At the Center. Dorothy Van Soest

bookshelf along the playroom wall, and he dropped the cars back into the box. He hadn’t been told to play with them, or if he could touch them even. He didn’t know if the police would come back if he did.

      No one had told him yet what he’d done wrong, but it must have been something really bad for the police to come and take him away. He’d never stolen anything. He was sure about that. Except for the one time he brought his friend Kenny’s baseball home, but that was by mistake and he gave it back the next day. Even Kenny knew he didn’t steal it, he said so himself.

      “You okay up there, Tony?”

      “Yes,” he said in barely a whisper. His name wasn’t Tony, it was Anthony, but if he didn’t answer the lady would come upstairs to check on him. The lady had told him to call her Mom. The other lady, who brought him here, had told him her real name. But he couldn’t remember, so he didn’t call her anything.

      “Tony?”

      “Yes,” he said, a little louder.

      It didn’t bother Anthony that the lady’s brown hair was so thin he could see through it down to her scalp, or that her pale skin was so transparent he could see the veins underneath. What did bother him was that sometimes he didn’t know what she was saying. Like when she said “You’ll be safe now” when he first got here. And the way she watched him, always watched him. She kept asking him if he was having fun and she jumped up at meals to give him more food before his plate was empty, and whenever he nodded she smiled so big all her teeth showed.

      He looked through the glass doors that went out to a small balcony outside the playroom. The sun was hiding behind the top of the tallest pine tree in the backyard. He’d been here three days now, long enough to know that meant in a little while the lady would start rattling pans down in the kitchen. He pushed the train off the track so it made a little noise but not too much.

      Then he heard heavy footsteps above his head. That’s how he knew the man was still upstairs. That morning before breakfast, Anthony was sitting on his bed waiting for the lady to call him down to eat when the man stopped outside his door and looked in on him. The girl with a room at the end of the hall stood behind him, watching.

      “Mornin’, Anthony,” the man said, all friendly-like.

      Anthony kept his eyes down and picked at the tufts of the blue cover on his bed.

      “I see the cat’s still got your tongue,” the man said with the smile that didn’t match his eyes. Then he looked down at the cell phone in his hand and went upstairs.

      Every morning the man went upstairs, and he stayed there until dinnertime, so quiet no one would know he was in the house except for the floorboards creaking every now and then. He was a big man with muscles on his upper arms that bulged out under the long-sleeved white shirt he wore every day. Like he was going to someplace fancy. Anthony didn’t know what the man did upstairs all day, but at dinner he talked a lot about houses and buildings and stuff that no one else acted interested in. When he yelled sometimes his sharp voice hurt Anthony’s ears, but he didn’t dare cover them when the man was looking.

      “Cindy,” the lady called up the stairs, “time to help with dinner.”

      Anthony looked out into the hall, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl. She had curly brown hair and skin that reminded him of milk. He liked her. She smiled at him a lot but she didn’t talk to him, at least not yet. What he liked most about her was the way she curled her lips down in a pout and made her face go crooked, like that morning at breakfast.

      —

      “Tony, honey,” the lady said, like she did every morning, “how about some bacon and eggs this morning? We’ve got to put some fat on those bones of yours.”

      Anthony nodded without thinking.

      “Mom,” the girl said, “Deedee’s having a party on Saturday night.”

      “Do you like your eggs scrambled like they’re all mixed together, Tony?”

      “I’m going. To Deedee’s party.”

      “Scrambled then, okay?”

      “Mom, I’m talking to you.” The girl banged her spoon on the side of her glass and the orange juice jiggled and some of it spilled onto the table.

      “I know, Cindy. I already told you that fourteen is too young for boy-girl parties. We’ll talk about it later.”

      That’s when the girl curled her lips down into that pout and tapped her feet on the floor.

      “I’m going,” she said.

      Anthony looked at her long legs and wondered if he would ever get that tall. He counted on his fingers from seven up to fourteen to see how many years it was before he would be as old as her. When the girl noticed him counting she smiled at him in that way of hers that made him wriggle in his seat, and he didn’t know whether he should smile back or not so he looked down at the table.

      —

      Anthony pushed his shoulder-length black hair behind his ears and watched for the girl now, hoping she would stop and say hi to him on her way downstairs.

      “Cindy! Now!”

      Her door opened at the end of the hall and slammed shut with a loud bang. The girl did stop outside the door to the playroom, just as Anthony had hoped she would. She smiled at him, only for a second, and he looked up at the cat’s tail ticking back and forth on the clock on the wall that looked like it had been there forever.

      —

      The next time Anthony looked out the glass doors he saw that the sun was gone and the balcony was in the shade. It would be dinnertime soon. He stood up, went out onto the balcony, and looked at the neighboring houses, all of them even taller and fancier than this one. After dinner the lady would take a walk with him and they would look at the green grass and flowers and the curlycue fences around the other houses. But there was no corner market where the people hung out. Maybe it was too far to walk. He never saw any men walking home from work looking tired and greasy and smelling bad, either, so he guessed they must work at home like the man did.

      He leaned over the short railing, careful not to push against the wood posts. They were wobbly and could give him slivers. He peered down at the concrete patio below, at the barbeque grill in the corner, the round glass table with its closed umbrella in the middle off to the side, the padded lounge chairs next to pots filled with red and yellow flowers. Then he felt hands on his back. Warm hands. Like his mama’s hands. His heart skipped a beat, then two. You’re a good boy, Anthony. She had come to get him. He should have known she would. He hadn’t brought any of his things with him, so he was ready. They could leave right away.

      But when he tried to turn around, the hands on his back burned like coals through his shirt and into his skin. He tried to push back, but the hands were too strong. His chest tightened and he got a sick feeling in his stomach as the hands pushed him forward, into the railing. His feet slipped out from under him. He heard the wood posts crack. He went over the edge, his mouth turning into a scream that had no sound. He was in a tunnel that pointed straight down and inside the tunnel a rumbling, a rushing, plunging him down and sucking the concrete up. He wanted to shut his eyes but they were frozen and then finally there was no space between him and the ground.

      ONE

      It was Wednesday morning. Five days ago, Anthony Little Eagle had been placed in foster care. Two days ago, he died. I could still see him, walking by my office last Friday with the uniformed police officer’s hand on his bony shoulder, his dark brown eyes wide with fear, holes in both knees of his jeans, his T-shirt dirty and thin from wear.

      Now I heard the knock on the door that I’d been waiting for. I let out the breath I had been unaware of holding in and fingered the beads on the necklace I always wore.

      “Come in,” I said.

      “Your ten o’clock appointment is here, Sylvia.” Mabel’s voice was uncharacteristically subdued and cracked ever so slightly