The Changeling. Victor LaValle

pointed to the front door. “There was a lot of knocking. I thought—” He stopped himself. “I didn’t know who it was. I was about to take a shower.”

      This was when Apollo registered the running water, still going. He got to his feet and sped to the bathroom. Because of the slow drain in their apartment, the tub had overflowed, and the bathroom floor showed puddles all over.

      “Apollo!” Lillian shouted when she found the mess. She pushed past her son and turned off the water. She pulled towels down from the rack and laid them on the floor. “I have to go check with Mrs. Ortiz and make sure we didn’t leak through her ceiling.”

      Despite this impossible box in the living room, there were some concerns no parent could ignore; for instance, did her son just cause a major accident for their downstairs neighbor, a kind old woman who used to babysit this thoughtless child? And how much might it cost her to fix Mrs. Ortiz’s ceiling?

      Lillian left the bathroom, and Apollo followed her. On her way to the door, she glanced back to the box, the items on the carpet, and quickly returned to them. She leaned over and snatched up one piece of paper, turned, and left the apartment. Apollo returned to living room. Lillian had taken the receipt for the overnight stay near Times Square. She thought she was hiding something, but it didn’t matter. In the time that he’d been sitting there, he’d basically committed all of it to memory and tried to connect the items to the stories he knew about his mother and father. One of the things he hadn’t been sure of was the bit his mother just confirmed.

      How could a man who held on to all these things just abandon his wife and child? And how had all this evidence ended up at Apollo’s front door? He looked at the lid of the box again and read the word etched across the top. Improbabilia.

      His mother would have to explain what most of the items signified, but one seemed easier to grasp. The children’s book, Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak. Apollo opened it. He’d been hoping to find a special note, a dedication of some kind, from father to son, even just evidence of his dad’s handwriting. None of that, but the pages were well worn, the upper-right corner of each page faintly smudged, the spine of the book showed cracks. This wasn’t for display; this book had been read many times. Apollo imagined Brian West—maybe sitting on this very couch—reading the book aloud to his child. Now he read the first page aloud to himself.

      “‘When Papa was away at sea,’” he began.

      His mother wasn’t a reader. For all her good qualities, this just wasn’t one of them. Lillian worked like a beast, and at night she had the energy to sit with him and watch television, that’s all. Many nights she fell asleep right there. Apollo didn’t mind. But once she’d knocked out, he’d take off her shoes, slip off her wig, turn off the television, and go into his room to read. He’d been like this ever since he could sound out words. The book in his hand allowed him to imagine there was a time when he wasn’t the only reader in the home. He liked to believe he’d inherited a taste for texts. Maybe this book had been only the first of many his father planned to share. Apollo’s appetite for reading only grew after he found the box.

      Apollo read in bed and while using the bathroom. He took books to the park. He read paperbacks while he played right field. He lost books, spilled soda on them, and splotches of melted chocolate fingerprints appeared inside. Even the kindest librarians had to start charging replacement fees. So Lillian began a practice of bringing books and magazines home from her law office. Reader’s Digest and People, Consumer Reports and Bon Appétit. He went through all of them and still wanted more. She befriended secretaries on other floors of the building and even convinced a few to start subscribing to magazines that differed from the ones at her firm. A dentist’s office across the street kept mass-market paperbacks for its clients, and she convinced the woman at the front desk to give the old copies to her rather than throw them away. These were romances and thrillers, mostly; true crime thrived. Lillian Kagwa didn’t vet the volumes, just plopped them into a plastic bag and took them home on the 7 train. So Apollo read Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, The Wayward Heiress by Blanche Chenier, and Dragon by Clive Cussler when he was way too young to understand them. Nevertheless, he finished each one. Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child.

      Lillian didn’t fully grasp the kind of child her son was until a Saturday in early October when their neighbor, Mrs. Ortiz from downstairs, came to the apartment. Mrs. Ortiz was there to see not Lillian but her son. Lillian’s immediate guess was that Apollo had done something wrong, but Mrs. Ortiz only waved a dollar bill in the air saying Apollo had promised her the issue of People magazine with that sweet Julia Roberts girl on the cover, but he hadn’t come by with it yet. After a few minutes Lillian sorted through her confusion, and consternation, to understand that her son had been selling off the books and magazines she’d been bringing home. She felt so aggravated that she went into Apollo’s room, found the issue amid one of the stacks on the floor, and gave it to Mrs. Ortiz for free. She tried to throw in a more recent issue with Barbara Bush on the cover, but Mrs. Ortiz didn’t know who that was.

      Apollo returned home right around sundown. New York had been going through a warm spell so the day had been only in the mid-seventies. He and his friends had been at Flushing Meadows Park playing two-hand touch until the temperature finally cooled. He showed up grimy but glowing. Lillian let him find her in the kitchen. She’d spent the late afternoon putting all the magazines and mass-market paperbacks into garbage bags. Those bags were on the small kitchen table instead of dinner. Before Apollo could ask why, Lillian told him about the visit from Mrs. Ortiz.

      “I went through the trouble of getting those things for you because I thought you were going to read them,” Lillian said. Now she lifted one bag, grunting with the weight. “But if not, we can just drop all these down to the incinerator.”

      Apollo untied one of the bags and peeked inside. “I do read them,” he said. “All of them. But after I’m done, what should I do?”

      “Throw them away, Apollo. What else?” She tied the bag closed again.

      “But Mrs. Ortiz likes reading People, so . . .”

      “So why not charge an old woman?”

      “She pays me a quarter. Cover price is $1.95. That’s a great deal for her, and she doesn’t care if it’s a few weeks old. What’s wrong with that?”

      Lillian opened her mouth to answer him but found she didn’t have a ready reply. She scanned the bags. “You sell all of it?”

      “The stuff I can’t sell, I throw away, but I do pretty good around the neighborhood.”

      “You’re twelve,” Lillian said, sitting down with a plop. “Where did you learn to do this?”

      Apollo remained silent a moment, then smiled widely. “You, Mom. I learned it by watching you.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “You work so hard. I see that. And I’m your son. It’s in my blood.”

      Lillian pointed to the chair beside her, and Apollo sat there. She watched him for a long count.

      “If you’re going to run a business, you should have business cards,” she said. “Your name should be on them, and a phone number. I guess we could put the home phone there. I’ll get them made for you. I can get them for free through my office.”

      Lillian rose from her chair and returned a moment later with a sheet of typing paper and a pen. She drew a large rectangle and scribbled in a few lines:

       Apollo Kagwa

       Used Books & Magazines

      She crossed out that second line and wrote in another.

      Affordable Books & Magazines.

      Under that she wrote their phone number.

      Then she set the tip of her pen at the top of the rectangle, right above Apollo’s name. “You’ll need a name for the business.” She waited