Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [10]
She’d leaped out of his grasp. “Answer this riddle, Jack,” she’d said, pulling a red scarf from around her waist and holding it up to the light. “What can burn in space?”
“The sun,” he’d said quickly, wanting to get this over with.
“Oh, my smart, smart boy!” She’d rubbed the top of his head. “That’s because the sun is made of oxygen. But can other things burn?”
He’d tried to think of an answer.
Then the homeless woman had reached out and grabbed his mother’s scarf. Mom had snatched it back, laughed, and then bent down to wrap it around the woman’s neck. “Burn, baby, burn!” his mom had said.
She’d danced around the station, demanding to know: “What can burn in space?”
Lots of people just turned away or put their hands up as if to say no to what she was selling. He’d followed her, trying to think; she might stop racing around if he could come up with the answer.
“What can burn in space?” she’d called out.
“A rocket?” a tall bald man had guessed, trying to play along.
For some reason that answer had made his mom frustrated. “Jack, help me. They won’t listen,” she’d said.
He’d tried really hard to figure out what it was that she was thinking, wanting to show her he understood. There was a song, she’d said, a song about a fire, they didn’t start the fire, but they had to put it out . . . and she wanted to tell people, warn them. He’d kept asking questions so that she’d look straight at him.
But she’d jumped away from Jack and had begun to pull on people’s clothing to get them to pay attention.
“Lady!” a man had yelled.
“Mom, please,” Jack had said, wrapping his arms around his mother’s waist, trying to hold her in place.
The Forest Hills train had pulled in.
“Mom, look! Our train is here.” The doors had slid open, and Jack had put his hands on her back and tried to drive her into the train, but she’d turned around fast, knocking him to the ground.
Soon after that, the police had come. They took his mom to the hospital, and he went first to DSS and then to his grandmother’s.
Jack had heard of DSS. He knew they took kids away from bad mothers. What he didn’t know until then was that his grandmother would try to take him, too.
She’d kept asking him questions, one after another. Mom had warned him about questions like this. Told him not to answer them from anyone — not his teacher or the social worker or his grandmother, especially his grandmother (“She can be evil, Jack,” his mother had said) — and he had tried to keep quiet, tried not to say anything, but his grandmother wouldn’t stop.
“You talk too much!” he’d finally shouted at her. And for a while she seemed to stop. But still she was there, watching him, staring at him, thinking about the questions she wanted to ask — he could tell. Eventually, he’d found places in her big house where he could hide from her until finally they let his mom go and she came to get him.
He couldn’t let that happen again.
Springing to a crouched position, he rolled up his sleeping bag and stuffed it into his backpack. He added the flashlight, three comic books, and the cheese. He tried to add the few items of clothing he’d brought along, but there was no way it would all fit. He couldn’t carry the tent or the borrowed air mattress he’d slept on, and now he’d have to leave clothes as well. Should he wear shorts or jeans? Shorts would be easier to walk in, he decided. But he grabbed one long-sleeved shirt and his Windbreaker and tied them around his waist. Then he rushed to collapse the tent around the remaining belongings and dragged the bundle into the woods, where, hopefully, it wouldn’t be found for days.
He hesitated for a single moment, wishing more than anything that Mom would appear, would drive right up and say, “Hey, Jackie, where’re you headed?” But