“Did I ever tell you how I met your father, my little canary?” Lenny’s mother asked.
And Lenny shook his head even though he had heard the story before. His mother smiled and pushed his hair from his forehead. For a moment, the bangles she always wore got stuck in a lock of his hair. He pulled the covers to his chin, hugged Mr. Silly Duck, and awaited the story.
“Your father is an angel,” she continued. “A real angel with big, white wings and golden hair. I was seventeen. I liked to skip school and spend the day at Muddy Creek, reading fashion magazines. I was so young and pretty then.”
“You’re pretty now, mommy,” Lenny said.
She kissed his forehead.
“Don’t interrupt. Where was I? Oh, yes, I was seventeen and playing hooky. I’d packed a picnic lunch, a new magazine, and a picnic blanket. I wiggled my toes in the mud and ate my tuna salad sandwich. Suddenly, there was a splashing in the distance. I thought it was a big fish. There was a legendary bass that lived in that creek, and everyone called him Bruno the Big, and they said he weighed twenty-five pounds. But it wasn’t Bruno the Big, it was a man. He popped out of the water with a fish in his hands. He was so handsome. He glowed in the sun. He looked like Hollywood. I waved to him and he spotted me and swam over.
“‘Would you like to share this with me?’ he asked. I nodded and showed him my picnic basket. ‘I’ve never had a picnic before,’ he said, and I told him there was a first time for everything.
He made a fire right there and cooked his fish. We spent the afternoon laughing and feeding each other. Oh, he was so funny. I wish you could meet him.
“It started to get late and the sun was setting. ‘I’ve got to get going,’ I said. ‘Will I ever see you again?’ He shook his head and kissed me. Then, he disappeared in a flash of white light, and nine months later you were born.”
“Am I an angel?” Lenny asked.
“Of course. You’re my angel and my little canary.”
She rubbed his chest through the covers and sang him a lullaby. She tapped the bells of the wind chimes that hung from the ceiling by eye hooks. His mother would go missing for days at a time. Lenny would wait by the door until she came home, and when she returned, she would give him a new wind chime and drive another eye hook into the ceiling. She called the chimes her sorries. Their ringing was in a different time signature than his mother’s song, and his mother didn’t care to match it. The lullaby had no words. It was just a collection of soft notes that rocked him to sleep.
In the morning, Lenny’s mother was gone again. She had left a note on the cover of an old magazine. Lenny did not recognize most of the words. He had not been to school in two years. Not since his mother came home from dinner with his old teacher, Mr. Drilbek, and Lenny awoke to him screaming and holding his bloodied nose in the hallway. “The bitch tried to bite my nose off,” he shouted, and then that was it for school.
“Work,” “trip,” “fridge,” and “Skelly,” were the only words Lenny could make out in the note. His mother was on a work trip. There was food in the fridge. If Mr. Skelly, the landlord, came by, he was to hide in the coat closet. There was a box of his favorite marshmallow cereal in the freezer. His mother knew he liked it cold. Another note was taped to the cereal box. Lenny did not have to read the note to know that it said, “Don’t just eat the marshmallows. Remember to drink water.”
Lenny set up camp on the couch with Mr. Silly Duck, a sheet, and the cereal box. He focused on the door. Sometimes when his mother disappeared like this, he’d spend days watching the door and not even notice that the sun had set and rose several times. He did not know what his mother did for a living. “Work,” she’d say when he asked. “My job is work.” Lenny thought this meant she shoveled coal into a boiler or used a pickaxe to break boulders down into small rocks. Sometimes, she’d go to work without her car and get picked up and dropped off by strange men she said were her cousins. Lenny thought she might be a secret agent.
There had been times when his mother would return without a wind chime. She’d say someone was coming for them and they needed to hide. They’d spend the night in a superstore parking lot, parked with the campers and RVs. The RV people cooked on small grills and danced to their radios. If any of them approached the car Lenny’s mother would pull out a bottle of pepper spray and tell them to fuck off, or she’d make them regret it. She often spoke to Lenny about people following them or hiding in the trees outside their house, people who wanted to hurt her and Lenny. He just wanted to smell the RV people’s grills and move to their strange music. Watching them dance and eat hot dogs, Lenny would begin to forget the kidnappers and killers hunting his mother and him.
Lenny thought every noise he heard was Mr. Skelly coming to evict Lenny and his mother from the double-wide that sat way in the back of his property. He’d hobble over on his prosthetic legs several times a month to remind Lenny’s mother that she’s not allowed to board up the windows or install extra locks on the front door. Lenny waited for a knock on the door or the jiggling of the knob, but Mr. Skelly did not show.
Lenny could’ve been sitting on the couch for days or just a few hours. The oven clock his mother never bothered to set blinked a green 12:00. The only working clock in the house was an analog clock, and he didn’t know how to read it. He was always mixing up the big hand and the little hand, and the purpose of the seconds hand escaped him.
He tunneled deep inside his own mind, returning to a fantasy land where he was a brave warrior with a gigantic sword, and Mr. Silly Duck was his squire. Lenny’s mother had yet again been kidnapped by a hideous troll. Dragons, witches, and other hideous creatures were always snatching her up. In his mind, Lenny crossed through swamps, fought snakes, and climbed up a mountain until he found the troll’s cave. Then finally he chopped off the troll’s head in one mighty. He imagined these scenes for hours and barely noticed the passage of time.
When his mother finally returned, she opened the door just a crack and popped her head out. There were leaves in her hair, and her make-up was smeared. Her miniskirt was torn. She smelled like smoke. A bruise on her cheek winked at him when she smiled. She revealed a bamboo wind chime with a wood parrot sitting atop. She jingled it and the chimes clacked. Lenny ran to her, kissed her cheek, and took the wind chime.
“It’s a bird because you’re my little canary,” his mother said.
“It’s a parrot. Not a canary,” Lenny said.
His mother took the wind chime back, pushed him aside, and went to his room to hang it. She held it above her head and pointed at a spot between a wind chime with an amethyst dangling from the center and a capiz chime made of blue and white shells. Lenny shook his head. His mother retrieved the hammer and plastic bag of eye hooks from Lenny’s underwear drawer. “How about here?” she asked, pointing to a space between a copper chime and one made from gemstones. He nodded. She drove the hook into the ceiling, and sheet rock dust snowed on her face.
His mother made them buttered toast that they ate in bed. Lenny pulled his mother’s hair over him smelled all the strange scents tucked inside it. She plugged in a hairdryer and pointed it at the wind chimes. Lenny smiled at their song.
The next day Lenny’s mother took him into the woods with an Easter basket. She pulled him through the brush by his hand and searched the forest floor. Lenny followed her doing the same, even though he did not know what they were doing. His mother plucked a mushroom both stained and white from the earth. “Bad,” she said as she inspected the mushroom. “Aminta mutabalis.” The name stumbled out of her mouth. She chucked the mushroom deep into the woods. “Never go so far that you can’t see the house,” she said. Lenny turned to find that they were much closer to home than he thought. Their little house’s dark windows gazed at him. They were surrounded by nail holes from when his mother had tried to board them up.
They came upon a dying oak tree. A staircase of orange mushrooms climbed the trunk. Lenny’s mother broke the mushrooms off step by step until she could no longer reach. At home, she made a stew from the mushrooms and the whole kitchen filled up with a chicken-like stink. She let Lenny sip from the ladle, and he smiled and mhmed even though he thought it tasted like an old shoe.
“You know,” his mother said, “one day we might not be able to go to the store. Someone might be waiting to ambush us there, or there could be someone waiting in a car outside the house and we’d be stuck in here. What would we eat then?”
“Cereal.”
“But what about when we’re out? We should learn to become self-sufficient. Do you know what that means?” Lenny shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I have all these books from the library.” She pointed to a stack of yellowing books atop the fridge. “Tomorrow we’re going to learn how to pick berries.”
After his mother had put him to bed, the mushroom stew kicked around in his stomach. It felt alive and resentful. Lenny was afraid he was pregnant with a mushroom baby. He did not know how to be a parent. When the nausea got worse, he threw up in a dresser drawer. He piled clothes over his sick and tried to seal off the drawer with little pieces of tape.
In the morning, Lenny climbed up on a chair and searched for the book on berries. None of the covers had photos, so he just brought the whole stack to his mother. She sat up in bed and hugged his head. There were still leaves in her hair from the previous day. The TV played staticky images of sitcoms. He placed the books on her lap.
“Not today, my canary,” she said. “I’m not feeling well.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, no. Just a little under the weather.”
Lenny imagined his mother being followed by a small storm cloud with a sad face. She got up and shut the blinds then left the room and did the same throughout the house. She locked the doors and jiggled the handles. Lenny followed behind her and watched her peek out the living room blinds and scan the front yard.
“Don’t answer the door and be extra quiet. I have a bad feeling about today.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Let’s just not take any chances.”
So, Lenny went back to bed after only being awake for a few minutes. He tossed and turned for a while. He felt like one of his mother’s shadow people was outside his window, but he did not want to look. The vomit smell from his dresser drawer haunted the room. Lenny worried it would leak from the dresser and fill the room. Eventually these thoughts wore him out, and he slept again.
Lenny awoke to his mother standing over him. She blew at one of his wind chimes, a copper one with a goldfish for a clapper. The evening light behind her cast a long shadow across the bed.
“This is important,” she said. “Listen, carefully.”
He sat up and pulled his feet out from under her. “Did I ever tell you how I met your father?” his mother asked.
“He’s an angel.”
“I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” she said. “Your Father wasn’t an angel, honey. He was a wolf.”
“Like the Big Bad Wolf?”
“Yes, now quiet. There was a path that lead through the woods behind grandma and grandpa’s house. When they would fight, I would walk through the woods until I thought they’d calmed down. One day, your grandparents had a great, big throwing-things fight over grandpa’s affair, so I walked deep into the woods. I didn’t follow my usual path, and instead, I wandered until I didn’t know where I was. A wolf came out from behind a big pine tree. He was the biggest wolf I’d ever seen. He had a perfect grey coat and the sharpest teeth but also smelled like French cologne.
“’Are you lost?’ he asked. ‘I can help you find the way.’
“‘No, no, not at all.’”
“Wolves can’t talk,” Lenny said. “They can only talk in stories.”
“Well, this is a story. No more interruptions. It’s very rude. Where was I?
Oh, yes.
“‘You look lost to me,’ said the wolf.
“No matter how much I insisted I wasn’t, he insisted I was. Wolves are good at sniffing out lies. I had no choice. I had to follow him. He kept saying we were almost there, but I knew we were going the wrong way. We stopped once we reached a part of the woods that was so thick I thought it was nighttime. Then, he turned and jumped on me. He pinned me to the ground and bit at my face and clawed my arms and back. I punched him and poked his eyes. He finally let go of me and ran off into the woods. Your grandparents weren’t happy about me giving birth to a wolf boy. So, I ran away, and nine months later I gave birth to you.”
“Am I a wolf boy?”
“No, you’re a regular boy, but there is a little bit of wolf in you. That’s why one day you’ll hurt me just like your father.”
“I would never ever, ever.” He wrapped his arms around her. “I would never hurt you.” “It’s okay. You can’t help it. It’s just a part of who you are,” she said.
***
By the time Lenny had finished decoding his mother’s most recent note, she came rushing into the house. Her makeup ran, and her stockings ripped. She did not greet Lenny with a kiss or a wind chime. She disappeared inside his room and emerged with his backpack. She dumped its contents and filled it with water bottles and the cereal from the freezer. She snatched Mr. Silly Duck from his hands and put him in the bag too. Lenny looked forward to the dancing of the RV people. His mother shoved his jacket into his arms. She put the backpack on him and tightened the straps.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Someone is coming to take me away and take you away from me.”
“Who?”
“I want you to hide in the woods. Just run out there and keep going. Don’t go near any people. Stay hidden.”
“I want to stay with you.”
“You don’t want to have to live with another mommy, do you?”
He shook his head and pictured a mannequin mommy spoon-feeding him soup with her stiff plastic arms.
“Good, little Canary. I will get you when it’s safe.”
She kissed his forehead, opened the backdoor, and pushed him towards the woods. He turned around, and his mother pointed her finger towards the trees. He shook his head. Tears ran down his face and hers. She pushed Lenny forward, through trees and underbrush. “It’s okay. I’m right here.” Lenny walked and walked with her arms and voice propelling him forward. They walked in silence for some time, and when Lenny turned around, she was gone.
***
Lenny figured that at some point the woods would have to end, but he walked, and walked and all he saw were trees. His home was an unimaginable distance behind him. The endless expanse of tree bark and foliage dizzied him. No matter where he turned, he felt he was going the wrong way. His mother once showed him an old book on trees, and she’d point to different trees, read their name, and then have him repeat them. Nothing he saw looked like any of those words. Tree branches slapped him. His legs drowned in fallen leaves and sticks. Blisters grew and burst on his feet. Blood wet his socks. He didn’t stop to rest. He was too afraid of a shadowy man snatching him up and throwing him in a burlap sack.
Lenny struggled against the woods. The trees grew thicker the further he journeyed into the woods, until not even his boney seven-year-old body could pass through them. A chipmunk wiggled its way through, as if mocking him. To his left, he could hear a road. He continued on in the opposite direction.
There was no way to tell how late it was. The forest canopy was so dense that only small beams of light made it through. Then the sun set, and Lenny was left in total darkness. He tripped on roots and stumbled into trunks. He called for his mother from inside his head and waited to hear her sing-song voice calling out for him. He pretended it was one of those series of days where he camped out on the couch waiting for her. The tree across from him became the front door. He anticipated the opening of the tree trunk and his mother emerging, wearing a crown of leaves and sticks.
Lenny spotted a long shadow walking on all fours. It looked like a man who’d forgotten how to walk. The creature turned to watch him. It could have been his father looking for him, so Lenny could be raised in a wolf den. “Daddy?” he asked the creature. It watched him for a few seconds before running off into the darkness.
A chipmunk rustling in Lenny’s cereal box woke him up. He swatted the chipmunk away with Mr. Silly Duck. It had ravaged the cereal, and what was left was wet with dew. Lenny wiped off some of the marshmallows and ate them. He continued off in what he thought was the same direction he had been heading in.
He walked for hours, without stopping to rest. For food, he picked bugs off tree trunks, took his chances with berries and mushrooms, and scavenged garbage that had blown deep into the woods. When it grew dark again, he awaited his father and all his teeth and claws.
That night he spotted a house. The yellow glow of the windows lured him. “Stay hidden,” his mother’s voice said, but he ignored her. He stopped at the tree line. The rancher was not much bigger than his double-wide, except this house had no broken windows or sagging siding. In the yard was a swing set and a sandbox littered with castle-shaped buckets. A wind chime hung near the backdoor, and Lenny thought this to be a good omen. The place was home to a small family: a mother, a father, and a boy. They watched TV and ate popcorn. Their disembodied heads floated by the windows as they journeyed to the bathroom or the kitchen. From the yard, Lenny watched the movie with them. The movie was about a boy who sneaks an orangutan into a fancy hotel. Lenny mimed the act of eating popcorn. He laughed as the orangutan flung pea soup at guests dressed in gowns and tuxedos. Lenny imagined watching the movie with his own family. He, his mother, and his wolf father curled up on the couch together, lit up by the soft blue of the TV screen.
The family dispersed to their bedrooms after the movie, and the lights went out one by one. Lenny approached the house. He crept up the stairs of the back porch and wiggled the handle of the sliding glass door. It was unlocked. The smell of apple-scented candles and lemon aerosol greeted him. Quiet nestled over everything only to be cast aside by snores traveling from the bedrooms. He opened the fridge and filled his bag with lunch meats and containers of leftovers. The cabinets were too high, so he scooted over. The chair’s legs screeched. The snoring paused.
Lenny left without searching the cabinets. He crawled under the porch and examined his bounty. Several falls’ worth of leaves filled the space beneath the porch. A horrible smell, like food left out in the sun, lived under there too, but Lenny was hungry and didn’t mind it. He dug into the containers with his hands and shoveled the food into his mouth one fistful at a time. He offered some to Mr. Silly Duck. After only a few bites, he was full. He lay in the leaves beneath the porch, weighed down by his journey through the woods, and fell into a deep, black dreamless sleep.
The next day, he stayed put beneath the porch. Getting caught would mean he’d have to go back to wandering the woods, and then surely the shadowy men that his mother warned him of would find him. There was a small window next to him. On the other side was a basement filled with crumbling boxes and exercise equipment. Music came from somewhere inside. Lenny rolled over to get a better look. The son sat in a folding chair with an acoustic guitar as big as him on his lap. The boy did his best to follow the sheet music in front of him, but he had chubby, clumsy fingers. He’d strum a couple notes then miss the next, causing a foul noise to erupt from the sound hole. His hands shook when he tried to form certain chords. Lenny once had a toy drum that his mother would let him bang on all through the day. And then one night, his mother changed her mind and stomped the thing and tossed it in the trash. The boy practiced scales, chords, and simple songs. He didn’t seem to have learned anything by the end of the session. Then the boy disappeared upstairs, and Lenny returned to staring up at the sky through the spaces between the porch boards.
At night, Lenny heard the sound of the boy’s playing again. The basement was dark and quiet. Lenny crawled out from under the porch and snuck to the back of the yard so he could see into the house. In the living room, the boy played across from his mother. His father stood behind him, holding the boy’s shoulders. Lenny could hardly hear the playing. He crept up to the house and got as close as he could to the backdoor.
“C’mon,” the father said. “Show your mother what you’ve learned. Play the song you played for me.”
So, the boy began strumming. The song was nothing Lenny knew. His musical knowledge was limited to the sounds of wind chimes. The boy hit a wrong note and apologized. His father told him to start over. Lenny could tell the song was warm and tender even though the notes were sour. Maybe it was a nursery rhyme or an old-time love song. The parents clapped when the boy was finished.
“That was gorgeous,” the mother said. “You’re so talented.”
“I’m really bad,” the boy said.
“No, no, no.”
The boy plucked at the strings and refused to look at his parents. The mother excused herself. She wasn’t feeling good.
A light turned on in the master bedroom. Lenny clutched Mr. Silly Duck and sidled towards the light. The window opened. A puff of smoke exited. From where Lenny stood, he could see a mirror situated atop a dresser. It reflected the mother. She sat against the wall smoking and stitching a hole in a sweatshirt. She removed her hair and set it in her lap. Her bare scalp looked like the surface of the moon. The father came into the room, and the mother flicked her cigarette out the window.
“I seriously can’t believe you right now,” the father said.
“It’s not lung cancer,” the mother said.
“He thinks his playing made you sicker. He won’t come out of his room.”
“He doesn’t even like the guitar. That’s all you. He wants to draw picture books.”
“It keeps him busy.”
“Quite frankly, a box of colored pencils and some paper would’ve been a lot cheaper.”
The father sat in the window, took the mother’s cigarettes, and lit one. Lenny could no longer see the mother with the father’s back in the way, but he pictured her smiling and rubbing the father’s knee.
The mother went to the boy’s room. Lenny followed her. The blinds were drawn, but he could hear the mother read to the boy. The book was about a young boy adventuring in a magical kingdom with a clock dog. She read scene after scene, then coaxed the boy to try. He stumbled over words like he stumbled over guitar cords.
“Ex, ex, ex,” the boy stuttered.
“Expectations,” the mother said.
“Expectations is the place you must a ways—”
“Always.”
“Always go to before you get to where you’re going.”
And Lenny could feel the mother smiling proud. He fantasized about being found under the porch by the mother. The family would take him in. He would learn to play the drums. He and the boy would form a band that played for the mother every night before being read to and tucked in.
When the family left the following day, Lenny slid open the back door and scrounged the fridge for food. He devoured cheese sticks and pudding packs and soggy pizza slices that had been pushed to the back of the fridge. He guzzled grape juice until it ran down the sides of his face. Balls of foil and purple puddles covered the floor. Lenny caught his reflection in a hallway mirror as he searched the rest of the house for snack caches. He picked leaves from his hair and attempted to dig the grime from his teeth. On a chair sat a pile of torn clothes with a ripped plush dinosaur atop. The sweatshirt the mother had sewn the night before was folded over the back of the chair. Lenny lifted the clothes to his face and inhaled the detergent’s scent.
The family’s shower confused him. Figuring out the water temperature was a difficult enough puzzle, let alone figuring out what all the bottles of shampoo and body wash were for. He slid into the water and the dirt lifted off his skin and floated in one big cloud. He poured a dollop from every bottle into his palm and rubbed it all over. Whenever his mother bathed him, she’d scrub him with a bar of soap as she sprayed him with the showerhead. Fruit-scented bubbles danced on his skin as he bathed. He pushed the cloud of filth to the other side of the tub. When he got out, he tried to wrap his hair in a towel like he’d seen his mother do, but he couldn’t figure it out, so he wore the towel like a veil.
The walls of the boy’s room had been painted to look like the sky. White smudges meant to be clouds decorated the soft blue walls. Toys lined every surface. Lenny took clothes from the dresser: underwear, socks, a T-shirt with a rocket ship on it, and a bathing suit covered in small hammerhead sharks. The book that the boy and his mother had been reading the night before sat on a nightstand among small plastic cowboys. Lenny studied the first page. There was no way those confused jumbles of letters could’ve been what made up the story he’d heard the previous night. He scanned more pages for the few words he recognized, but he still couldn’t tell what it said. He closed the book and chucked it across the room then retrieved it and put it back on the nightstand.
Someone fussed with the front door. Lenny ran out the back and crawled under the porch. It was the father. He cursed and shouted as he cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and wiped up the dirty footprints in the hallway. Lenny crawled deeper beneath the porch.
That night, after the boy played his guitar, read with his mother, and went to sleep, Lenny took the wind chime down and brought it with him beneath the porch. He looped the string around one of the boards and hung it. Some of the chimes dragged in the dirt. Lenny jingled them with his foot while he held Mr. Silly Duck. “This will be our home for now,” he said.
Lenny learned that the boy rode his bike to school when the weather was nice. One morning, Lenny washed his face with the hose and posted himself at the end of the street. Lenny had become adept at waiting and being still, so he stood in the sun for however long it took without fussing. Cars rolled by and the drivers gave him odd looks, so he hid behind a rose bush in a neighbor’s front yard. Sometime in the afternoon, the boy appeared over a hill. The bike’s hardware buzzed, and the boy’s clothes filled with wind. Lenny waved, and the boy hit his handbrakes, skidding to a stop a couple of yards away. The boy walked his bike back to Lenny’s spot.
“Do you want to play,” Lenny’s voice was hoarse. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in a few days, and his tongue had forgotten the shapes of certain words.
“Who are you?” the boy asked.
“Lenny. What’s your name?”
The boy studied him.
“Where do you live?” the boy asked.
“Right there.”
Lenny pointed to a blue house across the street with an elaborate garden in the front yard. The boy looked at the house and then back at Lenny.
“I can’t play today,” he said. “My mom wants me home soon. Maybe, tomorrow.”
Lenny waved good-bye to him, but the boy did not wave back.
Lenny waited for the boy the next day, and when he came by on his bike, he did not stop.
“Hi,” Lenny shouted, but the breeze created by the boy’s speed carried Lenny’s voice away. This happened again the following day, and Lenny returned to the space beneath the porch and didn’t come out for two days.
***
Those first few days beneath the porch gave way to several more. The boy’s playing became slightly more refined as he spent whole afternoons plucking away at his guitar. He and his mother finished their book. The boy stumbled over the words less and less. And when Lenny read the book during the day, he was able to reconcile the words with what the mother and the boy had read aloud.
The mother grew more skeletal, and more and more pill bottles filled the medicine cabinet. She no longer went to work, and instead spent most of her time in bed or throwing up. She stopped cooking, and the Father ordered out most nights or made TV dinners for the three of them. The mother’s constant presence made it hard for Lenny to sneak into the house. On the rare occasions that he could, the only food he could steal were containers of stale white rice from the back of the fridge and freezer bags of pizza slices. Once, the mother’s sister came over with containers of homecooked food for the family, but Lenny felt that food was special and refused to take it.
Lenny did his best not to make such a mess when he snuck inside the house. He ate over the toilet so that all of his crumbs would fall into the bowl and dried himself off completely before leaving the bathroom. He took more clothes from the boy’s room and some blankets from the linen closet. Every night he awaited the boy’s music and the mother’s voice as she complimented his playing and then later helped the boy read. But despite all his precautions the family still puzzled over how much food was being eaten and everyone blamed someone else. One morning the boy shouted that he had no clothes. “I washed them all,” the mother said. “Look harder.” But the boy said someone took them, and the mother said, “Who a magical elf? Get ready for school.”
The mother was absent-minded and blank-faced throughout most days. She no longer wore her wig. The TV in her bedroom played all day. Morning talk shows turned into afternoon talk shows, which turned into the evening news. She didn’t even leave the room when the father and son came home. The boy’s concerts moved to the foot of the bed. She could not respond with clapping or compliments anymore and instead just smiled and nodded in approval. The bookmark inside the new book they were reading had not moved in a few nights.
One evening the mother stormed through the house shouting. “The afghan,” she said. “Where is it?” Lenny, to himself, denied that the afghan she was looking for was the one he had with him under the porch. “It was in the closet and now it’s not,” the mother said.
“It’s okay,” the father said. “It’s probably somewhere. You need to rest.”
“And you and him need to clean for once, you goddamn slobs. I’m throwing my guts up all day, and I’m still cleaning up after all of you.”
Lenny came out from under the porch and watched the father struggle with the mother. She sobbed and leaned on him. Her body went limp, and the father had to drag her to the bedroom. When the boy came out of his room, he stared down the hallway. Lenny could no longer see the mother and father, but he could tell from the boy’s face that it was an ugly scene.
The father began sleeping on the couch, waking frequently to check on the mother. His heavy footfalls would echo through the house and keep Lenny awake at night. He was afraid the father would find that the mother had died. Lenny waited for a shout or a cry, and when it didn’t come, he rolled over and hugged Mr. Silly Duck.
The next week, when the food from the mother’s sister was gone, and the father returned to heating frozen pizzas for the family, Lenny foraged the woods behind their house for food. He plucked mushrooms and examined them closely. Which ones had his mother said would kill someone in the very worst way? He filled his shirt and pants pockets with the mushrooms and berries he deemed edible. He ate some of his gatherings beneath the porch and put what was left in the family’s fridge. The pile took up most of the center shelf. Lenny found a piece of stationary, drew a smiley face on it, and placed it on the pile. He pictured the family gathered around their table and eating the food with wide smiles. They’d thank God, but Lenny would know that it was really him they were thanking.
In the morning, the father lectured the boy in the kitchen. He’d found the pile of berries and mushrooms in the fridge and was not amused. Lenny watched through the backdoor and felt like he’d had a favorite toy taken from him. The boy accepted the blame and just stood there as the father pointed at the fridge.
“These could be poisonous,” the father shouted at the boy. “Your mother is sick enough. She doesn’t need poisonous mushrooms lying around the house like goddamn potpourri.”
The boy shook his head in agreement. The father told him that he couldn’t watch TV for the next two days or take his bike to school and then sent him to wait for the bus. The fight had disturbed the mother, she slogged her way to the kitchen and cornered the father. The father searched for an exit. She was like a vengeful spirit summoned by the boy. The mother called the father an asshole, and Lenny covered his ears. They shouted their grievances across the kitchen. The father was an exhausted caretaker and sick of the boy having his head up his ass. The mother was dying and felt the father was being a shitty father, turning into the spitting image of his own shitty father actually. Then the father said, “Well, maybe try not to act like you want to die so bad.” The words came out quick and sharp and then there was silence. Everyone could tell that it had been something he’d wanted to shout in the mother’s face for a long time.
“You try dying,” the mother said before shuffling back to her room. The father took a seat at the table. He held an invisible cigarette between his fingers and smoked it as he drank his coffee. When he left, Lenny huffed on the glass of the backdoor. “Sarree,” he wrote in the fog.
Lenny decided it was time to leave the family. All he did was make them fight. Things at home had to have cleared up by then. His mother was probably looking for him but couldn’t find him because he’d done such a good job hiding. “We’re going home,” he told Mr. Silly Duck.
The woods had changed during his time under the porch. Trees had fallen and blocked his way. Tangles of briars strangled the woods. No animals crossed his path. There were just a few rotting carcasses wilting in the early fall heat. Lenny walked in what he believed to be the direction to his home. He searched for his mother’s figure. She could’ve been sitting against a tree, eating an apple, or could’ve emerged from a briar patch to guide him home. He called for her. Wind rustling the trees answered him. There was no sight of the family’s house. The woods had gobbled it up. He tripped over roots and snagged his clothes on branches. No matter how far he ran, there were only more trees. He looked to Mr. Silly Duck for some form of direction but received a blank stare. As he was about to quit and curl up on the ground, he found himself behind his home.
Everything was still the same, his bedroom window was open, and he could hear all his wind chimes. His mother was in the kitchen window. She’d cut her hair and dyed it, but it was still his mother. As he was about to step out of the woods, a man walked out of the house, wearing Lenny’s mother’s pink bathrobe. He smoked and sipped coffee. The mug he used was one Lenny had painted for his mother as a gift for her birthday. Lenny wanted to slay the man like one of those bridge trolls, but Lenny did not have a mighty sword or a real squire.
The man went back into the house and followed Lenny’s mother to the bedroom. Lenny snuck beneath the window. There was a faint creaking. Then the creaking turned into an incessant banging, and Lenny’s mother and the man began shouting. He didn’t know if they were playing or fighting. The shouting and the banging wouldn’t stop no matter how much he wished for it to. He ran back into the woods with Mr. Silly Duck in his hand and pushed his way through the brush.
It wasn’t long before Lenny found his way back to the family’s house. He crawled beneath the porch and pulled his blankets over him. The sounds of his mother and the man knocked around in his head. They seemed to have followed him all the way through the woods. He looked to Mr. Silly Duck for help and noticed a large rip in the stuffed animal’s torso. Cotton fell from the rip and onto Lenny’s lap. He cried until he couldn’t anymore, and once he’d wiped the tears from his face, he snuck into the house and placed Mr. Silly Duck onto the mother’s sewing pile. The next day, after the family had gone, he found Mr. Silly Duck repaired. Lenny promised himself that he would not leave again, not until he was a man. Then he would buy the house from the family and start a family of his own.
The next morning the cold had finally come through, and in an instant the ground was dressed in leaves. The family came out on the porch. In all the time Lenny had been there, he had never seen them in the backyard. He watched the boy and the father hold the mother by her arms as they surveyed the yard. She was light enough that only the father needed to carry her, but the boy insisted on helping no matter how many times his mother explained this to him. She wore several coats and a knit cap on her head and resembled a child hiding in a basket of laundry.
“The colors,” the mother said.
“The colors,” the father and the boy repeated.
The father fetched the mother a chair from the kitchen as the mother leaned on the boy. She sat there watching the reds, oranges, and yellows of the woods. The boy ran towards the porch, and Lenny crawled deeper into the darkness. He reached under and pulled out a rake and returned to his mother. He raked a pile of leaves together in front of her.
“Look, look,” he shouted.
“We’re looking,” the father said, even though the mother was not.
The boy walked backwards several feet then sprinted and dove into the pile. The father clapped then helped the boy make the pile bigger, and the boy launched himself into the pile again. The mother didn’t look. She just sat there with her mouth agape, watching the leaves fall. Lenny had to grip the ground to contain his own urge to run out there shouting, “Look at me. Look at me,” and jump into that beautiful pile of leaves.
“I’m feeling tired,” the mother announced, and they helped her back in the house.
At night, Lenny stood outside the mother’s window. She lay awake, looking out into the backyard. She tossed blankets off her then retrieved them from the floor again. She tossed and turned beneath the covers. Lenny wanted to wave to her, crawl through that window and curl up next to her. He wanted to read to her and show her all the words he had learned. Limerick, tollbooth, synecdoche.
The next day, after the boy and the father had left, Lenny snuck into the house. He planned to present himself to the mother. He would thank her for fixing Mr. Silly Duck. He would spoon-feed her soup and cover her with blankets when she got cold. The sounds of a daytime talk show guided him to her room. The host of the show interviewed a mother about her morbidly obese daughter. Lenny heard the girl’s mother describe the child as “rambunctious,” and Lenny wondered how to spell that word. What came after the r-a-m?
The mother, the dying one, was asleep. Lenny tiptoed to the foot of her bed, but she did not stir. Negative space surrounded her. There was no dust or abandoned glasses of water on the nightstand and no light came through the blinds. The air even seemed thinner. On the dresser, a mannequin head wore the mother’s wig. Lenny affixed it atop his own head and studied himself in the mirror. It barely covered his own hair which was now long and unruly. He twirled and flipped the coarse locks like he’d seen his own mother do with her hair. Lenny believed the motion of his mother’s hair to be part of a magic only taught to girls. He curled the wig’s locks in his fingers. There was a silver brush next to the mannequin head. Lenny ran it through the wig. It became stuck in a knot. He tugged on it but felt the wig tearing.
In the mirror, Lenny saw the mother sit up in bed. He turned and knocked into the dresser. She didn’t look anything like she did through her window or from beneath the porch or even how she had appeared when she slept. She was nothing but a skeleton gift-wrapped in skin.
“Is it time?” she asked.
Lenny did not answer. He didn’t know what time it was.
“I’m ready to go,” she said. “I don’t care what my family wants. I’m ready to go.”
She waited for Lenny to speak.
“What are you waiting for?” she shouted.
She got out of bed and approached him. Her head swiveled, and her eyes grew wide. Her breathing became deep and hoarse. The sheet on the floor had a small blood stain on it shaped like a heart. A catheter bag partially filled with dark urine was taped to her leg.
“To think death came as a boy, stealing my wig,” she said.
Lenny knew, if he didn’t speak, she would grow angry again.
“Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going,” he said.
“Take me where I’m going.”
But Lenny did not know what to do with this woman. Her body seemed to be stretching into a knife-like shape. She limped towards him in sharp jerks. He pictured himself as a wolf boy, chewing on the mother’s bones.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Heaven, hell, the great beyond, the void, whatever it is. I don’t care” she said. “I don’t want to have to kill myself.”
The concept of suicide just conjured up more questions for Lenny. He heard and saw the word “hurt” in his mind. The mother stood over him now and looked into his face. Lenny’s eyes tried to escape to the back of his skull. He could see the entire workings of her throat behind her skin. She plucked the wig from his head, brushed it a bit, and placed it on the mannequin head.
“What’s your name?” she asked, but Lenny didn’t answer again. “Something sent you here to me.”
The mother grabbed at Lenny, but he fell out into the hallway. She came towards him, moving like she was wading across a river. Lenny ran towards the backdoor. He threw the chair holding the mother’s sewing pile to the floor. The mother fell to the floor. “Wait,” she begged, crying into her hands.
The mother climbed to her feet. “Wait,” she repeated, and Lenny ran out of the house. She shuffled towards the backdoor, holding onto the walls of the hallway, the kitchen counter, and then the railing of the porch. A gust of wind burst through the yard, and leaves fell from the trees. Lenny ran through that shower of red and gold and crossed over the tree line. The mother continued to plead as the strange boy disappeared into the woods.