tough strands of green fiber, plant stalks. Her eyes are shut.
Jack flings himself back, almost to the foot of the grave. He struggles to cry out and can’t force any sound from his throat.
Her eyes roll open. The eyeballs look like soft white onions. There are no irises, no pupils, no sign of sight. Then she winks.
Jack gets a shout out at last and runs.
10.
He creeps back for another look, just before lunch, when he has a break from the morning chores and the sun has cooked off the mist. He can see where he half tugged the mum out of the ground, but it has sunk back down, dirt crumbling and falling to cover . . . what? He can see the curve of something that might be a skull or could be nothing more than a big peeled stick in the dirt. He kicks loose soil over it to cover it up. When he’s done, he spreads the earth around, smooths it out.
He tries not to feel the top of her head right under the dirt, but his hand moves helplessly to the other plants. Feeling one hard curve of skull after another. Six in all.
This time when Jack leaves, he forces himself to walk, although his legs tremble.
11.
Three days later he squeezes into the front seat of the truck, between Connor and his father, and they drive to the efficiency apartments on Stalwart, where his mother spent the last weeks of her life. The police have finally authorized Hank McCourt to collect his deceased wife’s things. The apartment building is on a wide avenue of shops catering to diminished expectations: a check-cashing outfit, a vape shop, and a Baptist church with a white drive-thru sign out front that reads ALL FLESH IS GRASS AND JESUS IS THE LAWNMOWER.
Hank steers them under a white stucco arch and into a courtyard parking lot. The building is two stories and wraps around them on three sides. There’s a swimming pool in the center of the courtyard, enclosed by chain-link fence, but the water is low and there’s a filthy pair of white jockey underwear floating in the shallow end.
His father rolls up to park beside a police car. A cop leans against the cruiser, a steel clipboard in one hand and his campaign hat in the other. The last time Jack saw this cadet, he was inspecting an unopened bottle of gin. Just like then, he has a slender white stick poking out of the corner of his mouth.
Hank hops down on his side. Jack follows Connor out the other. The junior cadet hands Hank the clipboard and shows him where to sign.
“Kid want to stay out with me?” the young cop asks.
“He’ll be all right.”
The cop meets Jack’s gaze. “Want a smoke?” He offers him the box. At that moment Jack realizes what the cop has in his mouth: a candy cigarette.
Hank nods indulgently, although he takes a dim view of processed sugars, so Jack says, “Thank you, sir,” and helps himself.
The apartment is a single room with a grubby wall-to-wall carpet the color of dirt. Directly opposite the front door is a sliding glass door open to the day. Somehow the brightness of the afternoon makes the room seem even gloomier.
Jack steps out of the entryway into the open space. There’s a cot around the corner, the bed unmade. The air has a sour odor, like feet. A brown paper bag crammed with empty bottles of gin stands against one wall. Flies buzz around an open carton of Chinese food, next to a book called How to Fight for Your Kids and Win—A Field Guide to Divorce. Jack wanders over and peeks into the box of Chinese. At first it seems the noodles are squirming. But they aren’t noodles.
The three of them pack Bloom’s belongings while the cop watches.
Jack finds his mother’s clothes in neat piles under the bed and puts them in a box. He discovers an empty pill bottle: clozapine. Sounds like “clothespin,” what you’d use to clamp down on something, which makes sense—this is what she used to clamp down on the bad thoughts in her head. Jack discovers another bottle of gin, two-thirds empty, tangled in her bedsheets.
“Funny thing is,” the junior cadet says, “liquor store right next door, and the guy who runs the place says he never saw her.”
“People don’t like to shit where they eat, do they?” Connor says, scratching the back of his neck.