She reaches the front of the classroom, stops, turns, asks a question, waits for an answer. Gets an answer, the wrong one. Waits again. Gets another answer, the right one, smiles, nods, keeps smiling, keeps nodding, too long, something strange happening, the students starting to notice, even the ones paying the minimum amount of attention. Lucy at the front of the room, smiling and nodding stupidly, stuck in some broken-record loop.
A student at the back of the class says, “Mrs. Darby,” a concerned note in her voice, and then Lucy falls, heavily, without her arms to soften the impact, face-first on the floor.
Shocked cries in the classroom, students standing, the scraping of desk legs across tile. She is well-liked, not that it matters, not that any person falling in such a way wouldn’t provoke a similar reaction, but she is well-liked, patient and wise and funny with these kids, not the best students in the world, and she’s one of the few teachers who treats them like they still matter, like they still have a chance, and there’s a rush to the front of the room, some screams, a crowding around her body, everyone afraid to touch her. Face down, fluid pooling out from under her nose and mouth.
The student who finally reaches for her is tall and solid, a football player on the varsity squad, one of a few in the class. It’s a Friday, a game day, so he’s dressed for the occasion in a crisp white button-down shirt. There is a brief discussion over whether or not she should be moved, but he acts before any conclusion is reached. He rolls her over, gently, and the students gasp at the first sight of her face. The football player slides his arms under her, unafraid or unconcerned with the fluid, and then he lifts her, getting to his feet, her weight not much of a burden to him, cradling her in his arms. Another student opens the door and the football player carries her out into the hallway. A few students run ahead to the nurse, but the others follow the football player, a careful parade down the hallway, the boy’s white shirt wet and red now, Lucy’s head resting against his chest. Through the halls to the office where the nurse waits with the phone receiver in her hand, an ambulance on its way.
Darby could never picture the football player’s face. It was just a blur above the boy’s game day dress shirt, the red stain spreading across the starched white as he carried Lucy down the hall.
The doorbell had rung and Darby had opened the door to find two cops standing on the porch, hats in their hands. He’d stood in the kitchen for a long time after they left, before The Kid got home from school, trying to figure out what he was going to tell The Kid, how he was going to say it. Unable to move. The clock on the microwave gaining minutes, a rain shower coming and going, the light outside shifting and fading. That endless afternoon. At some point, he noticed The Kid standing in the living room, watching him. At some point, The Kid asked him what was wrong.
He told The Kid the story. Lucy falling in the classroom, her students rushing to her side, the football player carrying her down the hall. He left out some details, possibly added others. It was hard to remember, exactly, what he’d said. If he’d talked about her face hitting the floor, if he’d talked about the fluid on the boy’s shirt. He hoped not, he hoped he’d spared The Kid those things, but it was hard to remember.
He’d only repeated the story a couple of times, to Bob, to Lucy’s friend Amanda, and once, the day after, over the phone to Lucy’s mother in Chicago. That was it. The story was sealed, finished, never repeated. But most nights in the quiet house it visited him. He couldn’t shake it. He imagined the look in her eyes before she fell, her cheek on the cold tile floor.
Darby wondered what he had said. The football player. If he’d said anything as he carried her down the hall. If she had said anything, if she had been conscious at all.
He felt like he was still inside that moment, after the cops had left, before The Kid got home from school. Like nothing had happened since then. Like that afternoon had never really ended.
He turned off the TV and went out onto the sidewalk to get some air. He heard sirens in the distance, fire trucks, ambulances. There was an orange smear just above the rooftops to the east, gray smoke rising against the black sky. A quick movement caught his eye and he looked down at the cement, the cracks and crevices, the buckling sidewalk beneath his boots, and it was there that he saw it again, beneath the two holes in the manhole cover, some trick of the light, the glow of the fire reflected, maybe, something flashing through the holes from the space below.
It was there and then it was gone.
The Kid was in and out of sleep. It was like that most nights. His dad would tuck him into bed and go back downstairs to the TV playing low in the living room or out to the pickup, the radio playing low in the night. The Kid would drift, dozing, trying to stay awake to hear the important things, the buzz of the pager signaling that his dad had to go to work, and the other sound, the sound he’d waited to hear for almost a year now.
His dad had a job where he helped people after something bad happened to their family. That was how The Kid’s mom had explained it once, although his dad wasn’t a doctor and he wasn’t a cop. The Kid imagined his dad like a character in a comic book, a detective or government agent who showed up after a villain had committed a crime. He didn’t have any superpowers, but he used his brains, he used his wits to figure out what had happened and how to fix what had gone wrong.
The pager buzzed when somebody needed help. The pager was his dad’s signal device. One o’clock in the morning, two o’clock, The Kid would hear it buzz, hear his dad gathering his change of clothes and thermos of coffee, hear him coming back up to The Kid’s bedroom to stand over the bed. The Kid pretended he was asleep during all of this. He closed his eyes and made his breathing slow and deep. The Kid had seen superheroes do this in a couple of comics, pretending they were sleeping or dead. Batman knew how to do this, Green Arrow, Captain America. Lower your heart rate, calm your breathing. The Kid learned from their techniques, pretended he was asleep while his dad stood over his bed with his hand resting lightly on The Kid’s forehead.
Sometimes his dad left for work before the pager even buzzed, and this was how The Kid knew that his dad did have a kind of superpower, an intuition that he was needed somewhere in the city, a sense that someone out there needed help.
His dad got postcards sometimes. The Kid saw them when he brought in the mail. He’d gotten used to opening the mail that wasn’t addressed to him in the month after his mom had gone. So many cards had come from teachers at his mom’s school, parents of her students, old friends from back when she was a kid. His dad didn’t open them so The Kid opened them all, and that was how he knew that his dad got postcards from different people all over the city that said, Thank you, or, God bless you, or, You did the impossible for us. These cards were from people his dad had helped, the people he went to when his pager buzzed in the night.
The Kid drifted, dozing, half hearing things, sirens and car horns, engines gunning down the street, the rhythmic beating of police helicopters passing overhead, and then something would bring him back, a bus backfiring, a dog barking, some loud, sharp noise, and he would wake in a panic, afraid he’d missed it, the other sound he was waiting for.
He didn’t believe his dad, the story his dad had told him that day, about his mom falling over in front of her class. The Kid had never heard of a mom just dying like that. He had heard of dads dying, even knew a couple of kids in school whose dads had died. They’d been hurt at work or shot or killed in a car crash. This was the way some dads died. But moms didn’t die that way, as far as he knew. What moms did sometimes was leave. They got sick of kids and dads and they walked out the door and left. This had happened to Little Rey Lugo. His mom had left a couple of times. Once she was gone for over a month. The other kids in school said that she had another family, another husband and kids way out west by the beach. They said that when she got sick of Rey and his dad she went to live with her other family. The kids said that her other family was probably rich and lived in a bigger house.
This is wh
at The Kid thought had happened with his mom. Something similar. Maybe she didn’t have another family, another husband and son, maybe she didn’t have a big house by the beach, but she had left, she’d gone to school that day and hadn’t come back.
He’d heard his mom and dad arguing sometimes, whispering in the night down in their old bedroom or out in the living room when The Kid was supposed to be asleep. He’d heard his mom crying sometimes after an argument, and even sometimes when The Kid’s dad wasn’t there. Just standing in the kitchen in the afternoon while The Kid ate his after-school snack, talking to The Kid one minute and then quiet the next. The Kid would look over and see her crying. He’d look over while they were watching the talk show tape in the morning sometimes and see her crying then, too, just watching TV and crying silently. When he asked her what was wrong, she said that she didn’t know, that she just felt bad. She said that she didn’t know what was wrong.
The Kid suspected what was wrong. She was disgusted by The Kid, the fact that The Kid smelled bad, that he had B.O. and bad breath. She was embarrassed by The Kid, the things people said about him, all of The Kid’s problems at school. That’s why she’d left. He had made her sick and sad. That’s why his dad lied about what had happened. To protect The Kid’s feelings.
She was out there, somewhere. Sad, maybe alone, maybe crying. The Kid kept an eye out for her whenever he went anywhere. This is why he paid such close attention when he was walking around the neighborhood. When he came home from school, he looked for her in the windows of the house. He walked through the front door hoping she’d be standing there in the kitchen, smiling at him, opening her arms. She’d see how clean he was now, how long he brushed his teeth for, how long he swished the mouthwash, how hard he scrubbed in the shower, how much deodorant he used. His dad would come in from the pickup and apologize for the fights they’d had. She’d see how much they missed her and decide to stay home, decide that she was happy here, that this was where she belonged.
The Kid’s dad slept out in the pickup instead of in the old bedroom. One night, not long after his mom had left, The Kid heard something outside and went to his window and saw his dad down in the pickup, listening to the radio. It happened every night after that. His dad usually left one of the truck windows open for a while, until the night got too cold, and on nights when The Kid had his bedroom window open he could hear the radio from down in the truck. His dad listened to talk shows, people talking about sports or the news or taking calls with listeners’ questions about health problems or real estate. The Kid didn’t know what his dad’s interest was in any of this stuff, but that’s what he listened to. Sometimes The Kid would stand at his window, looking down on his dad in the glow from the streetlight, watching his dad sitting, watching his dad lying across the front seat. He wasn’t sure how much sleep his dad got. Some mornings The Kid woke up and went outside to find the windows of the truck rolled up, foggy with his dad’s breath, the radio still playing. The Kid would knock on the pickup’s window so his dad would wake up and start the day.
The Kid knew why his dad was sleeping out there, though his dad never told him. The Kid just knew. It was the same reason that The Kid tried to stay awake all night. His dad was waiting for The Kid’s mom, too. His dad was keeping watch, just like The Kid.
For weeks after she was gone The Kid would come home from school and find flowers and cards waiting on the front porch. The Kid felt bad that people had spent money on those things, wondered how mad those people would be if they found out it was all a lie. His dad never brought the flowers and cards inside. They just kind of piled up and then one day they were all gone. He didn’t know what his dad had done with them. Maybe his dad was ashamed, too, ashamed of lying to save The Kid’s feelings and then all those people went to all that trouble to send flowers and cards.
Every week for a while, Amanda had come by with dinner in Tupperware containers for The Kid and his dad. Chicken and cheese enchiladas, green corn tamales. The Kid felt bad about this, too, but the dinner was always good, better than the drive-thrus they went to, so he didn’t feel too bad. Amanda had been friends with his mom back before he was born, back even before his mom and dad had met. She brought the dinners for a while, and then she stopped. The Kid didn’t know why. At one point she just stopped and then they didn’t see Amanda at all anymore.
The flowers and cards hadn’t come for a long time, but his dad still got the postcards. Whenever The Kid felt angry that his dad hadn’t been able to stop his mom from leaving, he read the postcards waiting on the porch, thought of all the other people his dad had helped.
The only person The Kid had told about his suspicion was Matthew, about a week or so after his mom had gone. He couldn’t hold the secret anymore. It was too much for him. He was afraid he was going to blurt it out in school and get his dad in trouble. He felt like it was going to burst through his chest, like it was going to jump up out of his mouth into the quiet of the classroom. After school one day, up in Matthew’s bedroom, he told Matthew the story his dad had told him, and then he told Matthew why he thought it was a lie. Matthew agreed that this was a definite possibility. Matthew could picture The Kid’s mom leaving like Rey Lugo’s mom had left. This wasn’t unheard of. Matthew promised not to tell anyone else the truth. He swore on a Bible, which The Kid knew meant Matthew was serious.
Matthew told him what he could do to bring his mom back. He could make a Covenant. A Covenant was when you made a deal with God. How it worked was you gave something up, something that was important to you, something that was hard to go without. You sacrificed something and stuck to it, and what you asked God for in return would come true. Matthew said that this happened all the time. It usually happened with little things, stupid things, lost homework or lost pets, but it could happen with big things, too. Lost mothers. But this would mean a bigger sacrifice. Matthew said that if The Kid wanted this big thing, if he wanted his mom to come back from wherever she was, then he’d have to sacrifice something that would be very hard to live without.
The Kid thought for a while, and then he decided. He wouldn’t talk. He knew that if he sacrificed talking, he would never grow up to be a real talk show host, that he’d never broadcast It’s That Kid! on actual TV. It would always only be a made-up show. He thought about what it would be like to never talk for the rest of his life. He tried to picture himself as an adult, at his dad’s age, walking around not talking. It was a scary thought, but he would do it if it meant that his mom would come back.
The Kid didn’t know much about God. He’d never gone to church except on Christmas Eve with his mom a few times. All he knew about God was what he’d seen on TV and heard from Matthew. He hoped that this didn’t matter to God, hoped that God would accept The Kid’s sacrifice even though The Kid didn’t know too much about him.
He’d knelt on the hard wood floor of Matthew’s bedroom and followed the instructions Matthew gave. He closed his eyes, clasped his hands, repeated after his friend. The words of the Covenant. When Matthew stopped talking, The Kid was supposed to tell God what he promised to give up. Matthew stopped talking and there was a hole in the room, a pause, and then The Kid said the words, offered his sacrifice, and when he was done talking he closed his mouth and didn’t talk again.
It had gotten easier after a while, after his dad bought him the first notebook, after he’d learned to write fast, learned to think quick. He still even hosted the talk show, although it wasn’t quite as good, wasn’t quite the same. He knew this. But nothing was really quite the same.
The Kid had kept his end of the deal for a year now. Matthew said to be patient, but The Kid didn’t know how long he would have to wait, or if something else was required for the Covenant, if there was something else he needed to do.
He lay in bed and listened in the night, waited for the sound of his dad’s pager, for the other sound. He heard sirens instead, fire trucks from far away, getting closer. He went to his window, looked through the bars. He saw his dad out
on the sidewalk, looking down at the manhole cover. There was a flickering orange glow a few neighborhoods over, on the other side of Sunset Boulevard. Something on fire. The Kid could even smell it, burning wood, deep and dusky. He watched the glow, listened to the sirens getting closer. He watched until the glow went away, until the fire was put out, until he could barely stay awake any longer, fading at the window, fighting it but fading, and then it felt like he was being carried, someone in the room, maybe, a shadow of a person, it felt like he was flying, back into bed somehow and mad at himself for being so weak, unable to stop from falling asleep before he could hear the sound of his dad’s pager or the other sound, the one he was really waiting for, the sound of the front door opening and his mom coming home.
two
The Kid stood outside Mr. Bromwell’s office, on time for his appointment but waiting, listing to the murmur of Mr. Bromwell’s voice on the other side of the door, talking on the phone. He had all his stuff in a brown paper supermarket bag, his notebook and pencils and schoolbooks. The bag was only temporary, was only to make do until he and his dad could go shopping for a new backpack.
“Hey, Kid.”
The Kid turned and there was Michelle Mustache, coming slowly down the hall, what looked like cherry fruit juice staining her upper lip, making her nickname seem even truer than usual.
“You waiting for the shrink?” she said.
The Kid nodded.
“What do you talk about in there?”
The Kid shrugged. He didn’t feel like getting into a whole conversation.
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