“Don’t call here anymore, Tommy,” Ahn said. “It’s not good for you. You stay where you are and things are better.”
Then she hung up.
Thomas cried for the first time since he could remember. He had dreamed for years about being reunited with Eric and Ahn, but now all of that was over. They didn’t want him even to call. He blubbered there on the couch next to the pink phone. He was crying when May came home.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“They don’t love me,” the boy cried. “They told me not to call.”
May thought that he was talking about some friends at school. She took him in her arms and assured him that she and Elton loved him very much. And so did Madeline and lots of other people too.
But Thomas would not be consoled. He had lost something that day that could never be replaced. He was sorry that he’d called. At least if he hadn’t he never would have known the truth.
Ahn was also desolate over Thomas’s call. She sat in her small room, at the back of the big empty house, wringing the blood-spattered T-shirt that she’d kept from childhood. She didn’t want to hurt Thomas — she loved the little boy — but by now she was certain that Eric was cursed. He was a danger to anyone who threatened him or loved him. Thomas was safer where he was.
Three days after the phone call to the Nolan household, Elton came home in the middle of the day. May and Thomas were sitting in the kitchen.
“May!” Elton yelled.
They could tell by the way he slammed the door that he was in a bad mood. His father’s heavy footfalls down the hall brought Thomas to his feet. If he’d had a moment more, the boy would have ducked into the back porch.
“What the hell are you doing here, Lucky?” Elton said when he came in.
“He’s sick, Elton,” May said, thinking quickly. “They send him home.”
“Huh. That’s me too. They send me home too. Said I cracked the block on that fool’s Cadillac. I’idn’t do shit, but now I’m fired wit’ no references. Three years an’ now it’s like I never even had a job. Get me some gotdamn beer.”
Elton was drunk for the next three weeks. Thomas couldn’t come back home at noon anymore, and there were fights every night. Some nights he would sneak out of the house and go to stay with Pedro so he didn’t have to hear the yelling and crying.
One moonlit evening, while Elton broke furniture and called May a whore, Thomas went out to sit by Alicia’s tomb.
There were crickets and frogs singing all around him. He delighted in the moon shining on his hands and feet, and spoke softly to the girl.
“Are you lonely, Alicia?” he asked. “I know you must be, and I’m sorry if I don’t come talk to you enough. But I been real busy tryin’ to keep it cleaned up around here. An’ sometimes it’s better to be alone. Sometimes people jus’ scream an’ watch TV an’ tell you they don’t like you.”
Thomas climbed up on the makeshift tomb and lay down. He slept for a while, and when he awoke the moon filled not only his eyes but all of his senses. He tasted it and heard its rich music. He felt the light on his skin like golden oil soothing him. In his mind the moon was speaking to him, telling him that everything was all right. He fell back to sleep on the rock-rough crypt smiling at his good fortune.
The next day Pedro’s father was killed in a shoot-out on Slauson.
Alfonso Middleman was shot dead on the street. People told Pedro that it was kids trying to take his drug money. No one knew where Pedro’s mother’s family lived, and the father’s family wouldn’t even let him in the door.
“I went to his mother’s house,” the gray-eyed teenager said. “But they said that my mother lied and they were no blood to me. I don’t even know where they’re burying him. I can’t even go to his funeral.”
Pedro got a job selling crack out of an alley six blocks east of Thomas’s Eden. He made enough money and then bought a pistol from the people he dealt for.
“I’m gonna kill them suckahs murdered my dad,” he told Thomas one night. “Kill’em all. And then they can put me in jail. I don’t even care. But I’m not gonna let’em get away with that shit.”
Thomas spent seven nights with Pedro in the clubhouse. The bigger boy was despondent over the death of a father he hadn’t talked to in eight years. He hungered for revenge.
Thomas didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble at home. Elton had a night job at an assembly plant by then, and May was seeing Wolf again. Many nights she wasn’t home, and even when she was there, she was too high to miss Thomas.
It wasn’t until about a month later that everything went completely wrong.
Thomas was asleep in his back-porch bedroom. In his dream his mother was showing him how to fly. Wolf had been arrested the week before for drug dealing and implication in the murder of a man in Compton. That night May had promised Thomas that she wouldn’t see Wolf again and that she’d stop getting high. The boy had not asked her to stop, but he was happy that she wanted to.
He came awake suddenly with fear clutching his heart. He didn’t know why.
He hurried out of the house and across his valley into the clubhouse and up to the roof. There he found Pedro sitting on the rusted-out fire escape with the muzzle of his pistol shoved in his mouth. Pedro was crying. Thomas screamed and ran at his friend.
“Stop!” Thomas shouted as he leaped onto the metal basket.
The gun fired before Thomas could grab his friend. But he couldn’t stop, and when he fell upon Pedro, the metal wrenched away from the wall and crashed the four floors to the ground.
For long moments all Thomas knew was pain.
When he could finally think a bit, he crawled over his wide-eyed dead friend to the hole in the fence and back home. He made it to the street and up to the front door. There he collapsed.
Elton found him in the morning when he was coming home from work.
“Lucky.”
“I fell,” the boy said.
“Don’t worry, boy,” Elton said in an unusually kind voice. Thomas was happy to hear his father’s gentle tone.
He woke up in the hospital with May and Elton standing over him. There was a white woman wearing a brown dress suit standing there too, and a doctor and a nurse and a policeman in uniform.
“I want to speak to him alone,” the white woman in the suit said.
“Why?” Elton complained. “You think we did somethin’ to him? I’m not leavin’. I’m not.”
“I can have you arrested right now, Mr. Trueblood. Right now.”
Thomas didn’t understand what the woman wanted. He was feeling kindly toward Elton because he obviously cared about what happened to him. After all, he had brought him to the hospital even though it was bound to cost a lot of money.
Thomas felt dizzy, and somewhere beyond that his hip hurt. But he wasn’t worried about the pain.
The room cleared out except for the nurse in white and the white woman in the brown suit.
“My name is Mary,” the woman said. “You’re Tommy, right?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get hurt, Tommy?”
“Fell.”
“Did anybody push you?”
“No.”
“Did anybody hit you?”
“No.”
“Were you alone when you fell down?”
“No.”
“Was your father there?”
“No.”
“Was your mother there?”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh,” the woman said. Thomas could see the sad kindness in her face even though she wore lots of makeup. “I mean your father’s friend, Miss Fine. Was she there?”
“May wasn’t there either. It was just me an’ Pedro. He was sad about his father, and he had a gun that he was gonna use to shoot the boys that killed his father, but then he was on the roof and he shot the gun and I jumped out to save him but we fell.”