29
B ang! Bang! Bang!
“God dammit Joyce, I know you’re in there! I can hear your fucking kids crying for Christ’s sake!”
Adrien Porter-Marin shuffled under the throw blanket cast around his shoulders, tapping at his math homework with the eraser end of his pencil. This had been going on for almost ten minutes now. Inside the bedroom the siblings shared, his baby brother David had started to sob.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“ Joyce ! You want your brat to stay safe or not?! I heard fish tail’s going for a premium on the black market. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to that kid of yours…”
It was an empty threat, but unsettling all the same.
Adrien set down his pencil, rubbing his forehead.
He was half-tempted to turn off the kitchen light, but if he did that, then the guy would know for sure that he was being ignored.
Instead, he stood up from the kitchen table and went to crack open the door, the deadbolt chain pulling taut across the gap.
A tall man in a baseball hat stood outside, glowering down at him.
“My mom’s not here right now.”
There was a pause, and then a heavy sigh.
“Look, if she’s in there, can I—”
“She’s not,” the boy insisted, closing the door in defense. “She’s at work.”
Truth be told, Adrien had no idea where she was.
His mom would sometimes be home from her shift at Mervyn’s around eight, but it was well past ten and she still hadn’t shown up.
Despite this, Adrien wasn’t worried. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for her to stumble home the next morning, grumpy and squinting and reeking of cigarette smoke and alcohol.
The man outside the door sighed again.
“I’ll leave my number, then. Tell her to call me as soon as she gets home.”
The mail slot squeaked and a folded piece of lined paper peeked through.
“Sure,” Adrien said, taking the note. He tacked the paper to the fridge with a Mickey Mouse magnet, placing it alongside the many other late notices hung up beside it.
The man on the other side of the door still hadn’t left.
“You got any idea when she’ll be able to pay?” he asked. Adrien shrugged to himself and warily edged back towards the entryway. He had no idea when his mother would manage to catch up on her variety of debts. There was at least one person at their door every week asking for owed money.
“No, sorry,” Adrien told him. “I’m only ten so I don’t know about that stuff.”
Again, this was a lie. Chances were, Adrien knew way more about overdue bills, eviction notices, blackmail, and loan sharks than any ten-year-old had any right to know.
“Ten,” the man mumbled and then his footsteps creaked down the hall of the apartment building, signaling his departure.
As soon as he was gone, the door to the bedroom creaked open. Adrien spotted a little brown eye in the slat of light that poured in from the kitchen.
“Hey Peanut,” Adrien greeted his sister Jessica with a sigh. “Sorry, did that scare you?”
Behind her, he could hear David’s sobs fading into whimpers.
The four-year-old shook her head no, dark hair flying in messy clumps around her head. She was clutching a book to her chest, readjusting it in her grip.
“It jus’ woke me up,” she said, looking down at the book in her hands. “Um. Hey, Jelly—could you read me this?”
She held out the book to Adrien. It was black with a Japanese woodblock print on the front. It was one of very few reminders that they had of their father after Joyce had purged their household of her late husband’s belongings—they often read it in secret to feel closer to him and their heritage.
“ Yao Bikuni and Other Japanese Fairytales ?” he read the title, taking the book from her. “I dunno, Peanut, the endings are sometimes kind of sad.”
Jessica huffed and tugged on the scratchy throw blanket draped over her shoulders. “I don’t care ! Jus’ change the endings, like when you read me Charlotte’s Web .”
Adrien sighed, glancing over his shoulder at his forgotten math homework. It was getting late. He’d spent all night cooking, cleaning, and looking after his little siblings and had only just gotten around to his schoolwork when the guy started banging on the door.
“Okay,” he agreed, putting on his warmest, bravest grin. Another half-hour awake wouldn’t hurt. “Go climb into bed.”
Jessica squealed in joy and clambered onto the mattress on the floor that she shared with their mother.
She gathered up the deformed Scooby Doo stuffed animal that Adrien had sewn her for Christmas, grasping it to her chest. On the other side of the room, David was sitting up in his crib, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes.
Adrien leaned down into the toddler’s bed to give him a kiss on the forehead.
“Scary,” David whimpered before twisting his blanket up in his tiny fists. Little patches of red had broken out on his chubby cheeks.
“Sorry you got scared, Toast,” Adrien told him. “But he’s not coming back anymore. You can go back to sleep.”
It wasn’t like either Jessica or David had anything to be worried about—they hadn’t had the misfortune of inheriting their father’s “condition” as his mother so crudely liked to put it.
No one would be busting down the door to be paid to protect them from hunters anytime soon—Adrien was a different story.
“‘Kay,” David agreed, lying back down. He closed his eyes for all of three seconds before cracking one open. “Story?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna read you guys a story.” Adrien smiled, clicking on the desk lamp in the corner of the room.
He settled onto the mattress, flipping open the book.
“This one’s called ‘Yao Bikuni’, it means something like ‘the eight-thousand-year-old priestess’—or maybe eight hundred? Anyway, she was pretty old.”
He cleared his throat: “‘ Once upon a time —’.”
“In Japanese!” Jessica insisted. “Mukashi mukashi!”
“All right,” Adrien acquiesced. “ Mukashi mukashi, aru tokoro ni, there was a little girl who lived in Wakasa Province. She was very beautiful, but very spoiled, and every time her father would return home, she would ask him: ‘Otou-san, have you brought me a gift ?’
“ One day, a fisherman who lived nearby —”
“Hey Jelly?” Jessica interrupted.
“Hmm?”
“When’s Mama comin’ home?”
Adrien flinched and then shrugged off the reaction as smoothly as possible. “I… I dunno, I’m sorry. Uh… ‘ One day, a fisherman who lived nearby happened upon a bizarre-looking fish in his daily catch and—”
“Jelly, when’s Daddy gonna wake up?”
Adrien tried his hardest not to snap the book closed and throw it straight across the room in frustration. Instead, he wrapped an arm around his sister and took a breath to steady himself.
“Remember that we talked about this?” he asked. “Dad died. It doesn’t mean he’s asleep like Mom said, it means his body didn’t work anymore and now he’s… he’s gone.”
“But where did he go ?” Jessica asked, expression screwed up in discomfiture.
“Well, he went to heaven to be with Granny Kaede and Grandpa John,” Adrien told her.
“And Dippy-Dog, too?” Jessica asked, eyes wide with concern over the lost pet.
“Yeah, and Dippy-Dog, too,” Adrien lied through his teeth. In reality, their mom had given the dog to their neighbors before they’d had to move out to the one-bedroom apartment in the Fillmore. She told Jessica he’d been hit by a car.
Jessica was content with the answer and nodded at the book in his hands. “Keep readin’, okay?”
Adrien complied and continued with the story. It was a lot longer than he’d recalled it being. He kept glancing down at Jessica to check if she had fallen asleep.
About the time Adrien got to the part where the girl was married, Jessica had nodded off against his shoulder. Careful not to wake her, he laid her down on the bed, covering her with the blanket before clambering back to his feet.
He stepped out into the living room, shocked to see his mother sitting on the couch with a cigarette in hand, staring out the window across the room, dark eyes unfocused and unseeing.
She was a slight, pale woman with straw-colored hair and forward-rounded shoulders.
Her gaze flicked to him for a moment before she sighed in frustration.
“It’s late, you need to stay in bed,” she told him.
“I still have homework to do,” he responded, looking down at his socks.
“Don’t take that attitude with me!” his mother snapped, pulling a long drag off of her cigarette. “I have to work all goddamn day and the last thing I want to do is come home to you and your sass.”
“I’m sorry,” Adrien told her. He felt bad. He should have made more time to do his homework. He didn’t want her to have to worry.
His mother sighed, stubbing her cigarette out on the ashtray beside the couch.
“Ugh, it’s fine,” she huffed. “Come here.”
Adrien hesitated, still staring down at his toes. He didn’t know if it was a good “come here” or a bad “come here”. Sometimes he’d end up getting hit.
“The hell’re you looking so nervous for, I said come here!” she demanded, pointing at the couch cushion beside her. “You keep acting like that and the neighbors are going to think I beat you. Do you want that? Do you want that for your mother?!”
Adrien shook his head and rushed over to climb onto the couch beside her. To his relief she put an arm around him, squeezing his shoulder.
“I had a long damn day,” she groaned. “We hired a new girl and now the manager’s trying to cut my hours.”
“That must be frustrating,” he told her. “I’m sorry you have to deal with that.”
“What should I do, Adrien?” she asked, holding a loose fist up to her forehead. She stared into the kitchen at the bills on the fridge. “What should I do? I’m at the end of my rope.”
Adrien wanted to say: How should I know? I’m ten.
Instead he told her: “Maybe during the weekends I could babysit some other kids in the building? I’m already looking after Jessica and David then. It wouldn’t be a problem.”
His mother smiled at him. There were new lines on her forehead, and creases on her colored lips.