Matt Bell - Scrapper

W

On the way back to Kelly’s apartment the boy vomited without warning into the floor mats of Kelly’s truck, the cracks and crevices of the backseat. Then the boy vomited again because everyone vomited twice. He apologized softly from the backseat but Kelly waved his apology away. These things happened. It had been a long day or else the boy was overexcited. When they arrived at his apartment, Kelly lifted the boy from the backseat, the boy’s soiled clothes squishing against Kelly’s chest, the boy’s sour breath hot in his ear. The boy was too big to carry far but young enough to sometimes need to be carried and this was one of those times. The girl with the limp shuffled ahead to hold open doors and Kelly brought the boy up the stairs to his apartment and into the bathroom and as Kelly moved through the building the memory of carrying the boy before manifested again: how he had ascended the basement stairs with the boy, how he had taken him to the truck, to the hospital, through the first snow into the waiting light of the emergency room.

Let’s get you out of these clothes, Kelly said. Can you do it yourself or do you need help?

The boy could do it himself but he wasn’t. In the bathroom they kneeled before him, working together to pull his shirt over his head. The boy’s chest so narrow, the unmuscled frame of a child still, his belly a soft roundness over the waistband of his pants. Jackie’s got you, she said, starting the shower while Kelly wet a washcloth. He kneeled back down to clean the boy’s face, his hair, the crusting vomit requiring a more vigorous method. Kelly never knew the right thing to do so he held the boy’s head in one hand and scrubbed with the other. The steam filling the room didn’t help the smell but it did change it. Kelly threw the boy’s t-shirt in the trash and threw the washcloth in after it and when he turned around to face the boy he saw the girl staring at the boy’s back. She didn’t say anything but he saw some of what she’d seen in her look, enough to guess. The shower was running loud and the room was thick with steam and she gently turned the boy by the shoulders to show Kelly the ugly markings on the boy’s back, a stretched series of pinched bruises riding both sides of his spine.

Who did this to you? she asked — and it was almost Kelly who answered.

No one, the boy said. No one did anything.

Kelly asked too but the boy wouldn’t say the brother’s name, only cried harder, his body trembling. The shame of being hurt, of being hurt again. And when Kelly didn’t move to the boy’s side she was there instead, sitting down on the floor and pulling the half-dressed boy into her lap, saying, Jackie’s here, saying, Daniel, you’re safe now. You’re safe with us.

Kelly stood against the vanity, a new kind of uselessness falling over him, another failure to act. In the swelling steam of the room he watched this fine woman comforting this fantastic boy, telling the boy she would keep him safe, sounding so sure she couldn’t fail, speaking as if a mother comforting her own child, her soft speech promising the long safety of love, every motherhood’s first and most lasting and most necessary lie.

W

The boy’s parents were already waiting when Kelly pulled into the mother’s driveway, the father and the mother reunited and shivering in the short dusk of winter. What had the brother told them after he visited? Enough that before Kelly opened the door he knew the boy would be taken. As he approached the boy’s parents Kelly could barely listen over the ringing in his ears but he knew they would speak all the expected words, all the other words Kelly must have known would one day come: It had been a mistake to let the boy spend time with Kelly. They hadn’t known until the brother told them but they should have paid more attention. They too had been the victims of trauma. What happened to the boy had happened to them, in their own way, and in the aftermath they hadn’t been the best parents they could be.

The father said, Thank you for taking care of Daniel. It’s been a hard year for all of us.

The mother said, We missed him but we didn’t know how to be with him. This is our fault, not yours.

The father spoke again, said, We appreciate everything you’ve done — Daniel’s brother told us you’ve been watching him after school — but I think this friendship has run its course. Daniel needs friends his own age, normal friends. I hope you understand.

What Kelly wanted most was to put his hand on the boy, to touch his head or his shoulder. For it to be as easy as it had been beside the river, as it had been the day of the lost key. Instead Kelly would give the boy back so they didn’t have to take him. He would surrender his affection for the boy and he would promise not to see him again, not to let him into his apartment, certainly never to take him away again. A week from now his apartment key would come in the mail, the second key he’d made for the boy, barely used. It would be the mother’s handwriting on the envelope but there would be no accompanying note. Kelly knew this and later it came true.

The father offered his hand. The boy stayed beside Kelly, waiting to move until Kelly reached out, took the father’s hand. The father released his grip, reached for the boy. The boy didn’t move yet but he would soon and in the last moment with the boy at his side Kelly surveyed the family the boy was rejoining: The mother, fit in her sweater and slacks and scarf. The father, bigger bearded than ever, looming in his winter coat, smiling his odd smile. The palpable presence of the missing brother. The boy moved toward his mother, put his arms around her. She would smell the sickness on his breath and know what to do. This was the boy’s mother, the boy’s father. If they were not perfect they were good enough. It was they who had claimed responsibility for the boy, who had freed him from foster care and group homes, who had promised to give him a better life. Theirs was the first taking of the boy, the best of its kind.

You had to trust, you had to have faith in their goodness.

But doubt. But fear. But how Kelly had always succumbed to the rush toward quicker action, immediate results.

Daniel, Kelly said, the word harsh in his mouth.

Daniel, he said again, softer, more sure.

He’s sick, Kelly said, speaking to the parents. He threw up today. He needs you to take care of him.

The mother smiled, ran her hands through the boy’s hair. She said, Of course. Of course we will.

Now there was worry in her eyes and for a moment Kelly thought he would tell her. He opened his mouth, closed it again. He could insert himself further into their lives but by what right, at what cost. He could tell them about what he believed the brother had done to the boy but the boy wouldn’t admit the brother’s fault, and so would the mother and the father believe Kelly or would they think Kelly was the one who had hurt their son.

She said, What is it? Is there something else?

Kelly shook his head. It’s nothing, he said. What would the fear of exposing himself to danger let continue, for how long. He wanted someone to tell him what to do next but the girl with the limp was already taking him by the hand, pulling him away. The boy wasn’t his boy, she would say. In the truck he shook and flushed and drove away too fast, accelerating through the unplowed streets until the girl objected. It was almost the holidays, almost the new year. A few more weeks. The weather had turned bitter and there was more snow coming. The snow wasn’t like the rain. He couldn’t smell the snow before it arrived but he knew there were other ways to read the sky. He thought he might at last train himself to suss out such deeper signs, to hear clearly the subtlest speech of the slower, colder world to come.