The soft scratching noise began again, and this time she tried to focus more concretely on where it was coming from. Through the slightly parted curtains, a vague hint of light illuminated the room in amorphous, ghostly detail. Someone was sitting in the chair by the small table near the foot of her bed. That was where the sound was coming from—a steady, methodical scratching of a pen across some flattened medium. As her vision adjusted to the light and the shadows coalesced into more discernible detail, she realized it was Thomas. He had been sitting there and watching them with his dispassionate eyes while they slept. What is he doing? she wondered. The sound of the pen’s scratching went on and on.
She observed him from the bed. Here was the boy for whom she had sacrificed everything to protect—whose secret she had locked away in her heart as if it were her own. And at what cost? she asked herself. At what cost to all of us? The life they had once known was over now, and days that lay ahead were as shapeless and lonesome as the room around her. During those first desperate weeks after crossing the border, escape and concealment had been the only strategies she’d allowed herself to contemplate. But what now? What comes next? What purpose will define the course of our lives from here? The silence of her reply was loud and stifling in her ears, the sound of the stone slab of a tomb closing above her.
The scratching stopped, and her oldest son’s body sat rigid and motionless for a moment, as if caught in a trance. She maintained her breathing as before, slow and steady, as if she were still asleep. She wondered if he could make out her open eyes from across the room, and she allowed her lids to slide halfway shut, a compromise between seeing and being seen. She could hear the ceaseless rhythm of her heart drumming along in her ears, could feel the mounting tension in her body, and she wondered to herself: When did I begin to fear him? For that was what this was, wasn’t it? That was the manner in which she’d come to perceive him. She feared him, and resented him, and hated him for having placed them in this position—she and Joel, both. He had forced her to choose, and Susan realized on some level that she had chosen wrong. She had failed him as a mother, and had certainly failed Joel. In trying to protect them, she had done her children more harm than good, and now they were all paying for that transgression—each in their own way.
Thomas stood up from the chair and walked to the bed, standing over Susan and her youngest son as they lay defenseless beneath the covers. She closed her eyelids to mere slits, watching him through her lashes. She could have reached out with a tentative hand and touched his leg.
He stood there for what seemed like a very long time. The sun was beginning to crest above the horizon, the room becoming faintly brighter with every passing minute. A rooster crowed in the distance, and then fell abruptly silent in mid-intonation, as if quieted by a farmer’s axe. Thomas leaned over and placed a hand on Joel’s shoulder. Susan’s muscles bunched beneath her skin, the adrenaline flowing freely as she readied herself to act. She could no longer control her respirations, which slid in and out of her with increasing rapidity.
Thomas withdrew his hand from his brother’s shoulder, returning to a full upright position. He studied Joel for a moment longer, then turned and crossed the room to the door, flipping back the dead bolt and opening the door just wide enough to allow himself to pass through to the exterior walkway beyond. There was a soft click as the door swung shut behind him.
Susan slipped out from beneath the covers, stood, and crossed the floor to the window, pulling back the curtain several inches so that she could peer outside at the second-story exterior walkway and through the rails at the parking lot below. She could see the top of Thomas’s head as he descended the stairs. She turned her attention back to the room—to her sleeping son, to the suitcases standing at attention in the corner, to the plastic cups and napkins on the table beside her. She drew the curtain back farther, letting in some additional light. There was something else lying on the table, the thing on which Thomas had been scribbling, and she picked it up now for a closer look.
It was a photograph she had taken of Joel and a young Mexican girl of roughly his same age. There had been times over the past few months when their lives had fallen into transient normality—brief moments and unexpected encounters when the suffocating reality of their situation was temporarily lifted. This picture had captured such a moment, a fleeting friendship Joel had made with a young girl in the time it had taken Susan and Thomas to acquire gas and a few groceries. She’d allowed Joel to stay with the car while they shopped, and when she returned she’d been surprised to find them playing on the withered, sun-beaten grass, the two of them laughing and giggling as if they were the closest of friends rather than strangers who became acquaintances for the space of fifteen minutes at a roadside convenience store in rural Mexico. It had saddened Susan’s heart to see the way her youngest son interacted with the girl, for it made her realize how starved he must be for social relationships like this one. She had put the groceries in the car, and had sat there watching them for another twenty minutes, wishing there was more she could offer him. When it was time for them to go, she’d gone back inside and purchased a disposable camera to take their picture.
She looked down at that photograph now, clasped in her hands, and the only face smiling back at her was the girl’s. Above the neckline, Joel’s face had been scratched away by the dark lines of Thomas’s pen.
She stood there breathing deeply, the hurt and rage coursing through her body in alternating currents. Did he care so little for them that he would destroy even the few small tokens that brought them joy? He’d done it out of pure maliciousness, she decided, to spite them regardless of the sacrifices they had made to protect him. It was…
No, she corrected herself. This was something else she was seeing here.
She thought of Thomas sitting there at the table, watching them as the pen in his hand scratched back and forth across the face of her youngest child. There had been no spite or maliciousness in his expression, only a detached, calculating manner she had seen several times before. She recalled the way he had stood over them, one hand resting lightly on Joel’s shoulder as if… as if to say… good-bye.
Outside, a car trunk slammed, and she turned to look out the window. Thomas was heading back across the parking lot. In his left hand he held a lug wrench from the spare wheel compartment, the prying tip at its distal end catching the early morning sunlight along its black metallic surface.
“Joel. Joel, wake up,” she hissed, going quickly to the bed and shaking him roughly, casting aside the covers.
“What… ,” he replied, his voice still thick and muddled with sleep.
“Get up,” she urged, dragging him from the bed. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go right now.”