IN THE EMPTY PLAYGROUND, the weary swing had creaked as Deming’s mother swayed. This was last November, three months before she left. Eek-eek-eek, it went, eek-eek-eek. Deming leaned, palms on her back, but he couldn’t get her that high. Up, down, curving behind him and sweeping forward, her jacket a silver dollar against the gray sky, she had yelped into the clouds. Ha! Ha. He pushed her until she said, “Enough. Your turn.” She lifted one leg, then the other, patting the saggy U of the rubber seat.
He sat, legs dangling. “Ready?” Up he went, higher, swing squealing past the pockmarked asphalt, the slide flaked with curls of rust. A hot glob of lunch dribbled up inside him and the next thing he knew he was no longer clutching the chains but flying, soaring like a brick, and before he smacked into the asphalt he saw the pavement tilt sideways, blotting his vision, a concrete eclipse.
He’d awoken in a strange room with the worst headache of his life, lying on a cot next to another cot with an old man in a diaper and an IV drip, mold stains blotched across the ceiling tiles. He heard crying babies and saw white static. A sign on the wall said URGENT CARE.
His mother flipped through a magazine. When she saw him moving she jumped up, grabbed his hand. “You’re awake.”
“What happened?”
“You slipped, Kid.” She squeezed his hand harder.
“I did?”
“I was so scared. You were out for a minute. Seemed like forever. How are you feeling? Are you hungry?”
A nurse spoke about recovery, said Deming should rest. Here were white pills to take, and he needed to drink them with water.
He looked at his mother’s pouched and tired face, the brown splat of mole on her neck, and his eyes filled with bright, stabbing light. When he closed them he saw dark stars, and he questioned what he remembered. Maybe she pushed him too hard, or maybe he’d jumped, heeding an urge to leap and flap. Superhero dreams.
Leon had said it was an accident, Deming was a big boy and big boys didn’t get hurt easily. “Got to be more careful next time. Boys are energetic. Hard to keep you still.”
At the apartment, Deming woke again to his mother, at the edge of his bed, watching him in the dark. “Mama?” In the yellowy shadows of the streetlights filtering through the curtains, he saw the outline of her nose and chin, hair matted and uneven from sleep.
She ran her nails against his scalp, scratching lightly. He heard her whisper: “It’s important to be strong.”
DEMING AND KAY WATCHED the other moms across the parking lot of Ridgeborough Middle School, their baggy shin-length pants, mushroomy haircuts, and pastel cardigans. The other moms matched; their kids did, too. Other moms attended PTA meetings, had gone to one another’s baby showers, were elated when they found out their sons and daughters would one day be classmates. Ridgeborough parents worked at the hospital or in the prison, and none of the other kids had a mother and a father who both taught at a college.
The other moms stood in a tight circle by their cars, their voices jigsawing across the asphalt. They talked about their husbands and children, made plans with one another’s families for the upcoming weekend, and Deming noticed a hungry look on Kay’s face as she shook her keys. “They’re probably discussing scrapbooking and cookie recipes,” she said. “And voting Republican, for whoever their husbands vote for.”
Like him, Kay was a crumb, and like him, she didn’t want to be friends with the mom equivalents of Cody Campbell and Amber Bitburger. But unlike Deming, Kay had no friends, aside from her and Peter’s co-workers at Carlough. At least he had Roland.
Instead of friends, Kay and Peter had books they read in bed at night. They left articles for each other, clipped out of news magazines, on one another’s pillow, with underlined paragraphs and notes in the margins: Think you’d like this. Thought about you! Did you know?? The tall shelves in the living room were stuffed with hardcover books on subjects like war and economics and the electoral college. The most intriguing thing in the house was the stereo system from Peter’s brief bachelor days, with mustard-yellow speakers, a silver hi-fi tuner, and the crowning glory, a record player with a turntable wrapped in a soft cloth. The cabinet below the record player housed a small record collection, along with an eraser-like object used to clean the records.
ONE AFTERNOON, DEMING WAS at home by himself. He knelt in front of the stereo and, simultaneously daring himself and accepting the dare, pushed the cabinet door open. The records’ covers were throbbing and bright, bands he’d never heard of, and inside the cardboard pockets were hard black discs, slick and coated, with circular rings, what alien trees might be like if you sliced their trunks open.
When he saw Peter’s car pull into the driveway, Deming closed the cabinet.
Peter put his bag down on the couch. “How was school today, Daniel?”
Deming got up from the floor. “It was fine.”
“Why don’t you choose a record and we can listen to it?”
Conscious of Peter watching him, Deming opened the cabinet again. He took out the record he had been looking at, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, the words written in a psychedelic leer, as if the letters had fingers and feet. On the cover was a picture of a Black man standing with two white men.
“Hold it by the edges. You don’t want to scratch the surface.” Peter lifted the lid of the record player, Deming set the disc down, and slowly, the record spun, the needle lowering itself with a resolute crackle.
Peter turned the volume knob up in one circular motion. Then came the opening notes. The music filled the room with color, a punch with a grin. Deming hovered by the speaker. Peter twisted the volume knob higher, and they stood there, basking in sound.
“What—” Kay held her car keys, the front door open, and Deming felt a breeze stream into the house, as if the guitars were fanning him. “It’s really loud,” she said.
Peter turned the volume down, and when Kay left the room, he said to Deming, “Your mother doesn’t appreciate music the way we do.”