I’m sorry, the boy said, his voice crackling over the intercom.
Inside the apartment the boy hurried to unwrap himself, hat and gloves and scarf and overcoat and blazer, shivering and anxious.
I looked everywhere, the boy said. My room, my desk, my bag. Everywhere.
The constrained everywhere of the young.
Kelly had never seen this expression on the boy’s face: the boy was worried he would be punished. As if Kelly were Kelly’s father, the boy Kelly’s father’s boy.
Locks can be changed, Kelly said. I’m sure you’ll find it. It’s nothing.
Kelly reached for the boy and the boy flinched and Kelly grabbed him anyway. Kelly kneeled down, pulled the boy to his chest, put the weight of the boy’s head against his shoulder. He had never dared hold the boy before, had rarely touched him since bringing him out of the basement. He had barely let himself imagine all this heat, all these bones and scrawny muscles, all this need wrapping arms around him too. This amazing gesture, what he’d wanted for so long. Every moment after wouldn’t be this moment but this one could stretch as long as it had to, its memory becoming something lasting. A charm, Kelly thought, a reassurance in the dark.
THE WEATHERMAN SAID RAIN ALL day but they walked along the river anyway, her hand in his while the boy skipped ahead, kicked at loose rocks, debris fallen over the footpath. The water’s edge was the edge of the city and the edge of the country and on the other bank of the river there was another country because there was nowhere on earth where one nation ended and another did not begin. It was too cold, the end of the year, but it was still forecast to rain any minute and this was the right kind of danger for a man and a woman and a boy. A manageable catastrophe at worst, a story to share. There were other times of day when it wouldn’t be safe to be here. For now there was the rain that didn’t come and the charcoal sky and the high gusting wind putting new waves in the fast chop of the river. The boy ran ahead but he never failed to turn back, and every time he looked Kelly weighed the tangible substance of the gaze. He smiled, shook his head, pointed at the boy. She squeezed his hand. In the distance there was thunder but they couldn’t see the lightning and though they walked all day the rain never came. Ahead of them the boy passed into the darkness of a tunnel under a bridge and though Kelly couldn’t see him he could hear the boy’s laughter, the surprise at being alone in the dark and yet still safe.
W
On the way back to Kelly’s apartment the boy vomited without warning into the floor mats of Kelly’s truck, the cracks and crevices of the backseat. Then the boy vomited again because everyone vomited twice. He apologized softly from the backseat but Kelly waved his apology away. These things happened. It had been a long day or else the boy was overexcited. When they arrived at his apartment, Kelly lifted the boy from the backseat, the boy’s soiled clothes squishing against Kelly’s chest, the boy’s sour breath hot in his ear. The boy was too big to carry far but young enough to sometimes need to be carried and this was one of those times. The girl with the limp shuffled ahead to hold open doors and Kelly brought the boy up the stairs to his apartment and into the bathroom and as Kelly moved through the building the memory of carrying the boy before manifested again: how he had ascended the basement stairs with the boy, how he had taken him to the truck, to the hospital, through the first snow into the waiting light of the emergency room.
Let’s get you out of these clothes, Kelly said. Can you do it yourself or do you need help?
The boy could do it himself but he wasn’t. In the bathroom they kneeled before him, working together to pull his shirt over his head. The boy’s chest so narrow, the unmuscled frame of a child still, his belly a soft roundness over the waistband of his pants. Jackie’s got you, she said, starting the shower while Kelly wet a washcloth. He kneeled back down to clean the boy’s face, his hair, the crusting vomit requiring a more vigorous method. Kelly never knew the right thing to do so he held the boy’s head in one hand and scrubbed with the other. The steam filling the room didn’t help the smell but it did change it. Kelly threw the boy’s t-shirt in the trash and threw the washcloth in after it and when he turned around to face the boy he saw the girl staring at the boy’s back. She didn’t say anything but he saw some of what she’d seen in her look, enough to guess. The shower was running loud and the room was thick with steam and she gently turned the boy by the shoulders to show Kelly the ugly markings on the boy’s back, a stretched series of pinched bruises riding both sides of his spine.
Who did this to you? she asked — and it was almost Kelly who answered.
No one, the boy said. No one did anything.
Kelly asked too but the boy wouldn’t say the brother’s name, only cried harder, his body trembling. The shame of being hurt, of being hurt again. And when Kelly didn’t move to the boy’s side she was there instead, sitting down on the floor and pulling the half-dressed boy into her lap, saying, Jackie’s here, saying, Daniel, you’re safe now. You’re safe with us.
Kelly stood against the vanity, a new kind of uselessness falling over him, another failure to act. In the swelling steam of the room he watched this fine woman comforting this fantastic boy, telling the boy she would keep him safe, sounding so sure she couldn’t fail, speaking as if a mother comforting her own child, her soft speech promising the long safety of love, every motherhood’s first and most lasting and most necessary lie.
W
The boy’s parents were already waiting when Kelly pulled into the mother’s driveway, the father and the mother reunited and shivering in the short dusk of winter. What had the brother told them after he visited? Enough that before Kelly opened the door he knew the boy would be taken. As he approached the boy’s parents Kelly could barely listen over the ringing in his ears but he knew they would speak all the expected words, all the other words Kelly must have known would one day come: It had been a mistake to let the boy spend time with Kelly. They hadn’t known until the brother told them but they should have paid more attention. They too had been the victims of trauma. What happened to the boy had happened to them, in their own way, and in the aftermath they hadn’t been the best parents they could be.
The father said, Thank you for taking care of Daniel. It’s been a hard year for all of us.
The mother said, We missed him but we didn’t know how to be with him. This is our fault, not yours.
The father spoke again, said, We appreciate everything you’ve done — Daniel’s brother told us you’ve been watching him after school — but I think this friendship has run its course. Daniel needs friends his own age, normal friends. I hope you understand.
What Kelly wanted most was to put his hand on the boy, to touch his head or his shoulder. For it to be as easy as it had been beside the river, as it had been the day of the lost key. Instead Kelly would give the boy back so they didn’t have to take him. He would surrender his affection for the boy and he would promise not to see him again, not to let him into his apartment, certainly never to take him away again. A week from now his apartment key would come in the mail, the second key he’d made for the boy, barely used. It would be the mother’s handwriting on the envelope but there would be no accompanying note. Kelly knew this and later it came true.
The father offered his hand. The boy stayed beside Kelly, waiting to move until Kelly reached out, took the father’s hand. The father released his grip, reached for the boy. The boy didn’t move yet but he would soon and in the last moment with the boy at his side Kelly surveyed the family the boy was rejoining: The mother, fit in her sweater and slacks and scarf. The father, bigger bearded than ever, looming in his winter coat, smiling his odd smile. The palpable presence of the missing brother. The boy moved toward his mother, put his arms around her. She would smell the sickness on his breath and know what to do. This was the boy’s mother, the boy’s father. If they were not perfect they were good enough. It was they who had claimed responsibility for the boy, who had freed him from foster care and group homes, who had promised to give him a better life. Theirs was the first taking of the boy, the best of its kind.