I don’t remember what time it was when I got home, I only remember the moment I woke up. The pounding on the door. The fists. Vernon’s eyes through the peephole. The woman standing behind him. Her clipboard. The way her lips turned inward.
Trevor’s healing body is still cocooned in sleep and I retreat to the back of the apartment, to the mattress, like distance from the hole they already saw me peek through will erase us. Maybe I should have seen it coming. All the warnings were there and I still thought we could escape them, make it out of this together. I still thought I had a choice.
“Open the door, Kiara. We will call the police.” Vernon’s familiar growl.
Trevor’s stirring from his sleep and I want to will him back into it, so he won’t have to be conscious for whatever comes next; for when they pull us apart, pry his fingers from around my neck like an infant. The pounds keep coming. Trevor’s swollen eyes blinking open as much as they can, brown peeking through to stare up at me, frantically looking around for some kind of shield against the rupture. Trevor’s face crinkles and his lips part, trying to ask me what’s going on, but the cuts in his mouth sting him into silence.
I lean over and touch his head. I shaved it so I could patch up his wounds and now it’s grown out enough that I can feel it instead of just the bare scalp. I whisper to him, “Trevor, baby, some people are here and they might be taking you someplace else for a while, okay? Don’t you worry, though. I’m gonna open the door, you just rest there.” I steady my pitch so my voice won’t crack like it’s threatening to: reveal all the wounds that make me up, all the fear I’m harboring in my gums.
I inch toward the door again and I’m scared of it, scared of what comes from this, what Mama opened up. Maybe she called Vern or the government or whoever owns the woman-in-the-suit’s ass. Somebody always owning the woman, knocking on the door so all she has to do is stand there.
My hand on the knob, twisting, pulling, no longer any barrier between me and them. Vernon standing there with a snarl. The woman, waiting.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“This is Mrs. Randall from Child Protective Services.” For the amount of work Vernon put in to get me to open the door, he seems wildly uninterested. Bored, even. “I’ll leave you to it.” He directs this at the woman, Mrs. Randall, and retreats back down the stairs.
Mrs. Randall’s got the kind of face that looks like one a child draws into the sun. Circular, sloping. With these locs that make her look like she should be a poet, like she should be wearing a shawl and not a suit.
She holds out her hand and I shake it. “Nice to meet you. May I come in?”
If I didn’t know better, I would tell her, “No.” Would tell her to get the fuck away from Trevor and that bed, to not enter the only space we have left to call ours. Instead, I say, “Of course,” and she steps inside.
It’s all over the moment she sees him. I can tell from the way her whole face arches as she takes in his scabbing. I can’t blame her. Trevor’s body is a visible testament to how this place has chewed him up. How I haven’t been able to do nothing about it. Part of me is even relieved because what if it’s me? What if I’m the one who has done this to him?
Mrs. Randall begins to walk toward the bed and I can see Trevor starting to shake, his body writhing, and I know if he wasn’t so injured he would be pressed up in the corner, trying to get away from her. I bypass Mrs. Randall to go sit on the bed with Trevor, gather him into my arms. He presses his head into my chest so he’s not looking at her or me or anything.
Mrs. Randall crouches down by the mattress. “Hi, Trevor. My name is Larissa. I was hoping I could speak with you.”
Trevor pretends not to hear, doesn’t say shit back.
Mrs. Randall redirects her attention to me, standing again. “How about we talk first? Outside?”
I nod, leaning into Trevor’s ear. “Imma get up now, Trev. I’ll be right back.”
I have to physically remove him from his place on my chest. He flops back into a pillow and buries his head in it.
I follow Mrs. Randall back outside and close the door behind us. We lean against the railing facing the pool, half turned toward each other.
Her eyebrows tilt. “Look, I’m going to be frank with you, Ms. Johnson. You are not that child’s legal guardian and clearly he is in some form of danger, which doesn’t look good for him or for you. Social workers have visited Trevor and his mother three different times over the years and I understand that you may have just been trying to help, but that is not your responsibility and it would have been far more appropriate had you called us.