Apollo slipped into the living room. He could hear the quality of the oven’s flame change as the pot—or kettle?—was placed on the burner. He smelled, faintly, ginger in the air. In the darkness of the living room, he could almost see his breath as a faint cloud of blue electricity. Every sense became more finely tuned as he approached the threshold of the kitchen. Emma would be in there reenacting her crime, and this time he would find her, and they wouldn’t speak with each other. They would tear each other apart, down to the atomic level, a little nuclear fission in the kitchen, nothing left of them but the silhouettes of who they used to be burned into the wall.
“Apollo? Is that you?”
“Mom?” he said. He walked into the kitchen swatting the air, his confusion swarming him like flies.
Lillian Kagwa stood at the open fridge, holding a quart of skim milk. “I’m making tea,” she said.
Apollo looked at the oven to find a small pot of milk bubbling up. The tea leaves were already inside, and small strips of ginger, too. They boiled, and the level rose toward the lip, and Apollo did just as he’d learned when he was a boy, turned off the flame before the potion spilled over. With the heat off, the tea settled again, steaming, spinning, a rich brown color.
“Well done,” Lillian said, standing beside him. She had a teacup on the counter, and a sieve. She strained the tea, set the pot back on the oven, picked up her cup, and took one long sip.
“Why are you here?” Apollo asked. “It’s the middle of the night.” He pulled out a chair and sat because he felt unbalanced by his confusion.
“It’s twelve-twenty,” she said, standing over him. She’d always liked to have her tea on her feet, the habit of a woman who had to rush to work in the morning. “How was dinner with Dana and Patrice?” she asked.
Apollo looked up to the ceiling light. “Dana called you,” Apollo said. “She went into the bedroom and called you.”
“I was surprised that you’d been out to see them before you saw me.”
Apollo shook his head and laughed. “Please tell me you’re not guilting me right now, Mom.”
She sipped her tea. “What guilt? Do you feel guilty? Why didn’t you call me to pick you up, though?”
“Too early,” Apollo said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
Lillian took down a second mug and poured Apollo a cup of tea like hers. “Four in the morning,” she said. “That’s criminal. Let me make you something to eat.”
“I just had dinner with Patrice and Dana,” Apollo said.
In the time it took him to complete the sentence, Lillian had already opened the fridge and removed a half-carton of eggs, an onion, a block of cheddar cheese, sour cream, and a bag of semisweet chocolate chips. A selection strange enough that Apollo wanted to make a joke, but as she removed more items from the fridge—tangerines and cherry tomatoes—he realized how anxious she must be. They’d seen each other at his trial but hadn’t been allowed to talk. He’d called her from Rikers once, but this was the first time they’d been in the same room since then.
“I’m happy you’re here,” Apollo said. “I’m happy to see you.”
He stood and shut the fridge door gently. The two of them stood close and looked at the things she’d laid out.
“What was I planning to cook?” she asked.
“Let’s just have the tea,” Apollo said, guiding her to the chair he’d vacated.
He sat next to her, and neither spoke as they sipped. He felt sure he looked older than her. It seemed important to comfort her, to soothe any fears she could have. In a way it felt good to have someone to care for.
“You need to sleep,” Apollo said. “And I do, too.”
She brought a hand to her chest and patted it softly. “I was asleep when Dana called me. I go to bed so early most nights.”
“You were in Springfield Gardens?” he said. “How did you get here before me?”
Lillian gave a smile. Her purse sat on the table. She reached for it, unzipped the top, took out her phone, and swiped once on the screen. She held the phone toward him.
“I called an Uber,” she said.
“How much did that cost you?” He’d taken that scolding tone adults do with their elderly parents.
Lillian’s face flushed, and she set the phone down. “I called an Uber,” she said. “And now I’m here. Let’s leave it at that.”
They finished their tea and put the food back into the fridge. None of this stuff looked rotten, so Apollo realized Lillian must have brought it all recently, restocking his fridge for his return. Good mothers are a gift, he thought to himself.
“I called the police once a week until they finally told me it was okay to enter your place,” Lillian said. “Your super, Fabian, he let me use his keys. The police dug through everything, went through all the closets and dresser drawers. I didn’t want you to come back and find the place a mess. Not with everything else.”
Lillian washed the cups and cleaned the pot. Apollo told her to take his bed. When she protested, he explained he couldn’t sleep in it anyway.
“I’d offer to buy you a new bed,” she said. “But that Uber ride took most of my savings.”
Apollo laughed, and the sound turned a valve in Lillian, so she laughed, too.
They went into the bedroom, and he pulled back the sheets as if he was about to tuck his mother into bed for the night, but she grabbed his hand and shook it. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “I want you to come see Brian’s grave. We can bring flowers.”
Brian’s grave.
Two words, and suddenly Apollo felt like the one in need of tucking in.
“Nassau Knolls,” she said. “It’s in Port Washington. It’s a beautiful location.”
“Mom,” he whispered, “I’m not ready for that.”
She pulled him down next to her on the bed. She held his hand in both of hers.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said.
Apollo pulled his hand away. “You’re not going to tell me about Arthur getting shot again, are you? Ugandan dictatorship. You drove like crazy, but he still bled to death. You came to the United States. Immigrants are so amazing. You make America great. I got it.”
Lillian rubbed her thighs. “That’s not what I was going to say.”
“What then?”
“Something else!” Lillian stood up, slipped her shoes off, and set them by the bed. She gestured to the door, and Apollo was dismissed. She closed the door, and Apollo remained on the other side until he saw the light go out under the door. Did he want to apologize? No he did not. He wanted to say more, to say much worse. He wanted to do something worse. Not to her, to himself. Patrice had been right. If his friend hadn’t said something, who knew where he’d have gone next? The George Washington Bridge was a block from this apartment. Every 3.5 days somebody attempted to jump the waist-high handrail. Maybe tonight it would’ve been him.
Apollo thought giving Patrice and Dana the book had been a selfless gesture, but it’s possible he couldn’t be trusted to understand himself right now. What would he have done if Lillian hadn’t been here? He didn’t know, and that surprised him. Who was he now? What might he become? He’d always been so sure—a book man, a husband, a father—but now none of those roles seemed his to fill.
APOLLO HAD TO saw through the neon green sticker the police had affixed to Brian’s bedroom door. He’d probably dulled the blade of his bread knife by the time he cut through. Then he stood in the hallway listening for Lillian. Had he woken her? He held the knife in one hand and the door handle in the other. Was he really standing out here straining to hear his mother, or did he just want to avoid going inside? He turned on the light in the hallway and then pushed.
There were footprints in the room. All over the floor. Big shoes. Cops and EMTs; gray dust on the dark wooden floor, the space looking like a square-dancing diagram. Even in the dark he could see this much. Here he found the one room Lillian hadn’t been able to clean. One of the blackout curtains was half down,
moonlight coming through the bottom. The other was completely pulled up.
A large piece of wooden board had been put in to replace the broken window that led to the fire escape. When Fabian entered the bedroom, after he’d seen the baby but before he called the police, he’d found the security gate open and this window smashed. The glass had been on the sill and the fire escape, not inside the room. Emma had escaped this way. No one had been able to explain how—without keys, with the front door locked—Emma Valentine had gotten in that morning.
The glass had all been gathered and taken by the police forensics team. The hope had been to find blood on the fragments, and indeed, blood had been found. The blood of Emma Valentine. No revelation there, just corroboration.
Apollo stepped inside but hesitated to turn on the light. His mind returned, of all places, to the night Emma had given birth to Brian on the A train. Not to the dinner with Nichelle, nor to the bargaining with the dancers, but to the moment when his son’s head—still protected by the amniotic sac—had pressed against Apollo’s open palm. That moment just before his son slipped out and the sac burst all over his hands and the dirty floor. That slow time when their child had existed in two worlds at once—reality and eternity—and because Apollo and Emma were both in contact with the boy right then, they too, in a sense, had slipped between the two. The entire family had been Here and There. Together. A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids. Apollo stood in the semidarkness of this room and felt much the same. If he reached out now, he thought he’d even feel the thin membrane in the air like a curtain he might part. Here and There.
What would he find on the other side? What would find him?
Then Lillian turned on the light.
“I’m sorry,” she said when he turned back to look at her. “I woke up and had the worst feeling that you had disappeared.”
With the light on, the room returned to reality, became merely monstrous again. What a relief the police had taken the crib as well as the shards of glass. Somehow pictures of the crib had been leaked online. Who’d done that? One of the police? Someone in the lab? Apollo had been in the hospital when the images of it played on the local news. By the time he understood what he was seeing, a nurse turned the television off.
Brian’s room felt fifteen degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The wooden board in the window hardly kept out the chill. There were bugs in the room, flies. Some flew around lazily, while others climbed on the walls. Lillian left and returned with a yellow flyswatter.
Apollo left and returned with the broom and dustpan. He wanted those footprints out of the room, to erase all those strangers who’d stomped through. There were bookshelves that had been used to store Improbabilia’s stock before Brian was born. After Brian the books had gone into storage in the basement, and the shelves carried all the hand-me-downs and children’s toys and infant supplies. A case of day diapers and a pack of night diapers—both size two—sat on a shelf.
Emma had bought plastic drawers for the clothes even before the baby was born and spent hours sorting them all. Here lay the proof. Bins labeled “Onesies 0–6 mos,” “Sweatpants 0–6 mos,” and “Jeans 0–6 mos.” Another series of the same for clothes six-to-twelve months. “Sweaters,” “Socks,” “Hats & Scarves,” “Bibs,” “Washcloths.” An old yellow and orange coffee can from Café du Monde held a dozen pacifiers they’d never used because Brian soothed himself to sleep by sucking his thumb. Next to the can on the shelf sat a book about how and when to wean thumb sucking. Emma had arranged all this. She’d nested with the best of them, prepared such a welcome for the boy. How had that same woman turned this room into a crime scene?
The copy of Outside Over There also stood on the shelf, right beside the book on thumb sucking. Apollo took it down. He’d planned to read this book to the boy every night, but how many times had he actually done it? Zero. He’d recited it from memory that morning in the Riverdale basement, but there’d been a different magic to the idea of reading to him. Teaching his child to love a book. Turning the pages until Brian became old enough to do it for himself. Reading the words aloud until Brian needed no help. Sitting alongside his son, the two of them lost in their stories. He’d daydreamed it from the day they brought the baby home, and yet in six months, he’d been so tired and worn out that it hadn’t happened once. But then, it didn’t make sense to read to a six-month-old. There would be time. There would be time. He’d always assumed. Apollo opened the book and leafed through it.
Behind him Lillian slapped the flyswatter against the wall, making a faint cracking sound.
“ ‘You’re coming with me,’ ” Apollo said.
Behind him Lillian stopped swatting.
“What did you just say?” Lillian asked. The wooden floor croaked as she stepped toward him.
He turned away from the closet. “That’s the last thing I ever said to Brian.”
“Why did you say that to him?” Lillian asked.
“I started having the dream again,” Apollo said. “That old one, do you remember? Right after Brian was born.”
“I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would I tell you? It’s just an old nightmare.”
His mother began to cry. “I guess I have something to tell you,” Lillian said.
APOLLO KAGWA NEEDED a mop and bucket. Though it was nearly two in the morning, he needed to clean the wooden floors in Brian’s room tout de suite. He left the bedroom before Lillian could say any more. Went to the kitchen and found the mop in the closet and a bucket under the sink, even a bottle of Seventh Generation Wood Cleaner, half full. He moved from the kitchen into the bathroom, dropped the bucket into the tub. He’d run away from his mother. He didn’t know why, but he’d sensed that whatever she had to tell him was something he didn’t want to hear. But where could he go?
—
Lillian caught up with him as he sat on the edge of the tub. She stood in the hall, watching him through the doorway, arms crossed and head down.
“I’d been working at Lubbick and Weiss for only about eleven months,” she began. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “They had a very good dental plan. You just turned four, and it was past time for you to start seeing a dentist. And they had an excellent eye care plan. Grandma had glaucoma when she was only forty, so I worried something like that could happen to me. I felt very happy to be at the job. They were in midtown so I could just take the seven straight there and walk six blocks to the office.”
Apollo turned on the warm water and let it fill the bucket.
“But one of the lawyers, a man named Charles Blackwood, he started to spend a lot of time at my desk. I knew what that meant. And a few of the other girls warned me he was persistent. I would say he was relentless. He reminded me of your father except without the sweetness. He gave us tickets to see a show once. Do you remember that? At Shea Stadium. The Police and…who was it? Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. That was it.”
Apollo said nothing, only watched the bucket fill.
“Why would he think I would even enjoy that music? I didn’t know who those people were. All I really remember anymore is that it was loud. There were so many white people. And all of them were drinking. I think he meant for me to go with him, but I took you instead. We both had a bad night’s sleep that night.”
As the water ran, Apollo grabbed the wood cleaner and read its list of ingredients. Laureth-6 and organic cocos, nucifera oil, and caprylyl/decyl glucoside. He kept reading though the list of ingredients became less and less pronounceable. Lillian Kagwa might feel compelled to tell him this story, but that didn’t mean he had to listen. Why was he so sure he didn’t want to listen?
“I tried to be nice about saying no to Charles, but some men, you can’t be nice to them. If you’re polite, they think it means you’re undecided. They hear your tone and ignore your words. It makes life a lot harder for the woman, but I don’t think a man like that notices.
<
br /> “At a certain point I had to tell him, clearly, that I would not go out with him. I didn’t actually put it that way. I said I had a boyfriend. I wish I’d just said no, but it was hard to be that direct. I said I had a boyfriend and that was why I couldn’t go out with him. And do you know what he did? He made me start coming into the office on Saturday mornings. He wasn’t even there when I came in. It wasn’t like he wanted to see me. He wanted to punish me. And what could I do? Working there less than a year? I needed the job.”
The water reached the rim of the bucket, but Apollo didn’t shut it off. He’d turned back toward Lillian and lowered the bottle of wood cleaner. She dropped her arms and raised her head, meeting Apollo’s eyes. She stepped one foot into the bathroom but stopped there.
“For three weekends I was able to leave you with one of the other mothers in the building. Usually MJ and Petey’s family. You all liked each other, so that was easy. But one weekend I couldn’t get anyone to watch you. Just a lot of bad luck all at the same time. I called in and explained to the service, but Charles Blackwood called me personally soon afterward, from his home in Connecticut. He said if I didn’t go in, he’d let the partners know. He didn’t even come out and say he’d get me fired, but he reminded me of how much the partners liked discipline in the staff. I argued with him. I couldn’t argue for myself, but I felt I was arguing for you, and then I was fearless. Finally I talked him down to a half day. I’d come in from ten to one. He wouldn’t accept less. I got off the phone, and I felt completely lost. I tried everyone I knew. Either they weren’t home to answer the phone, or who knows what. Lots of people didn’t have answering machines back then, you couldn’t even leave a message. Anyway, I had no help. What could I do? The longer I tried to think of something, the later it got. So finally. Finally. I left you at home.”
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