The two black trash bags sat on the cracked concrete of the Hartwell Group Home porch, their plastic bellies sagging under the weight of everything a twelve-year-old boy owned in the world. Marcus Webb counted the bags before he allowed himself to feel anything. Two. Only two. He had packed them himself the night before, when his mother had been too busy with her boyfriend and her cigarettes to notice which shirts made it in and which got left behind.
Mrs. Callahan would have called it a tragedy. His mother called it temporary.
The Hartwell Group Home rose behind the bags like a gray tooth in a row of yellowing houses, three stories of peeling paint and barred windows that had been a boarding house before it had been an orphanage and was now something in between. A hand-painted sign hung over the front door, the letters faded to the color of old bone: HARTWELL GROUP HOME, A PLACE TO GROW. Someone had crossed out GROW with red marker and written SURVIVE underneath in handwriting that might have been adult or might have been kid. The smell of Pine-Sol and something older, maybe mouse, maybe mold, leaked from the screen door.
His mother stood beside the Camry with one hand on the hood, watching him not unpack.
Now stop being dramatic, Marcus. It's three weeks.
He heard her voice before she spoke, the particular way her sentences rose at the end when she wanted agreement. Three weeks. Like it was a vacation. Like summer camp with bunk beds and bad food and a woman named Mrs. Pettigrew who wore her hair in a bun so tight it pulled her eyebrows up.
She crossed the cracked walkway in heels that clicked against the concrete. In her hand she held something small and gray and lopsided.
I almost forgot. She pressed the thing into his palm. Her fingers were cold from the car's air conditioning, and she smelled like cigarettes and a perfume called White Shoulders that she only wore when she was trying.
Marcus looked down. It was the stuffed fox. Mr. Renard. He had not seen the fox in three years, since the divorce, since his mother had thrown out the boxes from his old room in Phoenix and told him it was time to be a big boy. The fox's left eye was a button. Its tail had been sewn back on twice. One ear stood straight up, the other flopped over at an angle that gave the face a look of permanent, gentle surprise.
He had not known she had kept it.
Be careful with him. She smiled. The smile was the fake one, the one that showed too many teeth. You're growing up so fast, Marcus. When I come back, you'll be taller than me.
He didn't ask where she was going. He had learned, at twelve, not to ask where she was going. The answer was always a man's name and a suitcase she never packed, or a job that didn't exist, or a sister in Arizona who had been dead for six years.
She kissed the top of his head. Her lipstick left a pink crescent on his scalp that he would scrub off in the bathroom later with the sleeve of his shirt.
Mrs. Callahan wasn't there. Marcus would have liked Mrs. Callahan to be there, but Mrs. Callahan was at the school where she taught second grade, and she didn't know yet. Nobody knew yet except his mother, and the woman who ran Hartwell, and Marcus.
She'll feed you, his mother said. They have a cook. There's a yard. There's a basketball hoop out back, she added, like a basketball hoop was a reason.
Marcus looked at the hoop. It had no net.
I have to go, honey. She was already backing toward the Camry, keys in her hand. I have to go, or I'll be late.
Late for what. He didn't say it. He didn't say anything.
The Camry's engine turned over on the second try, a cough and a rumble that he had memorized down to the rattle of the tailpipe. His mother waved from the window without turning around. The car pulled away from the curb, and Marcus watched it until it turned the corner, and then he watched the corner for another minute after that, in case she came back.
She didn't.
The screen door opened, and a woman came out. Mrs. Pettigrew. He knew her name because the sign in the office said MRS. PETTIGREW, DIRECTOR, and because she had interviewed him last week while his mother sat in the waiting room and filled out forms. Mrs. Pettigrew was tall and thin and wore her hair in the bun that made her eyebrows fly up, and she had a voice that sounded like a clipboard being tapped.
Marcus Webb? She said his name the way people say it when they've only seen the file. Come on in. I'll show you your room.
He picked up the two trash bags, one in each hand. The fox he kept pinned under his arm, against his ribs, where he could feel its lopsided ear through his shirt. He didn't look at the corner again.
The hallway smelled like Pine-Sol and cafeteria. There were tiles on the floor, white and black, in a checkerboard pattern, and the fluorescent light above buzzed so loud he could feel it in his back teeth. Mrs. Pettigrew walked ahead of him, her flats squeaking on the tiles, and she didn't offer to carry either of the bags. Three weeks, Marcus told himself. Three weeks is twenty-one days. It's a month of weekends. It's nothing.
Room 3B was at the end of the hall, second door from the fire escape. The door was open. Inside there were two beds, two desks, two small wardrobes with no mirrors, and a window that looked out onto the basketball court and the brick wall of the next building. The other bed was empty. The sheets on it were stripped to the mattress.
This is yours, Mrs. Pettigrew said, pointing to the bed by the window. Bed frames are metal, so don't jump on them. Bathroom is down the hall, third door on the left. Two other boys on this floor, both older. Dinner is at six. Lights out at nine. Curfew in this building is a suggestion, not a rule, but I will know if you break it.
She looked at him then, and for a second her face did something complicated, a softening around the mouth that she covered up with a cough.
Three weeks is short, she said. You get to go home. Some of these kids never get to go home.
Marcus nodded. He set the bags down on the bed and unzipped the first one. Inside were three shirts, two pairs of jeans, six pairs of underwear, six pairs of socks, a toothbrush, a comb, a book about bridges that Mrs. Callahan had given him last Christmas, and a photograph in a plastic frame of him and Mrs. Callahan at the science fair in third grade. In the photo he was holding a blue ribbon and Mrs. Callahan was laughing with her mouth open. He set the frame on the desk.
The fox he put on the pillow. He straightened the flopped ear, and it flopped back. He straightened it again.
Mrs. Pettigrew left the door open on her way out, and Marcus listened to her flats squeak back down the hall. Then he sat on the bed, and the springs complained, and the room got very quiet.
He did not cry. He had decided, walking up the front path with the two bags, that he was not going to cry in Room 3B. The walls here were thin. He could already hear the faint bass thump of a radio two floors down, and somewhere above him a toilet running.
He took the fox off the pillow and put it on his lap and looked at it.
Its button eye was loose. The thread that held the nose on was the color of old spit. One paw had been replaced with a piece of darker brown felt that didn't quite match.
He had named it Mr. Renard in third grade, when Mrs. Callahan had read them a book about foxes in France. Renard meant fox in French. Mrs. Callahan had taught the whole class the word, and Marcus had gone home and sewn the name onto the tag with red thread from his mother's sewing kit. His mother had been proud of that. She had taken a picture of the tag and sent it to his grandmother in Phoenix.
That was before the divorce. Before the move. Before the boyfriend who was now in the Camry with her, heading wherever they were heading.
Marcus put the fox back on the pillow. He unzipped the second bag. Inside were sneakers, a jacket that was too small, a deck of cards missing the joker, and a shoebox that held his collection of rocks and bottle caps and the metal tag off a dog collar that had belonged to a dog he had never met, in a town he had never lived in.
He lined the rocks up on the desk by the window. There were nine. He counted them. Three from the playground at the old school, two from the riverbed behind the new apartment, four from Mrs. Callahan's yard that she had let him dig up when she was putting in a new garden.
He put the bottle caps next to the rocks, and the dog tag at the end.
Then he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the toilet run and the radio thump and the faint sound, far away, of the basketball hoop's chain rattling in a breeze that had not yet arrived.
Three weeks, he told the fox. Twenty-one days.
The ceiling had a water stain in the shape of a state he couldn't identify. He tried to decide if it was Nevada or Utah, but he had never been to either, so he gave up and named it Ohio.
From down the hall, a door opened and closed. Footsteps, heavier than Mrs. Pettigrew's, went past his room and paused.
Hey, new kid.
Marcus sat up.
In the doorway stood a boy. He was maybe fifteen, maybe older, with the kind of broad shoulders that made his uniform shirt strain at the buttons. He had a scar that ran from his left eyebrow to his hairline, and he was eating an apple.
Marcus. Marcus Webb.
The boy bit the apple. I'm Devon. Dev. Don't call me Devon. Dev took another bite and looked at the two trash bags and then at the fox on the pillow and then at the desk with the rocks lined up. You collecting rocks?
Yeah, Marcus said.
Dev nodded slowly, like this was a normal thing. I collect bottle caps. Got a whole dresser drawer. He chewed and swallowed. There's a kid on the second floor, Jamal, he collects stamps. He's weird about it. Don't touch his stamps.
Marcus nodded back. Okay.
Dev pointed the apple at the fox. That thing ugly.
It's not ugly, Marcus said. It just has character.
Dev considered this. He took another bite. Yeah, he said around the apple. Okay. He turned and walked back down the hall, and Marcus heard his door close.
Marcus lay back down.
The water stain on the ceiling was definitely Ohio.
He was not going to think about his mother. He was not going to think about whether the boyfriend was named Ray or Roy or whether they were driving to Phoenix or Tucson or some town in a state whose shape was on the ceiling above his head.
He was not going to think about whether twenty-one days was really three weeks, or whether his mother had done the math, or whether Mrs. Callahan would call when she found out.
He was not going to think at all.
He closed his eyes.
The fox's button eye stared at the water stain.
Somewhere below the window, the basketball hoop's chain began to clink in a wind that had finally made it over the rooftops, and Marcus listened to it the way you listen to a clock when you are trying not to count the hours.
Three weeks.
Twenty-one days.
He fell asleep before dinner.
Marcus woke to the sound of a door opening down the hall, followed by footsteps that stopped outside his room. A tap on the frame, soft as knuckles against a door that had been painted so many times the wood felt soft.
Lights on, a voice said, deep and flat. Time to go.
Marcus sat up. The room had gone purple-gray with evening, the overhead light from the hallway cutting a yellow stripe across the floor. He blinked and reached for the fox without thinking, his hand closing around the body where it had fallen against his ribs.
A woman stood in the doorway, maybe sixty, with close-cropped gray hair and a face that looked like it had been folded and unfolded a thousand times. She wore a dark green cardigan over a white blouse, and a thin gold chain disappeared into the collar. Her eyes were pale blue, the color of old glass, and they moved over Marcus the way a teacher's eyes move when she is counting heads.
You must be Francine Boyd's boy, she said.
Marcus.
She nodded once. Mrs. Callahan. I'm the night supervisor. Come on down, we'll get you squared away in your room.
She stepped back into the hall without waiting to see if he followed, her flats making almost no sound on the tile. Marcus swung his legs off the bed, stuffed the fox inside his jacket, and went after her.
The hallway smelled like floor wax and something else, something warm and slightly sweet that he couldn't place. Mrs. Callahan walked ahead of him, her cardigan sleeves pushed up to the elbows, a ring of keys on a clip at her waist catching the light each time she turned a corner.
You eat dinner? she asked without looking back.
No.
We'll see what we've got. Kitchen should still have something.
They passed a room where a boy about Marcus's age was lying on a bed reading a paperback, the cover showing a spaceship and a woman with bright red hair. The boy glanced up, registered Marcus, and went back to his book without expression. His door had a strip of masking tape with a name on it that Marcus couldn't read.
Dev, Mrs. Callahan called without slowing. Lights out in twenty.
Yeah yeah, the boy said.
Mrs. Callahan shook her head, a small private motion, almost fond. Down the stairs, the banister worn to bare wood in the places where hands had gripped it for years, and into a lobby that smelled like coffee and old wood polish. The front desk was empty, a reading lamp casting a yellow circle on a stack of manila folders. Mrs. Callahan steered him past it toward a doorway on the far side, where a small kitchen sat under fluorescent light. A man in a stained apron was wiping down a counter, his radio playing something low and tinny.
Joe, Mrs. Callahan said, the new one didn't eat.
Joe turned, saw Marcus, and jerked his chin toward a stainless steel counter where a covered tray sat. Sandwich, apple, carton of milk. Got it ready in case.
Marcus looked at Mrs. Callahan. She shrugged.
We get a heads up when a kid's coming, she said. Not always a lot of notice, but usually enough.
Joe pushed the tray across the counter. Marcus climbed onto a stool and pulled the cover off. The sandwich was tuna on white, the bread soft with refrigeration. He picked it up and bit in, chewing carefully because his jaw felt strange, like he had forgotten the mechanics of it.
Mrs. Callahan leaned against the counter opposite him, arms folded, watching. She smelled, Marcus noticed now, like cigarettes and lavender hand cream, the two scents layered so thick he could almost see them. He wondered which was older, the smoking or the hand cream, and decided the smoking was probably older because the hand cream smelled like something you put on after a long day of not taking care of yourself.
You travel light, she said, nodding at his jacket where the fox's ears poked from the zipper.
Marcus swallowed. My mom said twenty-one days.
Mrs. Callahan's face didn't change. Twenty-one days, she repeated.
Three weeks.
That's what three weeks is, yes.
Marcus took another bite. The tuna was bland but it was food, and his stomach seemed surprised by it, contracting in a way that almost hurt. Joe wiped the counter behind Mrs. Callahan in long slow strokes, the rag making a wet sound against the steel.
Finish up, Mrs. Callahan said. I'll show you your room.
Marcus ate the apple in three bites, drank the milk standing, and set the tray in the gray plastic bus bin by the door. Joe nodded at him, the same jerking motion he'd used before, and Marcus found he liked that, the economy of it. No small talk, no questions, just a man who had made a tuna sandwich for a kid who hadn't shown up to eat it.
Mrs. Callahan led him through another hallway, narrower than the first, the carpet thin and patterned in swirls that had gone from brown to gray with age. The walls were painted a color that had once been yellow and was now a kind of tired cream. Framed pictures hung at uneven intervals: a class photo from some year he couldn't identify, a watercolor of the house itself done by someone with a steady hand, a clipping from a newspaper whose headline had faded past reading.
Boys' wing, Mrs. Callahan said. Your room is 3B. End of the hall, last on the left. You share a bathroom with the room next door, 3A, but I don't think anybody's in there tonight.
She stopped at a door painted the same cream as the walls, the number 3B affixed in tarnished brass. She worked a key from the ring at her waist and turned it in the lock, the mechanism clicking twice.
Inside, the room was narrow and clean. A bunk bed against the far wall, the lower bunk made up with a gray wool blanket and a single pillow in a white case. A small desk under a window that looked out onto the side yard, where a basketball hoop stood without a net. A wooden chair. A dresser with a small mirror bolted above it. The floor was the same thin carpet as the hall, and the light from the ceiling was a single bare bulb in a frosted glass fixture.
Home sweet home, Mrs. Callahan said, though she said it without irony, the way she might have said it to a thousand other kids in this same doorway. Bathroom's the second door on your right. Lights out at nine. No electronics after ten. If you need anything, my room's on the first floor, second door past the kitchen.
Marcus stepped inside. The room smelled like the lavender hand cream and something else, pine maybe, from a cleaning product. His eyes moved over the desk, the chair, the bunk above his that was stripped down to the bare mattress.
Questions? Mrs. Callahan asked.
Marcus shook his head.
She studied him for a moment, her pale eyes unreadable. You get hungry in the middle of the night, you come find me. Don't raid the kitchen, Joe gets territorial.
A small smile crossed her face, then disappeared. She stepped back into the hall and pulled the door almost closed, leaving it open a crack.
Goodnight, Marcus.
Goodnight.
He stood there until her footsteps faded down the stairs, then sat on the edge of the lower bunk. The mattress was thin and smelled like detergent. He set the fox on the pillow beside him and looked around the room the way you look around a place you might have to stay a while, taking inventory.
His backpack. He had left it in the office upstairs. He should go get it. He should ask if there was a toothbrush he could use, or if he was supposed to have brought one, if that was the kind of thing they told you. He should probably figure out which bathroom was his and whether there was a shower and what the rules were about towels.
He did none of these things.
Instead he lay back on the bunk and stared at the upper mattress, the springs making a faint pattern through the fabric. The bare bulb above him cast his shadow on the ceiling in long gray lines. Outside, the basketball hoop's chain began to clink again in the wind, a slow irregular rhythm, and Marcus let his eyes close.
Somewhere in the building a door opened and closed. A faucet ran. A television murmured somewhere distant, too low to make out words, just the rise and fall of voices. A clock he couldn't see ticked the seconds down with mechanical patience.
He thought about his mother, then, despite himself.
He thought about her standing in the kitchen with the phone in her hand, dialing, her face set in that way it got when she had decided something. He thought about her the last morning, standing in the doorway of his room with a suitcase at her feet, telling him it would be three weeks, just three weeks, she had to take care of something, and could he please just go to Mrs. Callahan's like a good boy, like he had when he was little, like it was nothing, like twenty-one days was nothing.
He thought about whether she had packed his backpack, or whether the woman at the office had packed it, or whether it was the same backpack he had used for school last year, the zipper that stuck, the strap that wouldn't shorten all the way.
He opened his eyes.
The fox stared back at him from the pillow, its smile fixed, one button eye darker than the other in the bare light.
Marcus reached out and rested his hand on its head. The fur was matted and cool, and the ears felt like they had been there forever, sewn on by hands that had long since stopped caring whether the stitches showed.
Twenty-one days, he said to the room.
The chain clinked.
The clock ticked.
Somewhere below the window, a car started and pulled away, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling like a slow hand waving goodbye.
The fox stayed where it was, and Marcus let his hand rest there for a moment longer before he slid it under the pillow, hiding the toy the way his mother had once hidden Christmas presents in the back of the linen closet. The cotton smelled faintly of detergent and something else, something older, like the inside of a cedar chest.
He lay still and listened.
The house had its own language once you learned it. The radiator clicked and hissed through its cycle, a metal throat clearing. The windowpane ticked as it cooled, contracting in the dark. The floorboards above him creaked once, a single footstep that could have been the house settling or someone walking the length of a hallway and back.
Twenty-one days.
He said it again, and the number felt smaller in his mouth the second time, like a stone worn smooth by a river.
Three weeks. He knew what three weeks meant because he had counted days before. He had counted the days until summer when he was seven, the days until his father came back from a job in another city, the days until a cast came off his arm after he had fallen from the lowest branch of the oak in the backyard. He knew how to wait. He knew how to make himself small so that the days would pass without him having to fight them.
He reached up and found the edge of the pillow, then eased his hand underneath until his fingers touched the cool curve of the fox's back. He held it there, pressing the toy flat against the mattress, and he thought about how to do this.
The other kids, whoever they were, sounded like they knew each other. The laughter that drifted through the walls had a rhythm to it, a call and response, the kind that came from long familiarity. They were probably brothers and sisters, or cousins, or at least friends who had arrived together. They had each other.
He had Mrs. Callahan.
That was something. It was not the same as having his mother, but it was a roof and a bed and a grown-up who knew his name and his favorite breakfast and the way he liked his sandwiches cut. It was more than some kids got. He had heard that on the news once, his mother watching with the sound down low, and he had filed it away the way he filed away measurements and load limits and the names of streets he would need to know when he was older.
More than some kids got.
He rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket up to his chin. The pillow smelled like the rest of the house, clean and faintly of lavender and of something else he could not name, something that might have been years. He wondered how many other boys had slept on this pillow, how many other children had lain in this bed and stared at the same ceiling and listened to the same radiator and tried to make themselves small enough to survive whatever had brought them here.
The thought made him feel less alone, and then it made him feel more alone, and he did not know which feeling was true.
He thought about calling down the hall, asking if any of the other kids wanted to come look at the stars. But the lights were off now, and the laughter had faded into the kind of murmur that meant people were getting ready to sleep, and his mother had told him once that you did not wake a house at night, that houses had their own sleep and you had to let them have it.
He had not called.
He had not knocked on any door.
He had stood in the hallway with the fox under his arm and listened, and then he had come back to bed and lain still, and now it was late and the clock was ticking and the radiator was cooling and the house was settling into its own long quiet.
He closed his eyes again and tried to picture his mother's face. He could not get it right. The features kept sliding away from him, the way water slid off a hot pan, and what was left was an impression rather than a portrait: the color of her hair, the way she tucked it behind her ears, the way she stood when she was tired, one hip higher than the other, her arms crossed over her chest.
He tried her voice. He could not get that right either. The words came out in his own voice, his own cadence, and that was wrong, because his mother did not speak like him. His mother had a way of starting sentences in the middle, of leaving out the parts she assumed you already knew. His mother had a way of laughing that meant she was surprised, and a way of not laughing that meant she was not surprised at all.
Twenty-one days.
He said it a third time, and this time it felt like a spell, like if he said it enough it would become true.
He lay there for a long time, and the clock kept ticking, and the radiator kept clicking, and the house kept settling, and somewhere outside an owl called once and then was quiet, and the stars he had been watching earlier came through the window one at a time as the clouds moved.
He did not know how long he lay there.
He knew that at some point he stopped trying to picture his mother and started listening to the house instead, and that at some point the radiator stopped clicking because the steam had run out, and that at some point his breathing slowed and his hand relaxed around the edge of the pillow and the fox stayed hidden underneath, patient as a stone.
He slept, finally, the way children sleep when they are too tired to keep themselves awake, in long, uneven stretches, the kind of sleep that does not really rest you but at least gives you a place to put the hours.
In the morning he would wake to the smell of bacon and the sound of Mrs. Callahan's radio in the kitchen, and he would go downstairs and eat at the table and try to smile when she asked him how he had slept, and the fox would still be under the pillow, waiting.
He would count the days.
He would start that morning, in the kitchen, with the bacon and the toast and the orange juice in a glass that was too big for him, and he would begin with one and go from there.
But that was the morning.
For now there was only the dark, and the ticking of the clock, and the soft sound of his own breathing, and the fox under the pillow with its smile and its mismatched eyes, and somewhere down the hall the faint, occasional creak of a floorboard under a stranger's foot.
Marcus lay still.
The house breathed.
The night moved on.