Instead of turning up Third Avenue and then over to Twenty-fourth, Lincoln looks at the blank front window over his shoulder and jumps the curb and runs down the alley. His feet slap the concrete, the shock running through his thin tennis shoes and into his thin body. He is already used to the cold. He snaps his head from side to side before shooting across Clinton and slows to a fast walk as he enters the church parking lot and skirts the edge of the church. The homeless men gathered earlier for breakfast have floated away to predestined spots in the city and the asphalt is rippled and empty. He reaches the chain-link fence and slows down, his heart beating wildly, his nose pressed against the rigid mesh. He finally sees what wasn’t visible from the upstairs window: the deer twisted from impact into an unnatural sleep, the once smooth fur pink with road rash and blood, and studded with ribs.

Lincoln wants to scale the fence, furt through the weeds and trash, the layers of Crown Royal and Ripple bottles losing their labels to the wet like old skin. He wants to walk down the hill and touch the deer, too. To feel the last shreds of its body heat before it turns cold, then stiff, then is picked up by the highway department and thrown in the back of an orange truck. He wants to hold its head in his lap but it is too late, it is always too late. After living for ten years without knowing, for certain, who his mother is and how his father died, he wants to be present when something happens. He wants to claim the right to say, This is what happened. See? This is how.

He turns away, crosses the parking lot again and walks, miserable and cold, to school.

2

Betty and Simon sit in silence for a while longer, not sure, as the morning cracks open around them, what should happen next. As soon as Lincoln made his frantic exit they both thought, both hoped, that when the front door slammed, other, more secret doors would open between them. That without Lincoln present they would have no choice but to speak about him and so be forced into the past by talking about Lincoln’s future. But they couldn’t. Talk of smaller things, facts that fit into the palm of the hand, were equally unavailable. Mention of work, or no work, the weather, specific aches or injuries beginning to plague them both, were of no use, were too small, to plug the cracks through which loomed a terrible silence. They sat caught between a history entirely too large to admit and a present too small to mention, and were unable to call forth the in-between, could not strike a balance that would rock them into each other as woman and man, as mother and son.

“I’d best get on, Ma.”