Chapter 2
Sam
On the night it happened, Mary Carter was asleep with the lamp on.
She did that on Fridays. She worked all week at the front desk of Dr. Patel's dental office, answering the phone and moving people's appointments around, and by Friday night she could not do anything with her evenings but eat and sit. She made rice and eggs. She watched half a movie. She put on her flannel nightgown and lay down on top of the covers with the lamp on, because Sam was not home yet, and a person cannot really sleep when her child is not home, even if the child is sixteen and has a phone and says he is at Ben's.
Home by 11, he had written. She still had the message. Promise. Don't wait up.
She had written back, I'm not waiting up. And then a heart, because he hated hearts, and she liked to see him pretend not to.
She woke up once. She would remember that afterward, and turn it over, and not know what to do with it. At some time after ten-thirty she opened her eyes because of a noise. It was two noises, close together, flat and hard. Like somebody dropping a heavy board on a concrete floor. She lay there. A dog barked. A car went by with its radio on. She thought, fireworks, it's a weekend, and turned over, and went back to sleep.
That was all. She had been thirty yards away. She had turned over.
At twenty past eleven someone knocked on the door.
It was a man and a woman, both in uniform, and they stood very straight in the hall light with their hats in their hands. She had never seen anyone hold a hat like that in real life. She thought, in a stupid, quick, bright way, they've come to the wrong apartment. She thought, they're collecting for something.
"Ma'am," said the woman. "Are you Mary Carter?"
"Yes."
"Are you the mother of Samuel Carter?"
"Yes. He's, is he in trouble?"
The man and the woman looked at each other. It was a very small look. It lasted less than a second, and in that second Mary understood, without any words at all, the whole of what she was about to be told. She felt it come down through the ceiling like a piece of cold glass. She put her hand out and took hold of the door frame.
"Ma'am, may we come in?"
"No."
"Ma'am."
"No. Say it here."
They said it there. She would not remember afterward who had spoken. It was one of them, or both. The words were involved in an incident, and officer-involved, and transported to Harlow General, and I'm very sorry. They kept saying I'm very sorry. She stood in the doorway in her flannel nightgown, with her bare feet on the cold floor, and watched their mouths move, and thought, with perfect clearness: He took his key.
That was the thing she thought. Not no. Not what. She thought, he took his key. He always wears it round his neck, on the shoelace, so he doesn't lose it. He wouldn't need to knock.
She thought, he was thirty yards from the door.
She did not remember the car.
She remembered a corridor in the hospital, long and white, with a squeak in the floor, and a chaplain in a soft blue sweater who put a hand on her arm and told her his name, which she forgot at once. She remembered a plastic chair. She remembered a small room, very cold, with a curtain, and a man who said, "Take as long as you need," and who did not leave.
She remembered Sam.
They had cleaned him. They had put a white sheet up to his chin. His eyes were closed, and his hair was lying flat, which it never did, and a little color had gone out of his lips. He looked younger. That was the thing that undid her. In the last year he had grown so much, three inches, four, his wrists coming out of every sleeve, and his voice cracking in the mornings, and his Adam's apple, and the long new bones in his face, that she had begun to think of him as nearly a man. And now he lay on the metal table with his face turned up, and he was ten years old.
She put her hand on his forehead.
It was cool, and smooth, and the same. It was the same forehead. She had kissed it six hundred times a year for sixteen years, and she knew exactly where it curved.
"Sam," she said.
The man behind her moved his feet.
"Samuel," she said, in her mother-voice, the one that meant I'm not angry, but. "Sam. Come on. Get up."
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. She stood there with her hand on his forehead and understood that she had said it because it was what you said, because it was a sentence she had said ten thousand times and her mouth did not know any other.
"Get up," she said again, more quietly. "Please."
Then she bent down and put her face against his shoulder, over the sheet, and stayed there for a long time, and nobody tried to move her.
The first week went by like a hand sliding along a wall.
She did the things you do. Uncle Frank, her brother, came from the hardware shop and took the phone away from her and made calls. A woman from the funeral home came and asked about songs. Mrs. Lopez, from downstairs, brought a casserole, and then another, and then a plastic container of beans, and stood in the hall with her hands wrapped in her apron saying "I don't know what to say, mija, I don't know what to say." A man from the church came. A woman from the school came with a card that forty children had signed. The mayor's office sent an email.
Nobody from the police came, except the first two, and a young officer on the second day who stood in the hall and said that the department would be in touch.
She said, "Why was he running?"
"Ma'am?"
"My son. They said he ran. Why was he running?"
"I don't have that information, ma'am. I think he matched a description."
"What description?"
"A male in a gray hooded sweatshirt."
"Half the boys in this city have a gray hooded sweatshirt."
The officer looked at his shoes. He was very young. "Yes, ma'am," he said. "I know."
She did not know why that was the thing that stayed with her. I know. It was the only honest thing anybody had said all week, and he had said it to his shoes.
On Thursday she went into Sam's room.
She had been putting it off. The door had been closed since the night, and she had walked past it so many times, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, that she had begun to feel a small hum coming through the wood, like a refrigerator. She stood in the hall for a while with her hand flat on the paint. Then she turned the knob.
It smelled like him.
That was not a thing she had been ready for. A smell of old sneakers and soap and warm cloth, and under it a sharper chemical edge, markers and thinner and glue. His bed was unmade. His blanket was on the floor, the green one that he had had since he was six. His desk was a mess of paper: a hundred sheets, two hundred, all covered in letters.
She had always known he drew. She had not known how much.
The letters were everywhere. Big ones, small ones. Fat bubbly ones with shadows, and sharp ones like blades, and long thin ones that leaned as if they were walking in the wind. He drew the alphabet over and over, in black marker, on any paper he could find: school folders, pizza boxes, the backs of her gas bills. On the wall above the desk he had pinned up dozens of shop signs he had photographed, a barber's pole, a cracked gold PHARMACY, a faded OPEN 24 HRS, and beside each one he had drawn it again, in his own way, to see if he could do better.
A letterer, she thought. Not an artist. That was the word he used. He had said it once at the kitchen table, in the spring, with his mouth full. Mom, I'm not an artist. Artists do faces. I do letters. There's a difference. Letters have to say something.
She had said, "Okay."
She had been tired. She had said it the way you say okay to a child about dinosaurs.
She sat down on the bed.
There was a smell of hot sauce. She found the bottle on the windowsill, behind the curtain, half full. Red, with a rooster on it. He put it on everything: eggs, rice, pizza, cereal once, on a dare. She had told him it would give him an ulcer. He had said, "It's a vegetable, Mom." She had said, "It is not a vegetable." He had said, "It's made of peppers. A pepper is a vegetable." And then he had laughed, the big honking laugh, the one that did not match the rest of him at all, that always came out of him like a goose being let out of a box.
She held the bottle in her lap.
She waited for herself to cry, and she did not. It was strange. She had cried in the hospital, and in the car, and at the funeral home. She had expected to cry here, with his things all round her. But she only sat on the bed with a half-empty bottle of hot sauce and a feeling that someone had gone out of the room a moment ago, and that if she turned her head quickly she would see the door still swinging.
She turned her head.
It was just the door.
At the back of the closet, behind a pile of shoes, was a long flat board wrapped in a trash bag.
She took it out. It was heavy. She laid it on the bed and pulled off the plastic, and it was a piece of plywood, about four feet by two, painted white on one side. Across the white, in pencil, he had marked out a line of enormous letters. And over the pencil, in black paint, he had started to fill them in.
MARY'S KITCHEN.
He had finished the first three letters. Then the M, and the A. The rest were only outlines, waiting.
Under the board, in the bag, was a note. It was a torn piece of lined paper, folded twice, in his scrawl.
Mom. Your birthday is Nov 9. Do NOT go in the closet. If you read this you cheated. —S.
She laughed.
It came out of her all at once, high and loud and cracked, and then she was bent over the board with her hands over her face, and the laugh and the other thing were the same thing, and she could not tell which was which. She sat on his bed, in his smell, among his letters, with her forehead pressed against the wet black M. She did not know how long.
When she lifted her head, Mrs. Lopez was in the doorway.
She was a small, brown, round woman of sixty, with grey hair in a braid and an enormous cardigan. She had been a neighbor on Ferris Street for twenty-two years. She did not say anything. She crossed the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and put her arm round Mary's shoulders, and they sat there for a while without speaking. Outside, a bus went by. Somebody laughed in the street.
"I made rice," said Mrs. Lopez at last.
"Thank you."
"You should eat."
"I made too much already. I keep making too much. Three days, now. I go to the store and I buy for three. Milk, and cereal, and those little yogurt things he likes. I stood in the aisle yesterday with the basket and I couldn't remember. I thought, has he finished the cereal? I thought, I'd better check." She stopped. "I came home and put it all in the cupboard. The bag of rice is the size of a pillow."
"I know, mija."
"I don't know what to do with it."
"We will eat it," said Mrs. Lopez. "Slowly."
Ben came on Saturday.
He was sixteen, with a round pink face and a lot of dark hair, and he stood in the hall of the apartment in his school jacket with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. He had not been at the funeral. She had thought it was cruel, and then had thought: He couldn't. He had been Sam's best friend since they were seven, since the afternoon they had both been sent to the principal for drawing on a desk. He had slept on this sofa a hundred times. He had eaten off her plates.
"Hi, Ben."
"Hi, Mrs. Carter." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I didn't come before."
"It's all right."
"I wanted to. I just. I kept getting to the corner and I couldn't." He looked up. His eyes were red and puffy. "I'm sorry."
"Come in. I've got rice."
They sat at the kitchen table, the two of them, and she put a plate in front of him, and he ate it, in small bites, without looking up. She watched him. She thought, I'll never see him eat here again. Not him. Not the other one. She did not say it.
"Ben," she said. "I need to ask you something."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Where was he, that night?"
He put down his fork.
"He wasn't at your place."
"No."
"He said he was."
"I know. I'm, he told me to say that. If you called." Ben's voice was low and rough. "He said he'd be home by eleven. He just had to finish something."
"Finish what?"
"The wall."
She waited.
"The tunnel. On Dock Street. He'd been working on it for a while. Not, not tagging. Not like stealing paint, or. He used his own. His uncle gave him cans from the shop, the damaged ones. He was doing letters. A whole line, real big. Like a, like a sentence." Ben's hands were flat on the table. "It was the best thing he ever did, Mrs. Carter. It was really, he had it planned out for like two months."
"Why didn't he tell me?"
"He was scared."
"Of me?"
"Of the, of the court thing."
"What court thing?"
Ben looked at her, and she saw the whole of his young round miserable face change. He looked as if he were standing on a roof.
"Mrs. Carter," he said. "I'm so sorry. I really thought he told you."
"Told me what?"
"In August. He got caught. The cops got him painting the wall under the bridge by the river. They didn't, they took him to the station. They let him go, but they gave him a paper. A diversion thing. For first-time. He had to go to a, a hearing, and do some community hours. He had to go in September. And he didn't."
"He didn't."
"He didn't go. He was too scared. He said, 'If I go, they'll call my mom. They'll make her take off work. She'll lose the whole shift.'" Ben's voice cracked. "He said you'd been working so hard. He said you'd been crying in the bathroom. He didn't want to be, to be one more thing."
One more thing.
She sat very still.
She remembered a night in August, a month after the heat broke, when she had come home with a headache, and Sam had been sitting on the stairs with a bag of ice on his knuckles. He had said he'd been in a fight at the basketball court. She had said, "With who?" He had said, "Nobody. It's nothing, Mom." And she, who had been standing in the stairwell in her work shoes with a pain behind her eyes, had said, "All right. Go put that on your hand."
She had not asked again.
"He made me promise not to say," said Ben. "I made the promise. I broke it. I'm sorry."
"No."
"I'm sorry."
"Ben." She reached across the table and took his hand. It was damp and hot, and she held it tight. "You didn't break anything. He's the one who should have said. And I'm the one who should have asked." She took a breath. "Do you know why he ran?"
"No."
"Think."
"I think, I think he saw the lights and he thought it was about the paper. The hearing." Ben pulled his hand back, and wiped his face. "He was so scared of cops, since August. He couldn't even walk past a car. And it was dark. And he'd been, it was eleven. He was supposed to be home. I just, I think he panicked. I think he thought, I'm in trouble, I'm in so much trouble, my mom's going to find out."
She looked at the clock above the stove.
A boy ran from the police because he was afraid his mother would find out he had painted a wall.
She said it again to herself, slowly, in the plainest words she could find. She turned it over. She could not make it be anything else.
"And that's all?" she said. "That's the whole reason?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"There wasn't anything else."
"No, ma'am." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "He didn't have anything. He had paint. He always had a can in his, in the pocket of his hoodie, in case, in case he got a chance to touch something up. He called it his pocket-piece. I used to tease him about it. I said, 'One day somebody's going to think that's a gun.'"
He stopped.
The words hung in the kitchen like smoke.
Neither of them said anything. Outside, the afternoon went on. A truck went by. Somebody's radio, up the street, played a love song from a long time ago. Mary looked at Ben's face, and Ben looked at the tabletop, and in the yellow light of a Saturday in October, in an apartment on the second floor of number thirty-eight, they both heard what he had said.
"I'm sorry," said Ben, very low. "I didn't mean."
"I know."
"I said it as a joke."
"I know, honey."
On the following Tuesday, Mary went to the police station to collect his things.
She took the bus. She wore her good gray coat, the one from her sister's wedding. She stood in a line at a window behind scratched glass, with a number in her hand, between a man in a cast and a woman with a toddler on her hip. When her number was called, a young clerk with a shaved head slid a clipboard under the glass and said, "Sign here, here, and here."
"What am I signing for?"
"Personal effects. From, from the incident." He did not meet her eyes. "Everything that's been released. A few things are still held as evidence."
"Which things?"
"I'll show you."
He put a brown paper bag on the counter. It was folded at the top, taped, with a long white label on the front and a case number in black ink. She looked at the label. CARTER, SAMUEL. Deceased. Age 16. She had never seen her son's name on a bag.
Inside there were five things. She took them out one at a time and set them in a row on the scratched wooden counter.
A phone, the screen split across the middle.
A tube of cherry lip balm.
A black marker, nearly dry.
A shoelace, still knotted into a loop, with a house key hanging on the end of it.
And one gray sneaker, with the lace undone, and a dark brown stain across the toe.
She picked up the key. It was warm from the bag. It had a small piece of blue tape on the head where he had written, in tiny letters, HOME.
She held it a long time.
"Ma'am," said the clerk. "I'm sorry. I need you to sign."
She signed.
"There's one more thing on the sheet," she said, when she had put the pen down. She was looking at the list typed along the bottom of the form, a short list in small gray type. "Item seven. It says one aerosol paint can, black, partially discharged. Retained as evidence."
"Yes, ma'am."
"What is that?"
"It's, that's a spray can. It was recovered at the scene."
"Where at the scene?"
"I don't have that information. I just, I log things." He shifted from foot to foot. "It's the, I think it's the object. In the report. The one he, that he." He caught himself. "I'm not supposed to say."
"The object."
"Ma'am."
"What object?"
The clerk looked at her. He was twenty-two, perhaps, with a soft round face and a small gold cross on a chain, and she saw him weigh a rule against a thing he could not bear. His mouth worked.
"The one they thought was a weapon," he said.
She did not move.
A phone rang behind him. The woman with the toddler, in the next window, laughed at something. A radio crackled down a corridor.
"Thank you," said Mary.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have."
"No," said Mary. "You should."
She picked up the key on its shoelace, and the lip balm, and the dry marker, and put them into her coat pocket one by one. She picked up the sneaker. She held it against her chest, with both arms, as she had once held a baby. She turned and walked out through the glass doors into the cold bright afternoon, and the first question formed in her head, in clean, clear, plain words, as if somebody had written it on the wall.
He was killed over a can of paint.
She went down the steps to the bus stop and stood there with her son's shoe in her arms, and did not move until the bus had come, and gone, and come again.