Visitation Street (7 page)

The phone goes straight to voice mail. An automated voice tells Val that June’s mailbox is full. She crosses her fingers, holds her breath, counts backward from ten. She calls again and again, listening to June’s message, which she knows by heart, trying to believe that June will “get right back” to her.

Val dials Rita.

“Because of you I’m stuck at home tonight,” her sister says. “They say I’m responsible for you. Like I can keep track of every one of your crappy ideas.”

“What about June—”

“Nothing,” Rita says.

Val hangs up. The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs in the waiting room makes her head hurt. She fingers the bump on the back of her skull, tracing her stitches through the bandage. She closes her eyes. She counts to ten. Then she calls June until she exhausts her phone’s battery.

She presses her head against the window. From behind the heavy glass she watches New York stream and flicker—taxis shooting up the river-side drive, the blank-faced office buildings still lit up at night. She turns one of the handles on the window but it’s painted shut. She pulls the handle trying to shake the window loose. She barely rattles the glass. She turns and presses a shoulder against the pane but nothing happens.

Val wanders through the hospital, passing the incubated glow of the maternity wards and the locked double doors of the psych unit. She takes the elevator to the ground floor and finds herself amid the chaos of the emergency room where patients clutch and groan and sleep until someone notices.

She lingers by the desk, watching relatives and friends demand care, demand to see doctors, demand to talk to the person in charge and the person in charge of that person.

She heads into the lobby where there’s a Taco Bell and an Au Bon Pain, and beyond these a revolving door that leads to the street. No one is watching her. No one would notice if she slipped out. It would be simple to leave and start looking for June.

When she takes a step toward the exit, the door revolves, bringing in a hot gust of Brooklyn night. It spins again. And then three paramedics burst through the wheelchair entrance, pushing a gurney carrying a female figure into the hospital. They shove Val aside.

One of the paramedics heads to the admitting desk while the other two go to work on the figure on the gurney. All Val can make out are matted reddish-brown curls and a face smeared with blood. A thin sheet poorly disguises the ample curves of the body beneath it.

“I know her,” Val says, pushing her way toward the gurney. A nurse takes Val by the arm and pulls her out of range.

“June,” Val screams.

The paramedics make room for a doctor and two nurses. All of them are yelling at once, speaking in code. They wheel the gurney out of the waiting room and into a hallway.

The doctor grabs a set of paddles from the paramedic and presses them onto the patient’s chest. Her body heaves and flops. He jolts her again.

They are doing something to her throat, cutting, inserting a tube. They are pounding on her as if she is incapable of feeling.

No one notices Val. “June,” she says. “June!”

All the girls’ minor transgressions and small truancies fly into Val’s head, their childhood misdemeanors and thoughtless disobediences. Val runs the numbers on these, desperately calculating if a cigarette, a stolen magazine could have brought June here.

In eighth grade the girls skipped school for the first time. They took the back stairs. They shed their uniforms, revealing tank tops and shorts. They planned on taking the subway into the city, but they lost their nerve. Instead, they walked deeper into Brooklyn than they ever had been before.

They crossed from Red Hook into Sunset Park, stomping through the wilds of its industrial waterfront. They found a maze of train and trolley tracks—some stopped dead in the middle of cobblestone causeways, and others dove into the water. They skidded on the mossy overgrowth on an abandoned pier. They passed through an apple orchard. They waded across murky marshland and through shoulder-high weeds. They hurried past empty warehouses and tried to ignore the hollow strike of phantom footfalls.

It took them two hours to reach Bay Ridge, at Brooklyn’s far corner. The waterfront there was tame and vast. A manicured causeway for pedestrians and bicycles ran parallel to an expressway. The girls skipped over the concrete of the Sixty-Ninth Street Pier and headed up the seawall promenade until they came to the Verrazano Bridge.

Wind rushed over the open promenade, inciting the water and twisting the girls’ hair into knots. Bicycles and joggers passed them while cars accelerated on the adjacent expressway. The bridge loomed overhead. Its color and ribbed underbelly reminded Val of the giant blue whale that towered over the girls during a class trip to the Museum of Natural History. And standing underneath the bridge, she was filled with the same panic she had felt in the Hall of Ocean Life in the museum—an undeniable awareness of the unknown.

The Bay Ridge waterfront was the farthest either of the girls had ever been from home unaccompanied. Val insisted they keep going. When June wanted to head back, Val leaped over the promenade’s fence and scrambled onto the rocks at the water’s edge. She tiptoed along the rocks, daring June to follow.

June sat on the railing, watching Val, calling to her that if she didn’t turn around in two seconds, she was out of there. And then Val slipped, wedging her foot between two rocks where the suction of mud and water would not let her go.

June picked her way down and calmed her, told her to stop struggling or it would cause her foot to swell and they’d never get her free. She knelt on the slimy rocks and stuck her hands into the crevice without complaining about the filth and mud as she dug to free Val’s foot. She’d worked patiently, shredding her fingers. And then when Val’s foot was free, she fell backward, landing on her wrist and spraining it.

The doctor charges the paddles once more. The body tenses and falls limp. He replaces the paddles and walks away. One of the nurses writes something on a clipboard. They discuss where to move the dead girl.

Val approaches the stretcher. The body is turned away from her. All she can see is blood-matted curls.

She places her fingers on the girl’s forehead, rotating it toward her. The skin is cool and clammy. The head falls toward Val. She understands that this is not June behind the mask of blood. Val returns to her room.

She sits by the window clutching the figurine of the Virgin. She rocks back and forth in her chair, then leans her head on the glass. The expressway rumbles. Sirens roll in the distance. A woman in an apartment building across from the hospital is sitting on her fire escape. On another fire escape above her two men are lying on a mattress holding hands, watching the sky. On the next roof over three women and a man are sitting in a kiddie pool tossing a beach ball. In the window below them an older man with a telescope is looking at the sky.

On the river two tugs pull a container ship into dock. A bouquet of fireworks explodes from a small fishing boat lit up with red and orange Christmas lights.

Val waits for the moon to slide across the water, showing her where June slipped from her grasp.

The city and river wink and glimmer. Taillights dwindle to beady red points and wide-eyed headlamps draw close then disappear. The water cups the skyline’s reflection—a ghost city. Val clutches the plastic figurine until it begins to cut into her skin. She counts backward from ten, and then she begins to pray for the pink raft to appear in the river below.

T
he Seventy-Sixth Precinct smells of burned coffee. The vinyl tile is the color of a murky swimming pool. The windows are double-thick glass and don’t look out on much besides the blank stucco of a neighboring town house.

Jonathan sits at a large brown Formica table with a faux wood grain finish. He stares out the window of his interrogation room watching detectives lean into their small desk fans, cooling off the space between their collars and their necks.

When he demanded his one phone call, the cops laughed. He’s not under arrest and he can make as many phone calls as he likes. But there’s no phone in here and he left his cell in his apartment. The officers assure him that he’s in for routine questioning. Missing kids are no joke they say, as if Jonathan might have been under this impression.

Jonathan’s hangover has crept past the fog of his Tylenol PM, leaving an infuriating numbness that makes his eyes feel as if they are wearing sweaters. Now he hears his thoughts as he thinks them, a maddening echo of each unpleasant idea.

He fiddles with the table, chipping the Formica, worrying that he has cast doubts on his innocence by asking for a phone call. If the officers return, cuff him, lead him to a cell, he wonders who he can reach.

The only person he’s sure to get is Dawn. The girl never sleeps. He can imagine the scene if she waltzed into the station. She’d make him pay for summoning her by wearing an aqua mesh midriff top, hot pants, and platform go-go boots. She swears only “fags” wear heels before dark.
I’m a queen. It’s different
, she says.

Jonathan digs his fingers into his temples as if he can squeeze the hangover out. All morning he has been struggling to banish memories of his mother, but when he closes his eyes he sees Eden’s body, her seaweed-knotted hair. And now he confuses this picture with the girl under the pier. He mistakes the pale moons of their nails, their shriveled fingers, the mud and gravel on their palms. The last time he’d seen Eden—the last time he’d been out to his parents’ summer home—her face was the color of moonstone. It looked as if the bay had sunk into her cheeks and was struggling to push back out.

As the police wrapped her in a blanket, the sun broke over the bluffs on Castle Road on the eastern shore of Fishers Island. A soft orange glow—a warm color that brought no warmth—crept from Eden’s chin, to her cheeks, then illuminated eyes that were as still and opaque as marbles. Jonathan watched two men lift his mother into the ambulance. Three days later, when he took the ferry back to the mainland, he knew he wouldn’t return.

He stands up and walks to the window so he can watch the detectives who brought him in passing around a photo of a girl in a Catholic school uniform. Jonathan knows this girl as well as the one he found under the pier. He’s seen them together waiting for the 61 bus on Van Brunt. He’s noticed them in the halls of St. Bernardette’s before they faded back into the sea of plaid skirts and white blouses.

The room is soundproof. He watches the police move around as if they are in a silent movie. He watches the pantomime of their lips against the receivers of their beige desk phones. Without noise their business loses its urgency and becomes slapstick—the muted rush of two detectives grabbing their jackets from their chairs and dashing for the door, the comic exaggeration of the station’s chief chewing out a uniformed officer.

When two detectives enter his room, they bring with them a tumble of noise—the ringing telephones, radio static, the metallic slam of desk drawers. Then the door closes and it is silent again.

“I know the girl,” Jonathan says, before the detectives have a chance to sit down. “Is she okay?”

One of the detectives drops a manila folder onto the table. He’s heavyset. He wears a tan suit. There are threads dangling from Detective Coover’s green-and-blue-striped tie. His partner, Hughes, is younger and wears a navy suit that’s a little too sharp for the station. He leans against the window and crosses his arms as if he has somewhere better to be.

“You teach either of them?” Coover says.

“No. They never signed up for my class.”

“You see either girl last night?”

“I was in the bar last night. I made a scene. Ask any of the regulars. Then I went to bed. The bartender will tell you.” Jonathan looks at the clock.

“You got into a fight last night?” Hughes says. Jonathan suspects that he’s recently been promoted. His inflection rises at the tail of his sentences, leaning greedily toward the next conclusion.

Jonathan shakes his head. “I sang a show tune. Too loud.”

Hughes glances at his partner but doesn’t catch his eye. “A show tune. Jesus.”

“Let’s go back to the pier.” Coover opens a notepad.

“I was taking a walk. I found the girl, Valerie.” Jonathan massages his temple. “She was cold. I don’t know how long she’d been there.”

“Do you have any idea how she got the cut on the back of her head?” Coover asks.

“No.”

“Did you see a weapon?”

“I wasn’t looking for one.”

“But did you see one?”

“No.”

“She’ll be fine. But she’s got one hell of a cut. Someone or something banged her up.” Coover scratches behind his ear. “Any sign of the other girl?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone else down there?”

“No.”

“No one on the pier? No kids from the Houses?”

“No one.” Jonathan rubs his head. “Yes, maybe someone. I’m not sure from the Houses or not. But he was black, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s what he’s asking,” Hughes says.

“How old?” Coover says.

“I don’t know. Eighteen. Twenty-one. I’m not an expert.”

“What was he doing?”

“Nothing. Walking. I didn’t get a good look.”

“Walking. Just walking?”

“Yeah. Walking.”

“Can we show you some photos?”

Hughes pokes his head out of the room and signals for an officer, who brings him a binder. The detectives place the book on the table in front of Jonathan. They flip through the laminate pages of mug shots—black kids in their late teens with sullen, wary expressions.

Hughes’s breathing is heavy, each breath tense and expectant. He makes a small clicking noise each time Jonathan turns the page without making an ID. The photographs with their numbers and fine print make Jonathan queasy. Hughes’s musky cologne just about finishes him off. He looks toward the window, trying to take comfort in the air and light outside.

“Concentrate,” Hughes says, tapping the book. Jonathan notices that his nails are manicured.

But Jonathan can only think of Valerie—her chilled, drained body, the band of blood at the base of her skull. He remembers how she hung limp in his arms, the piano beat of her heart, the rasp of her breath. He feels no connection to the other girl, only to the one he found.