I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I had come all this way, I had done all the right things, and I still didn’t get to meet him. It wasn’t fair. There’s nothing fair about life. Not one single thing. You just have to get through it the best way you know how.
I put my head in my hands. We could hear people outside screaming, “No Justice, No Peace!” over and over and over again. “No Justice, No Peace!” Then we heard a big whoosh and a POW! and we both lay flat on the floor and covered our heads.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“Probably a car exploding,” Meredith whispered.
“Meredith?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too,” she said.
Then we slowly sat up again and she skooched closer to me and gave me a hug. “Oh,” she said, looking at my pants.
“What?” I looked down. There was a big wet spot, like I had peed. It smelled like pee. But I didn’t remember peeing. Or thinking that I had to go. But there it was, darkening my jeans, running down my leg. “I can’t believe it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Meredith said. “It doesn’t matter.”
And as completely humiliating and totally awful as it was that I had peed my pants, she was right. At that moment, it didn’t really matter that much. I pressed my eye up to a crack in the door. “There’s a payphone right outside,” I said. “We could call Gina.”
“Gina’s in Niagara Falls,” Meredith said. “She can’t help us.”
She was right, of course, but I still wanted to talk to Gina at that moment more than anyone had ever wanted to talk to another person in the history of the world.
Then someone threw a brick through the window of Art’s Chili Dogs and glass shattered all over us.
“Fuck!” Meredith said, shaking out her hoodie.
A guy peered through the busted-out window and saw us and turned his head and yelled to someone else, “Hey, there’s white people in here! Get over here! We’ll get ’em,” and he started climbing through the window. We stood up, then the guy’s friend ran up and looked at us and said, “Those are just kids, man, shit.” And the other guy said, “Who cares?” and started coming for us. I opened the door and pulled the toque over my face and Meredith put her bandana back on and she held the hatchet up high and we ran. We ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.
Everywhere I looked, people were doing the wrong thing. People threw bricks through the windows of stores and cars, and people pushed and shoved and trampled over each other to get inside and take whatever they could. I saw someone drive a Jeep through the front doors of a furniture store and people come out carrying couches, mattresses, and bedside tables. I saw two men knock sledgehammers through the windows of a Radio Shack and people load TVs, ghetto blasters, VCRs, video cameras, and computers into shopping carts and the backs of trucks and cars and haul them away. I saw a bunch of kids pour out of a party supplies store. They carried a unicorn piñata and threw sparkly confetti all over each other. I saw a man wrecking a red Volkswagen Beetle with a golf club. I saw a lady pushing a piano down the street. I saw a brown UPS van turned on its side, burning in a parking lot. I saw people coming out of a grocery store with chips and cereal and melons and so many diapers. I saw three little kids roll burning tires down the street. I saw Asian men with shotguns up on the roofs of their stores, shooting at people who tried to break in. I saw a man set fire to a bus bench. I saw two little boys run out of a costume shop wearing rainbow-coloured clown wigs. I saw four teenagers stagger under the weight of a refrigerator. I saw a woman pulling a rack of clothes from the drycleaners down the sidewalk. I saw three guys rip an ATM out of a wall. I saw four white nuns in a black Cadillac speeding down the street. I hoped they were praying in there, praying for all of us. A black man stood outside of his tobacco shop, screaming at the crowd. “Why are you doing this? Why do you gotta wreck my store?” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “I’m with you! I’m from the ghetto too. I tried to make it! I tried to give you something, give you a store. It’s not right! It’s not right what you’re doing! I’m like you! I’m not the man! Why you have to steal my computer? Wreck my store? I tried to make it.” His voice was cracking and tears sparkled down his cheeks. We kept running. Waterfalls of glass crashed over us as we passed a thousand angry faces. We tripped over splintered husks of plywood. The air was thick and oily. Chunks of ash and embers fell all around us. Everywhere I looked, buildings and cars and tires burned, sending black pillars of smoke up into the clear blue sky.
“Stop,” I said, tugging Meredith backwards by her shirt.
Her hair flew crazily around her head from the wind of the chopper blades above us. “What?” she said.
“I can’t run anymore. My throat … I can’t breathe.”
“Come on.” She pulled me into the doorway of a barber shop and we leaned against the plywood that was boarding it up. Someone had spray-painted it, BLACK OWNED in huge black letters. White piles of broken glass lined the street. There were steps in front of the barber shop and we sat down on them to rest for a minute.
“Oh, shit,” Meredith said.
I looked down at her lap. A dark puddle spread across it and leaked out onto the steps.
“You peed too,” I said, half-laughing.
“That’s not pee,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”
She grabbed my arm. “We have to get somewhere safe. Inside. Right now.”
27
We went inside the shop next door which had a red and blue sign out front that read KOREAN GROCERY. Noodles and packages of crackers were scattered everywhere. Glass jars of stringy red stuff lay broken in the aisles. Huge sacks of rice lay split open in front of us, spilling their guts out onto the floor. A chubby black teenage girl stood in the first aisle holding a wire basket. She picked a package of noodles off a shelf, turned it over, then politely put it back. A Korean man stood behind the counter and pointed a shotgun at us.
“Get out,” he said. “We no want you here.”
We put our hands above our heads. Meredith dropped the hatchet and it clattered to the floor.
“She’s having a baby,” I said, pointing at Meredith.
Meredith held her belly and moaned. Then a Korean woman popped up from behind the counter. Her black hair was glossy and fell to her shoulders. She wore a cream-coloured blouse. From the way she looked at Meredith, I knew she would help us. She looked at the man and said something to him in Korean. Then he said something to her that I didn’t understand but sounded kind of harsh. Then she yelled at him. Then he lowered the shotgun and shrugged his shoulders, and she stepped out from behind the counter and came toward us.
“Come, come,” she said, motioning for us to follow her to the back of the store.
We followed her to a door that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. She opened the door and led us into a tiny back room. There was a yellow bucket and a dirty mop dripping into a drain in the floor. Shelves filled with cleaning supplies and other junk lined the walls. Beside the door was a desk covered in ashtrays, receipts, spiral notebooks, calculators, and Jolly Rancher wrappers. There was a computer on the desk, and even though it was turned off, it seemed to be staring at us with its square, unblinking eye. A short, grey sofa was pressed up against the side wall and the woman took down a blue and white checkered tablecloth from a shelf above the desk. The plastic crinkled as she unfurled it and spread it over the sofa. Then she motioned for Meredith to lie down.
Meredith turned away from us and slid her pants off. She took a grey hoodie from her backpack and used it to cover herself. She sat sideways on the sofa and leaned her back against the arm, putting her legs into a diamond shape in front of her. Her face was squeezed up tight like a fist.
“Oh, God,” she said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Are you having a boy or a girl?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said.
“I have three boys,”
the woman said. “All born in America. Oldest one seventeen now,” she smiled. Her teeth were white and square as Chiclets. She took a green plastic bowl and a white rag down from the shelf. She filled the bowl with cold water and soaked the rag in it. She wrung out the rag and folded it into a rectangle and carefully placed it on Meredith’s forehead. Meredith’s face became smooth again.
“Thank you,” Meredith said, reaching out her hand.
The Korean woman took Meredith’s hand in her own and squeezed it. “You’re welcome,” she said. “My husband call 9-1-1 for you,” she said.
“They won’t come,” Meredith said. “There’s too much,” she waved her hand toward the door.
“They’ll come,” the woman said. “They don’t give up on people in America.”
Meredith moaned. I watched as thick red ribbons of blood snaked across the tablecloth. I looked at the woman and her dark eyes flashed with something I couldn’t know.
“They’ll come,” the woman said. Then she filled a white plastic kettle with water and plugged it into the wall. I wondered who could want a cup of tea at a time like this.
Meredith cried out again and another gush of blood slid around the tablecloth. Her face was as pale as the moon. She dug her nails into the tablecloth and screamed. More and more blood came, but still no baby.
The Korean woman left the room for a few minutes and while she was gone, I went into the far corner and took my pee-stained jeans and underwear off and changed into new undies and my Adidas trackpants. I wadded up my jeans and underoos and stuffed them into the garbage bin beside the desk. I knew Gina would be mad because they were my expensive Bugle Boy jeans, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to find a laundromat anywhere, and plus, I didn’t even know if pee ever washed out of clothes. Sometimes, throwing things away is the best thing you can do with them.
I pulled a chair over and sat beside Meredith. I made sure the cloth on her head stayed wet and that she had whatever she asked for. She never asked for anything, so I wasn’t really much use. Except for once, she asked for her mom. And I couldn’t do anything about that, either.
After about two hours, Meredith was surrounded in a pool of her own blood. It dripped onto the floor and crept toward the drain. I closed my eyes and saw Brian, bleeding on the floor of the TV room at Bright Light, losing everything. Meredith jerked and screamed and kicked her legs. She needed help, anyone could see that. The Korean woman sat on the edge of the desk. She drank a can of iced tea and looked worried.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, then I left the little room and ran out the back door to find someone. A nurse, a doctor, a veterinarian, anyone. The air was smoky and garbage littered the streets. The sun was gone and the sky looked bruised and hollow. There were only angry people around, no cops, no ambulance, no doctors. I climbed the fire escape to the roof of the store so I could get a better look. Maybe I could see the hospital and somehow get her there. Maybe I could signal to a helicopter to come get us, or send help. I stood on top of the roof and looked out over the city of Los Angeles.
Everywhere, everywhere, fires burned.
In the distance, I saw a red fire engine and fire fighters spraying water at a huge building that must have been a shopping mall. It was hard to believe my eyes, but people were actually attacking the fire fighters while they worked. Launching rocks and bottles at them and jumping onto their backs as they hosed down the blaze. “HELP!” I screamed out over the city. “HELP US!”
I screamed until I lost my voice. I took off my sweater and waved it over my head in the shape of S.O.S. so that the news helicopter would see me and send help. It paused for a second, the propeller driving dust and ash into my eyes, then it took a hard right and buzzed away. I don’t know if it saw me, I didn’t know if it would do anything, but it was all I had.
I was eleven years old. I didn’t know anything. But I knew enough to see that this was probably the end of the world.
When I got back to the room, the pool of blood around Meredith was even bigger, and she was clutching a bundle of rags to her chest. But then the bundle of rags made a mewling sound like a kitten, and I realized what it was.
“You had a baby,” I said.
Meredith looked up at me, her green eyes shining with tears. “A girl,” she said.
“Wow.”
She tilted the bundle a little so I could see it. The baby was reddish-purple, and her face looked like a raisin.
“Wow,” I said again.
“Tucker,” Meredith grabbed my shirt. “If I don’t make it, you have to look after her.”
“You’re going to make it,” I said. I looked down at my shoes. They were covered in blood.
“But if I don’t,” she said.
I looked at Meredith. She was a whiter shade of pale.
The Korean woman stood at the desk, holding a phone to her ear. I could hear the busy signal. She hung up and redialled, again and again.
“Take good care of her, Tucker. Teach her everything you know.”
“But I don’t know anything!”
“You do. You’re good.”
I shook my head.
“Teach her how to be a good person.”
I swallowed and snot strings reached to the floor and I realized I was crying. “What’s her name?” I asked, wiping my face.
Meredith closed her eyes for a moment. “I was thinking … Relvis.”
I stared at her.
Her lips cracked as her face broke into a smile. “Just kidding,” she said.
I laughed a tiny little laugh.
“What do you think of Angel?”
“She’s born in City of Angels,” the Korean woman said, nodding. She handed Meredith a glass of water.
“It’s nice,” I said and thought of Gina.
Meredith thanked the lady and sipped the water, then closed her eyes for a while. The baby’s eyes were grey like the ocean before a storm. She had a downy patch of black hair and see-through fingernails. She was smaller than the rabbit we had buried in Arizona, which seemed like a gazillion years ago, but was only the day before. She nuzzled into Meredith’s breast, and I felt like I shouldn’t watch, but I couldn’t look away.
Then there was a smashing sound from the front of the store and we could hear people yelling. The Korean woman left the room, closing the door behind her with a click.
“When you get home, take her to see Steve,” Meredith mumbled. “My brother. He’ll know what to do.”
“Meredith, you’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“All shall be well,” she said quietly. “And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” She closed her eyes.
“That’s right,” I said.
Then we heard a blast of gunshots from the front of the store. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Meredith shuddered. “Come here,” she whispered, looking at me with her beach-glass eyes.
I leaned my face in close to hers. She turned her head and kissed me softly on the cheek. The moment lasted a sweet forever. Then, she was gone.
28
I couldn’t remember what anything meant.
There was a riot outside.
My best friend was dead.
There was a tiny newborn baby wrapped in rags and J-cloths.
I had to get the heck out of Dodge.
I took everything out of Meredith’s backpack and made a nest for the baby inside it with the softest T-shirts she had. Then I wrapped the baby in my extra sweater so she would stay warm, and I put her inside the backpack and left the zipper open a bit so she could breathe. I got my plastic bag of special stuff out of my backpack, untied the knot, and took out Charlie, my little dog. I gave him a pat on the head and put him in Meredith’s palm and closed her hand around him. I left Charlie with Meredith because he was the best thing I had. And because then, I knew that when I left, she wouldn’t be alone.
I put Meredith’s stuff in my backpack and put it on my back and strapped the baby-backpack to my
front, and walked out of the room.
I didn’t see anyone in the store.
I didn’t see the Korean man lying behind the counter with a bullet in his forehead.
I didn’t see his wife, who had helped us the best she could, bleeding from the stomach behind the magazine rack.
I didn’t see the young black guy seizing on the floor of the candy aisle with his hand over his heart.
And I didn’t see the dark-haired guy, lying face down beside the cooler with a hole the size of an egg in the back of his head.
I didn’t see any of that. I just walked through the store and out onto the sidewalk and into the angry L.A. night.
29
I walked and walked and walked and walked. When I got tired, I kept walking. When I got thirsty, I kept walking. When I got scared, I kept walking. Everywhere people were looting and breaking things, setting fire to whatever they could. Lots of people wore T-shirts and shorts, but I was cold, and I shivered as I walked. A thin, white layer of ash covered everything, and everything was so loud. All of the noises put together made the worst sound. People screaming and smashing things, the crackle of fires, the crunch of buildings collapsing as they burned, the crash of glass as it shattered, the pop-pop of gunshots, and the ca-thunk of cars as they were flipped over. It was the sound of a city tearing itself apart.
The baby, Angel, started to cry, so the next time I passed a grocery store, I went in and took some stuff. I knew it was wrong, but there was no other way to get it since no one was working. I went to the baby aisle and took a bottle, four cans of formula, and I looked and looked for diapers, but all of the shelves where the diapers should’ve been were empty, so I took a roll of paper towels instead. I went to the check-out counter and took the baby out of Meredith’s backpack and put her down on the conveyor belt. I unwrapped the J-cloth from around her butt and put it in the garbage can behind the till. When I saw the purply stub of her umbilical cord, I got dizzy, because I knew that only a few hours before, that same cord had been connected to Meredith. The Korean woman had tied a green piece of string around it, and the knots were so tight, they could never be undone. I unwound a big roll of paper towels and wrapped them around her in the shape of a diaper. I took a bottle of water out of the cooler beside the till and then I opened the can of formula with the can-opener on my Swiss Army knife. I poured some formula into the baby bottle and mixed it with water like the directions on the side of the can said to do. I took a pencil from a cup of pens and pencils that sat on the drawer of the till and stirred it up with the pencil. Then I picked up the baby and held her in my arms the way I had seen mothers do. I tried to get her to drink from the bottle. At first she turned her head away and spat and gurgled and cried a bit. But after a while she let me put the bottle in her mouth and she sucked on it and took some formula. People were coming in and out of the store, loading up carts and bags with cereal, ice cream, cheese, pepperoni sticks, whatever was left. Nobody noticed me and the newborn baby. I wrapped her up in my sweater again and put her back inside the backpack and nestled her in there so she was warm and comfortable. On my way out, I grabbed a Coke and a Kit Kat and put them in my backpack for later.
Niagara Motel Page 17