An excerpt from 'This Boy We Made' by Taylor Harris (thurris)
Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo Getty Images Paul found him that morning. Our twenty-two-month-old boy, staring and still, awake without a sound. A twenty-pound toddler in blue pajamas, lying across the only thing we allowed in his crib—a taut cotton sheet.
Now he was much bigger, so I folded Tophs, who seemed to store all his body fat in his cheeks, into my arms, then into bed, thankful for an extra hour of sleep. With Eliot’s preschool on spring break and Paul teaching on Grounds, I had a full day ahead of playing tennis with foam balls in the hallway of our University of Virginia faculty apartment, a glorified dormitory suite with cinderblock walls, or listening to music on the desktop while the kids stomped on alphabet squares.
front, before I could tug his blue pajama pants up toward his waist, he had fallen back asleep. Our son with the beautiful face, the one who loved to clap in circles around the apartment or doctor’s office or sidewalk, stretched out and still between us. We’d met on the green Charlottesville trolley twelve years before, his face not unlike our son’s now—full, brown cheeks and black eyelashes that swept down before curling, scooping me up right along with them. He already knew my name, had seen me around Thomas Jefferson’s Grounds. Thankfully, he wore a nametag. The youngest son of a Harlem preacher, he’d been named after the apostle.
If Paul thought a trip to the doctor could wait, I’d believe him. Although this time it wasn’t Eliot’s nagging cough or Tophs’s acid reflux that caught my attention. My boy, who was barely hanging onto the growth chart with one hand, lay heavy as a rock on the floor. Before, I tried to keep Tophs on the growth chart by feeding him good fats: avocados, olive oil, butter-drenched everything. “Roll his peas in butter,” Dr. Quillian, his pediatrician, had said. “Do the opposite of what we’ve learned as adults.” We puzzled over his lack of growth, that he’d weighed two pounds less than his big sister at birth. But with those round cheeks and feet so cute in tiny New Balances, with his rhythmic clapping and alert, curious eyes, no one truly worried.
Dr. Quillian didn’t work Tuesdays, so Tophs saw another doctor on the team we’d met. Dr. Marcus Potter was African American, young, and warm. She was the kind of mom I wanted to be friends with and the kind of professional I wanted my Black children to see. The night before, Tophs had bit me hard on my shoulder in the buffet line at the dining hall, out of nowhere, and I’d dug my thumb into him, near his collarbone, forcing him to let go. I’d been angry in the moment, surprised by the pain. What if I’d punctured something? Why hadn’t I just endured the bite? What if I had put something in motion that would lead to his slow, labored death? I’d told Dr. Marcus Potter about the uncharacteristic bite but not my reaction.
“Okay, don’t leave. They just called me. They’re trying to catch you. They want to do bloodwork now.” I grabbed the diapers and water bottles, the stroller and shoes, my purse and my kids, all without a scream or a curse, in under five minutes. I have lived much of my life this way—detached but efficient under real pressure, a panicked mess when no real threat exists. I am built for flight or flight. My brain, a barely balanced sprinter in the starting block of my body, craves permission—the sound of a blank shot through the air—to run at full speed. Sometimes my brain gets it right.
Finally, the man who’d greeted us spoke up: “If one of you wants to finish up here and the other bring him on back …”
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