The brown leaves covered the sidewalk, but hadn’t yet been trodden into thin leather. She held the boy’s hand to keep him from slipping and falling. He tugged at her grip, wanting to race ahead and kick the damp stacks drifting over the curbs. The leaves smelled of wet and dirt, and left skeleton prints on the cement.
“Now—be careful,” she told the boy. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. There were so many things she couldn’t forget. . . . Maybe her head had filled up, and there was no more room for anything else. The mounded leaves, slick with the drizzling rain. Her father scratching at the door, the word when there had been words in his mouth, the little word that used to be her name. . . . The boy’s name; what was it? She couldn’t remember.
The boy had tugged her arm around to the side, not trying to run now, but stopping to press his other hand against one of the trees whose empty branches tangled the sky.
“You don’t want to do that.” She pulled but he dug in, gripping the tree trunk. “It’s all dirty. ” His red mitten was speckled with crumbling bark. A red strand of unraveled wool dangled from his wrist.
She looked where the boy pointed, his arm jutting up straight, the mitten a red flag at the end. On one of the wet branches, a squirrel gazed down at her, then darted off, its tail spiked with drops of rain.
The boy stared openmouthed where the squirrel had disappeared. The boy’s upper lip was shiny with snot, and there was a glaze of it on the back of one mitten, and the sleeve of the cheap nylon snow jacket. She shuddered, looking at the wet on the boy’s pug face. He wasn’t beautiful, not like the one before, the one with the angel lashes and the china and peach skin.
“Come on.” She had to bite her lip to fight the shudder, to make it go away, before she could take the boy’s hand again. “It’s gone now. See? It’s all gone.” She squeezed the mitten’s damp wool in her own gloved hand. “We have to go, too. Aren’t you hungry?” She smiled at him, the cold stiffening her face, as though the skin might crack.
The boy looked up at her, distrust in the small eyes. “Where’s my mother?”
She knelt down in front of the boy and zipped the jacket under his chin. “Well, that’s where we’re going, isn’t it?” There were people across the street, just people walking, a man and a woman she’d seen from the corner of her eye. But she couldn’t tell if they were looking over here, watching her and the boy. She brushed a dead leaf off the boy’s shoulder. “We’re going to find your mother. We’re going to where she is.”
She hated lying, even the lies she had told before. All the things she told the boy, and the ones before him, were lies. Everything her father had ever told her had been the truth, and that was no good, either.
Her knees ached when she stood up. The cold and damp had seeped into her bones. She squeezed the boy’s hand. “Don’t you want to go to where your mother is?”
Now his face was all confused. He looked away from her, down the long street, and she was afraid that he would cry out to the people who were walking there. But they were already gone—she hadn’t seen where. Maybe they had turned and gone up the steps into one of the narrow-fronted houses that were jammed so tight against each other.
“And you’re hungry, aren’t you? Your mother has cake there for you. I know she does. You want that, don’t you?”
How old was he? His name, his name . . . How big, how small was what she really meant. If he wouldn’t move, tugging out of her grasp, wouldn’t come with her . . . She wanted to pick him up, to be done with saying stupid things to his stupid little face, its smear of snot and its red pig nose. Just pick him up and carry him like a wet sack, the arms with the red-mittened hands caught tight against her breast. Carry him home and not have to say anything, not have to tell lies and smile . . .
She had tried that once and it hadn’t worked. Once when there hadn’t been any other little boy that she could find, and the one she had found wouldn’t come with her, wouldn’t come and it had been getting dark, yet it had been all light around her, she had been trapped in the bright blue-white circle from a street lamp overhead. And the boy had started crying, because she had been shouting at him, shouting for him to shut up and stop crying and come with her. She had picked him up, but he’d been too big and heavy for her, his weight squirming in her arms, the little hard fists striking her neck, the bawling mouth right up against one ear. Until she’d had to let him go and he’d fallen to the ground, scrambled to his feet and run off, crying and screaming so loud that other people—she had known they were there, she’d felt them even if she couldn’t see them—had turned and looked at her. She’d scurried away and then started running herself, her heart pounding in her throat. Even on the bus she’d caught, she’d known the others were looking at her, even pointing at her and whispering to each other. How could they have known? Until she’d felt a chill kiss under the collar of her blouse, and she’d touched the side of her face and her fingers had come away touched with red. The boy’s little fist, or a low branch clawing at her as she’d run by . . . The tissue in her purse had been a wet bright rag by the time she’d reached home.
That had been a bad time. The little boy had run away, and she’d been too frightened to try again, scared of people watching when it had gotten so dark, so dark that she couldn’t see them looking at her. She’d had to go home to where her father was waiting. And even though he couldn’t say the words anymore, to say what he wanted, she knew. One or the other, and the little boy had run away.
She’d stood naked in her bathroom, the tiny one at the back of the house, her face wet with the splashed cold water. She’d raised her arm high over her head, standing on tiptoe so she could see in the clouded mirror over the sink. A bruise under one breast—the little boy had kicked her; that must’ve been where she’d got it, though she couldn’t remember feeling it. Her father couldn’t have done that, though her ribs beneath the discolored skin ached with a familiar pain. He wasn’t strong enough, not anymore. . . .
