Nigel kept disappearing, and I didn’t know how to stop him from going to wherever it was he went. The house had taken on a new aura. A quietude. A somberosity. I swept the floors often to gather up the brittle leaves I sometimes imagined clustered by the baseboards. I could sweep for half an hour and come back with nothing more than a blouse button.
This dead hollowness was present even when both Nigel and I were present. It was a kind of cold damp, like the feeling I had one time at summer camp when I stepped into a stream while wearing socks and shoes. Even after changing into dry replacements, phantom water crept between my toes.
But as bad as home felt on any given day with Nigel in his room, talking on the phone or jotting in his journal, it was a trillion percent worse when he wasn’t home. In those off moments when I stopped home for lunch or when Nigel stayed late at school to participate in one club or another (I eventually requested a tracking protocol from the phone company, which was expensive, but at least I knew exactly where he was), I had to force myself to slow down and turn in to the driveway to keep from driving through to the next part of town. A matching herculean effort was needed to climb the short run of steps to the back door. I struggled up the path as though ingots were strapped to my calves. Perversely I had to cling to my mattress to keep from floating away through the kitchen transom in the middle of the night.
These were necessary pains. If I had one duty on those days when I didn’t drive Nigel home, it was to already be present when he showed up. Someone had to warm the sarcophagus for him.
I’d walk the halls turning on as many lights as I could, trying my best to eliminate the shadows and odd shapes at the edge of my vision that were neither truly shadow nor object. It never worked.
Pictures of the three of us loomed over every room. Our past smiles sneered at our present misfortune. Perhaps that was why Nigel began to fade away.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my ability to read. When I sat on the front room sofa, flipping through the pages of some recent bestseller on the American Dream, my eyes darted to and fro. They locked on the light fixture over the dining room table. The fixture was missing one of its three bulbs. Although I stockpiled fresh ones in the utility closet, I couldn’t bring myself to change it. My eyes locked on the low branches of the trees outside the picture window. The branch ends were like fine hands brushing against velvet, only to reject the diamonds on display. My eyes locked on the faux-antique grandfather clock Penny had bought from a thrift store and somehow carried in on her own.
I went to the door and scanned our block for any sign of Nigel. He was over two hours late. That was his recent pattern, to show up five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes after the promised time. The tracking app said the service was temporarily unavailable, which happened too often for my liking.
I shrugged on a jacket and trotted to the end of the block. Nigel was approaching from a distance. A City bus rambled up the street, its headlights throwing his body into relief, an afterimage burned into the air following a nuclear catastrophe. He was still skinny as a pen refill, but taller, ever taller. When he got to me, he gave a sheepish smile. I almost grabbed his collar, but I was acutely aware of being watched by various neighborly eyes through window shades and security cameras. Even though everyone on our block knew me, had shaken my hand, quizzed me on the elections (“You’re with Pavor, right?”), etc., there was always a chance one or more of them would call the police because of two big strange black guys up to no good on the street corner. Plotting evil. Threatening the security of babe and grandmother alike. That same desk sergeant would get the call. That same man would become enraged at the audacity. He’d call the Special Ward Unit down and maybe strap on a bulletproof vest for his first ride-along in twenty years.
These were trying times. Last month they’d arrested an entire family, in one of the houses just outside the Tiko, for being a threat to the general safety. A bulldozer flattened the house.
That’s why I hustled Nigel into the house and locked the deadbolt and turned out the exterior lights before I grabbed the back of his bubble coat collar.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“Hey! Let go.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“You know where I was and what I was doing.”
“I’ve been dying waiting here for you,” I said—or something similar.
“I wish,” he said. He looked tired. He always looked tired lately. The bags under his eyes made him seem a little older, like the old soul he was.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled. I tugged his collar. Nigel made a strange face, a mixture of worry, defiance, and anger that was somehow adorable. It was the same face he’d made the first time I fed him strained peas. Aircraft control denied the second plane requesting permission to land. “You act like it’s a big deal. I’m sure you had plenty to occupy yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just leave me alone.” He spun loose from my grip, leaving me with a simian paw full of coat. He went into his room and slammed the door. “I hate you.” Then the sound of that awful new Crown album he had taken to. It sounded like cats yodeling into an oscillating fan. I could have simply walked in—I had disabled the lock on his door a few days earlier. But I had a different idea.
Hours later, after we both went to bed without dinner, I was startled awake by the sound of a heavy book being knocked on its face. Just as I planned. I had set the book upright outside his door. It fell when he walked by.
Fully clothed, I climbed out of bed and opened my bedroom door. Just as I did, I heard the front door shutting. I jogged to the den, past the overturned volume one of that Proust book he was reading for school, and watched from a window as he climbed into the back of a delivery van. It took everything in me to keep from flinging the door open and running into the street like a Viking warrior. But I stuck to the script. I hurriedly exited the back of the house, started the Bug, and tailed the van. I would have answers. Intrepid me.