The Bridge: A Novel

by Solomon Jones

  When she left her aunt Judy’s, Kenya ran down the hall, past the elevator and into the stairwell, with its piss-stained corners and stale smoke.

  “Where you goin’, Kenya?”

  She turned around and saw Janay coming down the steps with jump ropes in her hands.

  “I was lookin’ for you,” Kenya answered.

  “You wanna play double Dutch?”

  “Okay.”

  The two girls ran down the remaining steps together, hoping they would run into someone else who wanted to play.

  They made their way out onto the sidewalk, anxiously looking up and down the street for some little girl who would be willing to turn the ropes. When she saw that there was no one else outside, Kenya sat down on the pole that ran along the length of the littered patches of grass outside the projects.

  “Don’t look like we gon’ be playin’ double Dutch no time soon,” she said.

  “What you doin’ out so early, anyway?” Janay asked, sitting down next to her friend.

  “I was tryin’ to find you so we could play tag.”

  “Why you always wanna play them little corny games?” Janay snorted.

  “Cause I got corny friends,” Kenya said, smirking.

  “Yeah, right,” Janay said with a giggle. “I’m the one showed you how to be cool.”

  “No you didn’t. It was them mice in your house—you know, the ones that be sittin’ at the table at dinner, talkin’ ’bout, ’pass the peas.’”

  Both girls laughed. But beneath the laughter, they knew the truth. Kenya would much rather live at Janay’s apartment than her own. In truth, anyone would.

  For the next few minutes, they sat quietly, absorbed in their own thoughts.

  “There go that bitch right there!” Rochelle yelled out from behind them.

  Janay stood up and gripped the jump ropes in her hands as Rochelle and her cousins approached. Kenya stood up, too, because she knew what was coming.

  Janay had been friends with the older girl until about a month before. That was when Rochelle found out that her boyfriend had tried to get Janay’s number. Janay, who was developing more quickly than Rochelle and most other twelve-year-olds, didn’t give it to him. In truth, she wasn’t even allowed to accept phone calls from boys. But that didn’t matter to Rochelle.

  She had seen Kenya and Janay coming outside from the window of her first-floor apartment. And remembering the rage she’d felt after finding out about her boyfriend trying to talk to Janay, Rochelle gathered her two cousins and rushed outside to catch her.

  Janay had managed to avoid Rochelle before. But from the look of the cornrows and the smear of Vaseline on Rochelle’s face, there would be no avoiding her this time. But Kenya, ever the peacemaker, tried to reason with her anyway.

  “Look, Rochelle,” Kenya said, stepping in front of Janay, “why don’t you go ‘head with that? Janay ain’t never say nothin’ to that boy. You need to be steppin’ to him, not her.”

  “Mind your business,” Rochelle said, pushing her.

  Kenya stumbled backward.

  Janay dropped her jump ropes and punched Rochelle hard across the jaw, knocking her into her younger cousin, who fell down and clutched her ankle.

  Rochelle swung a wild left hook at Janay, who ducked and hit Rochelle in the stomach with two sharp uppercuts.

  Rochelle doubled over as Janay grabbed a cornrow that had shaken loose in the melee. Janay swung wildly with her left hand, hitting Rochelle repeatedly in the face.

  Rochelle’s older cousin, who until then had watched in stunned silence, grabbed Janay and wrestled her to the ground. But Janay still had a grip on Rochelle’s hair, and Rochelle fell on top of both of them.

  Rochelle’s younger cousin, who was crying now, let go of her ankle, got up from the ground, and ran into the building.

  Seeing her friend pinned under two girls, Kenya started swinging. The first punch landed squarely on the back of Rochelle’s neck, and her forehead hit the sidewalk. She lay there writhing in pain as Janay got up and started punching Rochelle’s cousin.

  Kenya joined her, and by the time it was over, both Rochelle and her cousin were on the ground, curled up and trying to block the blows.

  Janay and Kenya stopped, then stood there for a moment, surveying the damage they had done.

  “Told you to stop messin’ with me,” Janay said.

  Rochelle peeked out from behind her arms, got up, and stumbled back a little as she tried to regain her balance.

  “This shit ain’t over,” she said as she helped her cousin get up from the ground. “Trust me, it ain’t over.”

  Lily took it all in when her daughter Janay and Kenya walked into her apartment. Janay’s clothes were filthy. There was a scrape on her knee. And the jump ropes she’d taken with her when she’d left the apartment were gone.

  “What you done got into nine o’clock in the mornin’?” Lily asked from the kitchen as she wet a clean towel and rushed into the living room.

  “It wasn’t her fault, Miss Lily,” Kenya said. “Rochelle and them started it.”

  “I told you ’bout hangin’ around that girl,” Lily said as she dabbed at Janay’s scraped knee, “wit’ her fast-ass self.”

  “I wasn’t hangin’ with her, Mom. She came outside and started messin’ with me ’cause she thought I was tryin’ to talk to her little dirty boyfriend.”

  Lily stopped dabbing at Janay’s knee and looked up into her eyes, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

  “She pushed Kenya,” Janay said, looking down at her mother. “So I hit her.”

  Lily stood up, went into the bathroom, and came back to the living room with a Band-Aid.

  “Lemme tell you somethin’, Janay,” Lily said as she bandaged her daughter’s knee and sat down across from her. “Rochelle and the rest o’ these little girls around here—they gon’ grow up a lot faster than you. Some o’ these same little hoodlums y’all call yourself fightin’ over gon’ be dead or in jail in two or three years. And Rochelle and the rest of ’em gon’ still be here in these projects, carryin’ they babies. And you know what’s gon’ happen to Rochelle and them after that? They gon’ be stuck right here for the rest o’ they life. And if you keep goin’ out here runnin’ behind ’em, yo’ ass gon’ be stuck here, too.”

  “But, Mom, I—”

  “But nothin’. You nine years old, Janay. Ain’t a boy on this earth worth fightin’ over, especially these boys around here. You think I work two jobs every day so you can be out here fightin’ over these nothin’-ass boys? I’m tryin’ to get us the hell outta here.”

  “Mom,” Janay said, explaining slowly as if she was speaking to a child, “I won the fight.”

  “That’s even more reason for you to stay outta that foolishness. These people ’round here’ll make a fight between little girls into somethin’ it ain’t even gotta be. Now I don’t want you out there in that mess no more. You hear me?”

  Kenya was sitting on a chair across from them, watching as Lily stared hard at her daughter and grabbed her arm.

  “I said, ’Do you hear me?’”

  “Yes,” Janay said in a near whisper.

  “All right then. Get in there and change your clothes. Kenya, you come here.”

  Kenya came and sat between Lily’s legs as the woman reached over and grabbed a comb and hair grease from the end table.

  “Look at you with your hair all over your head. I guess you jumped in it, too, huh?”

  “They was gon’ try to jump Janay,” she said. “I ain’t know what else to do.”

  Lily smiled. If her daughter was going to have a friend, she was glad that it was Kenya. At least the girl was loyal.

  As Lily pulled the comb through a tangled patch of Kenya’s hair, she thought of how the girl would stay at her home for hours—doing her homework during the school year, and then staying up with Janay, playing with dolls, and eventually, staying over.

  “It ain’t a lot of little girls ’round here I w
ould let in my house,” Lily said as she deftly twisted Kenya’s hair into cornrows. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Kenya thought about that as she felt the comb working through her hair.

  “I wouldn’t wanna go to a lotta people house,” Kenya said, looking down at her hands sadly. “Not even mine.”

  Lily started to respond, then thought better of it. She knew what the child meant.

  “Sometime I wish I lived with you, Miss Lily,” Kenya said softly. “I wish I could stay here so I wouldn’t have to go back.”

  After Lily finished Kenya’s hair, and Janay bathed and changed her clothes, the two of them went outside and played as if the fight with Rochelle had never happened.

  Between trips to the store to get twenty-five-cent Hugs and bags of Andy Capp Hot Fries, they played until the sun sank down in the sky and rested against the rooftop of the high-rise.

  By seven o’clock, they had switched games and were playing tag. That’s when Lily came to her apartment window and called Janay in for dinner.

  “Come on, Kenya,” Janay said as she started toward home. “You know you want some o’ that chicken my mom made. Don’t even front.”

  Kenya hadn’t planned on fronting. She was hungry, and she knew that Aunt Judy probably hadn’t cooked. So Kenya followed Janay inside, and the two of them sat at the table as Lily zipped around the kitchen, placing chicken legs, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes on plastic plates.

  “Bless the food, Janay,” Lily said as she wiped her hands on a towel and sat down at the table with the girls.

  “God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food,” Janay mumbled, pausing and lifting her eyes to glance across the table. “And thank you for sending my friend Kenya to eat it with us. Amen.”

  Kenya scooped up a forkful of mashed potatoes and slowly lifted them to her mouth.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl?” Lily said. “You don’t like my cookin’ no more?”

  “I like it, Miss Lily. It’s just that …”

  She let the rest of the sentence trail off.

  “It’s just that what?”

  “Nothin’,” Kenya said, swallowing the potatoes.

  She pushed the food back and forth on her plate. Kenya thought that if she stayed late enough, Miss Lily would call her Aunt Judy and ask if she could spend the night.

  Lily nipped it in the bud with her usual forthrightness.

  “You can’t spend the night tonight, Kenya. Your Aunt Judy want you to come home.”

  “I wasn’t tryin’ to spend the night, Miss Lily,” Kenya said in her best little-girl voice. “My mom supposed to be comin’ over tonight, and I gotta be home when she get there. We goin’ to the movies.”

  Lily started to call her on the lie. But she would see Kenya the next evening and talk with her about it then.

  Lynch, Janay, and Lily sat for a long time after they finished talking. There seemed to be no sound in the room. But in reality, they were listening to the echoes of Kenya’s story.

  It was a story that was at once haunting and heart-rending, hopeful and sad. They all desperately wished for it to go on. They only hoped that there would somehow be more to tell. For now, though, there were only regrets.

  “I wish I woulda just let her stay here with me,” Lily said, shaking her head. “But Judy ain’t want her stayin’ here no more. She knew how Kenya felt about me, and she ain’t like it. She ain’t want us bein’ that close.”

  “Had you and Judy had some kind of falling-out?” Lynch asked.

  “Darnell and me was seein’ each other for a while back before he started smokin’.”

  Lynch tried unsuccessfully to hide his surprise.

  “What, I can’t want a man, too?” Lily said with an embarrassed smile. “I was lonely, and he used to come here to get Kenya when she would spend the night. I guess one thing just led to another. And Judy ain’t like it when she found out. We stopped speakin’, and after while, she stopped lettin’ Kenya spend the night down here.”

  “So she could stay here during the day, but at night, she had to go home, even though Judy knew what was going on in her apartment?” Lynch asked.

  “That ain’t matter. Judy just wanted to be in control o’ somethin’. She wasn’t nobody otherwise—just Sonny woman. Some old has-been livin’ in the projects. Kenya was the only thing in her life where she had some say, so she tried to control everything Kenya did. And even though she knew it woulda been better for Kenya to stay at my place—someplace safe and stable, without a whole buncha people runnin’ in and out—Judy wanted to call the shots.

  “Sad part of it is, she ain’t care about Kenya for real. ’Cause if she did, she wouldn’ta spent so much time tryin’ to keep her from the people who loved her the most.”

  Lynch nodded and turned to Janay. “So what about the fight with Rochelle? Did you take her seriously when she said it wasn’t the end of it?”

  “Not really,” Janay said. “I mean, Rochelle, she kinda crazy, and she like to fight. But usually, somethin’ like that, we probably end up bein’ friends again sooner or later.”

  “But when she said it wasn’t over, did you think she would be coming back or trying to involve other people?” Lynch asked.

  “It wasn’t like we rolled on ’em or nothin’ like that. Her cousin ran, and it was two-on-two. If they wanted to fight some more, they probably woulda came back outside when we did. But they didn’t, so I thought it was over.”

  “Did you take it seriously, Lily?”

  “If I woulda took that mess seriously, I wouldn’ta let Janay and Kenya go back outside. Far as Rochelle and them, I know her people, and I know they ain’t even like that. Rochelle mom go to work every day just like I do, and she one o’ the few people in this place I know I could go and talk to if I had to.”

  “So why’d you tell Janay that it could escalate into something bigger?”

  “I told her for next time,” Lily said. “’Cause next time she get out there fightin’, it might be some people that ain’t tryin’ to let it go at that.”

  “I’m still gonna have to talk to the girl and her mother,” Lynch said. “Just to cover all the bases. What apartment are they in?”

  “They in ID,” Lily said. “Rochelle mother name Florine. We call her Flo.”

  Lynch jotted down the information.

  “But the person you really need to be lookin’ at is that girl Tyreeka. She the last one seen Kenya. She was with her Friday night. But then she disappeared with some drug dealer from down Twelfth and Parrish.”

  “Where’s the boy now?”

  “I don’t know. We went down there yesterday—”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and Darnell and Tyreeka mother. We went down there to talk to him, and it turned out Sonny stole the boy car and used it to get away from y’all. So the boy act like he was gon’ try to find Sonny. He left the corner, and ain’t nobody seen him since. And Tyreeka, she come traipsin’ her li’l stank ass back here yesterday afternoon with a bunch o’ shoppin’ bags. She say she left Kenya at the front o’ the buildin’. But I think she lyin’. ’Cause her and that boy claim he gave her some money, and that’s how she bought all that mess down the Gallery. But I think somebody paid her to keep her mouth shut or somethin’.”

  “What apartment is she in?”

  “Somewhere on the tenth floor. Ask somebody up there, they’ll be able to tell you.”

  Lynch caught up on his notes and spoke without looking up. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  Lily hesitated, then looked down at her daughter Janay.

  “You ain’t gon’ say you talked to us. Right, Kevin? ’Cause I really don’t want my name up in it.”

  “I already promised you I wouldn’t mention you or Janay,” Lynch said. “I’m going to stick to that.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you know this or not,” Lily said. “But Janay saw Sonny on the elevator Saturday mornin’. I started to call 9-I-I, but like I s
aid, I ain’t want Janay name in it. So I went up to the cop that was guardin’ Judy door and told him I was the one who seen him. But really, it was Janay.”

  “How did you happen to see him?” Lynch asked Janay.

  “I had came out to see if I could find Kenya after Miss Daneen came in here and said she was missin’. I thought maybe if I went outside, I might see her. But when I went to catch the elevator and the doors opened, Mr. Sonny was on there.”

  “What was he doing?” Lynch asked.

  “Looked like he mighta been goin’ up to the roof. He pushed the twelfth-floor button a couple times.”

  “Was anyone on the elevator with him?”

  “No, but it was a piece o’ Kenya shirt on the floor in the corner.”

  “Did he seem nervous?”

  “He just seemed like he was in a rush. I don’t think he seen that piece o’ her shirt, and if he did, he ain’t seem worried about it. I just remember him askin’ me if I was gettin’ on, and he kept lookin’ at his watch. Then the doors closed, and I came back and told my mom I saw him.”

  “Do you remember what time it was?”

  “I just know it was after seven o’clock, ’cause I remember the first cartoon was on Channel 29 ’round that time. I tried to watch it, but I couldn’t, ’cause I kept thinkin’ ’bout Kenya.”

  “Thanks, Janay,” Lynch said, turning to Lily.

  “There’s only one more thing I need to know from you,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “In your gut, what do you really think happened to Kenya?”

  Lily was quiet for a long time.

  “I think she got mixed up in somethin’ she ain’t have nothin’ to do with. And whatever it was, it had somethin’ to do with that apartment up there. I don’t know if it was Sonny and Judy, or if it was one o’ them men that be up there smokin’ and trickin’.

  “But I tell you one thing. Kenya was loved. She still is. And the deeper you get into this, the more you gon’ find out how much. People you thought ain’t never give a damn ’bout that girl gon’ come up out the woodwork.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Lynch said as he got up and walked to the door.