"Someone's at the door, Tomás!"

Stirring, pulling himself from the half-asleep state he'd drifted into on the couch, the young man strove to shake the drowsiness from his brain. His mother's voice, it'd sliced through his dreams—and what'd they been about? Something good, this time, something he'd wanted to continue dreaming, not like the nightmares he'd had for the past several weeks. Strange to think he'd gone through eighteen years of life with hardly any dreams at all (or any he could really remember) and then all of a sudden, the past month or so he'd begun struggling to sleep, that's how terrible they'd been. But this one—this one had been good. He felt warm in all the right places.

"Tomás? Did you hear me?"

Someone was indeed knocking at the door, he realized, had been knocking the entire while he'd been attempting to clear his head.

What time was it?

The clock on the fireplace mantle read 11:47. He'd fallen asleep on the couch trying to get his schoolwork done, again. In fact, he'd been lying on his Chromebook, the keyboard part of it, and a brief touch of his clammy cheek revealed the imprints of small squares.

The knock—or knocks, there were four of them in a row—sounded once more, loud and slow and evenly paced.

Who in the world was knocking on the door at almost midnight, on a school night, no less? Now fully awake, Tomás realized the anomaly. It was more than just the timing. There was no urgency in the knock; this was no insistent neighbor or someone whose car had broken down.

"I'm not crazy, am I?" A woman in an oversized tee and gym shorts, hair so frazzled she very well looked crazy, startled Tomás when she came up alongside him. "You do hear it, don't you?"

Tomás looked down at his mother from his six-foot-two height. She'd always told him he'd gotten his height from his father, but he'd never seen the man or even had a photo of him to corroborate it. "Yeah," he replied, his forehead wrinkling. "I hear it. It's weird, though. You stay here."

"Don't answer it!" his mother whisper-hissed, worried to wake her younger boy, worried, as well, that the unknown entity beyond the door might hear her.

"I'll just try to see who it is."

The woman wasn't happy about it, but what could she do? She'd raised a determined and fearless young man (in spite of their circumstances) and while Tomás could be rash, he wasn't stupid. Like it or not, Elena had come to rely on her boy who was, in all ways but those of the conjugal variety, the most important man in her life.

His steps slow yet determined, Tomás moved through the living room toward the front door, which was at the end of a short, dark entryway. There were no windows alongside the door, no windows inside it, either, but there was a peephole above the exterior knocker, and the young man knew if he moved quietly enough, he'd be able to peek through it without alerting whomever was there to his presence. By the time he reached the door, though, he'd begun to think the stranger had gone away, or that maybe he and his mother had heard a bird or some other perfectly reasonable if seemingly uncanny source of the noise, because there'd been a pretty long stretch of silence, and yet the moment his hands pressed against the wood, the knock came again. Tomás nearly jumped out of his skin, in spite of his mental preparation. Those four deliberate, evenly timed raps erupted prickles all down his arms.

The peephole, however, revealed nothing at all of interest. To both his unease and his relief, Tomás's quivering eye took in merely the front stoop basked in the yellowish glow of the overhead porchlight, the sides of his vision pinching oddly due to the curvature of the tiny glass tube. The absence of a presence gave him a semblance of courage, the notion that he was expected to go out and confirm, and yet even as he stood there, observing nothing at all, there it was again—knock . . . knock . . . knock . . . knock—as if pounding against his very chest, mocking him in its impossibility.

The door knocker itself was knocking on its own! But it couldn't be—

Tomás's palm was slick against the brass knob, slipped as he attempted to tighten his grip, but he held firm and, with his free hand twisting the bolt, he all at once pulled back the door. Such a whoosh of air rushed into the house that it rustled the pages of a magazine lying open on the coffee table behind him. The adrenaline that'd built up in his brain came to a boil when he stepped outside and caught sight of a Jeep some ways down on the street, idling until he'd opened the door, at which point the vehicle spurred into motion and burned rubber, moving too quickly for him to catch its plates when he bolted into the yard in attempt to get a look at it.

Shoulders slumping, Tomás picked up the plastic fishing line the passenger in the vehicle had been holding (now visible only because it caught the shine of a streetlamp) and followed it all the way from the road, back across his yard, up to his door, where it'd been tied neatly to the knocker.

Nice trick. Clean.

"Tomás! Tomás—who was it? Who was at the door?"

The boy pushed past his mother and into the house, angry for reasons he couldn't entirely grasp and certainly didn't want to explain. She'd need something, though. Some rationale. So, trying to hold back the distending rage within, he turned to her with muted features, a flattened rage, and replied, "Just assholes from school. Fucking assholes. Pranking, all right?"

Elena immediately cringed. "Tomás, your brother might hear."

"You think Eddie doesn't cuss, Mamá?"

A cluck of the tongue. "Not that I hear. No, not Eduardo."

"He's no angel, Mamá."

Tomás had gone into the kitchen, fumbled about in a drawer or two, returned with a pair of scissors. Elena watched him in consternation, this son she loved and trusted but who'd concurrently become something of a mystery to her, grown into a man with his man's taciturn heart. As he headed for the open door once again, Elena glimpsed, for the first time, the gleam play off a bundle of string or twine knotted at the door knocker. She swallowed. A prank. Tomás was right. It'd been some kind of trick.

"Mom?"

Elena turned to find her younger boy emerging as a ghost from the gloom of the hall. Eduardo's jet hair, in need of a trim as it was, stuck to his damp forehead. The boy's pajama tank hung limp on his frail frame. The AC unit had been on the fritz, so she'd been turning it off at night in an attempt to keep a little more life in the thing, and the southern Louisiana nights were warming up, especially as the spring was heading toward summer.

"Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It's nothing. Everything's fine."

Rather than obey, Eduardo approached his mother, leaned against her side, and Elena melted. This one was still her baby, even if he was nearly eleven. Eddie had always been a sweet child, always one to hug her or give her a kiss on her cheek, tell her he loved her, no matter who was watching. He was never embarrassed in front of other children, never cared what anyone else thought. Both he and Tomás were good boys, would help around the house without being asked, looked after her, and Elena was grateful for them. Even Tomás with his acerbic tongue and fluctuating attitude had been a Godsend. For all the time she'd spent on her own, no thanks to their fathers (twice loved, and twice left) Elena had ended up with the two biggest blessings any woman could ask for in the shape of her sons.

"I was having a dream that someone was banging on the walls," the boy said, rubbing at his face. He'd ended up with the long, dark lashes of his father.

Elena caught herself narrowing her eyes in memory of the man and shook herself free of the painful image. "It was someone at the door. You heard the knocking."

"Who's at the door?"

"No, no. Don't worry, Eddie. It was a prank, all right? Tomás says it was just someone messing around." Elena placed her hands on Eduardo's shoulders, angled him away from the still-open door and his brother, who was wrestling with the fishing wire, trying to wind it into a manageable ball. "Look at me, honey. Look." Eddie looked at her. "You have school tomorrow. Why don't you go back to bed, huh?"

A troubled look flitted across the boy's gentle features, his elfish nose, his large brown eyes, his gap-toothed mouth. He looked askance, oblivious to his mother's suggestion. "It was scary," he added. "I remember now. She had a . . . some kind of thing she was hitting the wall with. An axe. She was trying to come through, into my room."

Elena's motherly affect stiffened. "Who?"

"The girl," Eduardo said, lifting his face back toward his mother's. "The one without eyes."

A brief silence followed, only the sound of Tomás's muttered swearing audible, and then Elena softened. She squeezed her boy's shoulders lovingly, kissed him on the damp forehead. "Just a nightmare, Eddie. I promise there was no one with an axe. Come on, I'll tuck you back in."

That prospect cheered the child, and he gave one last, curious look to his older brother before heading back toward his room, pulling his mother along by the hand.

Happy his audience had gone, Tomás shut the door, closing himself outside in the balmy night. He wrangled the ball of twine more aggressively than necessary, unsure why he was so interested in winding it up neatly, and when he realized his foolishness, he left the porch for the carport, where the trash cans were located. As he shoved the wiry mass into the bin, the young man noticed, suddenly, how tight the muscles in his stomach had become and relaxed them. He hadn't caught the Jeep's plates, but he knew exactly who'd been in that vehicle. Not that he'd tell his mother or anyone else for that matter. Wouldn't do any good, anyhow. For every wrong he found in this place, his mother fabricated two rights. He'd disliked Luther the moment they'd driven into it, the closeness, the sense of unwarranted pride it held in itself. The time Tomás was forced to spend here was merely filler, a place to wallow before his actual life could begin. Why his mother had moved them from New Orleans when he'd been perfectly happy was beyond him. She'd said the work was better for her, here. And maybe she'd been right about that; they'd certainly had more to eat, an actual house instead of a crumbling apartment. Eddie's health had improved. Something about being closer to the ocean air, Elena said, parroting whatever crap that psychic friend of hers had told her, no doubt. If she'd only listen to a real doctor . . .

Didn't matter, now. Here they were, and whatever the reason, Eddie did seem happier, and maybe his happines translated to physical improvement. Tomás could manage his minor struggles if it meant Eduardo and his mom had it better in the long run.

What time was it, anyway? Too late to get much more out of the night, and yet he was too wound up for a decent sleep, at this point. He eyed the circular stepping stone beneath the uneven row of boxwoods under the front window. On it was an imprint of his hand when he'd been about six years old, surrounded in glass rocks he'd pressed into the cement: a Mother's Day gift Elena had held onto all these years. Tomás crossed the carport and tipped up the stone, retrieved the Altoids tin he'd hidden underneath it, and sighed contentedly. Thank God for his mother's sense of nostalgia. Retrieving the container's contents, Tomás lit a cigarette and quickly rehid his contraband goods.

He hovered by his mother's car while he smoked, cautious of her potential view from the house. He'd heard the your granddaddy died of lung cancer! talk too many times to desire enduring it again. Future cancers or no, Tomás needed something to get him through, and if a cigarette once in a while quelled the disquietude within, the whole family was better off for it.

Seventeen when he'd had him—Elena had been seventeen. His age. Tomás reflected on that often, these days, not that he was in any rush to procreate, and not like there were any romantic prospects on the horizon. All he really wanted was to get through school and get out of Luther, go back to New Orleans or maybe even somewhere beyond. The world was big, and he had the itch to see something of it. When his grandparents—Elena's parents—had been alive, they'd talked often about Honduras, from which they'd emigrated. Maybe Tomás could try to get there someday. Surely there were other relatives, people he'd never met, never known he'd had in his life, people who'd welcome him with open arms. He spoke enough Spanish to get by down there, and without his anchor-of-a-mother dragging him along, he'd be free to pursue his own whims.

The warm haze enveloping him as he stood back-to-post was exactly the comfort Tomás needed as he ruminated. Those assholes, waking up his brother, his mom . . . making an idiot of him. Not the first time they'd done it, either. Oh, yes, Tomás was sure he could name the pranksters who'd shown up at his house, and if he'd had his way, they'd have been sorry a long time ago for fucking with him. Elena had no idea what sort of shit he'd put up with since starting up school last October in this dump-of-a-town. They'd run over his bike, damaging it beyond repair and forcing him to take the bus to school like a small child; they'd rubbed literal crap on his locker; they'd done a thousand small things that added up to big meaning—the looks, the slurs, the subtle ways their bodies turned when he walked by, as if his very nearness could somehow taint the air they breathed. It might've been bearable, all of it, if he'd been able to push back, to tell them to fuck off, to get just enough in their faces to convince them he was capable of a lot worse. He'd held his own, back in New Orleans, during the handful of physical altercations he'd stumbled into. Always managed to come out less damaged than whoever he'd gone at it with. And he'd been smart enough to keep his business out of school, take it to the streets, to vacant locales, to avoid trouble with school administration or law enforcement, to keep his mother from finding out and worrying. Sure she'd never believed his stories about how he'd sustained that fat lip or black eye, this or that bruise or gash, but Tomás never caved to her prying, either, and she'd always given up and moved on.

Here, though, things were different. This place was small. His family stood out. Not him, so much; it wasn't as if he were the only Latino in town—not by far. Nor was he in any way too different in attire or background or attitude. It wasn't Eduardo, either. Not Eddie's sickness, which no one but the family quite knew about.

No. The reason Tomás had never fought back against the assholes that made his days miserable at that waste of a school, the reason he wasn't going to call the police about the prank, the reason he was going to pretend he had no idea who'd been in that incredibly distinctive Jeep—

—it was Elena. His mother. It was all because of her.

Tomás would do everything he could to keep her in the dark about this hellhole's judgment of her, regardless of how much she might deserve it.