The marker had been attached to a granite block, common practice. In order to remove the marker, Apollo would have to take the block as well. Since this had been a baby’s grave, the block was small. In three minutes Apollo pulled it free. The sounds of roots tearing loose and soil cracking played alongside his labored grunting. He dropped the mattock. So close to collapse, it seemed impossible to do anything more than breathe. And yet with a stoop, he lifted the grave marker with its granite backing. It must’ve weighed thirty pounds. His body didn’t know how it could handle the weight, but there was no room for discussion. This wasn’t the grave of Brian Kagwa, so why would his father leave the marker there?
Apollo moved toward the fence. He hefted the grave marker under one arm and dragged the mattock behind him with the other. The Odyssey idled in the street, Patrice at the wheel. When Apollo appeared at the fence, Patrice startled as if he was seeing Death by daylight. Apollo opened the side door of the car and plopped the grave marker down as if it was a bag of fertilizer. He dropped the mattock onto the floor. Then he got in. Patrice looked back at the marker and the mattock.
“We can’t explain that stuff if we get pulled over,” Patrice said. “You understand that, right?”
“Then don’t get pulled over,” Apollo said.
Patrice put the car in motion.
Port Washington became Munsey Park, then Manhasset, then Great Neck and onward in the journey out of Long Island and back to New York City. Apollo felt a kind of calm that might also be called certainty. The magic of the world had been revealed. All the deceptions were gone. To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn’t enjoy the illusion of order anymore. Monsters aren’t real until you meet one.
Well, Apollo had met a monster. He and Emma and Brian, they’d all met it. Apollo wasn’t thinking about the thing in the grave. Or even the thing that spawned it. He meant the man who’d pretended to be his friend, the former William Wheeler. He’d met his enemy. He knew its true name.
BRIAN WEST WAS at the front door.
Apollo reached his hand in the air and turned all three locks.
It wasn’t Brian West yet.
The man knelt and pulled off his blue skin.
Brian West called Lillian Kagwa’s name.
Gargamel and Azrael wanted to destroy the Smurfs.
Hot water ran in the bathroom, and the apartment filled with steam.
Gargamel and Azrael hid in the woods.
The Smurfs suspected nothing.
Brian West picked up his son.
Brian West carried Apollo into the bathroom.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
He took off Apollo’s clothes.
APOLLO SLEPT, ON and off, for two days and two nights. It might be a stretch to call it sleep. More like a little coma. He woke in starts but couldn’t muster the mindfulness to do more than roll over and fall back asleep again. He felt so groggy, it seemed like he’d been dosed. The last two days had been an uncut drug, an overdose of the improbable.
Patrice had driven him home, helped him upstairs, where he stumbled and flopped onto the mattress. Apollo remembered none of this. He had sat in the back of the minivan cradling a grave marker bearing his son’s name and awakened in his bed. Outside he saw morning light. He thought he’d only shut his eyes for ten minutes. When he tried to rise, his body still felt sore, so bruised he might’ve turned purple. He staggered to the kitchen. He stood at the sink and stared into the glass-faced kitchen cabinets but could make out only a hazy vision of himself. He and Emma had brought the cabinets home from IKEA by train. Two boxes per trip because that was all he could carry. Akurum wall cabinets in Lidi white. Each cost $115 before taxes. Ridiculous the kind of stuff that comes to mind. Insane to imagine they’d once fought over the choice as if nothing mattered more.
He needed water; he needed food. He filled a glass from the tap, then drank three more. He turned to find the grave marker on the kitchen table, laid out like a placemat. The mattock was propped by the front door. What about the book? He tensed so tightly, he nearly threw his back out. He scanned the kitchen, the living room, went to the front door and opened it. He returned to the bedroom, his bed. No book. No book. He’d had it tucked under one arm, hadn’t he? Had slipped it into the back of his pants while he held Gayl.
The book. He focused on that. He’d lost the one Cal gave him, but he had another one here. His father’s copy. He went into Brian’s room and pulled it from the shelf.
Outside Over There.
He returned to the kitchen and slid the grave marker aside so he’d have room to read. Then, before he sat, he pawed through the pantry and found a box of table crackers. They were stale, but that didn’t matter. He would force himself to eat something.
“?‘When Papa was away at sea,’?” Apollo read.
On the next page Apollo stopped to examine the image of Mama, a young white woman with long brown hair. She wore a faded red dress with a white ruffled collar. She stared into the middle distance.
At what?
At nothing. Her look was one of a woman lost. Bereft. Depressed. In this story, the father might’ve been off on a ship, but the mother hardly counted as present either. Apollo brought a finger to the illustration now. Her vacant eyes; her downturned mouth. He traced her slumped shoulders. Hadn’t he looked across his kitchen table at Emma and seen this same woman?
On the next page the scene of Ida playing music for her sister, the goblins sneaking in through the window. Then the goblins made off with the human child, leaving its replacement behind. Next Ida picked up the child and held it, hugged it. The page after that showed the ice child half melted and dropped to the floor. Finally Ida had realized the fraud.
His finger rested on two words. “The changeling.” There it was in the crib, in Ida’s arms, disintegrating on the floor.
The changeling.
Apollo couldn’t keep reading because the words on the page blurred. This happened because his hands were shaking. He had to lay the book flat. He heard the sound of dirt being cleared with shovel and mattock, the hours of night he’d been down in that hole.
“No one was watching the baby,” he said in the empty apartment.
But then he turned and looked at the chair to his right. The one where Emma used to sit. He could almost make out her image, a ghostly silhouette. He touched the ragged red string with his thumb, turned it on his ring finger.
“One person was watching,” Apollo said.
She said Brian is in the forest.
There’s only one forest in all of New York City.
HE PACKED A suitcase because he didn’t know when he would be back. He couldn’t be sure he’d ever be back. He found the small suitcase they’d kept under the bed, the one they’d planned to use if Emma went into labor and the home birth didn’t work. Their hospital bag. Emma had unpacked most of it long ago, of course, the nightgown and extra toiletries, slippers and socks, snacks and drinks, all those things had been returned to their drawers or consumed. The only stuff left in it was a pack of bendy straws for sipping liquids during labor and a bottle of massage oil. To save space, Emma had slipped both into a pouch on the side. Apollo didn’t realize they were there when he pulled it out. So now both the straws and the oil would be making the trip with him.