things can happen to a boy. —Nurse Higgins
Dash stopped reading and looked out at the window-framed bright sky as if watching the words on the paper fly away. A deep silence sifted down into the room and settled over everything.
Nephthys shifted in her chair and worked what she’d heard the boy read around in her mind. Down by the river. There was only one river Nurse Higgins could have meant. And once more her blood ran cold and she shivered at the image of her brother’s body.
She looked at Dash perched on the radiator and shook her head as if loosening the dust and moths from a dress worn only on special occasions. “Wuh happened at school?” She asked this with the innocence of a stranger, toneless and without judgment.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Don’t sound like nothin’ to me.”
“Just teasing.”
“About a make-believe man?” Dash was silent.
Nephthys had no plan to press the boy for an answer, for she’d seen many things in the darkened hallways of her mind and the byways of the quadrants. And in her years of ferrying souls from one place to the next, she’d learned that people were as real or as unreal as others wanted them to be. Which was one of the reasons why she drank. She reached once more for her flask and remembered that it was empty. Listless, she looked at Dash, this great-nephew whom she hardly knew. And she wished that she could conjure something matronly or mighty to say to him. What could she say? She didn’t know. But you and I know that things can happen to a boy …
“Oonuh hungry? Nyam?”
Dash nodded and then shook his head, seeming to half comprehend what she meant. “No, ma’am.”
“Rock candy?”
The boy sat up straight, brightening. “Do you have any mint?”
Nephthys scanned the cluttered floor for the rock candy as if deciphering a puzzle that she’d put together many times before. “Yeah, got mint. Get that Sears shoebox there,” she said, pointing.
Dash stood up and moved across the jumbled floor like a blind man making his way through a crowded street. He spotted the Sears shoebox and kneeled in front of it and lifted the lid. It was filled with the colorful mayhem of every kind of candy. He rummaged through the box. And snaked in and around the wonderful pieces was a delicate strip of faded indigo cloth. He pulled it out and examined it, holding it up to the light. The cloth was made of heavy cotton, decorated with a dark-blue and white geometric pattern. “What’s this?” he asked.
Nephthys was lost in her calculations of where the whiskey bottle might be. When she saw the indigo cloth Dash was holding, the tide of liquor in her blood receded. The cloth was hand dyed by her mother; a relic from another place and dimension, which like all bewitched treasures—ageless and so impossible—the ancients sought to keep from pirates by burying. Which was why she’d kept it inside an old hatbox in her closet. But how did it get in the Sears box, in the living room? She tried to make sense of it, but the tide of what she’d been drinking came in again and she was unable to do so. “Put that back,” she said. Then, softer, “You can have more candy.”
The boy put the indigo cloth back into the box as he was told and pulled out two more pieces of candy. “Thank you, Auntie,” he said. He glanced at her and quickly looked away.
Nephthys stiffened. Auntie. The word ran down her back like cold water, a flash of a feeling that quickly faded into the lifelessness of a title she felt she’d never earned. But the gratitude she heard in the boy’s voice resuscitated something in her heart that she thought was dead. “Welcome, Dash.”
Nephthys rubbed her half finger as something else came alive inside. She was working her way around to asking about how the boy’s mother was doing. There was no telling. Dash looked well enough. But Amber was capable of almost anything. And in that way that people in Anacostia ask loaded questions with loaded answers, Nephthys said: “How your mama been?”
Dash was enjoying the rock candy but the pleasant look on his face quickly faded. He shrugged. “Fine.” He toyed nervously with the empty candy wrapper in his hand, folding it and unfolding it. And after a long silence he said, “I think Mama had a dream about me.”
The words hit Nephthys like a rogue wave and she reeled in her chair. The old fear rose inside of her. Because Amber Kinwell knew things days or weeks or months before they happened. Sometimes years, it seemed. The woman with the peacock feather in her hat who drowned her husband’s mistress in a bathtub. The six black boys murdered in a special cell of the capital jail. And who could forget the dead toddlers? Amber said she dreamed that a woman was going to kill her three children with rat poison. Two weeks later it was reported on the news that a woman named Cenna Henson had killed her three children (a two-year-old boy and three-year-old twins). It was later discovered that on the eve of the woman’s eviction, she cooked an ambitious dinner and laced every delicious bite with rat poisoning. They were all found in poses—she and the toddlers—tranquil and polished, like cherub pieces in a menagerie. But there still seemed to be things that Amber didn’t see, even in the horror of the ordinary. She saw the woman feeding her toddlers but not eating the food herself. She saw the little coffins but not the mother’s casket beside them. Yet the dreams always seemed to come to pass, one way or another. Like her brother, the river, and the shark.
Nephthys rubbed her half finger. Could it be happening again? Because there was only one time before when her niece dreamed about a Kinwell. Her stomach was turning and her head was buzzing. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see Dash’s face when she asked the question, the same query that everyone had of Amber Kinwell whether they doubted her sanity or not. She gripped the arms of her chair with both hands, clenching her eyes tighter. “Wuh she see?”
Dash stared into the wasteland of objects on the living room floor as if the answer might be there somewhere. “She won’t say. But I can tell it’s about me.”
Nephthys sighed. Even if the boy could tell her what the dream was about, was there anything she could do? She opened her eyes and looked at Dash. And had she been able to find her bottle earlier, she might have left the whole matter alone—the letter from Nurse Higgins and the dream—and watched them sail away with all the other reasons she drank. But now she couldn’t.
Someone was singing loudly in the apartment hallway and Nephthys glanced at the grit-filmed clock on the wall, its hour and minute hands stuck in the same position for years. “School be lettin’ out soon, won’t it? Better get on home, Dash.” What she meant was that she didn’t want the boy in any more trouble for the day, because anything at all was possible in that little periwinkle-blue house at the bottom of the hill at the edge of the world. And she needed time to think.
Dash stood up from the radiator.
Nephthys watched him pick his way to the front door. And feeling helpless, she turned once more to the small things that she thought the old could offer the young, for she believed that sugar held great healing powers for the woes of any child. She struggled up from her chair and followed him to the door. She reached into her housecoat pocket and held out a red gumdrop. “Nyam. Eat.”
Dash took the candy from her, staring at her half finger.
Nephthys turned the dead bolt, trying to smile, thinking of what bothered her most about the letter. Down by the river. A make-believe man … A strange feeling crept into her and she pushed it away. “Oonuh push on through to tomorrow, baby cootuh,” she said, and turned the knob and pulled the heavy door open.
At the threshold, each looked at the other as if their eyes could help them find what next to say. But there were no more words between them—the boy and his great-aunt—nothing to frame the door that opened to this place they were now sharing. A place that held secrets.
Dash stepped out and Nephthys watched him walk down the glum hallway of sounds until he was gone. Loud static from a record player somewhere announced the beginning of a rhythm and blues song:
Caught