Page 150 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

He took the cereal, and kissed her hard, until Lainie started making loud disgusted noises. “Thanks,” he said, and didn’t mean for breakfast.

“Always,” she said, and that wasn’t about breakfast, either.

~*~

“…but then there was thisothertruck, and it wasblue, and it was going reallyfast–”

“Brush your teeth,” Remy said, slotted his own toothbrush into the holder, and turned to leave the bathroom.

“But, Remy,” Cal protested, “I didn’t get to tell you about the–”

“Brush your teeth,” he said, firmly, over his shoulder, and went down the hall to the kitchen.

It was a morning just like every other morning in his memory. It would have been identical, if not for two factors.

Mama was at the kitchen table with her laptop, same as always. Sweats and a soft-looking shirt, hair piled up loosely on top of her head. She wore blue light glasses sometimes, in the early mornings like this, when the screen was brighter than the kitchen lamps, and the dark still snugged tight in the corners of the windows. She wore them now, worrying absently at her lower lip with her teeth. But, usually, her mouth was trying to frown against that little tic, and she usually had one hand cupped beneath her chin, the other scrolling across the laptop’s touch pad. Today, her mouth was tugging upward against the bite of her front teeth, and both hands were on the keyboard, fairly flying over it,click-click-click-click.

The second factor was that though he was home, sleeping in his own bed, wearing his own clothes, clean every night, and well-fed once more, he didn’tfeelthe same.

Mama glanced up, saw him, and her smile widened, hands stilling on the keyboard. “Hi, baby. You okay this morning?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His belly squirmed, as though he’d lied, so he went to the fridge to get a yogurt.

“Sleep okay?” she asked.

“Yes.” Thatwasa lie, because he’d slept poorly. He’d tossed, and thrashed, and surfaced from at least a half-dozen dreams in which he’d been trapped beneath black swamp water, hands tangling around his ankles, his wrists, his throat. Dreams in which Boyle’s sneering face cracked wide and toothy as a gator’s just before he bit Remy’s face off. Each time, he’d blinked against the semidarkness of his room to find that it was, in fact, his room, the one he shared with Cal, with the little football-shaped nightlight over on the dresser, Cal sleeping starfished out in the other bed, covers trailing down onto the floor where he’d kicked them loose. But he’d felt no great relief in his surroundings; hadn’t breathed easier when he rolled over and sought sleep again.

Behind him, Mama’s hands resumed typing, the click-click returning, and he thought of her hands – familiar, kind, sure – dragging a knife across Boyle’s belly, opening him up.

He wasn’t afraid that she’d do that to him. His trust in his parents’ love was complete and unwavering. But it was the idea that she’d had to do it in the first place…that she couldn’t simply be “Mama,” but that she’d had to be someone who cut a man open, too…

It made his bed, and his books, and his room, and Cal’s stories about his favorite car-themed TV show seem like the flimsiest of window dressings. Real life – his life – seemed like a play on a stage, now. And his mother’s hands gutting a man were a part of the real world. The ugly world that people on TV and at school tried to pretend didn’t exist.

He opened the fridge, and there sat his yogurt, in its little white cups, same as ever. All his favorites: peach, blueberry, strawberry. An image filled his mind, of the blonde womanwho’d claimed to be his aunt, setting a yogurt cup and a spoon before him on the table where Boyle sat.

He let the fridge fall shut.

Behind him, the clicking had paused again. “Remy,” Mama said, in a gentle voice. “Come sit with me for a minute.”

When he turned, she was patting the chair directly beside hers, and he went and sat.

She didn’t speak at first. Pushed the laptop away – he saw she wasn’t writing an email, but something else, long paragraphs in a Word document; a story, then, or part of one – and reached to rake her nails through his hair, tidying it where it was still damp. It felt nice, and he leaned into it.

No, he wasn’t afraid of Mama’s hands, no matter what they’d done.

She said, “Have you had nightmares?”

He nodded.

“Me, too.”

He sat up straighter, surprised, and she nodded.

“Every night. I have nightmares that we didn’t find you in time. That – that Boyle did something terrible to you. That we…” She broke off, and her eyes looked shiny, her smile small and close-lipped. “Daddy and I wereso scared. We were so worried about you. And, to be honest, I’m still worried, even though you’re home safe and sound. Even though Boyle’s gone. Being scared like that…that kind of worry…it takes a while to go away.” She tipped her head, and he thought she could see right inside his skull, could read his mind. “It can make it hard for things to go back to normal.”

He let out a deep breath he hadn’t been aware of holding, and nodded. “Yeah.” Because that was just it: everything was back to normal physically, but in his mind, he was still in the swamp, was still scared, still running, still desperate to get away.

She smiled at him again, and stroked his hair some more. “But we can get through it together. That helps.”

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