Chapter Text
The apartment smelled like beer and sugar and something blue.
Sally Jackson stood at the kitchen counter in a plaid shirt and bare feet and stirred batter in a glass bowl. The batter was the color of late summer sky. There was a small bottle of food coloring next to her elbow with a thumbprint on the cap. Percy was sitting at the kitchen table with his chin on his arms and his eyes on the bowl.
He was six and a half. It was a Sunday afternoon. Gabe was asleep in the recliner two rooms over, his snore carrying through the wall the way the TV did, regular and heavy. Sally had waited for the snore before she got the bottle out of the cabinet behind the cereal where she kept the things that were hers.
"Why blue," Percy said. He'd asked before. He liked her answer.
The spoon paused. For a beat her hand was still on the wooden handle and her eyes had gone somewhere Percy could not follow, somewhere past the bowl, past the kitchen. The batter settled. The kitchen sat in the quiet of Gabe's snore.
Then she came back. The spoon moved again.
"Because Gabe says you can't make blue food." Sally tipped the bowl. The batter slid in a slow swell. "And we don't listen to Gabe."
She poured the batter into a baking pan. She slid the pan into the oven. She sat down across from Percy with the wooden spoon still in her hand and let him lick the back of it. The batter was sweet and faintly metallic from the food coloring. Percy ate three spoonfuls before she pulled it back, smiling, and ran the spoon under the tap.
"You'll spoil your dinner."
"Dinner's frozen pizza."
"Then it's already spoiled."
She laughed. The laugh was small. It had been getting smaller for a year. But it was still there, on a Sunday afternoon when Gabe was asleep, and Percy held onto the sound of it the way other kids held onto blankets.
The cake came out blue and slightly sunken in the middle. Sally cut it into squares while it was still warm and put one on a plate for Percy and one on a plate for herself, and they ate at the kitchen table with the TV from the next room playing some game Gabe had been winning before he passed out. Sally's bare feet rested on the rung of Percy's chair. There was flour on her cheekbone. Her hair was in a bun that was coming loose.
At one point she looked up from her plate at Percy. The look held a second longer than it should have. Her eyes went into him and then through him, and her face went still in a way the smile didn't quite cover. She was looking at him the way people look at things they don't have a feeling for yet.
Then she blinked. She came back. She cut another square of cake and slid it onto his plate without asking.
"Eat up."
"Okay."
It was a good afternoon. Percy filed it that way without knowing he was filing it.
He filed the other thing too, in a different place, without a name for it yet.
***
Three weeks later he was standing in the kitchen trying to read the back of a cereal box when he heard a sound from the living room.
A slap. Open hand. The kind that comes with a flat sound and a small intake of breath after.
He knew the sound. He had heard it before. He froze with the cereal box in his hands.
Sally was in the kitchen too. She was rinsing dishes at the sink. She did not turn around. She did not look at Percy. The water kept running. Her shoulders did not move. After a long moment she shut off the tap and dried her hands on the dish towel and went back to the living room and said, Gabe, I'm going to start dinner, in a voice so even and pleasant that Percy understood, standing there with the cereal box, that she had heard the slap and made a decision about it, and the decision had not included him.
He looked at the trash can. The crumpled paper towel was still on top from this morning. Underneath it, half-buried, was the corner of a blue square. The last of last week's cake. He had not seen her throw it out.
He put the cereal box back on the shelf. He went to his room.
He did not ask her about blue food again.
***
The apartment smelled like beer and something burning.
A Marlboro Red, stubbed out on the edge of the kitchen counter, still trailing smoke toward the ceiling. There were marks all along that counter, little black crescents where the cigarettes had eaten into the laminate. Percy used to count them when he was bored. He'd gotten to forty-seven before he realized they weren't going to stop multiplying.
He was seven years old.
The TV was on. Some football game Gabe had money on. The volume was loud enough that the walls buzzed with it, the announcer's voice filling the apartment the way cigarette smoke did, reaching every corner. Gabe sat in his recliner, the one with the permanent dip in the cushion shaped exactly like him, a Budweiser sweating on the armrest. He hadn't moved in two hours. Percy knew this because Percy always knew where Gabe was. You learned where the weight was in a room, and you stayed out of its path.
The kitchen was small. The hallway was narrow. Percy's room didn't have a lock.
He was standing in that hallway now, bare feet on carpet that hadn't been clean in years, watching his mother through the crack in her bedroom door. Sally was packing a duffel bag. The blue one she kept in the closet behind the winter coats. She was folding clothes into it, quick and neat, the way she did everything. She smoothed a collar down with her thumb like she was apologizing to it.
She wasn't folding his clothes.
Percy pressed his shoulder against the wall and watched. She moved from the dresser to the bag, dresser to the bag, and her hands were steady. Percy's weren't. He curled them into fists and pressed them against his thighs. He didn't have the word for what was happening, but his body knew. His body always knew before he did.
The duffel was almost full.
Sally opened the top drawer of the nightstand and took out two envelopes. She put both in her purse, the brown one with the broken clasp she always said she'd replace. She zipped the duffel shut. She straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror above the dresser.
Percy could see her face in the reflection. She looked tired. She always looked tired. Dark circles that makeup couldn't fix, lines at the corners of her mouth. But there was something else tonight. Something set. A decision that had finished being made.
She turned toward the door.
Percy didn't move. He stood in the hallway with his fists at his sides, and she walked right past him. She didn't look at him. Didn't stop, didn't crouch down, didn't put her hand on his head the way she sometimes did when she thought he was sleeping.
You could leave someone and still see them. She didn't.
Sally walked into the living room. Gabe didn't look up from the TV, but he heard the bag. You could hear a lot from that recliner.
"Going somewhere?"
"I'll be back," Sally said. Her voice was even. No waver. She'd rehearsed this, or she'd made the decision so completely that her voice had no choice but to comply.
"Uh-huh." Gabe took a drink. "When?"
"A few days."
"Right." Another drink. Gabe's eyes didn't leave the screen. "Kid stays."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
Percy heard that from the hallway. Yes. One syllable. She didn't argue. She didn't say take care of him or I'll call or be good for Gabe, baby. Just yes, the way you confirm a delivery address.
She picked up her purse and the duffel. She walked to the front door. She opened it.
Percy took a step forward. One step, bare foot on dirty carpet, and he opened his mouth. He was going to say something. He didn't know what. Maybe Mom. Maybe where. Maybe just a sound, the kind a kid makes when the floor drops out.
Sally stepped through the door.
She pulled it shut behind her. The click of the latch was small, ordinary, just metal finding metal. Percy heard every part of it.
He stood in the hallway and stared at the door.
He waited.
The football game went to commercial. A woman on TV started talking about dish soap with the enthusiasm of someone who had never lived here. Percy didn't move. The door didn't open. Nobody came back.
The hallway was fourteen steps long. Percy had counted once. Fourteen steps from his room to the front door, and his mother had walked every one of them without looking back.
"Hey."
Gabe's voice from the living room. He didn't need to be loud. The apartment was small enough that his voice reached everywhere, the same way the smoke did.
"Kid. Get in here."
Percy didn't move. He was still looking at the door. Some part of him was still waiting. She'd come back. She always came back. From the grocery store, from work, from the walks that lasted too long. She came back.
"I said get in here."
The recliner creaked. Gabe was getting up.
Percy turned away from the door. He walked into the living room because there was nothing else to do. Gabe was standing now. Heavy, wide, filling the space the way he filled every space. Some people get small to survive. Gabe got big.
He looked down at Percy. Flat brown eyes. A Budweiser still in his hand. The game was back on. The announcer was saying something about a penalty.
Gabe put his hand on Percy's shoulder.
Just weight. Thick fingers landing on the bones of a seven-year-old's shoulder and staying there. A claim. The way you put your hand on something that belongs to you. A wallet. A remote control. A kid whose mother just walked out and left him behind.
"Looks like it's you and me," Gabe said.
He said it the way he said everything, like the words cost him something and he resented the expense. Then he sat back down in the recliner and picked up the remote and turned the volume up until the apartment shook with it.
Percy stood in the living room. The cigarette on the counter had gone out. The duffel-shaped space in the closet was empty. The front door was closed and his mother was on the other side of it, getting farther away with every second, and nobody here was going to say her name again.
He didn't cry. Crying was loud, and loud was dangerous. He pressed his teeth together until his jaw shook and the wanting passed.
Gabe changed the channel. Then he changed it back.
"Get me another beer," he said.
Percy went to the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He took out a Budweiser. It was cold and wet against his small hands and he carried it carefully because dropping things had consequences. He brought it to Gabe and Gabe took it without looking at him.
Percy went to his room. He closed the door, the one without a lock, and sat on his bed and put his hands on his knees and looked at the wall.
On the other side of that wall, the TV played and Gabe drank and the apartment settled into the shape it would hold for the next five years.
The front door stayed closed.
His mother did not come back.
***
Outside, it was starting to rain.
Percy didn't know this. He was sitting on his bed with his hands on his knees, staring at a wall. People leave. That was the first lesson.
Three blocks away, Sally Jackson walked fast with a duffel over her shoulder and a purse with a broken clasp. The rain hit her face and she did not turn around. She had reasons. They felt solid tonight.
She kept walking.
Behind her, in an apartment on the East Side, a seven-year-old boy sat perfectly still and did not cry.
The door was locked.
***
He woke up on the floor.
Not on the bed. The bed was where Sally had told him to sleep, every night for as long as he could remember, even after she stopped tucking him in. The bed had rules. The bed was a rule. He had no memory of getting off it. He woke up on the carpet by the door of his room with his shoes still on and his cheek pressed to the rug and the gray light of a Saturday morning coming through the window in stripes.
The apartment was quiet.
He sat up and listened. The TV was off. That was the first wrong thing. Gabe slept with the TV on. The TV was always on. Percy sat on the floor and listened to the absence of the television and felt, in a small precise way under his breastbone, the shape of the front door staying closed.
He got up. He walked the fourteen steps from his room to the front door. He counted them out of habit. He looked at the door. The chain was on. The deadbolt was thrown. Sally had taken her keys, both of them, the one she always kept and the spare from the hook. The door was a wall now.
He went to the kitchen. The cigarette on the counter from last night had grown a long ash and then collapsed. The ash had fallen on the laminate next to the burns. Percy stood in the kitchen and waited for something to feel like the morning. Coffee was a morning thing. Sally used to put the kettle on. The kettle was on the stove with no water in it. He picked it up. He filled it from the tap. He set it on the burner.
He didn't turn the burner on.
He didn't know how. Sally had always done the burners. He stood at the stove with the kettle full and his hand on the knob and tried to remember which way you turned it, and the trying made his throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with the kettle. He took his hand off the knob. He left the kettle on the cold burner and went back to his room.
He sat on the bed. He waited.
He waited until eleven, which was when Gabe finally woke up. The recliner squeaked. The TV came on. Volume loud. Football pre-game clattered through the wall. Gabe shouted something, kid, and Percy went to the living room because that was the rule.
Gabe was hungover. His eyes were red and his mouth was wet. He looked at Percy without surprise, like Percy was a piece of furniture he hadn't quite remembered owning, and then he looked back at the TV.
"Eat something."
"There's nothing."
Gabe's head turned.
"There's nothing in the kitchen?"
"There's beer."
Gabe looked at him for a long second. Then he laughed. The laugh was short and ugly and ended in a cough.
"Yeah," he said. "There's beer."
He fished a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. He held it out to Percy without looking at him.
"Bodega. Roosevelt. Cereal, milk. You're old enough."
Percy took the twenty. He put on his shoes, which were already on. He walked the fourteen steps to the front door. Gabe got up to unlock it. He didn't open it for him. He unbolted it and went back to the recliner. Percy let himself out.
The hallway smelled like onions and old carpet. The elevator was broken; it had been broken since spring. Percy took the stairs. He held the bill in his fist the whole way down because if he opened his hand he would drop it and dropping money had consequences. He did not look up at any of the apartment doors he passed. He did not check the mailboxes in the lobby. His mother's name was still on the box for 4-G. He did not look.
The bodega was three blocks. The man at the counter knew Sally. He looked at Percy with the twenty in his fist and his face did something Percy did not have a word for, and then he rang up the cereal and the milk and gave Percy the change in coins without asking what the coins were for.
"Where's your mom, mijo."
"Errands."
The man nodded. He nodded slowly. He did not push. He gave Percy a piece of mango candy from the jar by the register and didn't charge him for it.
Percy carried the cereal and the milk back the three blocks and up the eight flights. He did not stop at 4-G. He went into the apartment. He closed the door. He set the cereal on the counter. He poured a bowl. He ate it standing up because Gabe was in the chair and the chair was where Sally used to sit and he didn't want to look at it.
That was Saturday.
Sunday she didn't come back.
Monday she didn't come back.
By Wednesday Percy had stopped going to the door at every sound in the hallway. By Friday he had stopped expecting the phone to ring. By Saturday, one full week, he had carved out a small hard place inside himself and put the wanting in there and shut the lid.
Gabe was watching a poker tournament with the volume up. The cigarette on the counter was a fresh one, smoldering, two inches of ash hanging off the end. Percy stood in the kitchen and looked at the front door for a long minute and decided, in a way he didn't have words for, that he would not look at it again.
He didn't.
He went to his room. He closed the door. The door did not lock. He sat on the bed and put his hands on his knees and stared at the wall.
The cigarette burned down to the filter on the counter. Gabe didn't notice. The new black crescent it left was the forty-eighth, but Percy had already stopped counting.