Thrust: A Novel

“For the first time in his life, he’d found a reason to survive school. He set about constructing a kind of fort in a dark corner of the basement, away from sight and sound, where the box would be safe and protected. A place he could visit every moment he had: every morning before school, every afternoon as soon as he got home, and every night after dinner, before he went to bed.

“On the second day, he began to feed the tiny girl with a bottle. He warmed the milk patiently next to the furnace.

“On the third day, he stopped going to school. He pretended to go, he rode the bus, he got off the bus, he walked around the buildings, he walked home.

“On the fourth day, someone heard crying in the middle of the night.

“On the fifth day, his father found out he’d been skipping school and hit him so hard across the face that his glasses ended up in the next room, but he said nothing.

“On the sixth day, the baby smiled up at Mikael, and his entire world shifted on some imagined axis.

“On the seventh day, unbeknownst to Mikael, his father followed him down to the basement. He tried to take that beautiful baby girl. All that was left of Vera.

“On that day, the boy from nowhere had a choice to make.”

He looked at Lilly dead-on. “Didn’t he.”

—

Lilly was not sure she had taken a breath in more than an hour listening to Mikael narrate his story. Narrate a past that was forever gone to him. A self that simply slipped, like those of so many foster kids who go violent or dormant with trauma, or those who stray when it becomes clear that no one and no place will have them. An image of her own brother, lost to unimaginable violence — Was he alive? Dead? — crept up her throat and lodged in her temples. A sea of lost children surged in her psyche; most of the minors she worked with were lost to the system or worse.

“You see?” Mikael said, his voice now hard again, as his teen eyes sank back into the cinder-block room. “He was going to take her.” The fact of it seemed to punctuate his sentences. “When he bent over, I hit him. In the head. I had a bicycle-tire pump, so I used that. Did it hard, four times, so he couldn’t come back and attack me. I hit him harder than he’d ever hit me, I think. The second time, I heard a cracking sound. There was blood everywhere. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t alive.

“Then I went and got her box, her little box on rockers, and I put it over by the door where I knew I could grab her quickly. I had an old plastic lighter, and I started touching it to everything in the room that would burn. Then I grabbed the girl out of the box and I ran, with her tucked against my body. Up the stairs, out of the basement, out of the door, into the night. She did not cry. I ran and ran.

“I made it to the railyards, and I climbed onto a train before it left. We rode that way all night till we were in another city. Where they found me. After the building burned and all those people died.”

Now he looked at Lilly again, as if somehow what he knew, the story he told, had restored to him some temporary grasp on his life.

“I left her there, in the new city. And I want you to look for her.”

He reached up to pull back his collar, twisted his neck to show Lilly something that wasn’t there. “She has a little tattoo, right here on the back of her neck. I gave it to her with a needle and ink and fire. It says indigo. She cried when I did it, but only a little. Like she knew. I would never burn her in that basement — but I burned a word into her, so she’d have it and no one else could take it.”

Lilly knew something too. From the file. She couldn’t say it, but Mikael could tell.

“I know about the skull they found. I don’t know whose skull that was, what baby it was. But I heard about the police report. Maybe someone killed their baby there because they couldn’t feed it. I don’t know. People in the building were always doing things for money. One man sold his wife, his young wife, Albanian.

“They said someone saw me with a baby, but no one saw me. Except my father.

“I want you to find her. I left her on the doorstep of a blue-painted house in that city. The one where they found me. You must have it in the notes. I told them all, but no one here believes me. Go find her. He was going to take her. My father was an animal. But only to children. Do you understand? My father is not my father. He stole me. He took a baby. To sell for money. Only no one wanted me. He was a fucking thief.”

Mikael slammed his hands onto the table, loud enough for the guards to hear. He picked up the twisted gray rope of umbilical cord, nestled it under his shirt, and dared her with his eyes to tell.

She would not. But neither did she have any clue what to do with what he’d told her. Who would believe a story like that?

The air in the room disappeared, as if some vacuum had sucked it away.