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With shaking legs and racing mind, Beverly somehow made it to the table, and she was still sitting there when Tommie wandered into the kitchen. He plopped into his seat, wiping the sleep from his eyes. To steady her fraying nerves, she forced herself to rise. She poured him a bowl of cereal, added milk, and brought his breakfast to the table along with a spoon.
She flashed a quick smile, hoping he wouldn’t notice she was barely holding it together, then went to make his lunch. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple, along with change for milk from the cafeteria. No Doritos or Fritos or Oreos or Nutter Butters, sadly, but right now it was all she could do to keep from glancing out the window, expecting to find Gary standing in the yard.
“I heard someone last night,” Tommie eventually said.
His words nearly made her jump. She tried to remember the last time he’d spoken first in the morning, without her having to coax it out of him. When his words finally registered, she felt another surge of anxiety.
“That was probably me,” she said. “I was up late cleaning the kitchen.”
“I heard someone outside.”
Water was dripping from the faucet, the plink-plink-plink steady and rhythmic, clashing with morning birdsong. An old truck puttered along the gravel road, and she saw an arm wave from the window before it vanished from sight. Mist rose from the fields as though a cloud had dropped from the sky.
“There was no one outside,” she said. “I would have heard them.”
“He was on the roof.”
A year ago, Tommie had begun having nightmares. She thought it had something to do with the television he watched, or maybe the book Where the Wild Things Are. In his early nightmares, he would awaken with cries, claiming that he was being chased by a monster. Sometimes the monster was like a dinosaur; other times it was a wild animal or a hooded figure of some sort. And always, always, Tommie swore that the monster was calling his name.
“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”
“I was awake. I could hear the music from the kitchen.”
Had it been Gary, she told herself, he would have already been in the kitchen. Had it been Gary’s associates, they would have already loaded Tommie and her into the black SUV with tinted windows. Trying to keep her own worries in check, she found the hair wax and smoothed down Tommie’s cowlick, even though her hands were trembling ever so slightly.
“I’ll check after you go to school, but it was probably squirrels.”
“It called my name.”
Beverly closed her eyes, feeling a sigh of relief. It was definitely a dream, thank God. But the relief was short-lived, washed away by her earlier dread like a sandcastle in a rising tide.
“I was singing in the kitchen along with the radio. That’s probably what you heard.” Her voice sounded strangely tinny and distant to her ears.
Tommie glanced up at her, looking suddenly older than his years and younger at the same time. “Maybe,” he finally said, and she decided to change the subject.
“If you want, you can bring a friend over after school.”
“I don’t have any friends here.”
“You will,” she said. “I’m sure there are lots of nice kids in your class. Maybe you’ll get to know them better on field day. You said that’s coming up, right?”
He shrugged, and with that, he grew silent as he finished his cereal. Afterward, he tipped the bowl up, drinking the milk. Beverly thought again that she should eat as soon as she got him off to school, since she hadn’t had much the day before. She felt like she could write a book for people who wanted to lose weight; she’d call it The Too-Broke-to-Eat Diet.
She loaded Tommie’s lunch into his backpack, then walked with him out to the stump by the road. They took a seat, waiting.
“If you want to catch more tadpoles later, I’ll try to find an old jar we could use,” she offered. “You might not be able to bring them for show-and-tell, but you could bring them back to the house for a while if you want.”
Tommie studied the ground. “I don’t want to die, Mom,” he said.
Beverly blinked. “What did you say?”
He turned toward her, his forehead wrinkled. “I said I don’t want them to die, Mom.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly thinking about cameras and nightmares and too little sleep and not enough food, and in the rising heat of the morning, it was hard to keep all her thoughts straight. She needed to do better. She needed to make sure that Tommie felt safe.
The yellow bus, squeaking and groaning, came to a stop; the door squealed as it opened. Tommie rose and climbed into the bus without looking back, without even saying goodbye.
Cameras.
