Green, big man and expert bookseller, counter-IED specialist and child raised in the roughest part of Roxbury, did not like basements. He’d returned from Iskandariyah uninjured but not unharmed. He had never explained his fear, but Apollo intuited it and, most importantly, never asked about it directly. A fair number of estate sales in New York City took place in the basements of various apartment buildings, and Patrice Green never set foot in one of them.
“You hear that, Brian?” Apollo said as he let the front flap of the Baby-Björn fall loose and pulled his son free, turned him around. “Uncle Patrice is letting us take point.”
“But we split whatever you find,” Patrice said, looking over the baby’s head. “Sixty-forty. That’s the deal.”
Apollo lifted the boy higher. He’d expected Patrice to say something about the baby from the moment he’d shown up, but instead they’d gone on about the books. This was the first time his best friend had met his child—shouldn’t that merit at least one comment? Apollo felt surprised by how much this moment bothered him.
“Look into his eyes,” Apollo said, trying to act playful.
“What am I supposed to say to him?” Patrice asked.
Apollo raised his voice to a child’s register. “Tell me what happened in Iskandariyah, Uncle Patrice.”
Patrice leaned close to the baby. “Tell your daddy I said, Fuck you.”
“I haven’t mastered language yet.”
Patrice grinned. “I’ll teach you the gesture.”
Now Apollo had to smile. “You’re going to be a bad influence on me.”
“No worse than your daddy’s going to be.”
Apollo smooshed Brian right up against Patrice’s face. “Can you spell PTSD?”
Then Apollo turned and moved to the basement door with the baby.
Patrice shouted after him. “I understand why your pops abandoned you!”
THE BASEMENT FELT warmer than the garage. Down the Kagwa boys went. The basement sat as one grand open plane. In the far corner stood the boiler—a large white cylinder with a blue control panel, copper pipes running up into the ceiling and a silver tube running outside through the wall. It looked like something from the set of James Whale’s Frankenstein. The boiler rumbled now as if reanimating life.
In the opposite corner sat the washing machine and the dryer, and beside the two machines lay cleaning materials, shovels and rakes, and paint cans showing rust. The third corner of the basement was cluttered with children’s toys that had been sitting down here for a decade or four. Plastic dolls gone nearly gray and their dresses threadbare. Toy trucks overturned or dismantled. Teddy Ruxpin looked like he’d died in hibernation.
In the corner closest to the basement steps lay seven cardboard boxes. Maybe the garage had been too full to accommodate them. Apollo went down on one knee. He sniffed his son’s head. Didn’t even realize he’d done it until the smell made him smile. A moment later Brian wriggled and squirmed.
The fluffy blanket came out of the diaper bag. Apollo spread it out right beside the boxes of books. He set Brian down on his stomach, and the boy lay there, eyes wide, opening and closing his mouth, small gasps trickling out. Brian’s feet wriggled, and his hands swam over the blanket. In a moment he set his hands out flat and with a push he raised his head.
“Tummy time!” Apollo shouted, as if Brian had just successfully piloted an airplane.
A moment later Brian dropped his head back down onto the blanket. Apollo rolled him onto his back, and the baby looked up at the boards of the ceiling. Apollo left him to it and scooted forward to the first of the cardboard boxes. As he opened the flaps, he looked back at Brian.
“My father, your grandfather, disappeared when I was four years old. I used to have a nightmare about him leaving. His name was Brian West. We named you after him.”
Brian wriggled his head from side to side and threw his hands out wide.
“I didn’t hear anything about him, nothing from him, until I turned twelve years old. Then, out of nowhere, he left a box at my front door. It had the tickets to the movie he and Grandma saw on their first date. The headshot of the woman who testified against the shady businessman Grandma worked for. The thing was like a time capsule.”
Brian lifted his chubby legs, then dropped them back down. He rocked his body slightly and looked like that turtle once more, trapped on its back and trying to turn over.
“I always wondered why he did it. Why’d he leave the box and then disappear again?”
Apollo helped roll Brian back onto his belly.
“Now that you’re in my life, I understand. He wanted me to know how much I’d meant to him. He didn’t want me to go my whole life thinking I just didn’t matter. I don’t know what kind of situation he was in at the time, I don’t even know if the man is still alive, but I don’t think he could have been all that different from me. And I’m so happy with you already, little man. If I was trapped on Saturn, I’d still find a way to send a message and let you know you were loved.”
Apollo stopped moving, even breathing, and watched his baby boy labor to his lift his head. This small act, working to develop the muscles of his neck, would someday lead to sitting up, crawling, stumbling, sprinting. All that began here and now, in this basement of a Riverdale home. Apollo felt so fortunate to witness it. With the baby only two months old, Apollo was a mess of raw nerves. He got back to work just to keep from crying.
The books in the first box were worthless, so Apollo moved on to the second. The second box had as little to offer as the first. The third box, too.
“Brian left a book behind. A children’s book that he used to read to me. It’s called Outside Over There. I know it from memory by now.”
The fourth box had nothing good in it and neither did the fifth. Brian’s head lowered, the muscles exhausted, so Apollo turned him over again. The baby whimpered there on his back, so Apollo came closer to check him. After pulling off socks and shoes and pants, undoing the snaps on the onesie, he found the cause. As he changed Brian’s diaper, he spoke to his son again.
“‘When Papa was away at sea,’” Apollo recited. “That’s how the book begins. That’s the first page. Papa is gone and Mama sits out in an arbor. I had no idea what an arbor was. It’s basically a small wooden structure people put out in their gardens, like a trellis. She sits on a bench underneath the arbor. So dad is far away and mom is outside in the garden.”
He wrapped the boy back up, slipped the piss diaper into the special pouch provided in the diaper bag, and put away the wipes and the tube of coconut oil.
“But inside the house there’s a little girl named Ida. She’s very young, but she’s left to take care of her baby sister all on her own. She plays a horn for the baby to try and help it sleep. But she’s looking out the window while she makes music. She’s in the same room, but even she’s not watching the baby. And that’s when the goblins sneak in.”
Brian
