Emaciated. His eight-year-old boy looked emaciated. Emaciated, and he saw a psychiatrist twice a week. David ate. We made him eat. We watched him eat. David ate, just not enough. He pecked at his food and did not gain weight, not an ounce, and he did not grow, not an inch. What eight-year-old needed a shrink twice a week?

Traffic pushed and pulled father and son at a confused pace toward Boston Children’s Hospital and David’s appointment with Dr. Fahnestock. The skin, tendon, muscle and bone spanning Officer Pete O’Malley’s jaw and temple rippled with thoughts he should not think and words he could not say. David was perched beside him in the front seat, both spindly arms to the outside of his seatbelt shoulder strap, his scant weight barely enough to offset the tension. The boy fixated on something outside their station wagon. Officer O’Malley snapped a finger, harder than intended, against the back of David’s head.

“What is so fascinating?”

“Fire,” David chirped. “There is a fire under the city.” David pigeoned out spots in the fog his breath had made on the inside of the window, his sharp nose in profile looking to Officer O’Malley like a bird’s beak. He looked out the passenger-side window as they made their way north on Tremont Street toward Francis Street. He saw nothing to warrant David’s excitement and looked askance at his son.

“Smoke from the sewers,” David warbled in his small voice. “Look at the sewers, smoke from them all.”

Officer O’Malley scanned the iron-grated drainage sewers on both sides of Tremont Street. “That is not smoke, David. It is steam. The water in the drainage pipe is warmer than the air outside, it makes steam,” he explained, instantly regretting his matter-of-factness. He tried for a quick fix: “Did you think dragons lived under the city?”

“Nah, I thought a fire was burning underground,” David answered. “And we should pull the fire alarm.”

There had been no time to change before picking David up from school. Officer O’Malley was in his police uniform. He adjusted the holster digging into his leg and checked the time. Dr. Fahnestock insisted David never miss or be late for an appointment. Consistency was imperative, he had been told, or admonished it felt like. David had been late a time or two.

Failure to thrive, the words Dr. Fahnestock used when speaking of David to him and Linda, his wife, David’s mother, never strayed far, in a worrisome way, from Officer O’Malley’s thoughts. Dr. Fahnestock was a renowned child psychiatrist and an absolutely, drop-dead gorgeous woman, model pretty, he thought, tall with long dark hair she wore lose down her back and a stunning smile she wore naturally, effortlessly, continuously. He forgot how breathtakingly beautiful and vibrant Dr. Fahnestock was between visits, and this made him jumble his words a bit each time they met. Didn’t most kids thrive naturally or with ease, he wondered? Or maybe they throve satisfactorily or commendably or with excellence? What came after failing to thrive? What happened if his boy utterly failed to thrive? Officer O’Malley tightened his grip on the steering wheel and willed traffic to thin out and time to slow down so they would not be late. He prayed for David to be small for his age. He could work with small for his age. Get David into calisthenics, gymnastics. Teach him to bite and claw and kick like a raptor. He plopped his police hat on David’s head, amused by how lost in the thing his son looked.

David’s lips, thin red lines etched onto a pale face, twitched, maybe smiled. Officer O’Malley could not be certain. David was a towhead, which made him appear ghostly white, translucent almost. His hair was so fine and white it looked iridescent. David cantered the police hat and followed a column of white smoke spewing from an industrial chimney up ahead and off to the right. He crooked his head against the car window and wrenched his neck at an impossible angle. Watching his son hold this contorted position brought to the mind of Officer O’Malley a birdling alone in a nest with hollow bones, no appetite and not enough feathers or strength or instinct or thrive or whatever the fuck it took to fly. He zeroed on his son in that awkward birdlike position following a line of white smoke with an unnatural intensity to its vanishing point in a cold and cloudless afternoon sky, and he thought, what the fuck?

Bullying was mentioned in David’s last parent-teacher meeting, according to his wife. Nothing excessive, typical grammar-school stuff, promptly resolved. Officer O’Malley could pry no more detail on the bullying from either Linda or David. The thought of his son being bullied made Officer O’Malley’s jaw and temple ripple. He searched David’s delicate profile for the hard truth while David checked out the city from under a police hat. Aside from an intense fixity to his gaze at times, David seemed normal enough, untroubled, not failing at anything, just not growing, just small for his age, extremely small, pathetically small, abusively small, tragically small, deathly small, wraith small, too small for a seatbelt to work properly, too small to thrive.

They needed to make a right turn. They were in the left lane. No one would let them cut over. Officer O’Malley’s enormous hands slammed down on the blue steering wheel of his Ford Country Squire station wagon. “Fuck you, Bozo,” he snapped at a ComGas van blocking his way. He finagled the station wagon into the right lane but not in time to make the green light. The station wagon stopped jarringly before a crosswalk as hordes of people rushed to cross the intersection. Pedestrians swarmed in front of, behind and between cars stopped at the traffic light. David’s head spun as if on a swivel monitoring the jaywalkers rushing their station wagon.

Officer O’Malley was looking straight ahead at the traffic light when his police hat, its hard visor, struck his thigh. David had his legs pulled up onto the seat, his skinny arms tautly wrapped around his shins. Looking deathly pale, David rocked, his eyes locked on the floor of the station wagon.

“What’s wrong, David? What is it?”

David’s eyes were open and unblinking. His pupils were dilated, making his eyes look to Officer O’Malley like vacant black marbles. David rocked and stared at the floor. Officer O’Malley snapped his fingers before David’s face. “David, Davey talk to me, son,” he pleaded, gently shaking a knee with one hand while steering the station wagon with the other. Officer O’Malley dropped into his dad voice, not much louder but world’s deeper in tone and menace: “Come on now, David. You are scaring me,” he said.

Not much scared Officer O’Malley. He had been a Boston cop for five years and had seen more than a few scary things. Officer O’Malley could handle himself, but David’s failure to thrive put the fear of God in him, spooked him witless, unnerved him, overwhelmed him, unmanned him. Small for his age or failure to thrive? What’s in a label, Officer O’Malley thought? He answered himself with a shudder: everything. Officer O’Malley felt it in his marrow. They were into some seriously fucked up shit with a seven-year-old boy failing to thrive and needing a shrink twice a week.

A commuter train on elevated tracks overtook them with deafening sound and engulfed their blue station wagon in its wake of swirling city grit. David, staring at the train from his sunken position in the passenger seat, bolted upright. “Race it,” he cawed, his hands splayed like talons on the wagon’s blue dashboard. David strained against his seatbelt, the shoulder strap digging into the side of his thin neck, a neck so thin, Officer O’Malley thought, he could wring it with one hand. Officer O’Malley looked at a lone blue vein on the side of his son’s neck protruding from below the seatbelt. He took note of the blood, the will coursing through his son’s woefully undersized body.

“Race the train!” David screeched, startling Officer O’Malley with his vehemence. “Beat it to the tunnel!”

The tunnel, where the train plunged underground and did not surface again until Forest Hills, was a quarter mile ahead. They were three passenger cars behind. David fought his seatbelt and slapped the blue dash. He was not going to sit back or back off, that much was clear to Officer O’Malley who accelerated the station wagon while arching a burly forearm from the top of the blue steering wheel to check their speed. He pulled the station wagon even with the train and looked again at the vein, no it was an artery protruding from his son’s neck above and below the seatbelt. Officer O’Malley marveled at the bulging blue chord pulsing with thrive. He pressed down on the accelerator until his foot met with floorboard. Father and son flew down Tremont Street toward Francis Street neck and neck with the commuter train, Officer O’Malley working his jaw and rocking in synch with his son as if the shifting of his weight could somehow make the difference.

The race ended in a tie too close to call. Officer O’Malley made a right on Francis Street and slapped down his left blinker for the turn into the parking garage for Boston Children’s Hospital. He plopped his police hat on David’s head for a second time and negotiated the spiraling garage entrance, pulling his hand down over his mouth, which had gone bone dry. David leaned into the never-ending turn, enjoying the corkscrew. Officer O’Malley went a little faster, making their tires squeal. “David, why did you take my hat off,” he asked?

“What?”

“I’m asking you, David. Why did you take off my police hat?”

“I did not take it off,” David answered.  “It flew off.”

Officer O’Malley pulled into a parking space and looked his son over. David’s Boston Red Sox jacket was bunched and twisted. “Shit, David, get your jacket squared away. We are late.” He snapped his pointer finger, harder than intended, against the top of David’s head. David struck a scarecrow pose with his arms straight out to the sides. Officer O’Malley pinched the loose material above David’s shoulders and centered the zipper. He rolled up excess sleeve and snapped the jacket’s dark blue collar into shape. David’s cowlick stuck up. Officer O’Malley licked his hand and tried patting the cowlick down. It was no use. A pale towhead with a cowlick, one of those white, parrotlike birds, a cockatoo, Officer O’Malley thought, a thought that made him smile.

On their way to the elevator, David started with the questions. “Why is it so dark in here?” he asked.

Officer O’Malley looked at his watch. “Shit, we’re late.”

David was trot-skipping, trying to keep up with his dad. “I call her Felicia,” he said, his light voice barely carrying. “Can’t say Fahnestock.”

Officer O’Malley heard David’s chirpy voice but not his words. He made a blind grab down and back for his boy’s small hand. “We’re late, David. Let’s hustle.”

“It smells like melted bubble gum in here, David said, and to play with his echo in the dark parking garage on his way to see a beautiful shrink, David repeated, “Bubble gum. Bubble gum. Bubble gum,” which sounded to Officer O’Malley like the clueless gobble, gobble, gobble of a turkey before slaughter.