back to them.”
He is back in Little Leap, he is crawling through the house on his hands and knees when he discovers his mother in the bathroom, pitched over the toilet bowl. At first he thinks she is being sick, as he himself keeps being sick. Then he sees that she is drinking greedily, scooping up water from the bowl with both hands.
His mother is leaving the house. She is wearing her winter coat and her blue bandanna. She warns him to lock the door and not to let anyone in. “Even if they tell you Jesus sent them.”
He is in the kitchen, trimming the mold from the last slice of raisin bread. The raisins are like bits of gravel.
He is standing outside his parents’ room. Through the half-closed door he sees someone sprawled across the bed. Really, all he can see is a pair of bare legs. A woman, not his mother, the legs are too dark to be his mother’s, the legs are black. He steps back, not wanting to intrude, not wanting to disturb this person, this mystery guest, he cannot imagine who she is—they do not know any black women in Little Leap—and he cannot imagine why she has been put here, in his parents’ room, instead of in the guest room down the hall.
The way she lies there makes him think she’s asleep, but it is daylight (the only time he’d be able to see since the power went out), and she is not still, she is restless, her legs keep moving, moving, as if she was dreaming of climbing stairs, and she is talking to herself, a muttering singsong that spooks him.
A single thought is being hammered like a nail to the inside of his skull: something must be done. But the thought that should follow—what it is that must be done—doesn’t come, and will not ever come, there is just the hammering, harder and harder, the nail being driven in deeper and deeper, until there is only pain, unimaginable pain.
He didn’t let them in. They broke in. He hears them banging and shouting. He hears them coughing and gagging, sees the scurrying beams of their flashlights before they tumble pell-mell into the room.
It’s okay, you’re safe now, they say. But they look as if they were seeing a ghost.
A woman’s trembling fingers caress his cheek. “Poor little thing.”
He says, “Are you from Jesus?” and everyone smiles.
He dreams. He remembers.
Now an old story comes back to him, a story his mother liked to tell—and one he liked to hear—about a man who saved a younger man from being run over by a subway train. A seizure had sent the younger man sprawling onto the tracks. The other man had only seconds to decide what to do. He jumped onto the tracks and lay down, protecting the convulsing man with his own body. The train rolled just inches above his hunched back.
Once, the story came up when his parents were having some friends over for dinner. The others laughed when his mother confessed that she thought about the Subway Superman all the time. He was the person she most wanted to be.
“Don’t laugh, it’s true. I’d rather pass a test like that than win the lottery. Maybe it’s because I’m the kind of person who’s afraid of everything and can’t imagine ever doing such a thing myself. But just think, with something like that on your résumé, you could be at peace with yourself. It wouldn’t matter what mistakes you’d made, or whatever stupid, shameful, petty things you might’ve done. Anytime you started to be down on yourself, you could look back to the day you proved to the world you were a good human being. How could you ever hate yourself again? Plus, everyone would have to treat you with respect, no one could say they were better than you.
“And think about his kids.” (The man’s two little girls had been with him that day.) “How lucky for them to know this about their father. Anyway, if it was me, even if I never accomplished another thing in life, I’d die happy. I’d have given my son a reason to be proud for the rest of his life.”
Her voice had wobbled a bit as she finished, and Cole’s father addressed the table in a stage whisper: “I think my wife’s had a little too much wine.” And though his mother laughed along with everyone else, Cole knew that later, after the guests were gone,