Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [35]
‘What’s going on here?’
Joey said, ‘Is Nancy going to die?’
‘What?’
‘After we leave the house. Will she be dead?’
Nancy was still on the porch steps, hunched, eyes closed, when Ben came back out and sat down next to her.
‘He’s scared to leave.’
Her eyes blinked open. ‘What?’
‘He said, after he was taken away from home before, he was told his mother was dead and he never saw her again. He’s scared the same thing will happen now and he’ll get another new mom.’
Appalled, Nancy felt the past rise up and crash down on her, an intolerable weight she must endure.
‘Oh God. Oh God.’
‘It’s okay. I told him that wouldn’t happen.’
‘Ben. Maybe we were wrong . . .’
Within the house they heard the kitten-soft sound of Joey slowly descending the stairs.
‘I told him he could sit on your lap in the truck. You’d be fine as long as he was around.’ He added ruefully, ‘He doesn’t give a shit about me.’
16
When Joey asked where they were going Nancy told him they had a new home. He would have a new school.
‘It’ll be an adventure. It’ll be fun.’
The rented apartment was cramped, though Joey still had a room – of sorts: a curtained closet just big enough to take his bed, with a few toys and books stored in boxes underneath.
Ben looked from the chipped sink to the small table, the light from the overhead bulb showing every scratch on the surface.
‘This is no place to be.’
‘Maybe we won’t have to stay here too long.’
He had managed to hold on to the truck, which he drove back and forth between small-holdings and stores, carrying farm goods, equipment, supplies. Newspaper headlines were no longer optimistic, though Ben tried to keep cheerful when the boy was in earshot.
‘We’re doing okay,’ he said. ‘We’re doing okay.’
For the first time he gave thanks that there was just Joey to think about. He had expected Nancy to give him a kid well before this, and was increasingly aware of unspoken grandparental speculation. Now – silver lining time – it meant one mouth less to feed.
He could have used a drink now and then but alcohol, like choice, was not an option: Prohibition had never been a good idea, in his book, but the way the world was now, the ban added just that bit to the load, like the last straw that broke the camel’s back. On a bad day, he reflected, he might just break the law. He began to smoke more, but soon stopped: cigarettes didn’t grow on trees.
At the local nursery Nancy cared for toddlers whose mothers went out to work. Her hair no longer bounced sleek and shiny to her shoulders; washed less frequently, it hung, lank, tucked carelessly behind her ears. There was packet-mix angel food cake for tea and they became familiar with cheap meat loaf, the breadcrumbs almost outweighing the beef.
Joey had never been a noisy child. He grew quieter.
There were times, lying in the dark of his closet-bedroom, when he thought about his mother. He wondered what kind of a person she had been; all he could recall was a shape, a woman in a kimono who moved silently on the tatami mat floors of a wood and paper house, who stroked his head and soothed him when he cried, and took him walking by the sea. He found it impossible to imagine her face or hear her voice.
He remembers the sound of screaming, he presses his hands to his ears to shut out the sound. But who was screaming? And why? All he knew was that he had been taken away.
In the yard outside the school he waited by the chicken-wire fencing until Nancy collected him after hurrying from her workplace.
One Saturday afternoon, helping her clear away the meal, he looked around the room that served as kitchen and living room.
Above the sink, washing hung suspended from the ceiling, whites that remained grey however hard Nancy scrubbed, shirts that she wrung out and twisted, but that dripped, creating a clammy dankness in the air.
Joey said, mildly, ‘It’s horrible here.’
‘Yes,’ Nancy agreed. ‘It is.’
She looked at the remains of a corned beef casserole on the table.