Before Apollo even turned his head, Gayl leaped from his lap and sprinted. “Mommy!” she called out. She practically levitated into her mother’s arms.
“She’s fed,” Apollo said, standing up. “Well, she ate one bite at least.”
“I guess that’s something,” Gayl’s mother said, teasing. “I hope she wasn’t any trouble.”
“Gayl is great,” Apollo said.
“Yes, she is,” her mother said, looking into her daughter’s eyes. “She’s also up way past bedtime.”
“No!” Gayl shouted, but then she yawned so wide they could’ve counted all her teeth.
Gayl’s mother turned so she faced Apollo. “I didn’t get to know Emma too well while she was here,” she said. “My little ones keep me pretty busy, you understand. But she took a liking to my boy, Freddie. He’s shy. Doesn’t talk a lot, but he loves to read. She had her own problems to deal with, but she read to him before bedtime, each night she was here. That told me all I needed to know about her.”
Mother and child walked out of the Doctor’s Cottage, but in a moment they returned. Gayl’s mother held her hand out. The red string lay in her palm.
Apollo took it from her with a nod. He looked at the loop for a long minute before slipping it onto his ring finger.
HE STEPPED OUT of the Doctor’s Cottage, book tucked under one arm like a man out for a walk with the paper. He could see the library not ten yards away. Through the windows he watched Cal. She’d started her puppet show. They’d never made those frightening puppets, but it didn’t matter. Apollo could see the heads of the bigger children, each of them drawn toward the puppets. Not Cal, but the show.
“Glamour,” Apollo whispered.
He seemed to be the only person outside. Cal, the guards, and the children were in the library, the other women and youngest children were bedding down inside the Nurses’ Residence. He stood there swaying. The courtyard took on the kind of silence New York City hasn’t known for three hundred years. They weren’t by the river, but Apollo could hear the sound of the waters slapping against the shoreline of North Brother Island.
As sudden as a strong wind, he felt a new current in the air. At first he mistook it for a sound, a kind of chattering suddenly filling the courtyard, but in a moment he understood it, instead, as a charge in his body. He felt as if a wave of electricity was running through his jaw. His teeth clenched tight, and his neck burned. He felt tuned into a higher frequency. He could almost sense the direction of the broadcast. Not the library or the Nurses’ Residence. The Tuberculosis Pavilion.
William.
Apollo took two steps in that direction, but then spun like a top and walked back to the library. He came to the doorway and leaned in. Cal didn’t look away from the children as she told the tale of Rapunzel.
The guards noted him, but it was Gretta, standing at the back, rigid and ready, who walked toward Apollo. She pushed him out of the library and squeezed his arm. “Cal may have decided to trust you,” she whispered. “But that doesn’t mean I do.”
“Listen,” Apollo said. “Please. There’s something I have to tell Cal.”
“You tell me,” Gretta said. “Let those children enjoy ten minutes of happiness.”
“It’s William,” Apollo said. “He made a threat.”
“He makes those all the time.”
“He said he’d called in the cavalry,” Apollo told her. “I don’t know who, but someone’s coming.”
Gretta let go of Apollo’s arm, and her expression flattened with shock, as if she’d been slapped. “Someone’s coming,” she repeated. She reached a hand in the air, swatting faintly at the dark. She collected herself, turned from Apollo, and rushed back inside.
Apollo watched her skirt along the edge of the crowd, all those children listening. Gretta reached Cal, interrupted the show, leaned close, and whispered in the woman’s ear. Cal lowered the puppets, just an inch, lost her smile for a moment, then caught herself and raised the puppets and resumed the story, but her eyes scanned the room until she locked eyes with one of her guards. And with that Apollo walked off.
—
The seclusion rooms overlooked a copse of trees at the bottom of a slight slope. The moon shone down on the top of the hill, leaving the trees in darkness, but the path quite clear. No one out there but Apollo.
He skirted along the edge of the pavilion, trying to find the window where William was being held. When he got there, he squatted and found a rock as big as a softball in the dirt. He stepped back five paces and threw the stone, and the window shattered. Now there was only the mesh of the cage between Apollo and William’s cell.
From inside the cage there was no sound, no reaction. Apollo listened for something from the cage. Maybe the guards had already taken him while he’d been feeding Gayl. Maybe his body lay smoldering somewhere right now.
Apollo crept closer to the window. He tried to see inside, but the room was too dark. “William,” he hissed. “William! If you’re in there you answer me.”
He went onto his toes to see inside. He brought his nose to the cage.
“William Wheeler!”
Finally a grunt came from inside the cage. The sound of scuffing and shuffling in the dirt. “That’s not my name, so stop fucking using it.”
Now a figure shambled to the window. Not a man but a shape, a shadow, grumbling with menace.
“I met your wife,” Apollo said. “She said you sent her To Kill a Mockingbird with every page defaced.”
“What do you care? You got your money, right?”
“You stole that money from her, William!”
Inside the cell the figure grumbled.
“I told you to stop calling me that. It’s not my real name. I didn’t know my real name either. Didn’t know who I really was. Then I found the place where I belonged. Found people who understood me. I could talk to them like I never could to anyone. When I was there, I took off William Wheeler’s face and found my true face underneath. Once my friends saw my true face, they gave me my true name. In fact, Apollo, you know it already, too.”
“How would I know that?”
The man in the cage raised his voice and spoke as if reading an announcement. “Dinner plans tonight. A meal inspired by Baby Brian.”
Apollo took a step backward. The man brought his face to the mesh barrier.
“Boiled vegetables!” he shouted.
“You’re Kinder Garten,” Apollo said.
“We!” he hissed. “We are Kinder Garten. Ten thousand men with one name.”
The man in the cage jammed his fingertips through the metal webbing. In the moonlight the nails looked as ragged as claws. Apollo felt hit by a wave of confusion. He felt like a capsized ship.
“You killed your daughter,” Apollo said. “That’s what Gretta said.”
“I made a choice!” Kinder Garten shouted back. “For my family, I made the hardest choice there is.”