Roughly an hour later, in an effort to avoid being alone with her black-dog thoughts, Nerese exited the oversized and geologically slow hospital elevator on six and headed down a building-length corridor to visit Ray in the monitored-care ward.
Halfway there she saw a cluster of kids, maybe thirteen, fourteen years old, huddled at the entrance, their collective gaze fixed on something or someone inside. Even at some distance from them, Nerese was struck by the fact that she had never seen a crew of young-side teenagers so silently fearful as this group before her.
Coming abreast of them, she saw that one by one they were tentatively entering the ward and heading for Ray’s bed, where, propped upright, he received them like dazed and damaged royalty, shaking their hands while trying to avert his garish face, each kid coming off somewhere between seasick and frightened, backtracking to the safety of the hall as soon as they pressed the flesh.
Nerese stood alongside the group observing the queasy procession; the kids were overseen by a stocky female teacher who acted as jumpmaster, holding the next kid by the shoulder then giving them a slight shove into the ward as soon as the previous kid had returned from his or her mission.
As for Ray, all traces of yesterday’s motormouthed agitation seemed to have vanished, replaced with a wooden self-consciousness, as if he was trying to mask the fact that he couldn’t quite place these children, his manner both formal and discombobulated.
“How are you doing,” Nerese said in a near whisper, touching the teacher’s elbow. “I’m Nerese Ammons with the Dempsy PD?”
“Evelyn Bondo.” The handshake was solid.
“Are these Ray’s students?” Nerese asked, backing away from the group as she spoke.
“They’re his writing class,” Bondo said, following her only to the point where she could still propel them with a touch of her hand.
“Nice kids,” Nerese said, just to say it, the woman waiting for more. “Do you have any idea of what happened to him?”
“Not really,” Bondo said.
Nerese watched the kids for a moment; a black girl with frosted hair and oversized glasses quietly slid a red and black notebook onto Ray’s night table without saying anything. Ray looked from the notebook to the girl, a momentary light coming into his eyes.
“Are these all the kids?”
“These are all the kids.”
“Small class, huh?”
Bondo nodded, poking a boy. “Rashaad. Go.”
“Did he have problems with any of them? Run-ins . . .”
“No . . .” Bondo taking a hair too long to say it.
“No, but . . .” Nerese pushed.
“No,” she said more cleanly. Nerese reinterpreted her previous hesitation as some kind of personal disapproval of the man, more than any kind of suspicion.
“How about other kids in the school, maybe not in his class?”
“I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it. He’s only in there two hours a week.”
“He’s a good teacher, Ray? I’m asking because I know kids hate hospitals and to come here . . .”
“They like him,” Bondo said, and left it at that.
“Hey, gorgeous, how you feeling today?” Nerese took her customary seat, the stolen FUBU jacket folded neatly in her lap.
“Why won’t they feed me. A chip of ice. Give me a chip of ice at least.”
“They don’t feed head traumas until they’re out of the woods,” she said for the second day in a row.
Ray stared off. “I feel like I sleep all the time but I don’t sleep at all. I have these dreams but I’m wide awake,” speaking to her as if from under a pile of coats, his words muffled and affectless.
“Who did this to you, Ray?” Nerese jumping on his confusion, hoping to win the lottery here.
“This . . .”
“Who hit you.”
Ray said nothing, Nerese unable to tell whether his silence was willful or just a by-product of today’s glaze, the poor bastard having definitely gone sour over the last twenty-four hours.
She reached for the composition book left by that kid with the frosted hair and exaggerated glasses.
The pages were filled with the rotund swan-necked penmanship of an adolescent girl—poems, prose and an old runny photo Scotch-taped above a story entitled “Baby.” Other titles: “Living Dead,” “Our Mutual Enemy,” “Living Dead II,” “Blue Dempsy” and “Dempsy River Anthology—Dead Man Talking.”
Nerese replaced the book on the night table and regarded her charge.
Lying motionless on his side, the right cheek of his empurpled fright mask pressed into the pillow, Ray stared right through her, stared at nothing; the blood-dipped eyes beneath the skull and skin suggesting a second hidden face more terrible still.
“Ray, can I ask you about two checks you wrote?” Nerese almost embarrassed by the absurdity of the question given his condition. “One was made out to cash, three thousand two hundred dollars endorsed by the McCloskey Brothers Funeral Home. That was for your mother?”
“My mother?”
“Yeah.”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Yeah, I know, and I’m sorry about that. Did you bury her through McCloskey Brothers?”
Ray just lay there, unresponsive; Nerese let it go for now.
“The other’s for seventy-three hundred dollars, written a few days later, also made out to cash,” squinting at her own handwriting, “endorsed by, Ray Mitchell. That’s you.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Seventy-three hundred in cash. That’s a lot of pocket money to ‘I don’t know’ about. You have some kind of major under-the-table expense a little while back? Something you couldn’t pay for by check?”
“You know, I’m lying here,” he said thickly, ignoring her questions. “And, I have these memories . . . Things I didn’t even know I ever knew . . .” He faded for a few seconds, then came back. “Like now, right now I can tell you about the first time I saw her, exactly what that felt like.”
“Saw . . .”
“Ruby.”
“OK,” Nerese said tentatively, wanting to pull him back to the seventy-three hundred dollars, but also curious as to where he would go on his own.
“Room 331 NYU Medical Center, December 15, 1990, five-thirty in the morning. I’m sitting on a pink plastic chair. There’s no bed in the room, they had rolled it out with Claire to the OR, it’s just me in the chair, a big space where a bed should be, and some drapes . . . I was driving a cab then, no more teaching, a fucking strung-out cokehead just sitting there crashing, and the anesthesiologist, all of a sudden the anesthesiologist walks in with a baby wrapped in a blanket, hands it to me, says, ‘Here you go’ . . . And, all I want to do is just get back in the cab, get high and drive . . . So I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’ as if, as if he had just said, ‘Hey you, hold this for me?’ I can barely bring myself to look down at her. I’m thinking, Why did he give me this baby here? Where’s he going . . .
“And when I did, you know, look? There’s this little thing in my arms, red face, blue eyes, black hair, see-through fingertips . . .” Ray’s voice started to quiver. “Three hours later I’m out there like the Flying Dutchman, whacked, wasted, picking up fares, supposedly to support my wife and child? But every other dime was going up my nose.”
Ray went south again, Nerese on the verge of touching him when he came back on his own.
“And for the next four years, Claire stays home with Ruby, starts writing those kids’ books of hers, being with Ruby . . . But me . . . For four years, coke coke coke coke . . . And, if I want to torture myself? I ask . . . I ask, Where were you, asshole. Do you have any idea what you missed? What you can never get back? And for what. For what,” his voice momentarily rising to an angry quack.
Nerese restrained herself from offering any solace, letting him unreel.
“And I remember, oh”—he flinched—“I remember this one time—Ruby, she couldn’t have been more than three, quiet little girl, a
lways . . . She’s sitting on some steps and she’s got her knees together and her palms flat on her knees very prim, and on either side of her, she put her Batman and Robin dolls, they were about a foot high, she’s in the middle, and she had bent their arms and legs so that they were seated exactly in the same posture as her, and she just keeps looking from Batman to Robin to Batman. And, she’s talking to them, I can’t really hear and there’s something so sweet about her at that moment, so babyish, and I wanted to join in, jump in, but I knew it would ruin whatever fantasy she had going right then, so all I did, all I really could do, was watch from a distance, but I don’t remember much else of her as a child, a toddler, a baby.”
Ray subsided, Nerese watching him breathe, wide-eyed open-mouthed exhalations.
“And whenever I tried to kiss her or hug her back then, she’d say, ‘I don’t like kissing.’ She’d do the same to Claire, she was very much in her own world, but it would upset me, it would upset . . . but I’d be like, ‘OK, if that’s the way you want it . . .’ And I’d be off in the taxi, fucking idiot . . .”
“OK, but Ray, that was then,” Nerese just having to say it. “She’s still just a kid.”
“And, when she turned five? Claire kicked me out . . . It was a long time coming. I don’t even think Ruby noticed. I mean of course she did, but . . .” Another hypnotic pause, Nerese starting to acclimate herself to Ray’s ebb and flow.
“The thing is . . . The minute I left? I stopped. On my own. No N.A., no A.A. Stopped on a dime.”
“Good,” Nerese said, angling for a way back in now. “Good for you.”
“Quit drugs, quit the cab, back to school. Polygraph school. As a student. A year and a half by myself, cleaning up, to go back to them.”
Nerese grunted, something not happy coming up.
“A year and a half. I was so ready . . . I call her, ‘I need to talk to you,’ she’s, ‘Great, me too.’ We go, sit down, she says, ‘I need a divorce. I met someone and I’m in love.’”
“No . . .”
“So I gave it to her. What else could I do.”
“I hear you,” she said, restlessly refolding the jacket in her lap.
“I had, I had completely forgotten about other people, new people. A year and a half, that’s a long time . . .”
“For some.” Nerese still looking for a way in.
“Two days later, I’m back driving a cab, driving fifty, sixty hours a week, back with the coke, back like I never left . . . And Ruby knew. She knew . . . Didn’t know it as, as cocaine or even drugs, I don’t think, but you can’t fool a kid . . .”
“No, you can’t,” Nerese said, drifting off into thoughts of her nephew, her dumb-ass nephew and his incomprehensible mother, thoughts of how some people should have to pass a test before they were allowed to have children.
“So do I stop?” Ray’s voice rose in a febrile lilt. “No. ‘I can’t make it this week, sweetheart.’ And at first she’s, ‘Daddy, you promised.’ Then after a while it’s, ‘OK, whatever.’”
And then Ray began to cry. Head-bashed, sleep-starved, drunk on his own remorse, he began to quietly weep, like a solitary lush at the short end of the bar.
“‘OK, whatever,’” scourging himself. “I can’t, I cannot believe I wouldn’t stop for her.”
“But Ray, that was a long time ago. You’re all squared away with her now, right?” Nerese not knowing if he was or wasn’t, not even knowing if his drug problems were in the past tense but assuming they were: he never failed to make his monthly payments—mortgage, child support—and even more tellingly, he still had over three hundred thousand dollars socked away from that television gig. Nerese had learned the hard way from her son’s father how cocaine could go through a bank account like fire through dry timber.
“Do you want to know how I finally stopped?”
“Actually I want you to tell me about that seventy-three hundred in cash you needed.”
“I’m back driving the cab. Back on coke. And it was bad. Worse than before, because now I don’t have anyone to answer to.”
Nerese, in her restless anxiety flapping out the FUBU then refolding it, wasn’t sure whether he was responding to her question or his own.
“I’m at La Guardia, pick up a fare, black guy in his twenties, beautiful suit, going to the Four Seasons. I’m driving, and I see, every time I look in the rearview, he’s looking at me, studying me. I’m high, but not too bad, not too jagged yet, but I’m starting to get spooked—what’s he looking at me like that for?
“Halfway to the city, I just can’t stand it. I check in the rearview, sure enough he’s looking right back at me. I say, ‘Do we know each other?’
“He says, ‘Mr. Mitchell?’ Says it kind of cautious, but it’s on my license right in front of him on the partition so I don’t . . .
“He says, ‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Mitchell? John Shaker.’
“And I almost died. He was an old student of mine from the Bronx.”
“From that Shakespeare class you took off with?” Nerese resigned herself to hearing this out.
“No,” Ray said, slipping into another mini-fugue, then coming back with a fragment of a smile. “His year? The class trip was two hours in a Times Square video arcade, my treat, after fifteen minutes in the Morgan Library checking out handwritten drafts of nineteenth-century novels.”
“You know something?” Nerese said softly. “I would have fired your ass, too.”
“I was a good teacher. It wasn’t clicking for them. Believe me.”
“Yeah, OK.”
“I couldn’t believe it was this kid Shaker. We talk, it turns out he had become some kind of hot-shit TV producer, writer-producer. Starts telling me how I was his favorite teacher, how I had turned him on to writing, how I’m responsible for his life path. Looks like nine million dollars in the back of my cab, and he couldn’t have been sweeter. I’m feeling so torn—happy, but all fucked up, embarrassed to be driving him, he can’t even call me by my first name.
“And then he asks me, ‘How about you, Mr. Mitchell? How’s your writing going?’
“And, I just pull off to the shoulder, stop and I just, just . . . I couldn’t drive, I just . . .
“And he’s great, doesn’t look at his watch, isn’t like, ‘Hey Shaky, let’s go, let’s go.’ He’s just . . . He’s great.
“Finally I suck it up, come back to myself. He asks me if I know anything about TV, writing for TV, one-hour dramatic series.
“I’m, you know, ‘Not really.’
“He says, ‘I have this show in development, Brokedown High, takes place in an inner-city New York high school. I’m looking for writers, do you want to take a crack at it? It would be an honor for me to hire you.’ I tell him I never did anything like that before. He says, ‘What’s to know. It’s based on our old school,’ says, ‘I know you have the heart for it. You’ll learn by doing. Earn while you learn. Trust me.’
“And I’m . . . ‘OK.’
“We get to the Four Seasons, I refuse to take his money. He’s getting out of the cab, at the last second, he leans back in, says, ‘Just one thing . . . I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I don’t tolerate drugs in my shop and I believe you need to know that.’”
Ray took a breather, then: “And see, this is why I still have hope for myself leaving this world as an honorable person, Tweetie. I respond so well to shame? I haven’t touched the stuff since. But I wouldn’t stop for my daughter . . .”
“Stopping is stopping,” Nerese said, thinking, And not stopping is not stopping; once again brooding over her son’s father, wherever he may be. “Tell me about the seventy-three hundred dollars.”
“I don’t know,” he said dejectedly.
“Sure you do.” Nerese shrugged, guessing, drugs, blackmail, some kind of scam, something not good.
“Stuff . . .”
“Stuff.”
Another long pause. “It’s nothing. Just let it be.”
“Look, it’s eas
y enough for me to find out on my own.”
“Then do,” he said lifelessly, and Nerese put it on a back burner.
“I take it you haven’t seen Ruby yet,” she said.
“No.”
“You know my next stop is to talk to her.”
“Who.”
“Ruby.”
“Oh, don’t.” Ray’s face suddenly melting.
“Make it so I don’t have to.”
“I swear to you, she doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Oh, you’d be amazed at how people who don’t know anything know something.”
And, suddenly anxious about time, Nerese once again began folding and refolding the FUBU jacket in her lap. With his eye drawn to her movements, Ray abruptly jerked back, his face stark with fear.
“What.” She leaned forward.
“Oh, I thought . . .” He pointed at the jacket. “I thought . . .” Then breathing deep with relief.
“You thought what?”
“Nothing.” Embarrassed now.
“It’s a jacket.”
“I know.” Ray was big-eyed, spooked at how he had spooked himself.
“A jacket, see?” She held it open by the shoulders, black leather body and orange wool sleeves, then turned it so that he could see the big chamois FUBU stitched across the back.
“I said I know.” Nerve-blown, exhaustion-wracked, Ray squawked like a parrot.
“How are you feeling today?” The neurologist materialized at bedside.
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