Visitation Street (21 page)

Cree swipes the bottle and tucks it under his arm.

“Hold up,” the bodega guy says. He pulls a brown paper bag from beneath the counter and hands it to Cree. “Guess you don’t know the drill.”

Cree puts the bottle in the bag. “Forgot.”

He stands on the corner of Van Brunt and Visitation trying to decide where to take his bottle—which of his hideouts is best for an evening with a forty. At first he thinks he’ll climb the abandoned warehouse where he’s stashed his telescope. He’ll swig the forty and train his lens on the cranes over in New Jersey. But the empty longshoreman’s bar is a better place. He can choose a booth and keep company with the old-timers’ ghosts and the mermaid figurehead.

When he gets to the bar, the door is open and there’s music inside—grinding, whiny rock. The busted furniture is cleared away. The floor is swept clean. A woman with jagged black hair is standing on one of the banquettes. She’s using a long pole with a brush on the end to whitewash Ren’s Japanese-style “RunDown” piece. A man in a paint-splattered plaid shirt is crouching on the floor with a sander.

They’ve done a lot of work. The long mirror behind the bar reflects something besides the dust. The wooden shelves shine, as does the long brass rail that runs along the lip of the bar.

He wonders if this couple knows how the late-afternoon light plummets in narrow columns through two holes in the roof of the porch out back, how the wooden figurehead casts a scary shadow if you sneak up on her the wrong way, that the empty liquor bottles with flaking and faded labels sometimes roll off the shelves.

He uncaps the forty. The liquor is sweet and thick, almost syrupy. He winces as he swallows. He closes his eyes and chugs quickly so he doesn’t have to taste. His eyes water, and some of the liquor rises back up his throat. He breathes deep, urging the booze to stay down. He pounds half the bottle. The street sways and bucks. His limbs feel as if they are rising through water. Then everything settles.

As he walks down Otsego Street, a cobbled alley with vacant lofts and abandoned lots, he feels the looseness of the evening. The hours that stretch before him feel pliant, as if they are waiting for him to shape them.

He understands what keeps Gloria in Red Hook. It’s not what is here now, but what was here back when—the history being buffed and polished away in the longshoreman’s bar. As he crosses from this abandoned corner of the waterside back over to the Houses he becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook—the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, the lofts overtaking the factories, the grocery stores overlapping the warehouses. The new bars cannibalizing the old ones. The skeletons of forgotten buildings—the sugar refinery and the dry dock—surviving among the new concrete bunkers being passed off as luxury living. The living walking on top of the dead—the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts. It’s not such a bad place, Cree thinks, if you look under the surface, which is where Gloria lives.

The courtyards and the park are only half full. Cree doesn’t recognize the kids on the benches, but he nods as he passes. They clock his bottle and nod back. He sits on a nearby bench and raises the forty in an informal salute. He drinks and listens to the conversation that never opens up to him. No one notices when he walks off.

Cree falls asleep with the TV on and wakes up to the sound of someone knocking. The clock tells him it’s two
A.M.,
just about the time Gloria returns from her shift. It’s too soon for his buzz to have hardened into a hangover. His brain feels melted and loose. By the blue glow of an infomercial, he stumbles toward the door expecting to find that Gloria has locked herself out.

The baby-faced hood is standing in the hall. He jumps back when Cree opens the door.

“Fuck do you want, little man?”

“Ernesto,” the kid says. “My name is Ernesto.”

“You know what time it is,
Ernesto
?”

“Don’t take me for a fool.” The kid crosses his arms, cocks his head to one side.

Cree rubs his head as if he can erase the muddy feeling in his brain.

“It’s your ma,” Ernesto says. “She went down. Over on Van Brunt.”

“Went down?”

“I saw it myself. Me and my boy were tagging the mailbox by the bus stop. She came down the steps of the bus, then she froze like she’d been electrocuted or something. Next thing, she’s on the ground. Some of them white kids from that bar called an ambulance.”

Although his heart is clenching and his breath comes short and tight, Cree doesn’t really trust this kid, this late-night messenger who’s been messing with his mother lately. Then his phone starts to buzz, the number of the hospital flashing on the screen.

“She’s alive?”

“Yeah,” Ernesto says.

As he runs down the hall, Cree listens to the nurse explain that his mom is in the ICU.

“Yo!” Ernesto calls after him. “Tell your boy, I did good by you.”

“My boy?”

“Ren. Tell Ren that I did you a solid.”

He runs the two miles to the hospital, which takes less time than waiting for the bus. He’s out of breath when he places both palms on the admitting desk in the emergency room. When he asks for Gloria, the receptionist takes her time tapping the name into her computer. While the computer pulls up the record, she sorts through files lying on her desk

“Gloria James,” Cree says. “Gloria James.”

Just as she locates his mother’s file, Carmen, one of Gloria’s coworkers from pediatrics, appears in the emergency room and takes Cree by the arm, leading him toward the ward.

“I was just clocking out when they brought her in,” Carmen says. “We made sure she got a room.” Carmen has a deep West Indian accent that can be harsh when she’s being authoritative or soothing when she’s patient. “It seems she’s had a stroke.”

“Bad?”

“Bad.”

“And—”

“They don’t know anything yet. It’s too soon. For now they have her hooked up.” Carmen pats Cree’s hand. “She can’t talk, baby. You should know.”

His mother lies in a hospital bed. She’s hooked up to oxygen. An IV is plugged into her hand. Her face is twisted, and her mouth is partially open like a photo taken at the punch line of a joke. A team of nurses swarms past him and wheels Gloria out. One pushes the rattling gurney; two others keep pace with the IVs and oxygen.

Cree stands alone in the room, listening to the whir of the instruments, the static of the intercom. He’s been around the hospital enough to know not to follow when they take Gloria for tests.

Gloria’s room has a view of the river, the tip of Manhattan and Jersey. Cree can see the rectangular silhouettes of the Houses—a few windows lit with weak light. The nurses bring Gloria back, hooked up to more tubes and more machines. Her breathing and heartbeat are underscored by short beeps and the rhythmic compression of air.

The doctor, a middle-aged Indian with dead eyes, tells Cree that Gloria is stable. It could be months before they know how much damage has been done. So maybe Cree would like to wait somewhere else, at home, perhaps, where he can sleep.

Cree says nothing and Carmen explains that he will be waiting right here. She’s brought him blankets and pillows and converted three chairs into a makeshift bed.

When Cree and Gloria are alone, he takes her hand. Her face is twisted into its painful smile. He squeezes her fingers, careful not to jostle her IV. He wipes the tear that slides down her cheek.

The lights of Manhattan drop their reflections into the river. The taillights of cars on the expressway flow west. Cree watches the boats cut wakes on the dark water. He sees two tugs disappear upriver.

He knows he won’t sleep. He goes down to the lobby for a soda. He takes his drink outside, inhaling the Brooklyn scent and expelling the antiseptic hospital air. He steps to the side of the revolving door, making way for patients who stagger in and out.

“Yo. Yo, my man.”

Cree turns but can’t tell who’s calling to him.

“Yo, Cree. Cree James.”

Cree glances across the street where a tiered parking garage casts checkered light onto the street. Standing in one illuminated square is Ren. Cree crosses to him.

“You still following me?”

“I heard about your moms. I brought you something,” Ren says.

“I don’t need it.”

Ren hands over a long package wrapped in newspaper. “Your telescope. I thought you might want it to keep tabs. You know, from her window and all.” He jams his hands in his pockets and turns. He pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his tufts of hair. “Be well.”

Cree watches him walk down the street, then bolts back into the building, and runs up the eight flights of stairs and rushes to Gloria’s window. He trains the telescope on the street, trying to locate Ren. But the boy is ghost.

V
al feels Mr. Sprouse watching her in the cafeteria. He’s standing by the door near the lunch line, a small Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand. Recently, she’s noticed the music teacher’s eyes on her in the hallway or on the steps of the school—a gaze that lingers long after she expected him to look away.

Ever since Anna’s party, Val has eaten lunch alone. The girls at the surrounding tables don’t bother to keep their gossip to a whisper. They talk about her breaking the mirror. They exaggerate the story, confident she won’t come over and correct them. Irish Mikey becomes her boyfriend, her pimp, a hard-core slinger of crack, a gun-carrying lowlife. She doesn’t have the courage to remind her classmates that Anna was the one who summoned Mikey, hoping for something stronger than the dimes of schwag he sells. But even worse, they talk about June.

Val looks up from her lunch and sees Mr. Sprouse walking toward her table.

“Mind if I join you?”

The girls at the neighboring table slow their chatter to watch the music teacher and Val—a girl so lame only a teacher is willing to eat with her.
It could be worse
, she thinks. The teacher standing in front of her table waiting for her reply could have been Mr. Landers, the geometry teacher who scatters seed to pigeons on his way from the subway, or it could have been Mrs. Bloodworth who everyone is sure likes her students more than she should. At least Mr. Sprouse is good-looking. Even the bitchiest of her classmates would agree.

“Go ahead,” Val says. “They’ll run their mouths anyway.”

Her classmates’ rumors keep June alive. Somebody’s heard that June was spotted near the seedy strip clubs underneath the expressway in Sunset Park. Someone said she ran away with her older boyfriend. Someone is sure she’s living in a halfway house upstate.

“Now that June’s missing, everybody knows everything about her. They make her up as they go along.”

“Ignore it,” Mr. Sprouse says.

“Easy for you to say. It’s not like I have a million other friends to distract me.”

“People prefer a good story to a real tragedy,” Mr. Sprouse says. “Don’t listen to them.” He splays his hands on the table, transforming the scarred Formica into piano keys. His eyelids drop as he bangs out a song audible only in his head.

“What are you doing?” Val asks.

“Tuning them out.” He plays another string of invisible notes. “It’s Bach. Can’t you hear?”

“No.”

“Listen.” He inclines his head toward the table. Val does the same. She hears the pads of his fingers drumming the plastic, then a four-bar melody whistled into her ear that matches the notes. His lips brush her earlobe, electrifying the fine hairs. Mr. Sprouse pulls his hands back and drops them into his lap.

“You cheated. You whistled,” Val says.

“It worked. Ignoring people is an art. I do it all the time. On the other hand, I’m often ignored. You’ll get the hang of it.”

Erin Medina, a bottle blonde in the class above Val’s, starts talking loudly, raising her voice so it carries through the crowded lunchroom. “So last weekend, you know, I had to go to New Jersey because of my little brother and whatever. He wanted to go to this lame theme park.”

Val turns.

“Ignore,” Mr. Sprouse says.

“The park was supersad, but you’ll never guess who I saw.” Erin pauses and sips her can of iced tea. “June.”

Val stiffens. “Ignore her,” the music teacher repeats. Val looks at him, wondering if he’ll play his invisible piano for her, lower his lips to her ear once more.

“She was kinda beat-up looking, street kid style.”

“You’re sure it was her?” one of Erin’s classmates asks.

“What kind of question is that? I’m not blind. Of course it was her. She’d dyed her hair black. So I went up to her and I was, like, ‘Hey, I like your hair.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, whatever. Thanks.’”

“You didn’t ask her anything else?” the same classmate says.

“Like what? No, she was with this creepy older guy,” Erin says.

Val stands up. She ignores Mr. Sprouse who’s trying to draw her back into her seat. She marches over to Erin’s table. The girls look up from their lunches. Val grips Erin by the shoulder, tugging so Erin must wheel round to face her.

“You’re a liar,” Val says. “You’re a liar and you know it.”

“You’re crazy,” Erin says, “and
everyone
knows it.” She looks to her companions for backup.

Val’s face feels hot. Her nose stings with the threat of tears. “You’re liars,” she says. She’s shouting now, at this table of girls and the surrounding ones.

“You’re lying about June. You didn’t even know her. She’d never do any of the things you say.”

Erin and her friends inch back in their seats, as if they are worried Val’s going to strike or spit.

There’s no way to hold back her tears. June isn’t running around with a dangerous, older boyfriend. She isn’t waiting on line for a roller coaster. She hasn’t started wearing Goth makeup. She hasn’t cut or dyed her hair.

“June’s dead,” Val shouts. “She’s dead.” The cafeteria falls silent. Several teachers stand up and start making their way toward Val.

June is dead. That’s that. The moment Val says this, she knows it’s true. It doesn’t matter how many vigils are held, how many special assemblies. It doesn’t matter how many of her classmates write themselves into June’s life, how many of them try to reinvent June for their own pleasure. There are no songs, rituals, shrines, or prayers that will change this. June is dead. She’s swollen, bloated, rigid, decaying. She exactly as she appeared to Val in the mirror, except real. And it’s Val’s fault.