Gradually, the outlines of wineglasses appear on a table. A heap of shoes by a door. A black leather jacket crumpled on a chair. No sign of the woman with the blonde curls, the woman Clare kissed and tried to undress, the woman who had taken the bottle of red wine away and put the sofa pillow under Clare’s head, humming.
Clare feels like she has slept for a long time, too long. She slides her hand through the carpet pile, finds her phone, and presses the power button. Nothing. She’ll have to charge it in her car.
She has to think hard about where she is, what part of town. Hampden, Remington, Hamilton, she’s not sure. She does, however, know where she’s supposed to be before noon. Every Sunday, she is supposed to pick up her son from his father’s apartment, and she can’t look like she’s been wearing the same clothes for a couple of days. She can’t smell bad. She can’t give Martin any more ammunition.
Clare slips from the house, leaving the door unlocked. Although she hasn’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to her, she feels eyes peering at her from windows up and down the street. Like she’s a thief.
She scans the cars, looking for her silver Toyota, and walks faster, something sinking inside her. Sweet Jesus. She has dreamed this, being lost on long streets of identical houses, looking for lost things. She hums a few notes for courage and remembers a song about the dreams you dare to dream coming true. As if she were a hungover Dorothy in Kansas and finding a silver Toyota in a city before daybreak would be right up there with surviving a tornado. As if picking up her son on time would be a miracle.
Clare pulls her keychain from her bag and clicks the alarm button on her remote as she walks, even though that could draw attention. She looks closely at the small red alarm button, making sure that she didn’t push the button to pop the trunk instead, and presses it. Again, nothing.
She sings her song about daring to dream and thinks about the sweet boy smell of her son, as if that will bring her closer to her car, closer to him. Grass and tree sap and bubble bath. Singing him songs from Pixar movies. His sleepy head under her chin. A hint of that shampoo that’s not supposed to sting. The scent of baby powder. But he’s too old for powder now. He is five, tucked in the space between baby and boy. After that, she’ll probably lose him, too. She loses the words to her courage song, so she hums.
She considers going back to the house she just left, but she doesn’t know the number, and if the house had a special paint color or a wreath on the door, she doesn’t remember it. She has walked too far away from where she started. And besides, what would she say to anyone still sleeping in that house? Especially the woman who had hummed to her and then gone upstairs alone.
Clare shivers inside her biker jacket, yanks her purse strap back over her shoulder, and walks faster through her limbo. Rowhouses, dark cars, a time she isn’t sure of, a dead phone, people who may not love her but will put a sofa pillow under head.
She has to get to Martin’s apartment in the county. She switches from one side of the street to the other, turns a corner, and pushes the red alarm button on her car remote again. Nothing. She feels a siren rising in her throat, so she sings until she hears a bus crossing in front of her, half a block away. Keswick Road. She remembers parking near Keswick Road. And a white mini-mart place on a corner.
Morning breaks over the cars parked along Keswick, and Clare notices that a few of the cars have plastic flowers sprouting from their antennas. Or a tennis ball or a bumblebee, or rainbow ribbons. She wonders if a whole industry has sprung up to sell these things to people like her, people who are lost.
She fishes the keychain remote out of her purse again and tries the alarm button. Nothing.
When Clare looks up from her purse, she sees a boy silhouetted by the sun and walking in her direction. He walks like me, she thinks, like he drank too much and forgot where he parked. Like he’s trying hard to look like a grownup.
He can’t be more than six or seven, not much older than her son, and he’s barefoot. When he draws closer, she sees that he’s wearing superhero pajamas that are too small for him. Spiderman probably. She knows most of them because of her son. But Martin knows all the superheroes, more than she’ll ever know.
The boy shakes a flashlight then looks into the glass where the light should be. This is what men do, she thinks. They shake the broken things and look at all their parts. They try to make them work. Clare sees a last sputter of white before the kid’s flashlight dies, and she feels something hard in her chest. Shaking things, staring at them, pushing their buttons again and again—it doesn’t work.
Clare stops when they are only a few feet apart. He hasn’t noticed her yet, and she speaks quietly so that she won’t frighten him. Her own son would be afraid of a stranger. He would run to his dad.
“Want me to take a look at your flashlight?” She holds out a hand, slowly.
He shakes his head and sticks the flashlight in the waistband of his pajama bottoms. The thing is almost half the size of his leg. Clare bites her lip to keep from laughing or crying. She’s not sure what will come out of her. She swallows.
Though the morning light is still gray, and the boy is mostly backlit by the rising sun, she can see that his feet are filthy, maybe bloody with scrapes. But he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too preoccupied with the flashlight thrust into his pajama leg like a laser gun. The same way her son immerses himself in his own superhero fantasies. She may as well be on another planet.
“Looks like you could use a holster for that.” Maybe there is something she can fix after all. “Or a strap of some sort. You have a belt?”
He shakes his head, then puts one hand on the flashlight and the other on his hip, “No. Don’t need no belt. Need D batteries. You got D batteries?”
Clare is surprised he knows what kind of batteries he needs. But maybe all little boys know their batteries.
“No,” she says. “Not like I carry Duracells around in my purse. I guess you don’t have a phone in your drawers along with that flashlight?”
The boy squints and looks at the houses and cars like he’s also looking for a Toyota. Or a spaceship. “No.”
“So you’re lost.”
He shakes his head, hard. “I never get lost.” He pulls the flashlight up so it’s not halfway down his leg and slides the power switch a few times. “The lady was asleep on the floor and wouldn’t wake up, and my dad had to go somewhere so I left the lady’s house is all.”
Clare stops breathing for a long moment and searches her memory. Could there have been a boy at the house where she fell asleep? She couldn’t have missed him. Could she?
“Did your dad drive far to get to the lady’s house?” Clare thinks that, unlike herself, he could be miles away from what he’s looking for. This should put her own problems in perspective, but it doesn’t.
He shivers, shrugs.
Clare says, “I’m looking for a silver Toyota.” Maybe if he knows batteries, he knows cars. Another boy thing. “Corolla. Long scratch along the driver door. Duct-taped mirror?”
He shakes his head. “You seen a house with a Ravens flag and a lady with a pink shirt with glitter writing?” He shivers again, and Clare thinks about what a good mother would do. What a good person would do. She takes off the biker jacket and wraps it around the boy. It comes to his knees. Because it hangs open, she can still see the superhero letters between the jacket’s sagging lapels. He looks tougher than he should.
He points to a plastic flower on an antenna. “You got one of those?”
She rubs her cold arms. “No. But maybe I should get one. A great big old plastic daisy that sticks up high above every car and truck out there.” Clare looks in the direction of the sun, over the boarded-up church, lighting up the chain link fence around it. “They make solar ones, I think. So it glows all night.”
The boy slides the power switch on his flashlight up and down. “Yeah. So it don’t need stupid batteries.”
“Yeah.” Clare bends down closer, so that she can look at him full in the face. “So we don’t need no stupid-ass batteries.” He smiles, slides one arm out from inside the jacket, takes her hand, and they walk, Clare pressing the car alarm button in her purse from time to time, and the boy sliding the flashlight’s power switch up and down. No noise. No light.
Ahead, at the next corner, lights go on at a bright white mini-mart and a hand in the window flips a sign from Closed to Open. The smart thing to do, Clare thinks, would be to ask the cashier if she can charge her phone there. A personal favor for somebody she doesn’t know personally. Maybe the cashier would be willing to let Clare borrow her charger, if she brought one to work. A lot of people think ahead like that.
Clare tugs at the shoulder of her jacket on the boy. “Maybe that store has what we need. What do you say we check it out?”
He squints up at her and shrugs. If she had to describe the look, she’d call it cynical, that he trusts her about as much as he trusts the lady with the pink shirt with glitter writing. Maybe less. But he goes in the mini-mart with her anyway.
Near the front of the store, there’s security glass around the register with a small window and a metal tray for paying and getting change. When Clare gets up close to the glass, she spots the cashier on her knees, ripping open a box of Lance cheese cracker packs. The neon orange crackers are the same ones Clare remembers getting out of vending machines for her son when she should have brought a sandwich from home, maybe a cut-up apple or grapes in Tupperware. But he loved those orange crackers with fake peanut butter inside.
Her debit card is in her other purse, and if she has anything bigger than a five in this one, she’d be surprised. There is a bag of parking meter quarters and change from drive-thru places in the Toyota console. Also likely less than five bucks total, and also of no use to her now.
Clare raps on the security glass. “Excuse me.” The cashier stands up and looks at Clare and down at the barefoot boy in pajamas and a biker jacket. Clare takes a step back from the glass and says in her courteous voice, “Sorry to bother you, but do you have a phone charger I could borrow? And an outlet where I could plug it in?” She knows the voice doesn’t match her appearance, especially with this kid at her side.
The cashier points at a rack of phone accessories on the wall behind her. Behind glass. Clare guesses they get stolen a lot. Maybe she’d steal a charger herself, if they weren’t back there. The memory of stealing drugstore lipsticks when she was a kid hits her. The rush. She was good at slipping the tubes into a jacket pocket while adjusting a shoulder strap or reaching for a teen magazine. All her life she has wanted to get away with things.
“No, I meant like your own personal phone charger? If you bring one to work with you? You do, right?” The cashier slips something out of a drawer while staring at Clare’s face. Which is ridiculous, considering the security glass with only a small window and change tray between them.
Clare takes another step back and raises her empty hands. “I’d only use it for maybe two or three minutes, tops. I kind of have an emergency—or it will be an emergency if I don’t call my ex real soon about picking up my kid. He lives way out Carroll County.” Clare gives her a pretty-please smile and presses her palms together. The cashier looks down at the boy like she thinks it would be a good idea for sure if his dad came and got him.
Clare points at the boy and gives a quick laugh. “Oh, this kid isn’t mine. He’s just lost.”
The cashier shakes her head. “You want a phone charger, this one’s $14.99.” She points to another one. “This one is $24.99. You open it, no refund. No using the store electric. Insurance don’t allow it.”
There’s nothing to do except keep walking block after block, pressing the car alarm button, but the boy says to Clare, “See if they got D batteries.”
Clare knows without looking that all the batteries are behind the security glass, too. If they weren’t, she’d slip a small pack into her purse. He only needs two. Bulkier than a lipstick, but still nice and slippery. She thinks she still has it in her. But when she scans the shelves behind the glass, there they are. Next to the phone accessories. Of course.
Clare tells the boy, “Go look for one of those big antenna daisies.” Right now, she’d pay a lot for some batteries if she had her debit card, but something else will have to do. Maybe a Bic, anything with a light. A small kindness, like a sofa pillow under a drunk’s head. She starts to sing her courage song, just a whisper, and the boy smiles and fumbles a few of the words along with her. She tells him, “Go on. Find one of those flowers for my antenna,” and he disappears into one of the aisles.
The cashier glances up, and Clare can see that she’s checking out the boy in a convex mirror. She didn’t notice the mirror until now. This is good, the boy wandering the aisles, picking up items and fooling around with them the way kids do. A distraction.
Clare tells the cashier, “I understand about the charger and the outlets and all. Liability. I totally get it.” She holds up her hands in surrender then looks toward the boy. “He’s having a little fun, right? Not causing any trouble?” She thinks of her son looking at video games in Best Buy, with Martin.
The cashier goes back to ripping open a cardboard box, but it’s obvious she’s glancing at the mirror every few seconds. Probably listening real hard for zippers zipping on the biker jacket.
Clare gives the boy some time to look for a plastic daisy that probably doesn’t exist, at least not in a mini-mart, and lets him get sidetracked by candy bars and cheap toys along the way. A responsible parent wouldn’t put up with all that daydreaming and touching things. Hell, she thinks, a responsible person would know the kid’s name.
But she needs the cashier to keep her eye on the boy in the mirror.
At the end of one aisle, close to the entrance, there’s a spinning rack of party favors. The cheap toys that moms put in birthday party bags. Goody bags—that’s what they’re called. Clare remembers filling goody bags. Bubbles, tiny mazes, paddle balls, Disney sunglasses, kazoos, the $99¢-or-less stuff. And right at eye level, out of a little kid’s reach and definitely more than 99¢, she spots them. Glow sticks. Magical glow sticks that don’t need no stupid damn batteries. Clare feels her face light up.
The cashier’s attention goes from the cheese cracker boxes to the security camera and back again. She frowns at Clare once or twice, but it’s clear she doesn’t want to deal with this crap.
With her right hand, Clare lifts a kaleidoscope from the rack and holds it to her eye and points it toward the mini-mart window, turning it this way and that to see the patterns the mirrors and morning light make. With her left hand, she slides two glow sticks into her purse. Then she returns the kaleidoscope to the rack as the boy comes up behind her with a pink daisy in a package.
He holds it up. “Read what it says. It looks like it clips on.”
Clare reads that the flower is an odor-eliminating air freshener, “Pink Petals Scent,” that clips onto the car’s air vent. She lifts another glow stick from the rack and squats down in front of the boy. She tells him, “This is perfect. You found the absolutely most perfect daisy so that I will never ever lose my car again.” Clare holds the air freshener to her heart and whispers, “Thank you.”
She moves her hand with the glow stick just inside the black jacket so that only the two of them can see it. Then she touches a finger to her lips and slowly tears the package open. She has to give him this one small thing. The boy watches her, barely breathing, as she draws the glow stick from the package and bends and cracks it until it glows a neon green within the jacket, lighting up his superhero pajama top.
He holds the glow stick against his heart, whispers “thank you” back to her, and covers his chest with one side of the jacket. Clare thinks, He is used to not paying for things. Like me.
With the other glow sticks and now the air freshener flower in her purse, Clare stands and tells him, “We have to go now.” She places a finger to her lips again, and the boy doesn’t even whisper, or breathe.
There is a spot of blood by one of his feet, maybe a cut from a piece of broken glass outside, but with the glow stick still clutched to his chest, it doesn’t seem to bother him. It bothers Clare. She hoists him onto her hip, yanks her purse strap over her shoulder, and leaves the store. Over her shoulder, she says, “No biggie about the charger. Insurance. I totally get it.”
Before the door closes behind her, she spots the empty glow stick package on the floor, fallen within sight of the cashier.
With the boy on her hip, Clare turns in a direction that feels right somehow. She isn’t sure why. But she takes the car remote from her purse and begins clicking the alarm button as she walks. Quickly. Quickly. The boy bumping up and down on her hip, both of his arms wrapped around her arm with the car key.
The cashier yells out the mini-mart door, “What kind of mother steals stuff in front of a kid?” Clare keeps walking, fast, and doesn’t look back, but she can picture the cashier with the door wide open and the Closed sign facing out, maybe shaking a fist full of orange crackers at them. She wants to yell back at her about broken glass and personal injury and liability and a bleeding kid, but she is walking fast with the boy on her hip, almost running.
Whatever else the cashier is yelling is drowned out by a car alarm. Clare looks at the remote in her hand in disbelief. She holds her thumb away from the alarm button so she can’t shut off the alarm before she finds her car. The sun is rising over the rooftops now and she runs, the car alarm beating with the wild breaking of her heart. And from another direction, still far away, a police siren. Because of her car alarm? Or a Pink Petals Scent air freshener and glow sticks?
Then she sees her Toyota with its duct-taped mirror. With the sounds of the police siren and car alarm closer now, Clare squats between two SUVs and puts the boy on his feet so that he faces her. His superhero shirt is lit by the glow stick that he holds in his fist. His other hand still holds the flashlight. With her life in pieces, Clare thinks of batteries, if the boy will have someone who knows enough to unscrew the flashlight and put in two D batteries, that this is all it will take to make him happy. Light.
She pulls one of the two glow sticks from her purse and cracks it. This one is neon orange. Like cheese crackers, Clare thinks. The boy takes it and taps one of her shoulders with it and then the other, as if they are knights, as if they have avatars somewhere who are better than the two of them. Then he waves the glow sticks above their heads and makes light saber sounds. Loud, because he’s a kid and doesn’t know better.
“That’s my car alarm. You hear it?” And the sound is so sweet, she can’t turn it off quite yet. But he’s not paying any attention. He’s still waving the glow sticks, wearing the biker jacket like a cape now. When it starts to slip from his shoulders, he yanks it back on. “I have to go, but you can keep the Superman cape.”
He stops for a second to roll his eyes at her and make a sound of disgust. Wrong superhero, apparently. Then he goes back to whooshing the glow sticks through the air.
Clare wonders if someone will take the jacket from him. It doesn’t matter right now. It’s cold. For now, a consolation. More than what she has for her own kid—one last glow stick, not yet cracked. All that light inside, just waiting.
She rises up from her crouch and turns the alarm off. She hums her courage song, and the boy picks up the tune and keeps singing softly on his own when she stops and turns away, and while she runs. ◆
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