Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  He wades into the froth, hoists the board above his head, immediately feels that the energy lacking earlier is here now. The water has come alive. He drops the board and hauls himself up and zags the surface until a wave appears that might pose an actual challenge. And then he rides it straight into its hollow heart.

  PART FIVE

  The View from Here

  35

  Sunday

  A tiny child speeds past on a three-wheeled scooter and his mother chases, ponytail flying. Crisp watches until they vanish and Nolan Park is quiet again, just a couple picnicking on the grass and a lone woman reading on a bench.

  Laura, the resident artist, comes out of the house with their tea, piping hot chamomile, and puts it down to cool on the front steps. She sits beside Crisp.

  “Glad you decided to come back,” she says.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “That who you’re waiting for?” Her gaze follows Crisp’s to the man just then ambling into the park.

  Crisp doesn’t recall telling her he was waiting for anyone. It must be obvious. He says, “Yes.”

  She picks up one of the mugs, blows on it, stands. “Catch you later. Don’t leave without saying good-bye this time.”

  “I won’t.”

  Crisp studies everything about his father: the quick rhythm of his stride, the dark hue of his skin, the tight cut of his short hair, the deep set of his eyes, the breadth of his smile when he notices his grown son paying such close attention. Crisp’s brain toggles between Crespo and Ramsey, Crespo and Ramsey, unable to settle on which one he most needs this man to be: the miserable father or the inspired artist. Right now, there is no both.

  Mo raises a fist to bump hello but Crisp won’t go for it. Really? They aren’t a couple of dudes hanging out. He isn’t sure exactly what this is. Finally, Mo lowers his hand and asks, “How’d it go? At the police station.”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Called your mom. We talked.”

  “You talked?” Crisp can hardly imagine that conversation.

  Mo nods soberly. “I hurt her very badly.”

  “Did you now?”

  “I hurt you too. And I’m sorry.”

  But the words are ineffectual pellets against the hardness of this man’s actions. Crisp asks, “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  “I’m still your father.”

  “You were never my father.”

  “Okay. Well. I get it. Can I sit down?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You tell me when.”

  Feeling patronized, Crisp doesn’t respond to that. Confusion rears. He shakes his head. “I don’t know why I asked you to come here.”

  “I was wondering that myself.”

  “You know what?” Crisp realizing this as he speaks: “I didn’t ask you. I asked Wilson Ramsey. I used to read The Life of a Boy comics, I was really into it for a while—I mean, an invisible boy with no parents, no skin color, and superpowers? This is so fucked up I can’t even process it.”

  “Listen, man, I can’t process this shit either.”

  Despite himself, Crisp laughs.

  Mo’s smile returns. “Can Wilson Ramsey sit down, then?”

  “Answer me something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Am I the invisible boy?”

  “You don’t look invisible to me.”

  “I’m not, obviously. But was I? Back then? In your mind?”

  Mo takes a breath, nods. “I was trying to find you without looking, but I, well, let’s just say I was the worst mess you could imagine back when I was about your age and even older.”

  “‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’” Crisp echoes, delivering an unsubtle observation about his father’s narcissism, about how any father who abandons his children really only cares about himself when you strip away all the excuses. If Mo wants back into Crisp’s life now, and if Crisp agrees to take him, he will have to realize that no one’s going to make it easy.

  Mo’s eyebrows jerk up. “Yeah,” he says smoothly. “I do hear that.”

  “All right,” Crisp allows. “Wilson can sit down.”

  Mo places himself beside Crisp. “Never been to this island before, believe it or not.”

  “I hid out here all Friday morning.”

  “In this house?”

  Crisp reconsiders whether he really wants to show Mo, Wilson, whoever he is, the mural he started on Friday: how he tried to invent and define someone whose absence was a perpetual wound, how he tried and failed to turn a feeling into a person. He looks at Mo, loose skin on a round face, their matching chins, the sorry eyes, and returns to the decision he reached lying in bed last night. This is how he can take control of the situation, at least for now.

  “I want you to see something,” Crisp tells him.

  He leads Mo through the front door of the house. A white-haired woman in overalls kneels in one corner as if she’s trying to burrow into the wall. Without turning around, she says, “Laura?”

  “No—it’s Crisp,” he answers.

  “And Mo,” the father adds.

  “Don’t mind me,” she says. “If I take my eyes off this I’ll lose my line.”

  Reviewing his drawings, Crisp can’t tell if they’re better than he thought or worse. He can’t tell if the small figure in the various frames looks like a man or a woman or even a person or just a blob. He can’t tell if the stories are capable of translating from his thoughts into the mind of someone looking. He can’t tell if he even cares.

  Mo is looking. Looking intently. Stepping closer to see with tight focus. He asks Crisp, “You did this?”

  “Just to be clear, I’m not an artist of any kind and I have no intention of ever being one.”

  “Got that. This supposed to be me?”

  “Maybe. Yes.” Obviously.

  Mo looks at Crisp. “Want me to show you a thing or two?”

  Crisp hesitates, wondering if that’s a bad idea or a good idea. Every gesture from Mo feels overloaded. He answers, “Yeah, okay.”

  On their way to the supply cabinet, Mo asks, “What’s my superpower?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I’m the man, what’s my superpower? You going to make me invisible too?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  Standing in front of the open cabinet now, Mo inspects the paint markers. “Kind of meta. I like it. Except it could be more like a negative superpower, you feel me?”

  “Yeah.” And Crisp does; he does.

  Using varying shades of gray, Mo begins to teach Crisp about working with black on white, how to shadow and shade, to create suggestions of light and dark without forfeiting shape. How to nuance a simple line.

  As they work, bent together over the same patch of wall, Mo says, “You never answered me before. How’d it go with the cops?”

  Crisp’s pulse jackhammers. “Not sure I want to talk about it right now.”

  “No problem.”

  “I told the truth,” Crisp says anyway. The last time he saw Glynnie, she was sitting at that table with her parents and her fancy lawyer and the detectives. The next day, Crisp and his family gathered in Harry Johnson’s drab government-issue closet of a work space. The blind lawyer, who saw things more essential than what Crisp observed with his eyes, steered him smoothly through the process.

  His father asked a simple question and it feels stupid not to say what’s what. “I’m not the one in trouble. They’re charging Dante with breach of parole, unlawful firearms possession, and also kidnapping—for taking our phones and locking us in, and for grabbing JJ on his way to school. And Glynnie, my friend, she might have some problems.”

  “Dante Green.” Mo sucks in his lips, picks up a smoke-gray paint marker, and in a few deft strokes creates a comically malicious figure wearing a crown and a flowing cape.

  “That is spot-on. What, he have a thing for crowns his whole life?”

  Mo grins with what looks like satisfaction, hearin
g his son break free for a moment. “Used to wear a plastic crown on his head when he was a kid, till the guys told him he looked like a royal fool.”

  “His jacket has crowns all over it.”

  “Oh, my.” Mo shakes his head.

  “What were you thinking,” Crisp asks, “when he stepped into your Uber?”

  “I almost drove away, but he got in too fast.”

  “Should have run him over.”

  They share a laugh.

  “Listen, there’s another thing your mom told me about—this thing with school. College. You ever call them back? Find out what they wanted?”

  Crisp notices that Mo didn’t say Princeton, didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t. “I’m not so sure that place is for me,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “I won’t fit in.”

  “You think everybody there’s gonna be white, don’t you?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “Well if you don’t go, most everybody will be.” Mo laughs, but Crisp doesn’t, can’t.

  “I don’t even know if I’m black or if I’m white or what I am or even exactly who I am.”

  “You ever hear of Barack Obama?” Mo asks. “What is he?”

  “He’s just…Barack Obama.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not him.”

  “He wasn’t him either at the age of nineteen.”

  Mo has a point. Obama must have felt out of place in the Ivy League, at first, until he dominated with his brain and his talent and his decency and became just himself.

  Crisp asks, “Did you go to college?”

  “I got married and had a baby. I went to work. I junked it up. That’s three Is in a row—yeah, I’m a narcissist, you nailed me there. But you, you don’t have to be that. You go get yourself some real skills, turn things around, stop thinking so much about yourself. You go to that school. Unless…”

  “Yeah, I called them,” Crisp tells him. “I did. I don’t think they even know about any of the shit that went down.”

  “What’d they want, then?”

  “Somebody backed out of freshman year, some kid they gave a fellowship to. So they offered it to me, said I was second on the list.”

  “A fellowship.” Mo nods. “At Princeton.” Finally saying it, and with emphasis. “What kind?”

  “The lady called it a CLS—Critical Language Scholarship. For next summer. Something about the Department of State. I guess they think I’m good with languages.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “Then you go be that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That what you told them? Maybe?”

  “Stop trying to be my father, okay?”

  They get back to work on the wall. Crisp thinking now about next summer, which critical language he might choose to learn, because of course he told them yes.

  36

  Monday

  Flanked by her parents in the sedan’s backseat, Glynnie can see enough through the tinted windows to be reminded that it’s a bright June morning: people crossing streets with their takeout coffees en route to work, nannies pushing strollers. The car crosses Atlantic Avenue and leaves Boerum Hill behind for downtown, where a long line of people shuffle through a tall arched entry as the arraignment court opens for the day. Two news trucks are parked on Schermerhorn Street across from the court. Standing on the curb in front of it, reporters and cameramen wait together, chatting like old friends.

  The sedan loops around the block to a driveway that leads to an underground entrance that Ben Brafman arranged for them to use. Glynnie’s attorney waits inside the glass door, where, just as he promised, there isn’t a reporter or photographer in sight.

  He takes her elbow and draws her in front of her parents, who follow close behind. The lawyer’s cologne is strong up close. Orange juice bubbles up from her stomach into her throat and she coughs. She shouldn’t have eaten anything, but she wasn’t nervous then. She’s nervous now, though, being led through the corridors under the courthouse. Their footsteps sound like a cavalcade of horses. The smell of something fried lingers in the elevator. The air, when they step into another hallway, is too cold and the skin on her arms and neck prickles.

  Brafman opens a door marked Booking. He tells Mags and Nik, “Wait here, shouldn’t be too long.”

  Her mother tries to smile but Glynnie wishes she wouldn’t. Mags looks terrible, wrinkled and dry and beyond unrested. Her father put too much product in his short gray hair this morning and it holds the runnels left by his comb. She figures her parents are functioning the best they can without sleep. It’s been a long, long few days for all of them.

  The other night, as soon as they got home from the police station, her father went straight to his computer to make a fifty-thousand-dollar wire transfer to Ben Brafman, half for her bail, half for his retainer. In exchange, he arranged every shortcut in his power. He promised that, once she turned herself in, he’d plea down the initial charge of felony involuntary manslaughter to a misdemeanor. That there was a good chance she wouldn’t have to do any jail time. That she’d be in and out of booking so fast, with him at the helm, that she wouldn’t need to be transferred to a women’s holding facility somewhere else. Women’s, he said, and she knew that no one would ever again try calling her a girl.

  At the booking desk, a heavyset African American officer places each of Glynnie’s fingertips on a scanner one by one and uploads the images into her file. The glass feels greasy, which surprises her because she thought that, without ink, it would feel clean. Nothing about any of this, from Thursday night until now, has been what she expected.

  Next, she stands against a measurement chart and the officer snaps her photo, front and profile, both sides. Her face goes slack and heavy as a dead animal each time the shutter clicks. So this is what it feels like to be arrested when, in your mind, at least—in the context of the story as you experienced it, which, by default, was through a wholly subjective lens—you did the only thing you could have in the moment, made the only choices that seemed available to you, but at the end of the day it’s just another crime. Her mug shots are saved in the computer and it’s done: her identity is fixed in place.

  Is this how Crisp felt getting arrested last Wednesday? Watching your life take on a brand-new shape, knowing that even if you tried to smile you’d end up looking like shit in the photos.

  The booking officer tells Brafman, as if Glynnie isn’t even here, “You got about an hour before she can see the judge.”

  An hour. How can she wait here a whole hour? Brafman told them the process would be quick. But he doesn’t complain.

  He fake smiles at the clerk. “Thanks. Is there somewhere we can wait?”

  The officer’s gaze lifts off the screen and lands on Glynnie. “Holding cell, just like everyone else.”

  “No,” Brafman immediately argues. “She’ll be the only woman. It isn’t acceptable.”

  “We could get her transferred to Queens for the wait.”

  “Not for an hour. Let’s be reasonable.”

  The officer’s eyebrows lift like caterpillar humps. “Sir, I’ll need to get to my next customer now.” A little smirk when he says that: customer.

  Brafman looks at Glynnie as if to assess how much she can tolerate. She leans in to whisper, “There’s a basketball court on the roof. If it isn’t being used right now, could I wait there?”

  It takes several phone calls but the lawyer makes it clear that he’s worth his hefty retainer by swiftly accomplishing this minor goal. He goes to wait with her parents in the public area while a guard handcuffs Glynnie and escorts her back into the elevator. They ride in silence and get off at the last floor. He leads her through a hallway and past two locked gates. A box filled with worn basketballs sits outside a third gate.

  “Want one?” the guard asks.

  She shakes her head.

  He deposits her alone into the outdoor cage, clangs shut the gate, l
ocks it, and posts himself outside.

  Glynnie walks to the middle of the cage and recalls the snap snap snap of the basketball on Wednesday, how she looked up and saw Crisp. Now all she hears is the mixed rumble of traffic and restaurant generators from the streets below—the exact same urban cacophony you hear from the Dreyfus brownstone whenever you open a window.

  The view from up here is summer sky and an endless checkerboard of buildings. But if you pull in your gaze and look right in front of you, you see individual rooftops with trees and umbrellas and furniture. You see a cracked-spined sun-bleached book someone left on a table. You see a pair of sandals stashed in a corner by a door. You see the lazy snake of an uncoiled hose dangling off a spigot.

  You see the Dreyfus house.

  She stands at the fence and curls her fingers through the chain link and tries to see what Crisp saw when he spotted her on her roof the other day. She notices how nice her family’s deck looks from up here, nicer than she ever realized. She notices that the slew of buds on her mother’s rosebush are plumper than they were last week, almost ready to bloom. She tries to picture herself there last Thursday afternoon, smoking her dope, thinking her thoughts, feeling the sun on her skin, feeling so great because high school was finally over. But she can’t see it; that girl is gone.

  Acknowledgments

  Every idea that becomes a book is guided by silent partners who deserve distinction alongside the author. This book’s invisible hero is Emily Giglierano, whose extraordinary editorial instincts shone a path through thickets of early drafts as together we discovered the shape of this novel. I’m deeply grateful for her willingness to read and reread, to think and rethink, to talk and talk some more as we found our way to the heart of this story. It’s been a true pleasure to work with so many talented people at Mulholland Books and Little, Brown and Company: Josh Kendall, Reagan Arthur, Judy Clain, Maggie Southard Gladstone, Sabrina Callahan, Pamela Brown, Michael Noon, Nell Beram, Nicky Guerreiro, and Neil Heacox. At Mulholland UK, editor Ruth Tross continues to be a fantastic partner on every front. The other invisible hero standing behind this book is my agent and guiding force, Dan Conaway at Writers House, who, along with Andrea Vedder and Peggy Boulos Smith, keeps the channels open and the work flowing, always with heart. Last but certainly not least, thanks to my husband, Oliver, for all his love and support throughout our long shared journey.