The trouble started on the fourth day, when the power went off and the heat began to rise. He had wanted to call the power company, like he’d heard his mother do, but she hadn’t paid the telephone bill in a couple of months, either, and so the phone was dead. Besides, what could he say? That he was alone at home? And get her into trouble? He still remembered when the cop had come to their apartment after he’d missed school for a week. Mam had been home that evening, and Anton had hated how she’d acted around him. It had made him feel small and angry in a new way, to see her act like this, like she was a little kitten begging for a saucer of milk. Watching the cop look around their small, shabby apartment, his lip curled with disgust, listening to him lecturing his mother as if she were a bad girl, had made Anton want to break something. It was funny, what the cop had made him feel—invisible and yet hyperaware of his flushed body in a whole new way.
So no, even if he could have, he wouldn’t have called the power company. Or anyone else. She would be home soon. He would stay in place, like “The Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck,” which was his favorite poem in the whole world. When the apartment got too hot, he dunked his head under the cool water of the kitchen faucet. When he began to run out of food, he simply drank more water to fill his belly. He played on his Nintendo Game Boy until the batteries died. Every day he clung to the thought that this would be the day she would return home.
Until the afternoon of the seventh day, when he woke up from the couch in a sweat, shivering with the conviction that his mother was dead. He had no idea what had introduced this thought in his head, but he knew it was true. His mam was dead and he was trapped inside an apartment with two windows, both of which were sealed shut. No use trying the front door—when she went out, she always locked it from the outside to keep the punks who hung about the apartment complex from breaking in.
He looked around the living room in a panic. He had to find her. Find out what had happened to her. Already he was unsure of how many days had passed since she’d left him. Was it twelve? Or four? He was losing count.
Tears streamed down his cheeks as he tried to lift the painted-shut window, grunting. He thought of punching out the glass but then spotted the dining chair, and before he could think, he was lifting it and smashing it against the pane. He hadn’t anticipated how easily the glass would shatter or into how many pieces. It exploded like a bomb. But the main thing was the chair had made a hole large enough for him to heave himself out of. In his haste, he didn’t notice the big shard of glass lodged in the wooden frame, but once it cut open his thigh, he noticed it for sure. For a few moments, the pain was so severe that he thought he would pass out. He wanted to sit down on the lawn, but there was glass everywhere. So he began to walk. The trail of blood that followed him made him want to vomit, but then he remembered his dead mam, and he knew that if he could just make it to his friend Terry’s house a few buildings away, his dad would help him find her body.
Anton woke up with his heart pounding, and for a second he was back in that hot apartment, waking up on the couch with the cold realization that his mother was dead. Slowly, as he realized where he was, that terrible, icy feeling of dread eased away. He pushed the tiny button of the Timex watch that David had bought for him, and the digital screen glowed red in the dark. It was three in the morning.
Ever since they’d brought him here, he was waking up at this time. No matter how tired he was—whether he had helped his foster mom in the yard or shot hoops with David in the evening—he would awaken at this hour, his thoughts racing, his heart pounding. He had never known this middle-of-the-night fear until the Children’s Services folks had removed him. In his old life, he had not been afraid of the gang members prowling his neighborhood or of the bullies at school. Everybody had pretty much left him alone. Even the cops who patrolled the projects ignored him because he didn’t get into trouble. Mostly, he stayed home with his mam, the two of them eating a hot dog or a cheeseburger together when she got home from her job at the Tip Top, where she stocked shelves. After dinner, they watched TV or he did homework. Sometimes Mam had her friends over, and she’d ask him to go to his bedroom while they partied in the living room. He didn’t like those friends and he hated Victor, the guy who sold drugs to his mam, but he wasn’t scared of them. In fact, he liked the sound of their merriment because it broke up the everyday quiet and dullness of their life.
She was a good mom. That’s what he’d tried telling the social worker and the cops, but they had just patted his head and nodded in a way that he could tell meant they weren’t listening to him. He knew she’d done wrong to leave him locked up at home for so long, and that made him angry. He knew it was wrong for her to do the drugs, that she should Just Say No like the huge billboard across the street from the housing project said. She’d made a bad mistake, for sure, he understood that.
But what he didn’t get was why it was anyone’s business but his and his mam’s? Even Ernest, the social worker who he liked so much, acted like it was okay for them to take him out of his own home. And that it was okay for some old judge, who didn’t even know them, to put Mam in jail. It scared him terribly, to think of her in jail, along with thieves and kidnappers and gang members. She was so tiny. What if someone bullied her in jail or hurt her? It would be the fault of that old judge, who didn’t even know her.
Even without food and power, he had felt safer in his own apartment than he did in this big old house, where he got lost sometimes. And the people here—they were okay, they were nice, even, but he was a little afraid of them. The lady, FM, she was nice to him, made him corn on the cob every day after he’d told her he loved it. And even though he sucked at reading and still made spelling mistakes and all, she was patient with him, unlike Mrs. Rose at school, who rolled her eyes every time she returned a test to him. Yeah, he liked FM, especially after Maria, the cleaning lady, told him that FM’s son, James, had died in a car accident. His mam’s brother had died in a car wreck when she was little, and sometimes, when she talked about him, she still cried. That was who she’d named him after, her older brother. His uncle Anton. So he knew how sad FM must feel, and he let her teach him grammar and spelling even though they were boring, because she probably missed teaching her own boy.
David was nice too, but every time he bought Anton something—like the watch—he looked at him in a burning way, like he wanted something back. Like last night, when he’d mentioned going home to his mam soon and David’s face had grown funny. David was a judge, too, so how come he couldn’t free his mam? Then he could go back home and they could stop buying him clothes and stuff and go to their stupid party by themselves.