“Which?”
“I can’t remember, I’m afraid. One of these black cherries.” Noah patted a ravaged gray trunk. “They’ll be blooming in a couple of months.” He looked down at the daffodils in his other hand. “Want to leave these here for your dad?”
“’Kay.” Michael took the pinched bunch in their wet paper. He set them on a tree root and walked away.
Noah couldn’t bear to leave it at that, as he followed the boy toward the path. “Victor… He was such a charmer.” That sounded like a euphemism for con artist. “What I’m saying is, he had a lot of potential.” Even worse, in a way; a retrospective indictment.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Noah’s mouth twisted. “I suppose.”
“They’re always drilling it into us at school. Posters on the walls, ‘Unlock Every Child’s Potential,’” Michael quoted in a satirical falsetto. “‘You Will Never Have This Day Again, So Make It Count.’ ‘Believe in U! B U, Cuz Nobody Else Can B.’ I mean, who the fuck else do they think we think we’re going to be?”
Did he expect Noah to agree that no-hoper kids of the urban underclass were being peddled a pack of lies? Or did he want to be contradicted and urged to believe? Sidestepping the question, Noah said, “I bet you never used that kind of language in front of your grandmother.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, then.”
“If I’d ever cussed Grandma out, she’d have… I don’t know what,” Michael said fervently. “Chores every day, home from school by four thirty, no hanging around on the corner or she’d tell Mom on me. Grades slipped, I had to go to Homework Club. If I talked back she’d turn off the Wi-Fi. One time I talked smack about Grandma’s casserole, she took my phone for a week.”
Noah raised his eyebrows. Not some sweet lady looking down on her grandson, then; an angel with a flaming sword. “So what would she say if she heard you using obscenities?”
“Listen, Mister, she’s dead, and what the fuck do you care how I talk? I’m only your problem for a couple weeks.”
Michael had a point, Noah realized. This hiatus, this peculiar holiday with his great-uncle, it was hardly going to have any lasting influence on his diction.
Feed and water him, Joan suggested, and let yourself off the hook.
The cold was creeping through Noah’s thin leather gloves. “Want to go get a hot chocolate, to warm up?”
“Can I have a Coke?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How come, don’t they both have sugar?” Michael asked.
Noah struggled to formulate a case, in his head, for the more nutritional qualities of hot chocolate. Besides, it was the calories in hot drinks that warmed you up, not the joules. Noah had probably just offered hot chocolate because it was a taste of his own childhood: chocolat chaud after ice-skating in Central Park. “I guess so.”
“Coke, then?”
The kid’s logic was too much for Noah. “OK.”
In the convenience store, Michael glugged his pop. “What did your dog die of?”
“Mendeleev? A tumor. Bichon frises are horribly prone to them.”
“Meddle what?”
“Mendeleev, after the Russian chemist who devised the periodic table. You’ve heard of that?” Noah pulled out his phone case as illustration.
“Duh.”
Noah took that as a yes.
“Why’ve you got it on your case?”
The last Christmas present Fernande had ever given Noah; he was resisting upgrading his phone, because then he’d need a different-size case. “I like it.” I love it would have sounded sappy; I put my faith in it, cultish. “It’s a sort of family tree,” he added, remembering Rosa’s request. “The universe is three-quarters hydrogen,” putting a fingertip to the first element, “one-quarter helium. All the rest is just a rounding error.”
“Huh?”
“A mere sprinkle.”
“But we’re carbon-based life forms, aren’t we?”
“Humans? We’re mostly oxygen by mass, actually—or hydrogen, if you’re counting atoms.”
You’re going to bore the pants off this child, Joan warned him.
“But carbon’s what firms us up, yes, because it’s”—“a slut,” the guys used to say in Freshman Chem, though Noah wasn’t going to tell Michael that—“friendly. Carbon wants to bond with everything else.”
Michael frowned at the phone case. “I don’t see how that’s a family tree.”
“Well, a set of characters, if you like. Superheroes and villains,” Noah suggested. “For instance, mercury’s a standoffish element, keeps to itself.”
“Batman.”
“Right. So if you eat mercury—don’t, by the way—it passes right through you, unchanged. Historians have tracked Lewis and Clark’s route through the Wild West by the mercury laxatives left behind in latrine pits.”
That made the boy smirk.
“Each element is rather like the rest of its…” Noah wouldn’t say period because this was an eleven-year-old boy. “Its row mates, but it’s much more closely akin to its group, that’s its column”—his finger skimming vertically, now—“because they’ve each got the same number of electrons in their outer shell.”
“Can we go?”
As soon as you thought you were having a breakthrough moment with this kid, he left you flattened.
Michael threw his can in the trash as they walked down the block.
A man whizzed past them, flipped up his board to hold it vertically at the curb, then sped off across the intersection.
Noah thought to ask, “Do you skateboard?”
“Skate.”
“Oh, you prefer skating? Ice or roller?”
“It’s called skating, dude.”
“No, but I’m just asking whether you do it on ice or dry land.”
Michael punched an exasperated finger in the direction the man had gone. “Nobody says ‘skateboarding’ anymore.”
“Ah, I see. And do you yourself like skating?”
A scowl. “Mom got me a board, but last year some eighth-graders jacked it.”
That startled Noah. “You knew who’d taken it?”
“They skated right past, dissing me. Grandma said”—Michael quoted—“‘This is a test from the Lord, are you going to hold on to your wrath? Are you going to pass the test?’”
“What did passing the test involve?”
“Not getting into a fight.”
“And did you pass?” Noah asked.
Michael nodded grimly.
That sounded Stoic as much as Christian. “Your grandma must have been an impressive lady.”
The boy’s eyes slid sideways. “Are you making fun of her?”
“Are you kidding? Why would you think I was—”
A shrug. “She wasn’t some fancy-pants scientist.”
“I bet she was worth two of me.”
“Three.”
Silence stretched again as they walked. But that was all right, Noah told himself; he was still new to this. Besides, surely people didn’t have to talk every minute of the day. Joan and he had spent harmonious hours at a time in the apartment without exchanging a word. The skateboard story nagged at him, though. “Couldn’t you have reported them, at least, the kids who robbed you?”
“Called the cops?” Michael was openmouthed.
“Or told the school,” Noah suggested.
The boy’s head swung from side to side. “Snitches get stitches.”
“What?” Even the word was old-fashioned, ridiculous. Like rat, fink, canary, stool pigeon: shades of film noir.
“You just don’t do it,” Michael told him. “Like on stop signs, after the STOP, taggers put SNITCHING. One time a seventh-grader came in with a T-shirt that said SNITCHES END UP IN DITCHES, the principal made him take it off.”
“But Michael. Really. Why would you protect them when they stole your skateboard?”
“It’s not about protecting them.”
“Wha
t’s it about, then?”
Michael spoke very low. “Not being a punk-ass little bitch.”
Noah gave up for now.
A fire escape loomed above them in the gathering dusk. Every childhood had its own unspoken rules, he reminded himself, and at the time they seemed unbreakable, perpetual. “When I was a kid we played in the streets till it got dark. Ring-alevio—that was a kind of hide-and-seek in teams, all around buildings, up onto the roofs sometimes.”
“Cool.” Michael suddenly sounded younger. “Was it dangerous?”
“Nobody seemed to think so, then.” Kids might have fallen, but nobody would have been likely to shoot them, at least. “Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon, I Declare War…” They were all variants on war, it struck Noah now. He supposed children acted out the headlines of their day.
“What’s that?”
“I Declare War? Kind of like dodgeball.”
“That’s banned at my school.”
“Oh, for god’s sake!”
Michael objected: “Aren’t you a atheist?”
Noah corrected him: “An atheist.”
“That’s what I said.”
“It’s an, rather than a, when it’s followed by a vowel: an atheist.”
“Like, you’re an asshole.”
He supposed he deserved that one.
No one would have reason to expect you’d be a natural at this stuff, Joan pointed out.
Nor had his own father been, after all. Well-intentioned but stiff: no wonder Marc had asked an agency for a nanny the minute he’d heard from Margot that she was sending little Noé to New York in the summer of 1942. Father and son must have been practically strangers, after two years apart. Strange, Noah’s childhood; he’d been like a beanbag tossed between his parents. Blame the times.
Back at the apartment Noah told Michael he could watch TV, if he liked. The truth was, he was desperate for half an hour off.
“Nah, I’m good.” The boy curled up on the couch with his cracked phone. He scrolled, flicked; delicate finger movements, as if he were stroking a kitten.
Noah hovered. He wondered what Michael was looking at; which particular contaminated rivulet of the internet was pouring into this growing brain. “I’m surprised you haven’t sliced your fingers open on that screen. Why haven’t you”—replaced it, Noah was going to say, before he considered the price of such repairs—“taped over it, at least?”
“We only had Christmas tape. And crime-scene for Halloween.”
Noah tried not to judge. He went into the kitchen and emerged with a roll of clear packing tape and a pair of scissors. “May I?”
Michael pursed his lips.
“Come on, it’s driving me mad.”
The boy turned his phone off and handed it over.
Noah made a neat job of it: three overlapping rectangles, holding all the little shards in place. The lock screen read UNLOCK IF U WISH 2 DIE, with a close-up of a shark’s teeth. He checked that the screen was still responsive to the heat of his finger, through the tape. “You don’t seem to have any service. Who’s your provider?”
“Huh?”
“How do you make calls?”
“I don’t.”
“What, calling’s too old-fashioned? It’s all messaging these days?”
“Apps and shit.” Michael snatched back his phone.
Noah finally got it: He doesn’t have a phone plan. That would be too expensive. This was somebody’s discarded phone the kid was using for messages and games, catching Wi-Fi where he found it.
“Your wife—what did she get that prize for?”
Noah’s eyes followed Michael’s to the photo of Joan on the wall. “Ah, she helped create a new drug.” The word sounded wrong. “Medicine, for people with cancer.” Decades of tireless slog, as well as flashes of brilliance.
“Did you do that too, save lives?”
“Afraid not.” From as far back as Joan’s postdoc at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, it had been clear that their paths were forking—hers, up toward the limelight. Of course Noah had sometimes felt jealous, or more like crushed into insignificance. The two of them had joked about it; it was that or quarrel. Strangely, it had helped when the gap between their statures began to yawn so wide that Noah hadn’t had to rate himself on the same scale anymore. “I’ve spent most of my career working on polymers. Large molecules made of chains of chemicals.”
“Plastics? Like that floating shitpile twice the size of Texas?”
So even middle graders had heard about that. “Yes, artificial polymers are found in the Pacific garbage patch, and in your earbuds.” He glanced down at the boy’s red-and-white sneakers. “Your soles, too. And wood, and cotton, they’re polymers as well”—gesturing at Michael’s hoodie—“and so are your hair and nails. Your DNA, even. You know how that molecule’s shaped? A double spiral.” Noah drew it on the air. “Like a twisted rope ladder.”
But the roving beam of the boy’s attention had swung around, and clicked off.
Strangers, still. It didn’t help that they were technically related, Noah decided. When the human genome was mapped, pages of gobbledygook were found after each legible gene.
In the kitchen, he considered his cupboards. Penne; who didn’t like pasta? He put on a big pot of water to boil.
When he was checking the weather forecast on his phone he saw he had a text message from Rosa from hours ago. How’s it going? He must have failed to hear the alert while they were outside. Weary, he thought of replying with a message of his own, Fine. But that would sound as if he were hiding something.
So he called back instead. “Ms. Figueroa? Rosa? Sorry not to get back to you till after work…”
“Oh, I’ll be at the office a while yet,” she told him, rueful.
He imagined her trying to check up on all twenty-four of her charges. One for every hour of the day and night. “We were out for a walk.”
“Great. Any questions so far? Concerns?”
“Not really.” Or scores of them. Where to start?
“Could I talk to Michael for a minute?”
“Sure! Yes. I’ll give him my phone and I’ll, ah, be in the other room.” So he won’t be afraid to speak up.
After Noah had handed the phone to Michael and shut the door, he stood in the kitchen with NPR on to make it clear that he wasn’t eavesdropping. He listened to the tail end of an interview with a composer who sounded as if Noah should have heard of him. He stirred the penne. The minutes crawled by. He ran down a list of all the complaints Michael might be making.
Michael was suddenly behind him. Noah nearly scalded himself.
He took his phone back and said “Hello,” but she’d gone.
“Dinnertime,” he told the boy.
“I’m not hungry.”
Was the pasta an unfamiliar shape or something? Noah’s eye veered to the fruit bowl. “Kiwi? Pear? Satsuma?” He wished he had some plain apples to offer, or bananas.
“Nah. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
Noah tossed clams and olives with his pasta. And a glass of red wine for his heart. On impulse he wrapped the Pick-Pick Bird in a bit of bubble wrap and brought it to his room to add to his suitcase, tucking it into a shoe for protection.
He found the boy standing there with Marc’s hand, holding the leather cup and straps.
Noah thought of saying, “Stay out of people’s bedrooms.”
Michael slid his right palm into the cold grasp of the prosthesis. He shook hands with it, and Noah saw him flinch a little as the fingers moved in his.
“Careful.”
The boy spun around.
“That’s a hundred years old.” The sense of time made Noah dizzy.
“Some kind of robot thing?”
“It’s my father’s second hand. Well, his third, actually, if you count the one he lost, but the second metal one.”
“Diabetes?”
Noah stared.
“Grandma had three toes amputated,” Michael told him.
Michael’s eyes were big. “Who won?”
“That day? The French and the British. But then the Germans dug trenches to hide in, and it was four years of stalemate.” Groveling in the mud, waiting to die. “Marc was lucky, he got invalided out, sent back to his aunt in Monaco, and missed the rest of the war.” A talented painter, before; afterward he’d gone to university and found a late-blooming second gift for interpreting art. He’d never complained of pain, that Noah could remember, but he must have had some, phantom or otherwise. Noah thought of Amber’s brother in his wheelchair.
“Why his aunt?” Michael wanted to know.
The boy had to be hoping his own Aunt Grace would turn up soon, with the two little cousins. “His parents had both died of an infection called TB.” Strange, how the majority of wartime deaths came by illness rather than bullets.
The boy nodded. “I know kids with that, they have to take pills for nine months.”
Noah had read about the comeback of tuberculosis in New York, but only now did the statistic become real. He took Marc’s prosthesis from the boy. Its darkened creamy coloring was like no skin he’d ever seen; no wonder Marc had worn gloves for nine months of the year. “So the army gave him a fairly primitive wooden hand at first, then this high-tech one. If they could claim they’d sent you home fit for civilian life, they only had to pay you a tiny pension.”
“High-tech?” Michael sneered.
It was a marvelous thing, for its time, displaying all its smooth seams, and a square panel on the back of the hand that held its gears and levers. “This was cutting-edge tech bionics, for intellectuals—desk workers,” Noah translated. The middle-class hand. “My dad couldn’t do any heavy lifting with it, but he could count banknotes, turn pages, use a pen, tie a necktie…”
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