As he closed the closet door and huddled in the darkness, separated by thin wood from the dead body of his almost fiancé, he was thinking, he was praying I wish I had never been born.
One of the office building elevators opened on Junior’s floor. The ding sent him racing down the hallway towards the far exit sign. Two turns later, he burst into the rear stairwell and tripped down six flights to the dark parking lot.
The fresh air cleared his head. He wondered where his mind would have sent him if he’d found a closet in this mood. The deep purple dusk of the evening didn’t allow him to see too far. Picking a direction at random, he walked, wanting to run, away from the office building. He passed a bar just getting busy for the night as well-dressed men and women came from office buildings all down the block. He kept his head down and as usual, nobody paid him any mind.
The fall air bit enough to make him button his coat. As he did up the top button, something hard in his satchel hit his funny bone. Junior grabbed at his elbow. And the rectangular object bounced against his thigh. The box.
Junior stopped walking. What if his mother had been reacting to the box? What if she wasn’t herself? He turned and hurried back, barely noticing the other people on the street until he caught a man’s eye and the woman walking with him bumped into the frozen guy. Junior kept his eyes down the rest of the way back to his mother’s office building. He approached the front door and then kept on walking past her office building.
He still had the box. She wouldn’t be any different if he still had the box. He had to get rid of the box before he saw her again. At the next corner he took an immediate left into a bodega. He felt for the owner’s fears or rather, when he turned to look at the kid, the son of the owner’s fears. It wasn’t hard to find. His biggest fear wasn’t getting robbed. He was afraid a girl wouldn’t show up tonight like she had said she would. He was so focused on that fear, he wouldn’t see the least shadow of Junior.
Junior filched a lighter from the counter display, then he headed down the far aisle. He stopped to set fire to a display of variously colored bandanas just to provide the kid with the opportunity to remember that there were less ridiculous things to be frightened of.
He passed the restrooms and headed into the backroom. He kicked at the blankets and pillow bundled on a threadbare throw rug and continued past a dorm fridge to a small broom closet. He opened the door and stopped.
The broom closet was full. There wasn’t enough room for even a man built like Gumby to squeeze in. Normally he could shove enough stuff aside to fit. In these cases, he felt badly that the next person to open the door would find themselves in the center of an avalanche.
He reached in and started making room. He took out a long-handled push broom and a mop, a bundle of sale flags wrapped together, and a rifle. Upon further consideration, he tucked the rifle back in and took out a life-sized cardboard cut-out of an ethnically ambiguous woman in a bright, skimpy outfit. He set all of it to the side, made a brief silent apology to the kid who, he could hear, had noticed the fire, then stepped in and shut the door.
He peeked out the door just to be sure he’d gotten where he wanted and then knocked.
“Welcome back, Junior.” Diejuste lay in bed, a book of fairy tales fallen on the comforter beside her. She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes, but smiling. “I am doing research on our new friends.”
“The brownies?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is their magic not a genetic thing? They all look so different.” He came in and sat on her bed.
“How do you know the third one?”
“I saw them all together when I followed Orin to a bar after you got off the train.” Junior curled up by her feet and put his head in his hands. “Diejuste.” The name was starting to feel comfortable to him. “I met the woman who was my mother.”
Diejuste made little noises of sympathy. “Was she happier without you?”
Junior pushed himself up, facing Diejuste. “I screwed up. I took the box with me. She was awful because of the box, just like you and the brownies earlier and the whole Office Bar before. I have to leave it with you and go back to her.”
Diejuste physically backed away from Junior. “No. You can never leave that box with me, Brudda man. Why did you show da box to your mother?”
“I didn’t show her. I didn’t take it out at all.”
Diejuste crinkled her little brow. “It does no harm when it is in your bag. I am not reacting now.”
Junior sank a little. “No. The box is the only thing that explains it.”
“Did you speak with anybody other than your mother?”
“Yes.” Junior smiled. “There was this nun. And after we talked she was gonna go try to talking to a scared girl.”
“You had the box.”
“Yes, in my bag the whole time. I never got rid of it. I never left it anywhere. It was always with me. Why do you keep asking?”
“And after talking with you, the nun did not try to murder you or jump out the window? She went out to help this girl?”
Junior laid down again and he cried. He cried for himself, for losing his mother. He cried for her being awful. And he cried for it being his fault. Not like Jane’s death. This new Katheryn Leo really was his fault. He cried for having imagined she might miss him.
Diejuste reached down and brushed the hair back from his face. When he’d cried himself out, he rolled on his back.
“I thought she’d be better off without me.”
“She has the good job and the nice tings, doesn’t she?”
“She’s mean.” He sat up. “I need to try. I need to get rid of the box and give her a chance to be someone else.”
“She be your mudda. But she will not be your Mum.”
“Can you help me find someplace safe to stash the box?”
Diejuste got out of bed and started rooting through a dresser for clothes. “Where did you get the box?”
“I stole it from the brownies. They were fighting over it at the bar.”
“It must belong to brownie number three.”
“Amal.”
“Orin and Lucio could not keep it.” Diejuste paused in the doorway of her closet. She considered carefully as she took down a red knit hoodie with a zipper up the front. Zipped up, Elmo laughed on her chest. Finally she nodded and looked up and said, “We will go to meet Amal and find out if he is a worthy keeper of such evil.”
Junior stood up but Diejuste shut the closet door. He watched her head for the living room. “Where are you going?”
“My grandmudda is working. She will not notice me gone.”
“You’re eight. I can’t take you to a bar.”
Diejuste’s face melted into that gorgeous, dangerous Jane smile of joy. “I am older than you, Child.”
Junior sighed. He didn’t want to go alone anyway. “This way then. I don’t know how to walk there from here. We’re gonna have to take the closets.”
“You can take passengers?”
He held out a hand, “Come and see.”
Diejuste joined him in the closet.
As he closed the door, Junior warned, “I can only go to bedrooms. So we’re gonna find ourselves in a bedroom near The Office. We’ll have to find a way to sneak out of the home.”
“This sounds like a great adventure.” Again Diejuste shut her closet door.
9
The Family
Junior felt Diejuste shiver beside him as they made the transition from her closet to a new one. There was no frisson or sparks of light, no wobble of a synthesizer. The world simply changed around them. The clothes brushing against his back were replaced with the feel of shelving. He inched forward. This was not a residential bedroom closet.
Physical things generally shifted when he appeared among them. He never transported into a closet to find himself crushing shoes. While he did crouch, because after all most closets weren’t made to fit a six foot man even skinny as he was, he had never hit his head on a bar
or shelf. Sometimes he knocked hangers off, but he thought that only happened after he moved. He may have to cram himself into a closet to shut the door, but the destination closet would somehow make room for him.
He pushed the door farther open. It was just as dark outside the closet.
Diejuste giggled into the black. “That was new.”
As their eyes adjusted, they could see a room lined with industrial shelving. Kegs and cases of beer, wine, and liquor lined one half of the room while the other half held glasses and cleaning equipment and a variety of supplies. They stepped out.
“I thought you could only fly to bedrooms.” Diejuste crossed the room to peer at a clipboard hung beside the far door.
Junior shut the closet. He kicked something soft when he stepped away. A deep red dog bed had been tucked in beside a shelving unit that kept the closet door from opening far enough to crush the bed. Stacks of clothes filled the lowest level while the upper shelves were crowded with folded linens, bar towels, and aprons. Green light glowed from a hand vac recharging station beside the bed.
“This is a dog’s bedroom?” Diejuste didn’t quite ask the question.
Junior frowned. It didn’t make much change to his expression. “Someone else must sleep back here regularly. A human.”
He would have stayed there, trying to figure it out, but Diejuste took his hand. “Let us go out the back and circle around the front to enter this bar like proper people.”
“This is a bar?”
“Yes, Junior. Take a whiff and look around you.”
Junior sniffed the air. Warm orange and cloves. The scent of glög grew when Diejuste opened the door. He remembered the people around the bar earlier. They were good people. This was a good place. Seb had seen him and been kind. Beth just wanted to dance and play the jukebox. He shouldn’t be bringing his mess back here. “We shouldn’t have come. We’re not proper people. I’m a monster. You look like a little girl. We should go.”
“I am a loa and you are the boogeyman’s son.” She took his hand. “But if the brownies are regulars here, I think this is the kind of place that will not judge us for who we be.”
Junior let her lead him out of the storeroom. The dark corridor outside was hung with old pictures and antique liquor ads. An alcove to their left featured two doors with Lads and Ladies signs. To their right, the corridor led to the bar proper. But they headed for the screen door directly opposite the storeroom, which led outside to a covered courtyard. Christmas lights had been strung beside the ivy climbing the walls. Junior and Diejuste passed a tall stone fire pit and out a gate to the moonlit back alley. They followed this down to a street and then circled around the block to the unassuming front entrance to The Office.
Before they went in, Junior fumbled through his bag.
“No, Junior,” Diejuste set a tiny hand on his arm. “Don’t take out da box.”
Junior handed her a quarter. “There’s a toll.”
“Oh.” Diejuste grinned in apology.
She pulled the door open and let Junior lead the way in.
They paused a moment to let their eyes adjust to the lower light inside. A rich citrusy scent filled the air, blending with Paul Desmond’s sax solo on Take Five to subtly relax both goddess and monster.
Junior dropped his quarter on Beth’s corner of the bar without looking. He was searching the room for Amal. Diejuste clambered up onto a stool to look at the pattern the coins made on the polished wood. She took her time setting her coin and Junior’s into Beth’s unfinished infinity pattern.
The bar wasn’t full. A couple couples danced lazily in the clear space between the bar and the tables where the largest group was a rowdy half dozen barely-adults drinking beers and complaining about the old-fashioned music. Nobody stopped to stare at Junior and Diejuste.
Junior realized with a start that while they weren’t staring, most of the people who glanced over saw him. Two girls at the rowdy table looked through him and then put their heads together to giggle at the bizarre sight of an eight-year-old on a bar stool. But he wasn’t invisible to everyone. There wasn’t a lot of fear in The Office. He dropped his head a little and pulled his sleeves down over his hands.
“Welcome back, Scarecrow!” Seb spotted Junior hovering beside the bar. “What happened to you? If you didn’t like my glög I woulda got you something else.”
Realizing he hadn’t paid the bartender earlier, Junior stuck a hand in his bag to find some money. But Seb turned to help another customer and Diejuste put her hand on Junior’s arm.
“Be careful, Brudda man.”
He nodded and slid his hand out. Turning back to apologize to Seb, Junior spotted the brownies at the far end of the bar. Orin, Lucio and a redheaded woman bickered over the remains of takeout while Amal, licking his fingers, excused himself. The tall man ducked out the archway leading down the corridor Junior and Diejuste had seen on their way out the back.
“They’re here.”
Diejuste nodded. “Amal is alone in the back. That is good. Help me down.”
Junior helped Diejuste hop off her stool and led her down the length of the bar. They stopped, they thought briefly, when Orin recognized them.
The ginger raised his beer to them. “Hey Junior. Hi Diejuste.”
Lucio brushed Amal’s empty seat beside him. “What are you having? First one’s on me.”
Junior held up a hand and let his sleeves fall back. “Hi.”
The redheaded woman with them clamped a hand around his wrist. “You’re under arrest for aiding and abetting a murderer.”
“Dee!” Orin and Lucio objected together.
Junior looked at her and realized why she’d looked familiar. He’d seen her not three hours earlier, chasing his mother with a gun. This fierce, thirtyish woman was the detective he was to lie to tomorrow morning, Deirdre Morton.
For once in his life, Junior wanted to be invisible. Junior felt for her fears and found many. But she could still see him.
She set her steaming mug of glög on the bar, ignoring the brownies’ objections. Junior didn’t hear most of what they said until twenty-something Orin physically broke her hold.
“Lay off, baby sis.”
“Stay out of it, O. What were you doing with Posa?” The detective raised her voice to question Junior over the boys’ babble. “Where did you take her?”
Junior massaged his wrist. Orin’s sister had a strong grip. He didn’t know who Posa was.
The bar quieted for a moment as the wavering sax of Take Five died out. A cry went up and bodies leapt from their tables as Beth hit play on the driving drums of Sing, Sing, Sing. Wild, swirling bodies mimicked the panic in Junior’s mind.
He didn’t know any Posa. Jane woke him up on the train. Orin and Lucio stood right there beside Detective Morton. The bartender’s name was Seb. The boy in the basement was Shig. He’d called the girl JT. Sr. Melanie insisted her name was Laney. His mother was Kathryn or Leo or Councilwoman. He hadn’t heard Jane’s grandmother called anything, but in his other life she was Marie Delphine, not Posa.
Junior curled up inside himself, overwhelmed by the detective’s questions, the brownies’ defense, the jumping dancers, and Gene Krupa’s relentless kick drum.
Before he could find a way to slink away, Diejuste reached up and pulled his hand away from his wrist. She wove her fingers into his, her grip tight. Junior looked down. Diejuste gazed back with a warning in her eyes.
“How do you—Good evening Captain Morioka.” Detective Morton dropped her questioning mid-sentence.
Junior looked up to find her staring fixedly at the little Asian woman from Leo’s office. He felt himself fading a little from the detective’s sight.
Morton gestured to the front door. “We should step outside to talk.”
The boys wouldn’t have it. They thought it was great karmic payback for them that Morton’s boss had walked into their bar. While they all tried to talk over each other, the captain nodded at Junior, those all-seeing bla
ck eyes soft for him. Before he could think to thank her, she stepped between he and Morton. Junior saw her lean forward and murmur something quietly up at the detective. Both of them looked down at Morton’s shoes.
Diejuste made a show of pushing past Junior to clamber up onto the stool beside Lucio. She leaned over the bar to catch Seb’s eye. He left the pitcher he was pulling for one of the rowdy kids and came right over to her.
“I’d like a glass of milk, Seb.”
Seb said nothing about her age. He stepped away to fetch a chilled glass and milk from a clear-fronted fridge under the bar, ignoring the twenty-something’s complaints. He set the glass on a coaster in front of Diejuste and poured.
“Would you like some ice with that?”
“No. Thank you, Man.”
Seb returned to the pitcher.
Junior fished through his bag for money. He hadn’t seen Diejuste gather any wallet, ID, or money when she put on her Elmo sweater. Head down over his satchel, he felt himself fading away. Over the past eight years he’d become accustomed to being invisible. It was the normal of his existence. But in the past eight hours since he’d met Jane’s loa on the train, that normal had receded as if he had never been perpetually invisible. As if he wasn’t a monster.
Now it returned. The world diminished as it did when everyone around him became frightened at once. Morton and the brownies and the Captain looked startled, a little nervous, but not one revealed the kind of fear that would cause this. Morton glared at Orin and Lucio but the brownies had both reached out to try to touch the people around them and found they couldn’t. Captain Morioka’s eyes floated from Diejuste to Junior.
He reflexively ducked his head. “This is how I feel. All the time.”
Diejuste hadn’t turned from her milk. She nodded, her pigtails bouncing. Lucio noticed. He didn’t like feeling invisible.
“Are you doing this, Goddess?”
Junior (A Wyrdos Tale Book 3) Page 6