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?
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