He determined that he would try to enter his mother’s mind, searching places she might have gone, armed with a photograph he’d uncovered in a brown album half filled with fading snapshots. The picture he had found showed both his parents grinning in front of a Christmas tree choked with tinsel, locked in the past by denim vests and blowout afros, but he thought he should let the night people see only his mother. To preserve the memory of his father, too upsetting and confusing for him to comprehend at this point, he covered the image of Nat with a piece of newspaper, careful to fold it over the back like a sleeve and tape it there so as not to damage the front.
The police, as promised, left a message on Mrs. Vernon’s answering machine a couple of days after he’d spoken to them, assuring him that an investigation was under way, but he did not return their phone call. He had already given his own investigation priority, because, he had decided, in a just world only he should be allowed to find her, by chance or by God, but since he did not see a point in refusing their help outright, he didn’t respond.
On day three he lingered at the end of class, having nodded off a few times and nearly fallen asleep. He had not eaten well—only free breakfasts and lunches in school, from which he would bring home portions for later, hidden in his book bag and under his shirt. His placement in the second row from the back had saved him from drawing the teacher’s suspicions—though so many discipline problems exploded around him daily that Mr. Arceneaux wouldn’t have noticed anyway. The realization that nobody cared was both liberating and frightening—he could fail that class and other classes, drop out of school, and graduate to hanging out and drinking Dixie beer while sitting on milk crates and playing dominoes in front of boarded-up houses without anyone even raising an eyebrow. He could disappear or die and it would take weeks or years for anybody to realize what had happened.
As he swiveled his eyes through the room, drowsy and dizzy, he understood for the first time that his classmates didn’t count for any more than he did. It didn’t matter if they never acknowledged the shadow of worthlessness above them, poised to crush them like Godzilla’s foot. There wasn’t much they could do to resist that. Few things could save him, as he saw it. School might save him, at least that’s what everybody said, but school went down like medicine. Sports could, or becoming a singer or a rapper, but he wasn’t musical. But with school he thought the odds might improve. He had a sudden sharp mental picture of his dead father crossing the concrete playground and crunching through the grass and leaves outside to peer into the classroom and monitor his progress, his grayish face troubled and stern. Eddie didn’t pretend it had actually happened, but the what-if got to him. He sat up and forced himself to pay attention, stealing a nervous glance out the window every so often but seeing only birds.
Eddie feared that Darlene might be dead, but in the abstract that didn’t seem as bad to him as the idea that she had abandoned him on her own cord. He thought that he would prefer to find her dead than find her alive and have to endure a face-to-face rejection, possibly amplified by the addition of Some Man. Some Man he thought of as a brutish, stocky guy weighted down with gold-plated necklaces, cursed with an overhanging brow, a throaty growl, and a habit of challenging people to punch him in the gut. A foolishly proud James Brown–type with tattooed forearms and a Jheri curl who drove a white Cadillac edged with rust. In Eddie’s mind, this aggressive dude differed little from Mr. T; maybe that had something to do with the increased TV watching that came with having the house to himself. Perhaps Some Man would be his mother’s pimp, though he didn’t know that she had one, let alone if she had actually sold her body. He hadn’t seen her take any money or do anything. Still, Eddie dreaded the appearance of a flashy dresser with an iron fist who would confirm his mother’s status and imprison him with vicious, irrational rules. Any potential attachment of Darlene’s terrified him; anybody coming between them could only widen their rapidly expanding separation.
But that fear didn’t prevent him from venturing into the underworld every night after her disappearance and creating a fantasy life for himself as a detective. In fact, the fantasy was nearly real. Eddie divided up an old map of Houston, already so overused that the paper rectangles had nearly separated from one another. He circled each neighborhood and, starting with his own house in the Fifth Ward, knelt on the map in the living room scrawling through the city’s landmarks, making pie shapes inside the concentric ring roads. Every few nights he’d visit the seediest corners of the pie shapes, each time making new connections, like a paper chain that might lead him to her.
When he had done with the likeliest areas of the pie shapes, he moved outside the ring road, until his nightly journey began to require more bus fare than he could manage on what he borrowed from friends and teachers without explaining his situation, and he’d had to walk home long distances after the buses stopped running. School gradually ended, and for most kids, responsibility dissolved into heat and haze, but Eddie worried that he might have to figure out how to pay the rent and the bills if his mother did not return soon.
Whenever Eddie saw their landlord, Nacho Vasquez, a tan guy about Eddie’s height who wore denim shirts and a bolo tie with a silver and turquoise brooch, Nacho always steered the conversation toward Darlene—How’s your mom? he’d ask. Is she at home? It took until August for him to tell Eddie to remind her that she was two months behind on rent. Eddie explained that she had gone on a business trip—a long one. When asked what kind of business, Eddie said that the trip was a job, she had found work somewhere else for a little while. He told Nacho that she knew about the rent and would pay him when she got back. Eddie was about to get on a bicycle he’d borrowed from a school friend and go searching for her again.
She left you here? Nacho asked.
Mrs. Vernon looks after me, Eddie said. Every day.
Did she go by herself?
Yeah. She doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything.
She doesn’t? Oh. What kind of guys does your mom like?
I don’t know. She doesn’t like tall guys. Anymore.
Nacho turned mauve. Really? Has she ever dated, you know, someone like me? I’m half French and half Mexican.
Maybe. Yeah. I’ll ask!
When does she get back?