by Darlene Ryan
I dragged Q’s air mattress across the floor, setting it by the door and put one of his blankets on top. “You can sleep there. No one will touch you. No one.”
He stood there, arms wrapped around himself, and I figured he’d just take off the second I moved. “If you want to go, you can,” I said. “But if you want to stay here, it’s safe. Better than out there in the dark. And you can have breakfast in the morning.” I didn’t know what else to say. I’d never managed to get the dog at Pax House to come to me, and one day it just stopped hanging around. Was I doing the same thing all over again?
Leo moved toward the door, and I held my breath. Slowly he sat down on the mattress, pulling the blanket around himself. Q came out of the bathroom then.
He looked at the space where his mattress had been. Then he looked at me, stretched out on my own bed. He wasn’t stupid enough to try and sleep with me. He rolled up in his blanket on the floor, folding his arm under his head for a pillow.
I watched Leo sitting there in the darkness for a long time. He was still sitting there when I fell asleep.
I figured Leo would be gone when I woke up, but he was still by the door, slumped over sideways, asleep. I went into the bathroom, and when I came out, he was standing by the door, the blanket neatly folded on the air mattress.
“Hi,” I said, finger-combing my hair. “You hungry?”
The shrug again. I handed him two of the plates we’d found last night and a knife. “Wash these, please,” I said, jerking my elbow in the direction of the bathroom. “There’s stuff for washing dishes and some paper towel in there.” I figured he’d either do it or he’d go, and I needed to know which it was going to be.
He did it. I used Q’s folding knife to cut up an apple. I broke a blueberry muffin pretty much in half and got juice for him and water for me.
Leo came out of the bathroom and handed me the clean dishes. I spread peanut butter on the pieces of apple and made a plate for each of us. “Here,” I said. “Let’s go sit on the stairs so we don’t wake these guys up.”
I sat on the top step and set my plate on my lap. Leo stood there for a moment. I started to eat. He leaned against the wall by the top of the stairs and slowly slid down into a squat. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as we ate. He had dark hair that fell into his eyes, which were blue. The knuckles on one hand were scraped like he’d been in a fight, and there was a bruise, almost faded, on the side of his chin. He never stopped watching, looking around, looking for what I didn’t know, but I’d seen Q do the same thing.
I figured after breakfast I’d take him to Hannah. She’d know what to do. I wouldn’t tell Q until after, because he’d start with his foster-care speech. And maybe he was right, how the hell did I know? But I couldn’t take care of Dylan and this kid and me. There wasn’t enough space. There wasn’t enough food. There wasn’t enough anything. And I was just starting to maybe figure out a way that I could go to school. I couldn’t be somebody else’s mother; I already had Dylan to look after.
“You wanna get cleaned up?” I asked when he finished eating. He didn’t stink exactly, but he didn’t smell great either. We went back inside. Q was awake, sitting on my air mattress and eating a Pop-Tart. I gave Leo a towel and pointed to the bathroom. “You can have a bath if you want. The door locks from the inside.”
“Thank you,” he said softly. He took the towel and his battered backpack and closed the bathroom door behind him.
I waited until I heard the water running before I walked over to Q and kicked him. “What kind of a stupid poker game was that?” I said.
“I’m not going back.”
“He’s just a kid, Q,” I said.
Q’s face turned serious. “Why do you think I tried so hard to win him? What was I supposed to do? Huh? I didn’t know it was going to turn out the way it did.”
Q needed a shave. He still didn’t smell that great, and his hair was sticking up weirdly on one side, but I wasn’t mad anymore. “You couldn’t…you couldn’t leave him, I get that,” I said. “Just please don’t play with those people anymore.”
“How were things at the dump?” Q asked, a smile pulling at his mouth.
“Fine,” I said.
“You took Dylan.”
I picked up his blanket and started folding it. “I kinda had to, since you weren’t here.”
He sighed. “You’re going to keep doing this, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am,” I said, tossing the folded blanket onto the mattress. “It’s good stuff, and it’s just going to end up in the garbage for real.”
Dylan woke up then. While he showed Q his train, I got his breakfast ready. Leo came out of the bathroom as I was spreading a blob of peanut butter on the last of the apple. His hair was wet, and he was wearing different clothes. I pointed at Dylan. “That’s Dylan,” I said.
“Hey, kiddo,” I called to Dylan. “Here’s breakfast. Pee and wash your hands. And…and this is my friend Leo.”
Dylan padded to the bathroom, watching Leo all the way. I offered Leo another Pop-Tart. He glanced toward the bathroom. I shook my head. “He won’t eat one. He’s on a peanut butter kick.”
Dylan came out then and walked over to me for his plate. He threw his arms around my legs, and I hugged him, pushing his hair back from his face. “Can we go to the swings today?” he asked. If we went to the park, we could do the soup line for lunch. Not my favorite place, but it would be hot and not junk. “Okay,” I said. “But we have to go to the laundry.”
“Can I bring my train?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Now go eat.”
Leo had watched us the entire time. I bent down to look in my stash for something for my own breakfast. When I stood up, he was gone.
“Dylan, where did Leo go?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he said.
I leaned across the table to look out the window in time to see the kid run across the street. I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t swear in front of Dylan.
“He took off,” I told Q when he came out of the bathroom.
“Shit!” he said under his breath. “I was afraid of that.” He looked at his watch. “I have to go.”
I handed him a Pop-Tart and a chunk of apple. He leaned over to kiss me, catching the side of my mouth. “See you later.”
Dylan and I were on our way to the Laundromat when I saw Leo out of the corner of my eye, across the street. Dylan was being the little pain in the ass he could sometimes be. I needed the wheels for one bag of laundry, which meant he had to walk. I was carrying another bag and holding him by the hand. He had the stupid train—I had pretty quickly realized it was a bad idea to let him bring it. The bag fell off the cart for the third time at the exact moment that Dylan sat down on the sidewalk and said he was too tired to walk anymore. I’d figured out pretty quickly that snapping at him just made it worse. The only thing I could do was take one bag of dirty stuff back to the room.
I set down the bag I was carrying and reached for the one that had rolled onto the sidewalk.
“I’ll get it,” Leo said.
I hadn’t seen him come across the street. I pulled a hand back through my hair. “Thank you.”
He picked up the plastic garbage bag and looked at Dylan, still sitting on the pavement, stubbornly driving his train around his outstretched legs.
“I could carry this,” Leo said. “You could pull him, I mean, if you want to.”
What I wanted was to make Dylan walk, because it wasn’t that far and I was mad. But that would have been stupid.
I blew out a breath that made the wisps of hair around my face fly into the air. “Yeah, that would help,” I said. I pulled the wheeled platform the few feet to where Dylan sat. “Get on,” I said. “And hold on tight to that train, because if it falls off I’m not stopping for it.”
He smiled at me. “Yes, you will,” he said. He knew when I was full of crap.
I shook my head and tried to look stern. “No, I won’t.”
Dylan nodded. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“No. No. No,” I said. Considering that he was always dropping something and I always went back and got it, it was a stupid argument. But it made him laugh.
We walked a block answering each other back and forth until he did let go of the train—probably on purpose—and I did stop to pick it up, and then we both laughed.
When we got to the Laundromat, Leo carried the bag inside for me and set it on an empty washer. “If you want to throw any of your stuff in, you can,” I said as I started sorting. “If you want to.”
I didn’t look at him because I just had a feeling that if I did, he’d take off. After a minute he opened the old canvas pack he carried and dumped his stuff into the washer. Then he fished in his pocket and handed me two quarters. It felt weird to take the kid’s money, but I did.
I dropped into a chair by the window, where I could keep an eye on the washers and Dylan, who was driving his train around the bank of machines. Leo leaned on the wall by the dryers. After a few minutes he walked across the room and pulled a flyer off the end wall. He leaned over a washer. I couldn’t see what he was doing with the paper. Finally he straightened. Somehow he’d turned it into a small ball. He bent down to Dylan and said something. Dylan nodded, and the ball went into the back of one of the train cars. In a few minutes another flyer turned into another ball. A third one became a bird that Dylan flew around the room. By the time everything was dry, Dylan was getting whiny again.
“We’ll take this stuff home and then we’ll have some lunch and go to the park,” I told him.
Leo had stuffed his clean clothes into his backpack. When I tied the top of the second bag of laundry, he took it from me. I carried the other bag and pulled Dylan like before. Leo walked beside him, and Dylan talked pretty much the whole way. When we got back to the building, Leo brought the bag upstairs.
“Have lunch with us,” I said.
He shook his head and took a step backward. “No. I can’t,” he said.
“Please, please, please,” Dylan begged.
Suddenly I didn’t want to do the soup line. I still had a bunch of quarters.
Maybe I could score a leftover pizza at Pizza Man. “Pizza,” I said, hoping that would convince him.
“Yay!” Dylan cheered, hopping around the room on one foot.
“Okay,” Leo said.
We walked over to Pizza Man, and for once Dylan didn’t complain. I stood in line at the takeout window with my bag of quarters, hoping they’d have a missed pickup. They did. They had two of the small personal pizzas. One was bacon and pepperoni and the other was veggies. For the price of one, I got both.
We took the pizza to the park, sat on a bench by the swings and ate. We probably spent an hour on the swings and the climber after lunch. Finally I pulled a plastic garbage bag out of my backpack. “C’mon,” I called to Dylan.
“What are you doing?” Leo asked.
“Collecting returnables,” I said as Dylan raced up with a wine bottle.
“Is this good?” Dylan asked.
“Very good,” I said. He tore across the grass toward the big maple, where we usually found as many as a dozen empty beer bottles.
Leo spotted two wine-cooler bottles. With an extra set of eyes, we got the bag filled pretty quickly. Leo took it, and I let Dylan climb up on my back for the ride to the recycling center. When I turned around from the counter with the money, Leo was gone.
“Hey, kiddo, where did Leo go?” I said.
Dylan shrugged. “He said he had to go.”
I piggybacked Dylan all the way home, hoping Leo would just appear again out of nowhere, but he didn’t.
thirteen
Q came home with food from the hotel—chicken, rice, a salad with fancy lettuce. “This is our last meal from there,” he said. “Kevin got another job.”
We’d been getting stuff about twice a week from the hotel kitchen. I wondered what would happen to the food now, and I was really glad I’d met Lucy. I told Q about Leo spending part of the day with us.
“I wish he’d just stayed here,” he said. “He shouldn’t be wandering around by himself.”
“Maybe he’ll come back,” I said. I didn’t know if it was what I wanted or not. Dylan liked Leo, and I didn’t want him to have any more people who just disappeared from his life. He never said a word about his mother or his brother and sister, but sometimes he’d sit up in the middle of the night, crying and shaking. He wasn’t exactly awake, but he wasn’t quite asleep either. Pretty much all I could do was hold on to him until it stopped. Suddenly he’d be asleep in my arms. I’d lay him down and usually spend the rest of the night watching him. In the morning it would be like it hadn’t happened.
After we’d eaten, Q got the poker book out of the pocket of his jacket and went to sit by the window where the light was best.
“What’re you reading about?” I asked. “The rules of the game?”
He shook his head. “Strategy. I figured it wouldn’t hurt if I could learn more about odds and stuff.”
I figured it wouldn’t hurt if Q just stopped playing poker all together, but I kept that to myself. That night, after Dylan was asleep, Q and I had sex again. I’d given up on it ever being the way it was in books. It was okay and all, being so close to Q, but I’d always figured it would be special somehow, and it was just…ordinary.
Monday morning I was taking Dylan to the thrift store to look for shoes when I realized Leo was behind us. I stopped and pretended to tie my shoe. Dylan looked around the way I figured he would and caught sight of Leo.
“Leo!” he yelled, a big grin lighting up his face.
Leo walked up to us.
“I’m going to get shoes,” Dylan said. “You come.”
I didn’t wait for Leo to answer. I handed him the leather strap so he could pull Dylan up the sidewalk.
We found a pair of sneakers for Dylan. When we came out, we headed for the library, and Leo just seemed to get pulled along. I decided to try Pizza Man again for lunch. No pizza this time, but I did manage to get an order of macaroni and cheese with ham that hadn’t been picked up. The three of us ate it out of the foil pan with plastic forks, sitting on the same bench in the park as we did before. This time Leo disappeared while I was pushing Dylan on the swings. I thought I saw him when I was walking back with Lucy that night, loaded with a bag in each hand because it had been a good night. I looked across the street and then back over my shoulder, but he wasn’t there.
I packed the cooler and put two jars of peanut butter in the window, but once I lay down, I couldn’t get to sleep. Dylan was curled up in a tiny ball in his sleeping bag. Q was sprawled on his stomach, one arm thrown over me.
When I heard the noise, the first thing I figured it could be was a mouse. It was that kind of scratching sound. Then I heard it again, and something made me get up. My heart was pounding, and there wasn’t really any reason to go and look, but I had to do it. I pulled on my boots before I opened the door, because if whatever was out there was small and furry with a long tail, it was going to get its ass kicked.
It took me a second to see him in the faint light in the hall. For a second I thought it was a bag of clothes someone had dropped at the top of the stairs. Then I saw that it was a person, and a moment after that…oh God…it was Leo.
I ran to him. His face was bloodied. I touched him, and he flinched. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” I said. “Don’t move.” I ran back into the apartment, grabbed Q and shook him awake. “Q, it’s Leo. It’s Leo. He’s hurt.” I grabbed one of my blankets.
Q followed me out. “Oh shit,” he said when he saw Leo.
I knelt on the floor and wrapped the blanket around him. Q crouched beside me. “What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard a noise. It was him.” Leo’s face was swollen and dark with bruises. “You gotta find a phone,” I told Q. “We have to get an ambulance.”
“No!” Leo whispered, his voice low a
nd scratchy. He tried to get up.
I knew we would all be in a mess if an ambulance came, because police would come too, but that didn’t seem to matter. Leo was still trying to get up.
“Help me get him inside,” Q said.
“No,” I said. “He needs an ambulance and a doctor.” I got to my feet. If Q wasn’t going to get help, I would.
He grabbed my arm. “What he needs is to get out of this hallway, and so do we, in case whoever did this shows up.”
“Fine,” I said. We half dragged, half carried Leo into the room and got him on my mattress. The whole thing woke Dylan up.
“Maddie?” he called out. I heard the fear in his voice.
I kneeled by his bed. “I’m right here, kiddo.”
He rubbed his eyes. “What are you doing? You woke me up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Lay down and go back to sleep.”
He squinted across the room. “Maddie, why is Leo on your bed?”
My heart was racing in my chest. Lie or truth? “Leo fell down,” I said. Lie. “He got a bunch of owies.”
“You can fix them, right?”
I nodded. Lie, again.
He reached down, pulled up his blanket and handed it to me. “Leo can have my blankie,” he said.
The back of my throat got tight, and I had to put a hand on my chest to remind myself to breathe. I took the blanket and leaned over to kiss him. “Thanks, kiddo,” I whispered.
One arm came up and around my neck. “I love you, Maddie,” he whispered back.
I hugged him tightly. “I love you too,” I breathed against his neck.
He rolled over and snuggled down into his sleeping bag. I set Fred over his head.
Leo was half sitting on my air mattress, slumped against the wall. I tucked Dylan’s blanket around him and went for some water and a towel. Q caught my arm. “No ambulance, Maddie,” he said in a low voice. “He’ll run.”
I shrugged off his hand. “I know,” I said. I put warm water in a little plastic bowl I’d gotten at the thrift store for a quarter. Then I got the only clean towel we had and knelt on the floor beside Leo. I dipped the end of the towel in the water and started cleaning his face. He shook, and tears mixed with the blood and dirt on his face, but he didn’t make a sound. I didn’t even try not to cry. I wiped at the tears and dipped a clean end of the towel in the water.