Shortly after I dropped Mama at Aunt Shirls’s, I sped along General J. S. Beauregard Boulevard. The streetlights popped on in groups of three, as if to say, Wake up you fool wake up you fool wake up. I needed to see my son immediately. We had been drifting apart lately. But I was struck by the notion that I needed to make a few things plain. Some things could not go unsaid. He needed to hear that I loved him. He needed to know that I had his best interests at heart. He needed to know I would never leave him to fend for himself.
But where was Nigel? I sent him a message. It was time for his evening salmagundi of pills. And the hour of his nightly denatured demelanizing shot (auroxsorormab; Big Pharma name Erazamal—the stuff would settle into the nooks and crannies of Nigel’s body so that Dr. Nzinga could activate it when the final phase of treatment began) would follow shortly thereafter.
I consulted Nigel’s schedule: a soccer practice due to end momentarily.
I descended upon the soccer field, where girls and boys in knee socks swept across the green with the balletic grace of those who hadn’t yet had their hearts broken. One of the volunteer coaches approached me.
“Nigel isn’t here. I wish he was. He’s a good player, even if he plays like he’s afraid of his own shadow. We’ll pound that right out of him. Unlike Karen.” The coach took a few steps into the field—and leaped straight up into the air. “Kill it, Karen! You’ve got to beat it like a piñata!”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
He turned back to me but kept his eyes on Karen. “Oh, come on!” He slapped his palm against his face, then rested his hands on his hips. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
The coach threw his arm over my shoulder and shook his head. “There’s always one. Every season!”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“We haven’t seen him in weeks. He said you didn’t want him playing because you thought he’d get hurt. You need to have a talk with your boy. Straighten him out.”
I tried calling Nigel’s device. He didn’t answer, but as fate would have it, I was near the Pest’s neighborhood. Those two had become virtually inseparable of late. It was all I could do to set limitations on when and where they could see each other outside school. Chaperoned visits on the weekends and occasionally during the week, if there was a class project. But never at night, and certainly not without my permission. Araminta seemed quite protective of Nigel. What did she, a short pitch-black wood nymph, know about my son anyway? Yet Penny had always liked Araminta. It was the main reason I didn’t forbid Nigel from seeing her.
A three-minute drive, and the duplex came into view. The house where she lived was on the last residential block before the Tiko. Up the street, the barbed Tiko gate flashed and rolled open. Security stanchions dropped into the ground. The warning arm swung up and out of the way. A family of five carried grocery bags stuffed with their belongings into the compound.
I parked the Bug in front of the duplex where Araminta lived. An old brown dog, the worst kind of dog really, lifeless as a throw rug, sprawled across the porch. A diapered brown boy, the worst kind of boy really, all snails and tails, threw a ball at the dog. I passed a lopsided oak tree, climbed the front steps, and stepped over the dog-rug. The porch was a calamity. Empty alcohol bottles and discarded toys lay about. I stepped on what could have been a shell casing.
The interior glowed with warmth, and an adult-size shadow lurked on the other side of the semi-opaque curtain. When I picked Nigel up from here long ago, the shadow had been in the same place. I rapped my knuckles against the door. I noticed that one of my knuckles was bleeding. It didn’t hurt. Araminta opened the door but left the chain on the rickety latch. I asked about Nigel.
“Oh, hey, mister,” Araminta said. Only her big white eye was visible. “Nigel’s not here. Did you check where they play that soccer?”
“Was he here earlier?” I asked.
She said something that I couldn’t hear because a trumpet in my brain was going off. I could smell Nigel. Yes, my son, like everyone I loved, had a signature scent. But it wasn’t so acute that I typically made note of it. I mean, when he was an infant I used to kiss his baby-powder-scented feet and nuzzle the spring-field-smelling crown of his skull. But the present trace was linked to the way his room at home smelled lately. A sweet musk.
I lowered my shoulder. And the next thing I knew, I was inside the warm embrace of the house, tasting the odd air.
“Why’d you do that?” Araminta yelled. “You broke the door, you big crazy!” This was not true. I only terminated the functionality of the chain.
The shadow I had seen by the window wasn’t a person at all. It was a cutout of the basketball player I’d seen with Nigel that night at the arena. Several other cutouts were arranged around the room: a silhouette of a woman, a full-color of the chocolate milk spokesman who dressed like a crotchety old lady in those commercials, You bet not steal my good milks! A medical dummy sat in a chair at the dinner table.
Another odd thing was the cleanliness of the den. The ping of pine oil, freshly applied. Dewy flowers on an end table. Not a single nit on the carpet. Not a single volume out of place on the bookshelf, where titles by Du Bois and Nikki Giovanni reminded me that the intense study of these problems did not mean a better future was on the way—
Nigel’s C-Troos, the fad transparent tennis shoes of the moment, sat, like a pair of stone lions, on the floor at the far end of the couch. Araminta grabbed the shoes and hid them behind her back.
I smacked my lips and handed her my hat. “Where is he?”
She lowered her head and pointed toward the back of the house. Just then I noticed a hickey on the side of her neck.
Still following the ribbon of Nigel-scent, I passed an unoccupied room and then looped back across my own path and entered the room where Nigel had just slipped out of the closet and was trying to open the window, which appeared to be painted shut.
“Nigel,” Araminta said.
He turned around with a hopeful expression that faded when he saw me. “Oh, hey, Dad.” He did a little wave.
“Hello, Sonny Jim. I got you.”
“I guess I’m in trouble.”
“No trouble at all, other than being grounded for the rest of your ever-loving natural life. What did you think you were doing? What am I supposed to do with you?”
“I can explain.”
“We’ll talk when you get home. Just take your medicine.” I pulled a very small water bottle and a plastic pouch from my blazer.
“I’m not going home, and I’m not swallowing more of that junk.”
“Don’t play. I don’t have time for foolishness.” I sprinkled Nigel’s pills into my palm.
“He doesn’t want to take them,” Araminta said.
“Excuse me?” I said. “Who are you?”
“He doesn’t have to either.” She stepped in between us.
“This is family business, and it doesn’t concern you in the least.” I pushed past her with my hand open, in offering to Nigel, but he swatted it away, and the pills scattered through the air like fireworks. Araminta stepped on one of the pills, the white one that encouraged the emolliation of melanin within skin tissue. It had been worth several hundred dollars. Only powder remained.
“Stop!” I grabbed Araminta’s arm.
“Leave her alone!” Nigel rammed my stomach—a soccer header, ironically enough, so he had learned something after all—and I fell onto the bed. I lay a moment. I wasn’t hurt, but I was shocked. My son was in love. Dumb young puppy love. I stood up and held my palm at him. “Your own father,” I said, not being sure what I meant or why I said it.
“What kind of father?” he said, his chest heaving.
“I didn’t mean to shove you,” I said to Araminta. I got up. “You live here alone.”
“No.” She looked self-consciously to Nigel. “I don’t.”
“I could make a lot of trouble for you. I could call my law school classmate who works for child services and have him ship you upstate. But I wouldn’t do that. I have a better suggestion. You should come live with us. You shouldn’t be here by yourself.”
Nigel’s eyebrows had shot up. At least two of us liked the idea.
“No way. I ain’t closing my eyes in any house you was in.”
“Mr. Moses next door looks out for her,” Nigel said.
I gathered my hat from the floor, but not before dabbing my wet pinky in the powder and licking my finger. Bitter, bitter stuff. “Come on, Nigel.”
“No,” he said.
I told him I would call the services as soon as I stepped outside if he didn’t fall in line. Nigel frowned, and Araminta nudged him.
In the Bug, I opened the glove compartment and removed a bottle with the rest of Nigel’s medicine in it. I counted out the proper pills and added one. A sedative that Penny had sometimes used for insomnia.