"We’ve got four."
"I told her. She says bring five."
He laughed, softly. Through the back window of the car he could see his son’s face, slack and peaceful in sleep, his mouth a little open, the blue wallet rising and falling on his chest. Inside it were four passports and a fifth, the new one, with the lion and the unicorn on the cover and a photo of an eight-year-old boy trying very hard not to smile. They had applied for it in the spring, together, the three of them, at the kitchen table. Not as an escape. As a door. A door you kept, and knew was there, and did not have to use.
He would carry the fear. He understood that now. It had been handed down to him the way it had been handed to his mother, in a kitchen in Birmingham on a Sunday afternoon in 1963, by a father who came home and saw his wife sitting at the table in her hat. It was his inheritance, and there was no refusing it. It would wake him at three in the morning for the rest of his life. It would sit in his chest every time his son was late, every time the phone rang after ten, every time a car slowed down on a quiet street. He would carry it until he died.
But he would carry it in his own body. Not in his hands. Not on his son’s skin.
"Ready?" Danielle said.
Marcus looked at his house, dark now except for the light over the door. He looked at the end of the street. He looked at his son asleep in the back seat, holding everything they would need to go anywhere in the world, and coming home anyway.
"Ready," he said, and reached into the open garage, and turned off the light.