We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  The plantation? Since when did the firm have a plantation?

  Dinah stepped into the elevator. My device rang. Nigel’s school. I couldn’t get into the box without losing the signal.

  “Wait,” I said. “Tell me more.”

  Dinah pointed at her fingers. She was going to get a manicure. She waved, and the elevator doors closed.

  Octavia pinged my device. She wanted to immediately meet in her office to discuss my position in the firm. My heart fluttered. Finally, I would find out what was really going on. I turned down the hallway toward Octavia’s.

  But my device rang. The connection was fuzzy, although the voice on the phone was familiar. Mrs. Beardsley, a dean at the School Without Walls, said Nigel had had an incident.

  “Is my son okay?” I asked.

  “More or less,” the voice said.

  “What kind of answer—is he bleeding? Is he unconscious? Has an ambulance been called?”

  My device pinged again—question marks from Octavia.

  I returned to the reception area. I couldn’t just blow off my boss. Perhaps I could just talk to Octavia for a minute. But Nigel.

  “Your son is physically okay, but he’s asked for his mother,” Mrs. Beardsley said. A pause. “And for you.”

  I jabbed the elevator button, which lit up and went dark every time I touched it. Such unreliable machines. The stairwell was a few feet away. I took it.

  4

  I probably shouldn’t have left the Bug sputtering smoke in the front yard of Nigel’s school, the School Without Walls. Dashing, I left the driver’s door ajar, the bumper kissing a fire hydrant, the windshield wipers squeaking against dry glass. The School Without Walls was a compact compound of buildings made of simulated logs in a miniature wood. Largest of the buildings was the Central Hall, situated on the left edge of the property.

  It had been the site of the first Negro school in the City and later, during the Jazz Age, home to several speakeasies. Once the old structures were razed, the City planted trees, which over decades sprouted toward heaven, muffling the moans of displaced ghost clarinetists. Even though the area looked like something out of a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, the City skyscrapers played peekaboo just above the crenulated treetops. The Sky Tower, tallest obelisk in the state, was clearly visible, as it was from nearly anywhere in the City.

  I should have centered myself. I should have taken a few deep breaths of evergreen oxygen. Instead, I took Central Hall’s stone steps two at a time. I scared some students hanging out there. Or I would have scared them if I hadn’t run into the locked main door and bounced off like a pebble. The students’ laughter fell around me. My fedora tumbled across the landing.

  “The other door open,” a girl in a purple fur-collared coat and plaid skirt said. She had innumerable knots of twisted hair—some in red or green ribbons—and was darker-skinned than me, darker even than Franklin, blue-black, the dark of a shadow in a cave. She grabbed my hat and twirled it on her index finger. I reached, but she swiped it out of reach, a pocket-size matador. They didn’t exactly teach respect for elders at the School Without Walls. I snorted at the girl.

  “What’s your hurry, mister?” she said.

  “It’s kind of an emergency,” I said.

  “What’s with the hat?” She bent the brim back.

  “What’s with the coat?”

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  I didn’t have time to jaw with some brat. The call from Mrs. Beardsley (a call while flying across town confirmed that it was her), dean of student growth, had been stymied by bad reception. Sunspots. Then in the car, reception was worse than in the Sky Tower. Our conversation was a jumble of gerunds and inquisitives, a discourse in Cubist style. Locking what? You’re telling me—telling me he’s all right, right? Okay, don’t go calling his mother—his mother—okay?

  Nigel had been doing well that year. No random shouting. No throwing of history books. No flameouts in the boys’ lavatory. His grades were good. He seemed to like his teachers. Why would he have barricaded himself in a utility closet?

  A wailing, then a fire truck—the station was only two blocks away—trundled up the narrow clay driveway. No doubt called by the school to deal with my son.

  I ran inside and swam through an eddy of children on my way down the interior stairs. It wasn’t one of those schools where the kids wore uniforms. This let the kids conform to mass media culture by wearing gaudy, real-fur coats, often dyed an eye-torturing violet, the uniform of that annoying pop princess whose face popped up in every ad on every device I owned. Of course, the School Without Walls was so permissive that no one objected to all the mama rabbits and baby foxes that died to make the coats. Banning any fashion would have been considered fascist by the parents on the board.

  I had wanted to send Nigel to a more mainstream school, one that required khaki uniforms and distributed little folders with crests on them, somewhere he could socialize with the children of the shareholders I worked with at Seasons. But the private schools only had so many slots for kids whose parents weren’t alumni and megadonors and connected enough to know how to navigate the arcane application process. My top choice for Nigel, the Morrison School, hadn’t admitted a child of color in over a decade. Ultimately, Penny’s argument won out. If I was so worried about Nigel’s face, why not send him to a school where appearances didn’t matter? But appearances always mattered. He was one of perhaps six students of color in a body of several hundred, and he reported bullying at the School Without Walls, just like at his previous learning institutions. At least the School Without Walls had an on-call therapist to help him with his anxiety.

  I made the first floor. Mr. Gonzales’s art class, the same room as at the last open house. Some kids gathered around the classroom door.

  Mrs. Beardsley, in dark trim slacks and a button-down shirt, threw her arms out. “Clear this area, children.” She shooed the kids, and they fluttered away like pigeons. As soon as she turned her attention to me, a round-faced but otherwise nondescript girl pecked closer again. Beardsley escorted me into the room.

  Penny was kneeling at the closet door, her ear pressed to the wood. She stroked hair away from her ear and rose when she saw me. We hugged. She had somehow made it across the entire city, a ten-mile swing from Personal Hill Hospital, where she worked as a social worker, in the time it had taken me to make the relatively short drive from the Sky Tower downtown. Beardsley must have called her first and well before me. Penny’s forehead was pink with worry, a condition that yanked my strings out of tune.

  Mr. Gonzales stood near the chalkboard, a sweater tied around his neck. He ran fingers over his knuckles and wouldn’t look at me.

  “He’s in there?” I said.

  “Nigel won’t tell me why he went in,” Penny said.

  A white smudge trailed from the center of the classroom several yards toward the closet door. The mysterious substance, which had a yogurt-like consistency when I nudged it with my brogue, led under the closet threshold.

  “The class was in a free-painting session,” Mr. Gonzales said. “There was a commotion, and he ran inside. I simply don’t know what started it. The drama helper ran to call the fire department. He’s very swift.”

  The door was decorated with cutouts of a pocket watch, a cuckoo clock, a sundial. Nigel was behind that barrier. He could be bleeding, or unconscious, or eaten by rats. All I wanted was to go to the far side of the room and launch my body against the door. Whether I killed myself in the process wasn’t important. I needed him out of there.

  “Hey,” Penny said. She squeezed my hand. “You with me?”

  I glanced back at the door and bit my tongue.

  “He’ll be all right,” Penny said.

  We went to the door.

  Penny leaned on it. “Baby?” she said. “It’s Mommy.”

  Nigel’s voice, a s
ob from the other side.

  “Nigel boy?” I yelled.

  He called for me.

  I grabbed the knob with both hands, a transparent crystal bulb, a dollop of frozen light. The beveled edges grated my skin. I pulled. The knob twisted free from the door. Now the door couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  I stared at Penny, horrified. She pressed her hands to the door. “You can come out now,” she said. “We’re here to bring you home.”

  “Open the door, kid,” I said.

  Penny gave me a look. Teachers and children watched us from the doorway to the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” Nigel said, his voice muffled.

  “That’s okay,” Penny said. “Just let us in.” She lightly drummed an offbeat rhythm on the door.

  Nigel matched it. The door clicked but didn’t open. He couldn’t get out. “It’s locked,” he said.

  “In times like these,” Mrs. Beardsley said, “it’s important to remember the school’s philosophy of nonconfrontational optimism. We’ll sort this out. The firepersons are just outside.”

  Yes. The firepersons were outside. All that malarkey about them being heroes—pshaw. Hype! Probably polishing their helmets and checking the certifications on their ax handles. Regulations. Procedures. Whatever they were supposed to be doing, they weren’t in the room rescuing my son.

  I scanned the area for something to batter the door open with. The chairs and easels were too lightweight. Mr. Gonzales’s desk was too heavyweight. Mr. Gonzales himself? Right weight. Battering ram. Could I, in my adrenalized state, toss a 180-pound Latino man through the door? Yes! Wait. No.

  I went to the hallway, shaking my head. Students crowded me, some slurping ice cream cones as they enjoyed the spectacle of me. I barked, but they kept slurping. That was it. Ice cream. Whipped cream. Foam. Fire extinguisher. Super genius me, I patted one of the kids, a tall boy with a mop of tawny hair, on the head and found a fire extinguisher in the hallway. It was heavy, solid as an anvil. A twinge buzzed in my lower back, but it was a muted pain, easily ignored.

  “Wait,” Penny said.

  I told Nigel to get away from the door and cover his eyes. I rammed the butt of the canister into the knob apparatus. Nothing. Again, harder this time. The door cracked. Once more with feeling! Fell through the doorway, end over end, onto my face.

  Nigel was not there. It should have been dark in that closet, but daylight from the hallway washed in through an open-air grate in the wall. I crawled through it.

  Penny was on her knees hugging Nigel. My Nigel. He must have crawled out through the grate before I broke in. A white smear had splattered half his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

  “Are you okay?” Penny asked.

  “I’m okay,” Nigel said.

  By this point, I was on my knees, too, the three of us roped together by our arms. Something struck me as odd. I reared back, rubbing my thumb along his cheek. That white obscured most of Nigel’s birthmark. So help me, he looked like a normal child.

  “Is this paint?” Penny licked her fingers and scrubbed Nigel’s cheek.

  “No. Skin cream.” The girl in the fur coat stood next to Penny. “Nige was putting it on, and someone called him a beauty queen.” The girl produced a plastic container of face gunk, gunk that I was very familiar with, and gave it to Penny.

  “Who called him a beauty queen?” I asked.

  “I did.” The girl in the fur coat shrugged.

  “Madam C.J.’s Lightening Formula?” Penny asked.

  I shook my head, but Nigel didn’t notice.

  “Dad gave it to me,” Nigel said.

  “You gave our son skin bleach?” Penny said. “Tell me you didn’t give our son this shit.” Penny, like most people, had different levels of anger. Cursing in front of our son meant that she was near the max level. The only higher level was the one where she separated my head from my body before driving a stake through my heart with her bare hands. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Of course, it shouldn’t have been that big a deal. Skin toning cream has been around for millennia. It was the secret weapon of Egyptian pharaohs, Indian hijras, and legions of heads of state who had been unfortunately born a few shades too dark. People everywhere used it for their beautification needs, but I knew well enough that Penny wouldn’t appreciate me giving it to Nigel to reduce the appearance of his birthmark. That’s why it was our little secret. Or had been.

  On the outside landing, Penny ran her hands through her hair and tugged hard, a nervous tic.

  “What are those firemen doing to Dad’s car?” Nigel asked.

  “What?” Penny asked. She ran down the steps. “Guys, don’t do that.”

  Smoke streamed from the back of my Bug, that muffler I needed to replace. A fireman unleashed a torrent of water into the interior. Another fireman raised his ax above the back window.

  I noticed that Penny’s rubbing had removed some of the cream from Nigel’s face, revealing a dime-size view of his stain. I opened the container, which Penny had dropped on the landing, and worked a fresh glob of the cream onto the birthmark.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I know, Dad.”

  5

  I needed to connect with Octavia, who was probably not pleased that I had ignored her request to meet. With the antic activities at Nigel’s school, I forgot to at least tell Octavia why I didn’t show up. Having ghosted her for nearly eighteen hours, I figured messaging her would be less effective than meeting in person, which meant driving to a restored plantation one hundred miles out of the City. The firm retreat, Seasons’s annual orgy, where sex was replaced by talk of market trends, potential clients, and how to best take over the world, would begin in a few hours. There would be much maniacal laughter and twirling of mustaches. And while associates like myself were encouraged to go, the shareholders liked it just as well if we stayed back in the office and churned billable hours for them.

  Maybe it would have been better to wait until Monday. After all, I hadn’t been canned, and Octavia would be back in the office by then. Yet I also hadn’t been promoted or gotten my balloon bonus, pending for 96,342 hours, not that I was counting. No bonus meant no procedure for Nigel’s face, a situation I could not abide.

  I was loading my overnight bag into the hood trunk when Penny sauntered up—no woman anywhere sauntered like my Penny—carrying a floral-print duffel decorated with Hibiscus mutabilis.

  “You’re coming?” I asked.

  “On one condition.” She dropped her bag. “Two conditions, actually.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Apologize for hiding that cream from me, and promise you’ll never have our son use that crap again.”

  My cheeks flushed. I was more embarrassed, I realized, that I’d been caught than that I’d given Nigel the cream behind her back. But a part of me wanted to make the promise, to give in to the possibility that maybe Penny was right. She always thought I was overcompensating in my attempts to protect Nigel. She seemed to think I saw monsters everywhere I looked, which was correct, of course.

  “That’s a nice offer,” I said, “but I got this. I’ll just go, handle my business, and come home.”

  “Dammit. Don’t be an idiot. Can’t you see I’m worried about you?”

  “I’m all good.”

  Penny grabbed my face. I tried to look away, but she wouldn’t let me. “Are you really? All good? I need you to be better for your son. I need you to love this family and love yourself.”

  I knew what she meant. We got along pretty well most of the time, the three of us. But most of the emotionally violent arguments Penny and I had pertained to Nigel and how to best help him. Like what had happened at the school the day before. As usual, Penny was reacting to something I said or did that caused Nigel’s anxiety to m
anifest. If I hadn’t pushed the cream on him, he wouldn’t have wound up cowering in a closet. I needed to say less and do less. My family could be happy. We could be grinning fools.

  “I’m going with you,” Penny said. “That’s all there is to it.” She raised an eyebrow, and those eyes, those sea-green peepers, washed away my remaining resolve.

  “Fine,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” She crossed her arms.

  “For hiding the gunk from you.”

  “And?”

  “And I won’t let him use it again.” I sighed and put her duffel in the trunk next to my battered canvas valise.

  “Now, give me your palm.”

  I extended my hand. Penny took out a blue permanent marker and drew a misshapen circle. She often did this when we first met. She had a philosophy about focusing on the basics, the people in our orbit who mattered, the actions that supported instead of harmed. She chose a circle as a symbol of inclusion, but also because it was impossible to hand-draw one perfectly. Perfection was the enemy.

  Suddenly, I felt ashamed for hiding anything from her. It felt good to be forgiven. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “I called in,” she said.

  “What about kiddo?”

  “We can leave him with your mother. They don’t spend enough time together.”

  Leaving Nigel with Mama meant he would spend the weekend in the yard behind her restaurant in the deceptively hyperborean sun, drying up and darkening like a raisin, my warnings that she was setting her grandson up for lethal melanomas notwithstanding. Not to mention all the propaganda she would cram into his head. Black empowerment. Racial righteousness. Resistance. The woman fed filthy protesters for free.

  “Let’s make a family outing of it,” I said. “Bring him along.”

  Once I covered the Bug’s waterlogged seats with plastic, we hit the highway.

  “Look at this, Dad,” Nigel said. “It’s like a sponge.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Nigel was pressing his outstretched fingers into the seat cushion. Water bubbled through a hole in the plastic.