Kentucky’s air in the summer smells like dissolved and evaporated limestone. And manure, always manure. The children catch glimpses of each other’s waists and knees to the sound of cassettes rewinding in cassette players because everyone wanted to hear that one song again, but the batteries are dying and everything is slowing. A medicine bottle filled with mother’s cooking sherry passes from lips to lips and each partake.
Thunderstorms roll in and they run back home along the gray cement of the empty streets with the black anvils hovering behind, a billowing armada trembling with electricity. Lightning cracks and the air turns orange. Even the nights are hot, with windows open and fans a blur, the desire to stick your fingers between the bars guarding the spinning blades inexplicably strong. It is impossible to sleep in such heat, the body turning and twisting and tacky with sweat, so everyone stays up all night, listening to the chorus of crickets sounding the depth of the dark. And every night is every night that ever was all at once and every lonely boy prone in his bed is every lonely girl prone in hers, chests heaving with that painful pressure of hoping that there is someone out there unable to sleep on their account. The thunder ends. The crickets quiet. The houses settle and the only sound left is heavy breath in the night air. They get up, walk to the window and stare out at the dark yard, shallow breaths catching as they watch the shifting shape of the shadows, but it was nothing, they are certain, nothing but breeze, nothing, they are certain.
The door to the shelter was steel with reinforced glass windows. Inside, children sat in the play room, reading or watching each other play videogames on the Nintendo 64. Toys with missing legs and tangled hair slumped in the corner. College students read well-worn books to a pile of kids on the couch, as Leah Shepherd waited to meet with a mother. Because the woman had been physically abused by the father of her son, when she and her child were evicted from their two-bedroom apartment in a crumbling building downtown, she qualified for this shelter. The shelter was filled to capacity and gave priority to women who were the victims of domestic violence and likely, had the father of her children not abused her, she would have been sleeping in a car with her boy.
The boy liked to flop on the floor and kick his mother’s shins and she would say, “Honey, honey, honey,” and he would just kick and kick. Another mother sat in her room all day and only wanted to teach her son math and spelling above his grade while he cries to go outside. She wept when he got a problem wrong. He hit her in the face. Leah waited and a little girl asks her if she knew any stories and Leah said, “Oh yes. I know lots of stories.” Leah listened to two mothers in the hallway, out of sight, talking in rustling sounds, like leaves on a curb as a car drives past. The little girl asked Leah if she knew a story about the ghost that haunted the elementary school, but Leah said that she didn’t.
The man walked toward the table where Leah was eating lunch. She looked up, but could not see his face for the midday sun streaming through the windows behind him and then he spoke her name.
Denim jacket and pegged jeans and suede boots and with a cherry taste in her mouth, the woman waited for Leah to call her into the conference room. Her cell phone clamored in tiny pearls of need. The boy’s daddy had wrecked her again and she was done. Done with him and his family. Done with the calls. Done with him laying hands on her. Done with crying on the cell phone with her mother. Done with the boy looking at her from under his bed. She looked into her hands and waited for someone to respond.
A small cake crouched before them, crowned with three flickering candles. Blue candles with orange flames and tiny rivers of clear wax running down toward the white icing. “Come on, try,” Mrs. Shepherd said, but Leah held firm in her refusal to blow out the candles. Her gray eyes flickered and her short arms were wrapped tight around her chest. Her mother pursed her lips, blew and the hot tongues danced and were gone.
Mrs. Shepherd cut a slice from the cake and set it in front of the now smiling girl, who promptly crammed it in her mouth with chubby paws. Mrs. Shepherd washed her daughter’s hands and let her feel the thing moving in her stomach. “That’s your brother,” Mrs. Shepherd said and Leah made a face, wriggled free and thundered after the cat.
Leah could only remember this about Jacob’s birth: the golden rectangle of her door, her father lifting her out of bed, her mother in a maroon coat that drug the ground, the razors of light from the bright fluorescents in the hospital waiting room, the smell of cigarette smoke and the voices of men and then the wailing red boy that made her clap her hands to her ears. There was more that she might have remembered, but she was certain that the rest were not her own memories, but were the creation of the pictures her mother kept around the house, in the worn albums, in boxes in her parents’ bedroom. Perhaps she’d had memories of her own, but they’d been crowded out by the symphony of photographs her mother maintained. There was a time, when she was in high school and going through a phase she found unpleasant to think about now, when she would sneak into her parents’ bedroom and take one of the pictures from the dozen that were laying out and then listen to her mother and father arguing, her mother accusing her father of having moved it, having moved it and forgotten where it was. Later, Leah would put it back where it had been, but her parents reconciliation and apologies, whatever they were like, were always far too quiet for her to hear.
Leah did not like to think about what she’d been like when she was younger. In fifth grade, she’d been the butt of her classmates’ taunts and she’d become a terror herself, passing the pitiless jibes along. An overweight boy once tried to tease her, turning in his seat to hurl half-hearted slurs while the teacher stepped out of the classroom for a moment, a boy that Leah realized only in retrospect probably had a crush on her and was merely seeking her attention in the only way he understood. She’d mocked him without mercy. His belly poking out from under his thin shirt. The moles on his face. His cheap shoes that his parents probably bought for him used. Those sitting around them laughed and encouraged by their laughter, by being on this side of their laughter, Leah kept on until the boy filled the room with the slurp of his half-stifled sobs. The next day, the boy’s parents called the school to report the bullying and the school called the Shepherds and Mr. Shepherd sat his daughter down that afternoon and asked her why she would do such a thing. Say the things the principal told him she’d said. Leah shrugged, unsure. “I’ve never been more ashamed.” Looking back, Leah wished that she could say that it had been a moment that had changed her. That she’d become the boy’s defender after that, protecting him against the older children who call the boys far worse things. That they’d become close friends and stayed that way through the years and grades. She stopped taunting the boy in class only because she didn’t want to get in trouble with her parents, but she turned her torment elsewhere. She would have done anything to keep the other children from turning back on her.