Henry
The girl who liked to play with the boys, who was faster, smarter, and more competitive than any boy he had ever met, was named Piper. She turned around in her seat to look at him, gave him a smile that somehow reminded him that she’d left him in her dust during the hundred-yard dash in PE yesterday. It was the same look she’d given him then. It excited him, made him smile, too, though most guys would be mad to be beaten by a girl at anything.
He liked it—her speed, her confidence.
She reached her arm behind her, and he took the note she dangled.
Loser, it read.
Dork, he wrote back. He put the piece of paper in her waiting palm, heard her giggle when she read it.
He was helping her with math and a few other subjects. She wasn’t a great student, always looking out the window, waiting to be let back outside to run and play. She was smart, though, when she wanted to concentrate.
“Something you’d like to share, Piper?” asked Ms. Banks from the front of the room. She wasn’t mean enough to make them share their note.
“No, Ms. Banks,” said Piper. “Sorry.”
Later they’d meet in the library where they’d study for a while until his mom came. Piper walked home alone. Her house wasn’t far.
“Okay, guys,” said Ms. Banks. “Pop quiz.”
Everyone, except for Henry, let out a collective moan. Piper put her head down on her desk. She was barely clinging to a C.
Ms. Banks gave him his paper and he got to work.
He was starting to like it here, as much as he could like it anywhere. Which made him anxious. Because he remembered that other times he’d started to like places, they were suddenly packing up whatever apartment his mother had rented and leaving, often in the middle of the night, always without notice. Alice never gave a reason, just that it was time. Sometimes she’d seem angry, or anxious. He’d never challenged her.
He’d just come home from school one day and then wouldn’t go back the next. He’d never really had a friend before, someone who might miss him, wonder what happened to him.
He finished his test before anyone else and just sat for a while, staring at Piper’s wild golden mane, her head bent in concentration.
The day outside was brutally hot and humid, the sun blared, heat waving off the playground. The tall palm trees swayed lightly. His mom had been complaining about the heat—a lot. He wondered if that was a sign that they’d be moving soon. He liked it hot, when the air was heavy, and you could feel the sun on your skin. They weren’t far from the ocean; he could walk there and did. Something about the shorebirds calling, and the lapping waves, sand beneath his toes was soothing. It reminded him of—something. A memory just out of reach, a feeling that he’d like to have again but couldn’t quite touch. There were faces attached to the memory—a man, a child. But they were amorphous and strange, like faces in a dream.
The bell rang and he waited by Piper’s desk.
“How’d you do?”
“Maybe okay?” she said, wrinkling her nose at him.
“I’m sure you did fine.” He wasn’t, even though she knew the material. She was an outdoor creature, meant to run and play, not be penned inside regurgitating information she’d likely never use again.
“If I didn’t my mom’s not going to let me play soccer. I have to make Cs.”
“You will.”
“Dork,” she said, nudging him.
“Loser.”
They shared a bag of Doritos under the table in the library where you weren’t supposed to have snacks. He helped her with her biology homework. She told him that he was turning his right foot out when he ran, slowing his time.
At three they walked out and she headed home.
“See you,” she said, giving him a wave. She was certain of that. That he’d be there tomorrow and so would she.
“Yeah,” he said. “See ya.”
“Where’s your mom?” she said, glancing back. “She’s usually waiting.”
He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. “She’ll be here.”
He watched Piper until she disappeared around the corner.
He waited fifteen minutes. Twenty. Watching up and down the street. He could hear the football coach’s whistle blowing way off from the field behind the school. The air was thick with humidity, causing him to sweat beneath his backpack.
It was spring, the bright days already long and growing longer. He knew the way home. It wouldn’t take him much time to walk, though he hadn’t done it alone before.
At his other school, the teachers had waited to see everyone off. But they didn’t do that here in middle school. He could just walk home. But what if she came here and didn’t find him? She’d freak out. What if he waited and waited and she didn’t come?
His stomach felt queasy. A couple of times she hadn’t picked him up from other schools. Once she’d been late at work; he’d had to wait with a teacher who didn’t seem too happy about it. Once a nice mom who felt bad for him gave him a lift. He found his mom sleeping on the couch.
“Oh my goodness!” she said when she saw him. “I dozed off!”
She didn’t apologize and acted like it was nothing. It didn’t feel like nothing to him.
But he was older now, almost fourteen.
Finally, he left the school and made his way home.
He’d have to pass the mall with the gun shop and the strip club, where there was always a suspicious gathering of men hanging around. Sometimes they called at his mom as they walked by.
“Just ignore them,” she’d say, tugging on his arm. “Men are pigs.”
He knew his mom wasn’t pretty. That her nose was long, and her face marked with some faint acne scars. Even when she wore makeup, it didn’t seem to quite take. Her hair, when she loosed it from its ponytail, was limp and flat. But she’d had a few boyfriends. Men who were there for a time, then not. He barely remembered any of them.
That day, the men in the mall ignored him, didn’t even seem to notice him at all.
Their apartment building sat beside a green lake with a rusty fountain in the middle of it. The building was painted bright white and the hallways were exposed to the elements, like an old motel. He climbed up the stairs. He had a key and let himself inside, dropped his heavy backpack, relishing the cool of the interior.
“Mom?”
He walked through the living room to her room, which was empty. Then to his, also empty. Everything was plain and neat and orderly, beds made, kitchen clean. In the kitchen, he made some microwave macaroni and cheese, then ate it in front of the television, which he would not be able to do if his mom was home.
He watched SpongeBob, which was silly, childish but always funny.
He fell asleep on the couch with a knot in his stomach and an ache behind his eyes. When he woke up the dim light of dusk colored the room gray. There was a dryness to his throat, a humming in his ears.
“Mom?”
She wasn’t home.
Who could he call? He couldn’t think of anyone. There was no one—no grandparents, aunts, or uncles. Should he call the police? What would he say? My mom. She didn’t come home.
Henry didn’t know his father. For a long time, when he’d asked, she simply said, “You don’t have one.”
But after health class and sixth grade biology, he’d insisted on answers. There has to be a father. Scientifically.
“Look,” she told him then, cheeks reddening. “I went to a sperm bank. I wanted a child, not a husband.”
“Who is he?” Henry asked, grappling with that bit of information. A sperm bank?
“I have no idea and those records are sealed. Whoever donated his sperm, he didn’t want to be known. He probably just did it for the money.”
Henry had been aware of a feeling that would only grow and expand. A kind of shame. A kind of otherness. That there was something deeply and truly deficient within him. That feeling would only grow as he got older.
“It’s okay,” she said gently, maybe reading the horror on his face. “Some people have a mom and dad, a big family. Some people might have two dads, or two moms, or just a dad. You just have me. We only have each other. That’s it.”
Alice was a big proponent of the idea that you get what you get and don’t get upset. Henry pushed down that ugly, hollow feeling, but from that day forward, he was always aware of it.
Henry didn’t know where Alice worked. They hadn’t been here long and the subject hadn’t come up. In other places, she’d had a number of jobs—once a waitress, then a grocery store clerk. Once she’d cared for an elderly woman named Faith. Alice had worked at a bookstore, a clothing store. But where now? Another question without an answer.
At school, there were career days where parents came in to talk about their important jobs—doctor, lawyer, fireman. Some parents came to show skills—like cooking, painting, or crochet. Others came in to talk about their religion. His mom never did things like that. But they always had what they needed, a place to live, food, clothes, video games, books. She never talked about money. He never thought about it.
That he knew too little about his mother, about where she could be, about who she came from, dawned on him for the first time. She, too, must have had a mother and a father. They were dead. That’s all he knew about them. They were rotten, the both of them. Good riddance.
The sky was almost fully dark when he left the apartment again, key in one pocket, the twenty from his birthday card in the other. He walked back to school. The world seemed changed, store signs glowing, road busy with cars, a blur of red and white lights. But when he got to the school it was dark, deserted. Even the field lights were out, no games being played that night. The school was a hulking black shadow in the near dark; above, cumulous clouds towered, big as mountains. The air was sticky and hot.
He knew the way to Piper’s from school. She’d invited him one afternoon and her mom had made them gooey grilled cheese sandwiches. They’d had a swim in her pool. Her family kept horses on their expansive property. She’d taken him to the small barn down a path from her house. He remembered the smell of manure which somehow wasn’t that unpleasant; he loved the way the mare had nuzzled him.
At her house, he rang the bell and Piper’s mom came to the door. She was full-bodied and smiley, nails done and face flushed.
“Oh,” she said. “Henry! Are you here to help Piper with her homework?”
He shook his head, wasn’t sure what to say and didn’t trust his voice anyway.
Her face darkened with concern and she opened the door wider. “Honey, what’s wrong? Come on in.”
Later, when the police came, they asked all the questions that he couldn’t answer. Where did she work? Was there other family? A boyfriend, friends? Where had they lived before? He could tell by the way they looked at him that he should know these things. That it was weird that he didn’t.
The police took him back to the apartment; he rode in the back of the squad car and under other circumstances that might have been cool. But he felt rigid and brittle, like he might shatter into pieces. Piper’s mom followed behind them in her own car.
But when they got there, Alice still wasn’t home. Henry let the two policemen in, they walked around, footfalls heavy, radios chattering, looking in closets and behind shower curtains.
Piper’s mom stood with him, a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ll stay with us tonight, Henry. Get your things and we’ll leave a note for your mom. I’m sure she’ll call when she gets in. Must be a good explanation.”
The two officers exchanged a look. While Henry gathered his things, he heard them talking to Piper’s mom. If she doesn’t come back by tomorrow, call this number.
More than anything he remembered that the air was heavy with things the grown-ups didn’t want to say in front of him. That heaviness settled on his shoulders; he carried it out when Piper’s mom took him back to their safe, pretty house where bad things didn’t happen, and photographs everywhere showed smiling faces.
When a detective came to Piper’s house that night, Henry was roused from sleep in the guest room bed.
“Honey,” said Piper’s mom. The hallway light shined in bright through the open door. Her hand was warm and gentle on his arm. For a second, he thought she was Alice.
“Mom?”
“No, honey,” she said softly. “Come on downstairs.”
Her voice quavered, and her usually smiling face was grim. He followed her down the hallway lined with all those family pictures, a stone in his gut.
He felt small and shaky in the room of adults. The detective was older with salt-and-pepper hair, deep wrinkles. He had a hard set to his jaw, a deep furrow in his brow, wore a look of dread underlaid with a layer of compassion.
“I’m afraid I have hard news.”
Later, when Henry was asked to identify Alice’s body, he imagined that on her still, gray face he saw the same expression.