“Uncle?” said Erik. He sat up. He hissed again. “What… What…?”

“What?” said Mordecai, honestly bewildered.

Erik reached out and brushed the bandage on his cheek. “It hurts.”

Mordecai shook his head. “No it doesn’t.”

“Why?”

“Hyacinth fixed it.”

Erik shook his head. “No. Why?”

“Oh.” Mordecai put his hand on the bandage. For a moment, he couldn’t find the lie he had wanted to tell. It was a good thing he already had one or he never would’ve thought of it at all, “I fell down some stairs.”

Erik gasped a horrified breath and began to sob. “Down… down the up-stairs?”

Mordecai drew him into his lap and held him, even as he spoke, “Dear one, I don’t know what you mean.”

“The stairs always I go up,” said Erik. He was wrong and the crying made it worse, but he couldn’t stop either of those things. “The stairs I see. The stairs go where I am but I’m not.”

“The basement stairs?” cried Mordecai.

“Yes!”

“Did I fall down the basement stairs looking for you?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“No, oh, no, I didn’t. I didn’t do that at all. No. Not at all.” And now he was crying too. He tried not to do it very much, but he couldn’t keep it out of his voice, and certainly Erik could feel him. “Oh, dear one, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. Maybe it hurts a little bit. I fell down the stairs in the front room. It was nothing to do with you.”

“Why?” said Erik.

“Oh, gods, I don’t know. A cat. I was chasing a cat.”

“How a cat?”

“It came in through the bathroom window,” he said. He had to bite his tongue to keep back the part about the silver spoon. That made him laugh. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his palm.

Erik pushed back from him. He looked grave, but he was no longer crying. “Were you gonna eat the cat?”

“Oh, gods, no!” He laughed again, he had to. “I’ve sworn off cats for life. I’d rather die!” He dried Erik’s face with his sleeve. “Dear one, you know we only did that because we had to, don’t you?” He considered that. “Or do you? I don’t know what you know.”

“I don’t know what I know,” Erik replied heavily, one hand to his head. “It’s just there.”

“It’s not like they told you?”

“I don’t know.” It was more like maybe they told him a long time ago and he forgot, not about what it was, but about being told. Someone had told him what to call colours and how to eat with a spoon, but he didn’t remember that either.

“What do you know about the locket?” He didn’t want the boy to think that he just didn’t wear it anymore, or he’d thrown it away, especially if he knew what it meant.

“It was like this.” He made a small oval space with his hands. “You said you’d wear it.”

“Anything about her?”

“Mm-mm,” Erik said.

“It’s a story,” said Mordecai. He winced. “Do you mind a story?”

“I like a story,” Erik said. He crawled out of his uncle’s lap and sat on the floor. “I will listen very hard.”

“Oh. Okay.” Mordecai felt vaguely inclined to start up crying again. He sighed and told the story instead, “During the siege, during the war, sometimes we needed things. I would go out with some soldiers and we would look for things in the city.”

“You had bicycles,” Erik said.

Mordecai nodded. “Sometimes we had bicycles. We liked those best because you didn’t need gas or magic and you could go around things.”

He had a feeling Erik was going to pick up this story a lot faster than Peter and the Wolf. He had a feeling Erik remembered this story (which he had never heard) a lot better than Peter and the Wolf.

It was a sinking feeling. Erik knew things because things had been done to him. That wasn’t damage, they were playing with him. This morning’s anger recurred and faded helplessly.

“Your mother would come with us when she could,” he told the child, little knowing what he needed to be told, “because she could do magic very well and she could call…” There was no respectable term he wanted to use. “Well, she could call them, and I couldn’t do either of those things.”

“Why then you go?”

He grinned and shook his head, ashamed. “I don’t know. I guess I was good at figuring out what needed finding. But the thing is we went, and sometimes we couldn’t get back, and we had to stay wherever was safe until we could get back.”

“Mm-hm,” said Erik.

“One night we were holed up in this photography studio. There wasn’t anybody there and it was missing the window in front, but there were still all these cameras. We would get kind of silly at night because we were scared, but we were glad we weren’t dead yet…”

“You’d get drunk,” Erik said.

“Yes, and that. And I’d play violin. I had a violin back then and I kept it with me. So we were in this studio with all these cameras and one of them took instants… I don’t think you’ve ever seen instants. It’s like in the cheap newspaper, the one we get, no colour and no sound but you pull off the paper and you have your picture right away. You don’t have to wait. Oh, and they freeze really fast, even faster than the newspaper. They’re almost stills.”

“Mm-hm,” said Erik.

“So we were taking pictures of each other with this instant camera. It was just for fun. We left them there. Well, I thought we left them there. Your mother saved two, one of me and one of her, and they were really embarrassing. I was wearing my tie on my head and she was doing that face. You know? This one.” He pulled down the corner of one eye and stuck out his tongue.

Erik giggled appreciatively.

“And of course they both froze so we weren’t even looking in the camera. We looked very, very stupid. And she saved them and she put them in a locket. She saved that locket, I don’t know how long, and one night she sat down on my lap and she hung it around my neck, and she showed me the pictures and she told me she had it magicked so I couldn’t ever take it off.”

Erik put his hands over his mouth. “It was?” he said.

“For about an hour,” Mordecai admitted. “I did try, just to see if she’d really done it. It wasn’t much of a charm, but I decided I’d leave it on anyway. I thought I’d embarrass her.”

He lifted one finger, “This is an important thing to remember about your mother, Erik. You could not embarrass her. She thought it was great. She told everyone I was cursed. And then I really couldn’t take it off because everyone else thought it was great too.”

“But it’s gone,” said Erik sadly.

Mordecai shook his head. “I have it, but you can only see a little of it.” He undid the top buttons of his shirt and showed the thin gold scar on his chest. “That’s where Hyacinth pushed it through.”

“Oh, it’s there,” said Erik. He laid his hand against the thin thread of gold and shut his eye, as if he might be able to see it like Hyacinth could. Hell, maybe he could. He was different now, and not all of it was things that had gone.

“I wish she’d saved out the pictures. Not the one of me, but your mother. Maybe you would’ve liked to see her, even if she was making a silly face.”

Erik felt around the floor and presented a crayon. “We can draw.”

Mordecai took the crayon from him and shook his head. “It would be very hard to draw your mother with crayon. She was white. Not like people say ‘white people,’ her colour was white. Like paper.”

“Like Cousin Violet?” Erik said.

“A little like Cousin Violet,” Mordecai nodded. “But your mother had grey eyes like you, and she liked to wear colours. And she was better than a hundred Cousin Violets,” he added.

Erik opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. “That’s why you fall down stairs.”

Mordecai attempted a protest and then covered it with a hand. He didn’t fall down stairs, but he had experienced a cascading series of coincidences that led to him getting the snot beat out of him in a police station. Disproportionate retribution for an offhand slight that hadn’t even happened yet was exactly the kind of petty bullshit Cousin Violet would pull.

“Darn you, Cousin Violet,” he said mildly, afraid anything more might result in a trip down some actual stairs.

“They said you used to be nice,” Erik told him.

Of course they’d say that, Mordecai thought with a sigh. “I ran out of nice for them a long time ago,” he said.

“Why?”

“That’s a story that doesn’t need telling. Are you still tired, dear one?”

“Mm-hm,” Erik said. “But is it sleep now or eat?”

“It’s whatever you need right now,” Mordecai said. “We’re not having any schedule today. Today is too damn difficult for a schedule.”

Erik considered that, frowning. It was difficult to think outside patterns and memory and he didn’t always know what he needed. It was harder without the schedule. But maybe he ought to try that like he tried breakfast and story. Today was a day for trying things. “I guess sleep.”

“Then we’ll do that. You were doing that when I came in, anyway.” Mordecai lifted him gently and put him back in the bed.

“You have my drawings,” Erik noted in passing.

“Oh? Uh-huh.”

“I don’t like them. I want to do them all again right.”

Mordecai felt his throat narrow to a straw. “I… I don’t know. They’re nice.” And, because there was nothing else in his head but a thin screaming sound, he said what was on the note, “I’m really proud of you.”

“Because of wrong drawings?” Erik said, frowning.

“No. Because you keep trying things even when it’s really hard.” He meant that. “And you’re so much better at it than I am.” He meant that too.

“Trying things?”

“Yes.”

“I guess.” He sighed. “Can we have Julia?”

“No, dear one. We don’t have Julia anymore.” They had told him that so many times, but it never seemed to stick. It was like he wanted there to be Julia.

“I miss music,” Erik said softly, confirming it. “You used to sing.”

“No, dear one, not me. Julia sang. I used to play.” Unless…

No, that had been too long ago, before there was Julia and after Eileen. The child couldn’t possibly remember that.

Erik began to sing. He got all the way through the King of Marigold cooking breakfast before he trailed off, uncertain. But that was because he wasn’t sure it was okay, not because some god hadn’t just hit him up with all the lyrics to “Cry, Baby, Cry,” and maybe the whole damn album. Mordecai was sure.

They had a game they used to play, Erik and him. Tell me something about my mom I don’t know, Erik would say. And Mordecai would say something cute and silly like, She used to collect spoons. Not like souvenir spoons, table spoons. If we were going somewhere without her, she’d ask us to bring her back a spoon, I think just to be funny. She had a sense of humour.

Well, if Erik even remembered the game, they sure as hell couldn’t play that anymore, now, could they?

Mordecai clenched his jaw and fisted his hands. Stop it. Stop playing around with him and telling him things and changing him however you like. Let him heal. Just leave him alone!

“Please don’t, Erik,” the red man said. “I remember it. That was only when you were very little and you needed it.”

“Aren’t I little?” the green child asked him.

Doesn’t he need it? Mordecai asked himself. He had said so, hadn’t he?

“Erik… If you promise you’ll never tell anyone, you can have a song again. Just until you sleep, okay?”

Erik smiled and turned towards him, pillowing his head on his hands. He closed his eye. “Okay.”

What came out of him was the most awful, the worst possible thing. It was only because of all that business about coming in through the bathroom window. He was going to sing that one, then he thought that might make Erik suspicious about the cat. So he sang the next one.

His voice broke on the first word, “Once…” He had to clear his throat and start again.

Oh, gods! The only thing faster at delivering longing and sheer melancholy than the opening of “Golden Slumbers” was something boat-related he’d heard Sanaam say: That way is closed. It was instant, like needle drugs. Even so, those four words failed to express that the ice had knitted itself together between you and your home. The Beatles offered a much more elegant solution to making the listener want to slit their wrists in a warm bath.

He didn’t want to sing that one. He wanted to go back and pick something cute and simple they’d written so Ringo could pretend he was a singer too. But now that he had started, he couldn’t find anything else. It was like there was no other music.

The song promised a lullaby, and he’d promised a lullaby, and he delivered, but by the end of it he was curled up with his head buried in his arms and his voice was little more than a whisper. Mercifully, there was no request for an encore. Nothing from Erik but soft breathing and peace.

Mordecai felt the fingers of his left hand twitching. They wanted the notes for “Carry That Weight." He wished he could play it through. If he could get to the end of it, he might not feel so miserable. He always did Abbey Road when someone challenged him to a whole album. It had such a nice roundness to it, almost like a story but not quite, and it ended happily.

But there was nothing to play and he had no more words left in him.

He closed the curtains and he got into bed.

“Once…” he managed softly. He buried his tears in his pillow.