“Spit it out.”
“It’s . . . well, they sentenced Anton’s mom.” He heard Delores exhale loudly, as if whatever he was about to say would be anticlimactic, but he ignored her. “They gave her two and a half years in prison.”
“Oh my God. That poor woman. Is that normal? I mean, isn’t that excessive?”
Why did she not understand what he was telling her? Instead of celebrating the news, why would she concern herself with a drug-addled woman she didn’t know? “What this means is . . .” he began.
“. . . that poor Anton is going to be separated from his mother for more than two years.” She turned to face her husband. “You said you had good news?”
He stared at her blankly. Was she being deliberately obtuse? Or was this one of those celebrated communication failures between men and women?
“Is that a rhetorical question?” he asked.
“What?”
“To state the obvious, the good news is that Anton gets to live with us for the next several years without any of us having to look over our shoulders. We can provide him with a great education, a loving home, and a . . . a stable family life.”
“I see.” Delores didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm. “So it’s good news for us. And shitty news for Anton.”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
She shrugged. “Why? It’s true, isn’t it?”
His knees buckled. In order for this to work, he needed Delores on his side. How could she not see that this was in everybody’s best interest? “Baby,” he said urgently. “Think of what this means for him. What opportunities we can provide him.”
Delores looked him squarely in the eyes. “I’ll only say this once. So you better listen good.” Her lower lip quivered a bit, but she held his gaze. “Anton is not James. He never will be.”
He flinched as if she had slapped him. “That’s the lowest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I know that’s how it comes across. But that’s not how I mean it. I’m not trying to hurt you, David. I just want you to understand what’s going on. To see what you’re doing.”
He tilted his head back defiantly. “This isn’t about me. It’s about helping an innocent child.”
“Are you sure, David? Are you sure about that?”
He forced himself to maintain eye contact. “Yes.”
She looked at him for a full minute, and then, as if she’d come to a decision, she nodded. “Good,” she said as she moved away from him. “Then you break the good news to him.”
WHICH HE COULDN’T do, of course. Not that day. The next day, Saturday, he took the boy with him to the video store, where he allowed Anton to pick out three action movies, groaning inwardly at the thought of having to sit through them. After they got back in the car, he stroked the boy’s hair gently and told him he had some bad news: His mom was going to stay in jail for a while.
A tearful Anton turned to face him. “For how long, David?”
David understood now what Delores had tried telling him, and his heart was genuinely heavy when he said, “I don’t know, son. At least until after Christmas, okay?” And then, to punish himself for his earlier thoughtlessness, he added, “You must miss her a lot?”
In reply, Anton said, “Can I just go to my old apartment and get my things?”
“Afraid not, son.”
Anton nodded. After a few minutes, he turned away from David and looked out the closed window of the air-conditioned car. His right hand curled into a fist, and for a split second David thought he was going to attempt to smash the window. Instead, Anton tapped on it with his knuckles. Twice. Then he stared straight ahead.
And David had the strangest feeling that Anton had just tested the boundaries of his freedom and found that it extended only as far as the plushness of this car. It wasn’t just Anton’s mom they had locked away, he realized. Anton, too, was in a jail that he hadn’t chosen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They said this was a school, but maybe they were fooling him. This didn’t look like no school he’d ever been to. There were no buckets collecting rainwater in the classrooms. Nobody was shoving anybody against the wall in the hallways. And all the windows were closed because the whole building was air-conditioned, and you could actually hear what the teacher was saying instead of the sounds of traffic horns and police sirens.
The building itself wasn’t one of those crumbling brick structures that said “school.” Rather, it was shaped like a spaceship or something, with a curved roof and slanted walls inside. And instead of an ordinary blackboard, the classroom had a whiteboard upon which the teacher wrote with a marker.
FM had walked him to the principal’s office this morning, and the lady, Mrs. Johnson, had escorted him to his first class. The other students were already there, talking and joking with each other. “There you go, Anton,” Mrs. Johnson said at the door. “This is your classroom. Your teacher will be here in a moment.”
He stood quietly for a second, trying to still the churning in his stomach, feeling their eyes upon him as he walked to an unoccupied desk. These kids seemed so different from the boisterous classmates at his old school. Although these kids also talked loudly and were clearly happy to see each other after the summer, they were not shoving each other around, as he and his friends would’ve done. It was as if the air-conditioned air and the carpeted floors had muffled some essential trait that Anton recognized as childhood.
The first period was social studies, and their teacher was a nice-looking lady called Ms. Green. Her eyes searched the room until they fell on him and she smiled, and Anton had the odd and self-conscious feeling that she had been looking for him. Instead of smiling back, he looked down at his desk, hoping her eyes would glide away from him. And so he winced when he heard her say, “We have two new students this year, class. One of them is Natasha, who is from Russia. The other is Anton, who is from . . . around here. I hope you will make them feel welcome.”
Natasha, a petite girl with blond pigtails, leaped to her feet and waved quickly to the other students, who then looked expectantly at Anton. Feeling the heat of their expectations, he rose grudgingly to his feet. “Hiya,” he mumbled before sitting down again.
“Great,” Ms. Green said brightly. “Now, does everyone know where Russia is?”
Maybe it was because he was in the act of settling back into his chair when she asked the question. Maybe it was nervousness. Whatever the reason, Anton heard himself say, “In China?”
Natasha’s response was immediate. “China’s a different country, silly,” she snapped, and the class giggled.