With Michael and his mother gone — and neither absence given a definite end date — the house was calmer, although as Bud grew, that livened things up a bit. He was a toddler who ran up and down, everywhere, from the minute he could, both furious and amused at the same time: tight curls, light brown skin with a throw of dark brown freckles across his nose, as if he had been playing with a very fine paintbrush, a high piping voice that called Harper, ‘Nick-er-lus.’ Three syllables at least. Once he had learned to pronounce it, he would jump his small bottom up and down in his high chair at mealtimes, repeating it again and again if he did not have Harper’s full attention for one minute of the meal. ‘Nick-er-lus, Nick-er-lus, Nick. Er. Lus!’
‘You know, Nicolaas,’ Nina said once, when she was getting him to help her fold laundry. ‘That little boy thinks all the good things in the world come from you, like you’re a god or something. You should hear him when it’s time for you to come home from school.’
He was not a god. Nor was Poppa, the great lawyer who everyone admired so. If either of them had been a god, it would never have happened, that dreadful day three years later, in the bright sunshine, with the sun sparking off water clear as glass.
So many times, in the aftermath, he found himself reliving that afternoon and holding back or running forward, insisting that they took the other fork in the path, being ill that morning, or pushing Bud off a step so that he would twist an ankle — anything, anything that would mean that day could not progress until the moment when time stopped altogether, in bright light, the thunder of white water in the air.
Other families had holidays, that was the truth. But other families were not like theirs: Poppa, Nina, Nicolaas and Bud. It wasn’t just their ages or their different skin tones, no one of the four of them alike, it was Poppa’s work too. Nina explained it to them one evening, when Poppa was, as usual, late for dinner. ‘Think of it like this, boys. Your Poppa is out there fighting this giant monster. It’s a great big monster that eats people. And he knows full well he can’t defeat it all on his own and that it’s going to take years and years but even when he works really hard that monster keeps on eating. But if he stops work for a bit, the monster eats harder and faster.’ She paused and looked at each of them sternly. ‘And so what’s Poppa to say to the people who get eaten if he takes a break? Sorry, I’ll be back tomorrow?’
Harper looked at Bud, across the table from him, five years old, wide-eyed, knife and fork clutched in the wrong hands. He thought maybe that comparison was a little much for his small brother.
The front door slammed and Poppa ambled, shoulders down, into the kitchen, loosening his tie. Bud dropped the knife and fork onto the table with a clatter, jumped down from his seat and flung himself against Poppa’s legs, burying his face in them. Poppa put his hand absently on Bud’s head and looked up and Nina said, ‘I was just explaining to the boys how you were out slaying the dragon.’
‘Oh,’ said Poppa, gently detaching Bud from his trousers and giving him a small shove back towards the table, glancing at the food, ‘that dragon.’
That night, Harper lay awake in his room after bedtime, as he often did, using his new torch to make hand puppets on the wall. He and Bud still shared the same small room — he didn’t really see why he couldn’t have the one that his mother and Michael had used. It had been kept just as it was three years ago, except cleaner, and was now called ‘the guest room’. It annoyed Harper that he got sent to bed at the same time as Bud. He was more than twice his age, after all. Nina said it was okay for him to read for a bit while Bud went to sleep but often he lay awake with his hands behind his head for some time. Since he got his new torch, last birthday, he had taken to making finger puppet shows on the walls, the stories of princes and warriors that his mother used to tell him about, from the place she always called ‘the Indies’. It was the only time he missed his mother, at bedtime; something about telling himself the stories made him hear her voice, occasionally. His shadow shows were always an amalgam of his mother’s tales and events from the cartoons he and Bud were allowed to go to on Saturdays at the Variety picture house for nine cents apiece, although he didn’t think the original Arjuna had had a space rocket.
That particular evening, Harper was doing a puppet show for himself with the torch laid horizontally on top of books piled on his bedside table. Across the room, Bud was asleep, curled up turned away from him, the small hillock of his back exposed where his quilt had slipped down. Then Harper heard voices from across the landing.
Bored of his own puppet show — Arjuna always won, of course — he crept out of bed and went out onto the landing. The door to Poppa and Nina’s room was not quite closed.
‘C’mon,’ he heard Nina say. ‘They’re growing boys, especially Nicolaas, a few days is all I’m asking.’
‘I can see they’re growing.’ Poppa sounded disgruntled but not annoyed. He sounded like a man who had already lost the argument. ‘Seems like they’re doing just fine to me.’
‘He just wants to feel like a normal boy, you know, in a family, doing things that families do.’
‘That’s true enough, honey, but how many black families do you know get out in all that “fresh air” you talk about?’
‘You saying fresh air is just for white people?’
‘I’m saying fresh air costs money. How many families you know. .’
Nina’s voice rose. ‘I’m not talking about the families we know, I’m talking about ours. You telling me you’re scared of the looks we going to get from whitefolks on a path through a forest? After you stand up in front of judges?’
‘You know that’s not true.’ The way Nina and Poppa talked when they were alone was different from the way they talked in front of Harper and Bud, less proper, a kind of in-joke, as if they were about to start laughing and thumping each other any minute.
‘You scared of bears!’
‘No. .’
‘You are, Michael Senior! Shame on you, big man like you and he’s scared of bears!’
He loved that laughing tone they had when they talked to each other like this. He loved nothing better than overhearing it. Eavesdropping was a habit he had got into when Michael and his mother were around and it had proved a habit hard to break — but when he eavesdropped on Nina and Poppa, what he heard mostly was them teasing each other.
The door to his room creaked. He looked round. Bud stood there in his pyjamas. Harper lifted a finger to his lips and gave him a stern look to be quiet.
‘I need to pee,’ whispered Bud.
‘Ssshh. .’ said Harper, ‘they’re talking about taking us on holiday.’
Bud’s eyes widened. He crept up behind Harper, shuffling his bare feet silently along the boards so as not to lift them, then stood very close, leaning his head on Bud’s arm.
‘You know, the boys would probably go somewhere for a bit of fun. .’ Poppa’s voice was the tone of a man negotiating the terms of his capitulation. ‘Like the beach, or amusements, you know, throw balls at coconuts, eat sticky stuff. There’s a great big ocean over thataway, you know, goes by the name of the Pacific. You saying you want to go the other direction?’