Nest
Don’t mess with Micah was a common phrase in the housing cooperative where I was mercifully offered a unit, after several years on the waitlist, the summer my son, River, turned two. Micah didn’t mix with the other parents, those supervising their children in the communal courtyard in varying degrees, depending on their child’s age. I was out there most evenings and weekends—basically whenever River wanted to play with the other children—but I quickly learned the parent of a seven-year-old might duck inside to get dinner started or throw on a load of laundry. In a way I became an informal overseer of all the kids because I had to be out there; there was no turning your back on a two-year-old.
It would have been more accurate to say, Don’t mess with Hunter and Koda, Micah’s boys. They were eight and ten, and had finally arrived at the top of the food chain. I observed that kids of a certain age—usually eleven or twelve, or those entering puberty—didn’t play, opting instead to cocoon with their video games and iPhones indoors. I’d watch them slink back and forth between the nearby 7-11, clutching giant Slurpee cups. Sometimes I’d address them just to make them speak, to remind them they could. But that July, Hunter and Koda hadn’t yet aged out of the courtyard antics. They were full-throttle with the water balloons and Nerf guns. They wanted action and they usually got it because, frankly, they brought it: an energy that accelerated the intensity of play and eventually tipped it over into argument and dissolution. Their presence put parents on edge. If things became unruly it was understood that whomever had witnessed the trouble would step in and correct the behavior. Not exactly discipline the children so much as act as referee to their play, and when those boys entered the mix, calling a time-out was inevitable. Micah, though, didn’t tolerate orders, not even gentle entreaties of her boys to chill out, if they didn’t come from her. And somehow, without ever being present, she heard everything.
Micah’s reputation was all gossip until one Saturday afternoon in July. I was outside climbing up and down a set of concrete stairs, spotting River and shielding him from the limbs of the more sure-footed children flying past. There was some business with bamboo that I was peripherally aware of, children pulling it from the earth and javelin tossing the stalks across the courtyard. Parents were trying to halt the destruction, threatening to take away privileges like screen time and dessert, none of which had any effect, though the bamboo harvest did eventually stop.
The conversation among the adults quickly turned back to what was on everyone’s minds: the fugitive boys from Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island. They were teenagers, actually. At first they were just missing, then, within a matter of days, reports confirmed they’d ferried to the mainland and were suspected murderers travelling north. The news cycle exploded with experts lecturing on alienated boys, violent video games, gender roles and mental health. We traded sound bites and regurgitated facts about the teenagers’ home lives, their parents and community. We speculated on where they’d turn up—relieved that tips from the public suggested they were moving away from British Columbia—and, most of all, why? Why had two childhood friends run off on a killing spree? None among us voiced our real concern, but we all wondered: could it happen to us? Could our boys turn out like that?
“Dad?” A tremulous child, Logan (there was an abundance of boys in the co-op at this time), with long hair and a hysterical fear of squirrels, vied for his father’s attention.
“It’s always the mothers who get blamed when boys go rogue,” said Colleen, my immediate neighbour.
“This goes beyond rogue,” said Ryan, Logan’s father. “It’s psychotic.”
“You watch,” Colleen said. “Their mothers will be burned at the stake.”
“Dad,” Logan pleaded.
“What?” Ryan snapped.
Logan pointed to the playhouse, a wooden gazebo with ferns sprouting from the roof. “They’re going to stab us,” he said quietly.
Apparently Hunter and Koda were filing the bamboo into spears to use on the other, less resourceful children. Ryan left us to investigate.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I heard him say to the boys, crouched with Swiss Army knives in hand. “I’m calling a stop work order on this.”
That’s when Micah appeared, striding out of the shadows. “Watch your tone,” she said. I almost let River fall headfirst down the stairs. I grabbed his arm, but the yank startled and possibly hurt him and he started to wail.
Micah was tall and slender, lean in a way most mothers I knew were not, or no longer. Also stylish with an asymmetrical bob dyed platinum blonde.
“You deal with your kids, I’ll deal with mine,” she said, arms triangulated like wings with hands on her hips. I thought of a katydid, camouflaged one moment, the most striking creature the next. River squawked and writhed in my arms, desperate to begin his obsessive stair-climbing again.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” I chanted, trying to quiet him so that I could hear what came next.
“This is what kids are supposed to do,” Micah continued. “What you’re seeing here is natural development.” She was calm, composed, but everything about her was taut, trigger ready. I couldn’t look away.
“I’m all for development,” Ryan said, “as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of an eyeball.” There was an attempt at lightness in his voice, a desire to defuse.
Ignoring him, Micah said to her boys, “Keep it up.” From what I could tell they’d never stopped, had barely even registered the altercation over their accumulating arsenal. Micah turned and legged it in her frayed denim shorts back to her place, but not before her eyes landed on me, holding River nearly upside down in my arms.
“Sometimes you have to let them fall,” she said, not unkindly. And then she was gone.
“I do,” I sputtered to no one. But did I? And why should I? Was she implying I should let River launch himself down ten concrete steps? Was she calling me a helicopter parent? My child was two years old. I couldn’t exactly let him run wild with the others, unattended. Strangers often used the courtyard as a shortcut. He was vulnerable in so many ways.
I began to look out for Micah, or look for her. I’m not sure which. I brought River outside to play when he was content inside. I imagined scolding Hunter and Koda without cause just to make her appear, to see if she would. I asked the other parents about her, trying to appear naïve: “What’s that woman’s name again?” It turned out everyone enjoyed the topic—thinks she’s better than us, anger management issues, orders takeout seven nights a week—but no one really knew her. I did learn the boys usually spent summers with their dad, in Prince George, but for some reason weren’t this year, much to everyone’s dismay. She was a graphic designer, a runner, but that was it. What more did I want, or need, to know? There were other single moms in the co-op, but she seemed to have it figured out, how to parent and work and move through the world with a fierce, magnetic grace. I was struggling in my job as publicist for a small local publisher, which often required me to attend events in the evening, necessitating a babysitter. In bookstores, before pitiable audiences of friends, family, and the odd stray, I watched my authors monotone through their self-important work, reading longer than anyone in the room had an attention span for, all while the babysitting meter ticked. I just didn’t care like I once had. Whereas I used to view the writing life as sacred, I now saw it as egocentric and my job upholding and promoting it complicit, void of any meaningful contribution to society. But how could I make a change when I had daycare and housing expenses forever bearing down on me? I couldn’t afford not to care. One thing I could do, though, was contribute to my new community. It was an unofficial requirement of the co-op that a member from each household join one of the committees that met monthly to discuss and resolve issues related to their mandates—there were grounds, maintenance, parking, membership, and recycling committees. The latter of which, I learned, Micah was chair.
The recycling committee’s next meeting was in a week’s time, at the end of July. I anticipated it as though it were a date. The evenings were hot and I was tired from work and my commute, but I was a better mother with something to look forward to. I made watermelon slice and peanut butter toast picnics for dinner, which River and I ate in our underwear on our small sun-splashed deck. I knelt at the tub for longer than I would have liked while he wallowed in the tepid water and ate frozen blueberries. And I let him play outside a little in the evening, even though I didn’t have the energy or desire to make small talk with my neighbors at the end of a workday.
“They’re in Alberta by now, or Saskatchewan,” a dad said to no one in particular, staring into his phone as I hurried along the main causeway, trailing River. I’d followed the updates that day, too. The boys from Port Alberni were on the run, moving across provinces pursued by police. The media was calling it a manhunt. Journalists had descended on their hometown looking to interview anyone who’d ever brushed shoulders with the teens. Colleen was wrong: so far their mothers weren’t being blamed, though their home lives were under scrutiny, particularly that of the boy who lived with his grandmother. There was a story there, a sinkhole in his past from which the darkness sprung. There was less discussion and speculation among the parents as new, grim details were revealed. Three people dead. Communities on edge. The long, glittering days of summer now cast a menacing light.
“Not in the face!” a mother shouted. “No shooting in the face! How many times do I have to tell you?”
I sat on a nearby retaining wall, watching the battle of water guns. River pedaled throughout the chaos in a stray plastic car. The bigger children ignored him, ran past and around him to refill their ammunition at the tap. Hunter and Koda weren’t among them and despite the commotion there was a sense of ease to the play. Or maybe I imagined it. But no, the parents lingered with their evening drinks out of the line of fire and talked amiably about upcoming camping trips, triple-checking the weather forecast on their phones. There were shrieks and laughter and the odd injustice, but there was no ganging up on one another, no battle to achieve tears, as there would have been if the brothers were involved. One-by-one the children got cold and tired and were called in. I thought about the troubled fugitives bedding down for the night in mosquitoed wetlands. Were they sick with fear and remorse, or were they exhilarated, triumphant?
“Two minutes,” I told River, preparing him to go inside. Just then Colleen’s daughter, Violet, ran past and squirted River’s car. I don’t think a drop even touched him, but it was the act of being singled out and targeted that startled and set him off. Violet ran hooting from sight.
The conversation revolved around soft plastics—plastic bags to be precise. Apparently the city would no longer collect and recycle them. It caused flares of indignity among the five well-intentioned members who comprised the committee. Micah, however, seemed tired as she took notes on the proceedings to share with the board. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her jaw muscles flexed noticeably when a sparrow-like woman named Anne spoke. Micah wore a black tank top and large gold hoop earrings, along with her trademark jean shorts. The door to the common room was propped open to encourage airflow, but only the whoops of children playing rushed in and out. I had hired a girl whom I’d observed to be one of the least disaffected among my teen neighbours to watch River while I attended the meeting. Her name was Sage and she rode horses on the weekend. Sage was outside with River. I’d instructed her to keep a close watch, to keep him a few steps removed from the play, safe from its volatile epicenter. She seemed to understand. I had not explicitly said, keep him away from Hunter and Koda, but implied it. “Some kids get carried away,” I said, and nodded in the direction of the shirtless brothers whose torsos were scrawled with ballpoint pen depictions of flames.
Anne couldn’t move past her dismay over the city’s decision on soft plastics. “Why?” she wanted to know. But none of us could say.
“It just means you’ll have to take your bags to a drop-off point yourself,” Micah said. “It’s not the worst thing.”
“I’m retired,” Anne said, “so I have time to do that. But how many people will?”
“Actually,” I said, “I think most people nowadays pack reusable bags with them. There’s definitely growing awareness about the evils of plastic.”
“The evils of plastic?” Micah repeated. “Who are you?”
“Lauren,” I said, though I’d introduced myself at the start of the meeting.
“No, I know. I just mean, are you some kind of eco-warrior?”
“Sorry?” I said. There was such derision in her voice. I looked around the table to gauge others’ reactions, but no one appeared to notice. I grew hot and my face flushed extravagantly. I felt like an ant beneath one of the children’s magnifying glasses: seen and deemed worthy of death.
“We’ll need to include this in the newsletter,” Micah said. “Maybe put a sign on the recycling room door, too.”
The meeting shifted to the need to remind members to crush their containers to avoid bins overflowing before pick-up day. Outside, the children’s cries were growing increasingly feverish, crossing the line from play into overwrought. I hoped Sage had hauled River inside by now. I could’ve gotten out of my chair to look, no one would’ve cared, but I stayed seated. I didn’t want to be singled out again by Micah. Anne continued to wring her hands over the plastic bags and decided she would write a letter to the city. This seemed to calm her. Micah’s phone began to ring and she glanced at the screen.
“Meeting adjourned,” she said, sweeping her notes from the table and heading for the door, phone to her ear. I heard her laugh and felt resentful. Why did I care? Why did I want to befriend the one self-exiled woman in a cooperative? Why not continue to let her drift out there on the raft of aloneness she’d built? I can’t say. Only that I felt compelled to lure her in to shore and burn that raft to ash.
It was Friday of the August long weekend and I’d taken the day off work. I must have mentioned it to Colleen because when I woke she’d already texted suggesting we have coffee on the communal deck. Colleen was the best sort of neighbour: welcoming, unobtrusive, chatty. But I didn’t want to be her friend, her confidant. I had no desire to map her quirks and failings the way I did Micah’s. Colleen gave me everything up front, laid it all out there like garage sale treasures on quilts for every passerby to observe and comment on. I did not covet those kinds of treasures. I wanted a small glass swan slipped to me in the night, or beneath a table, and know it was only mine to hold. Still, I texted Colleen back and told her I’d join her in twenty minutes, after River’s breakfast.
“All we want is for our sons to become good men, am I right?” Colleen launched in as soon as I was across from her at the picnic table. “But how, exactly, do we do this when the patriarchy’s been pinching our asses since we were nine years old choosing penny-candies at the corner store? That’s just my experience. I don’t know about you,” she said, not waiting for a reply. “It should really be #mefuckingtoo because honestly, how is this a revelation to anyone? And, more importantly, considering how we came up, are we even equipped to guide our twenty-first century boys?”
A wasp zipped around my mug and I swatted it away. “Good question,” I said. I wasn’t prepared for pre-coffee philosophizing.
“I like that you don’t cut his hair,” Colleen said, nodding toward where River was making his way in the direction of the sandbox we all knew was filled with cat feces.
“River,” I said to his small, determined back, “not in there, please.”
“Why do we cut boys’ hair and let girls’ grow long? It’s so stupid, but it’s a perfect example of one those things we don’t think about. Though clearly you do, and that’s good, that’s really good.”
There was a wasp in my coffee now and I tried to tip it into a potted hosta without pouring it all out. “I’m not sure I do,” I said, watching the wasp crawl about in the dirt. “I just think he has amazing hair.”
“Well, whatever,” Colleen said. “You’re doing a great job.”
“Thanks,” I said. “We’re all just muddling along, aren’t we, hoping to get some of it right?”
“Some of us already think we have it figured out.”
Colleen rolled her eyes in the direction of Micah’s place, where I could see the sliding glass door was open, a gauzy curtain catching the breeze. “She could learn a thing or two from you.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said.
Other doors began to open and children trickled out with unbrushed hair, eyes pinched against the sun. River was now digging with commitment in the sandbox and I didn’t have the heart to stop him, cat feces or not, because I was drinking my coffee in peace.
“There must be a nest somewhere,” Colleen said, flapping her hands and rising suddenly so that the picnic table rocked and more of my coffee spilled. “It happens every year.”
I had plans to take River to the spray park on Granville Island but the day kept getting away from me. After the sandbox he was tired, went down for a nap. While he slept, I answered a few emails, one from an author anxious for me to post a positive review of her work on social media before it became old news, another who’d found a misplaced comma in her biography on the publisher’s website. Who’s going to notice? I wanted to reply, but instead corrected it, let her know I’d done so, and thanked her for her keen eye. I filled a tray of juice popsicles and put them in the freezer, fished flies from the inflatable wading pool I’d set up on our deck and added some fresh water. But when River woke he had a low fever. I tried to carry him to the pool but he thrashed and moaned so that I abandoned the idea and gave him a dose of Tylenol instead. He fell asleep again and I saw our long weekend plans—beach jaunts and ice cream stops—crumble into a rubble of indistinct hours spent nursing River’s symptoms and streaming movies. I had no official summer vacation planned; I didn’t have the money. And while I could’ve arranged to visit my father and his wife in the Okanagan, we’d have to bus both ways and be subjected to the fierce orderliness of their lake view condo. The thought of keeping my sticky, cherry-juice-stained child off their white couches did not sound like a vacation.
Later that afternoon, River sat naked in my lap while I fed him green Jell-O. He took small, unenthusiastic bites and I wondered if I should take him to emergency at Children’s Hospital. His body burned against mine and he shivered violently when I held a cold cloth to his forehead. He’d had colds in the past, many snotty-faced colds, but this was new for me. He couldn’t even keep his eyes open for Paw Patrol. I heard parents outside, a discharge of laughter followed by a shout of reprimand. With River asleep again, I checked the news on my phone. An aluminum boat, presumed to have been used by the outlaw teens, had been found on the banks of the Nelson River, in Manitoba. Small communities in the area were setting curfews. The boggy forest along the river was too dense for a ground search, so helicopters beat the air overhead, trying to flush them out. I looked at River’s small shape under the sheet. How did a boy go wrong? How to know when he’s taken a fork in the road and call him back before it’s too late? The sheet rose and fell with his breath. I put my face to his mouth to smell the hot, sugary life in him.
Colleen texted to invite me outside for a glass of wine. I told her about River and she said we could sit near my place, with the door open, so I could hear if he needed me. I said I had a headache and didn’t think I could drink wine. She replied I could drink whatever I liked. I could think of no other excuse so I took a glass of water outside to join her. The evening glowed with false promise that August would never end, that we would never again find ourselves in the grip of November rain. Colleen had told me it happened almost like clockwork in the co-op; come October, the doors closed and hibernation began. I wouldn’t see most of my neighbours again until May. I welcomed the prospect of seclusion, quiet, but I also would have liked to have a friend nearby with whom I didn’t need to make plans, who might just knock on my door and visit for an hour. I imagined Micah dropping by with sushi, eating with her amid the containers at my felt-pen-stained kitchen table while snow fell outside.
“Should I be worried?” I said.
“Kids get sick all the time,” Colleen said. “He picked something up at daycare.” She had two kids, a pre-teen boy and six-year-old Violet, one of the few girls roaming the co-op. When she spoke of them, or about children in general, it was with a weary knowledge that came from experience, and while she tended to set my mind at ease, she also shut down any discussion. There wasn’t room for possibility with Colleen.
The water guns were out that evening and from where we sat I watched long arcs shoot skyward, into trees and over railings onto my neighbours’ deck chairs. The children weren’t background noise tonight, they were warriors on a mission. Hunter and Koda were whipping up a frenzy, calling for teams, for battle.
“When they catch those boys, I hope they’re locked up and psychoanalyzed,” Colleen said. “I want to see brain scans and pictures of their bedrooms, the posters on their walls and the books on their shelves. The whole story’s there, we’re just not hearing it.”
“It has to end soon,” I said. “They’re going to get caught.”
“Of course they will. Teenagers are notoriously stupid.”
Another cluster of parents were seated on a deck a little ways down from us, closer to the action. I wanted Colleen to join them, the livelier group. I wanted to go inside and imagine another life for myself and River, searching out vocational programs on college websites. Or I wanted to watch Netflix. I didn’t want to think about those messed-up boys on the run. When they were found, a couple days later, they would be dead, killed by their own or each other’s hand. The videos they recorded before their deaths wouldn’t be made public. And the public would gladly forget about them and the working-class mill town that made them. Their mothers would never be interviewed. Their mothers wouldn’t surface, either, out of grief or horror or non-existence. What could they have said? What could they have done?
I gulped my water and said I needed to check on River.
“I might be a while.”
“I’ll be here,” Colleen said. “Violet’s down there in the mayhem, so I’m not going anywhere.”
Inside, River had kicked off his sheet and lay breathing steadily. His forehead was still hot to touch. I kissed his cheeks and his arm flung up involuntarily. He moaned, rolled onto his stomach. I scanned his back, legs, feet. Something caught my eye. On his soles: spots, pinpricks of red. I searched the rest of his body and found them on his palms, too. I pulled out my phone and Googled: fever spots on hands and feet. Apparently River had a common virus among children: hand, foot and mouth. The spots would swell into tiny blisters and there were likely more percolating on the insides of his cheeks and on his tongue. I was relieved. Colleen was right: something he picked up at daycare. I pulled the fan from the closet and set it at the foot of the bed, wind rippling across the sheets. I was not an incompetent mother, only inexperienced. I needed people like Colleen in my life. She didn’t have to be my best friend, just a friend. Did people even have best friends past a certain age? Generally that was someone’s partner, but River’s father and I had messed that up, luckily before River was born.
When I returned outside Colleen was gone. So was the other group of parents who’d gathered further down the row. Had I been inside that long? Surely everyone’s dinner hadn’t arrived at the same moment.
I heard traffic on the neighbouring street, an indicator of the absence of children’s cries. A stream of water shot up into the giant maple that shaded the sandbox and gazebo. The water arced and broke apart in silvery chunks as it fell back to earth. Then another stream, another. No, they were two separate streams. Two water guns aiming at the same target. I moved closer to see what they were so bent on hitting.
“Knock it off, you guys,” I heard someone say. A woman. “We’ll need an ambulance if you keep this up.” The streams of water continued, synchronous, deliberate, reaching for what I finally saw was a large grey cone fixed to a high branch. A wasps’ nest. I moved to the stairs leading down into the courtyard. From there I saw Hunter and Koda, side-by-side, water bazookas in hand, determined to shoot it down. I understood the appeal, the desire to watch it fall and detonate on the pavement below, an explosion of wasps.
“People are allergic,” Micah said to her boys’ resolute backs. “You two, enough.” The streams of water continued. The nest rocked a little. They were only managing to hit the bottom, the wasps’ entrance, and I could see a small swarm gathering at the opening, trying to assess the problem.
“So, no video games for a week,” Micah continued. “You two cool with that?” Target practice continued unabated. It was as though they didn’t hear. Adults steered their children away from the scene, toward safety and home. It was uncomfortable to behold Micah’s ineffectual parenting, but I couldn’t stop staring. Her gloss was rubbing off before me. I pitied her. I wanted to help.
“Hey, guys,” I called out. “Listen to your mom.” My words bounced off their gleaming summer bodies like a harmless spray of Nerf gun darts. Micah turned to me and I felt her focus intensely. Why the look of scorn? She was stubborn and ungrateful, an overextended mother with an inflated sense of self, raising two entitled boys. I almost turned and went inside right then. But I couldn’t. What had begun as annoyance had undergone a chemical process in my veins; I was flooded with righteous contempt.
“Good riddance,” I said, though Micah was too far to hear.
“Lauren.” Someone said my name.
“Who does she think she is, anyway?” I said to no one in particular.
“Lauren.” That voice again. Stern and authoritative. Colleen walked toward me, shepherding her daughter Violet along before her. Micah stood with her hands folded on top of her head. Tattoos of her boys’ names ran along the underside of each arm, elbow to armpit, in ornate cursive ink. Did you love your children more if you needled their names into your skin, did it keep them closer, protect them?
“Let’s check on River,” Colleen said.
Hunter had moved to stand atop the electrical box with his water gun. He was closer to his target and the stream of water made contact, causing the nest to swing on its branch. Koda refilled his weapon at the tap. Colleen gently took hold of my arm.
“You coming?” she said.
“No,” I said, resisting her pull. I wanted to see what Micah would do next, how she would rein them in, if she even could.
Both boys were on top of the electrical box now, hitting the nest simultaneously. It rocked above their heads like the lethal piñata it was. They were relentless in their attack; they worked in beautiful tandem.
“Guys,” Micah sighed. She moved toward the electrical box, reached up and placed a hand on Hunter’s foot. “Listen to me. You need to stop.” She stood almost directly beneath the nest, thirty feet up. Droplets from the boys’ guns rained down on her.
“We’ve almost got it,” Koda said. “You’d better move.”
“This is the worst idea,” Micah said. She looked over to where Colleen and I stood watching at a safe distance. “Move along,” she said, and waved her hands to indicate we should go.
I shook my head, no. We weren’t going anywhere. The boys were right. The nest was going to come down. Were they more mischievous than other boys, or just curious? If they’d had another mother, would they be so disliked among my neighbours, by me? They were just boys with water guns on a hot summer evening. They drilled into the nest where it connected to the branch.
“Any second now,” Colleen said.
“Then what?” I asked.
Colleen shrugged.
The nest fell at an odd angle and a blur of wasps followed it down to land with a soft thud near Micah’s feet, a throw cushion tossed from the couch. There was no explosion. It was constructed of paper, not mud, and built to flex with the wind. The boys whooped in celebration and Micah jumped back, away from the nest fizzing now that the internal hive had been disrupted.
“Shit,” she said, grabbing her ankle. “Get inside,” she told her boys. They leapt down from the electrical box, still eyeing the nest, wanting it to do more.
“Go,” Micah ordered. This time they listened. The brothers jogged through the courtyard, spent water guns in hand. I knew that when a wasp stung its target, it also released a chemical message to its colony, ordering them to attack. Wasps flitted around Micah now, spun up and down her long limbs. She started to run for home, with her boys, then stopped and appeared to resist the impulse. She had to go another direction. “Fuckers,” she spat, swatting wildly. She ran toward the underground parking garage, trailed by an erratic haze of insects. Out of sight, I heard her shriek— another sting, another several—and the sound echoed through the concrete bunker of parking stalls. Then a metallic crash followed by silence. Had she climbed inside a car? Had she tripped? People stored rusted, flat-tired bikes and other hopeless items where they shouldn’t. I could’ve checked on her, I should have, but I was grateful to her for leading the swarm away from the courtyard, grateful she was gone from view.
“Mama?” I heard River say. Then louder, with a hint of panic, “Mama?”
Maybe later, once the wasps had fully vacated their ruined home, and if the raccoons didn’t get to it first, I would tear off a piece to show him. I would point to the branch where it hung, the spot where it fell, and he would know one more thing to look out for in this world. The courtyard was empty, quiet. You could almost convince yourself no one was in trouble, there was no threat of danger.
“Hey, baby,” I heard Colleen say. She’d gone to my house, where the front door stood open and River waited shivering on the threshold. “Your mama’s right here.” And I was, in an instant. I lifted him into my arms, buried my face in his hot neck and made the sounds a mother makes to comfort her child, even though he wasn’t crying, he was fine.
Photo by PROJETO CAFÉ GATO-MOURISCO from Unsplash.
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