto the cushioned armchair below.
    I’d later be told that what I did next was unequivocally wacky behavior, even for a ten-year-old—“borderline mental illness,” my father said. But here it is: in my ninja suit I crept across the carpet to the spindles of the balcony, and I saw, down there asnooze on our sofa, the woman called Kim. Her hair—what was that color called? sangria? currant?—was cropped close, spiky like a man’s, and this sent tides of delight through me because all night I’d been expecting a commonplace do, an umber or mousy mane, permed just past her shoulders.
    I secured the grappling hook’s talon to the banister and rappelled, knot by knot, to the armchair, then ducked behind one of the two sofas, on my knees at the corner of it, spying on her erotic snores. Then, step by glacial, silent step, I approached those snores, my own breath clinched. I was close enough to smell her now, a fruity odor, part shampoo, part disinfectant. I’d punched nose-holes in my mask for ventilation, un-ninja of me, I know, but I couldn’t breathe in the thing otherwise.
    Her face was warmed by skylights: a creamy complexion, the dimmed galaxy of freckles across pronounced cheekbones, lips like azaleas. I was standing over her, bent at the waist, only two feet between us, my heart bobbing in my breast. And when her eyes flashed open—the sleeping mind sometimes knows when a delinquent is watching it—the sound she made was not so much a scream from the mouth as a moan from the throat, a clipped moan stucksomewhere between surprise and injury. Of course I rushed away, retreated back up to my bedroom, bolted the door, left Kim there on the sofa wondering if she’d been poked or probed. Even a visual trespass can feel filthy. I have no memory now of what followed, of what we five did that day after my father returned from work, but I know that evening she left and never came back.
    My decade-old self, the child as traitor: the unconscious saboteur of my father’s romantic hopes. Such maliciousness, such bristling, can hide in the heart of a child. He gets even for perceived wrongs, for whatever marring he feels has been unjustly done to him, and he gets even against those who deserve it least. Of what was my father guilty? Of driving away my mother? What hazard did Kim present to me? The splitting of my father’s affections? Of course my creepy ninja act was not to blame for her going away and never coming back, but neither was it darling boyishness: a ten-year-old is not a five-year-old. The latter can get away with all orders of mischief; the former is just two years shy of pubic hair.
    During those childhood years, there would be only one more appearance by a woman in our house, a fellow divorcee with two children of her own, a Manville girl, someone who’d known my mother before she’d disappeared, someone who could have been Carly Simon’s stunt double. Her