The rusted squeak of metal grows louder over the wind, and I look up. In the courtyard of a nearby tower is an asphalt lot and a set of swings that have hung since my childhood. There’s a child on the swings pumping hard, leaning her body into each swoop up and out, the chain buckling with each fall down. But then I see this is no child but an adult wearing an unbuttoned full-length raincoat and a long and heavy dark skirt, her clothes flapping about her. I walk closer and see her face.
“Aisha?” I call.
She doesn’t respond, maybe she doesn’t hear. I watch the slick on her forehead. I watch the poles anchoring the swings rocking dangerously upon the sodden earth.
I SPOTTED HER ON THE HOT NIGHT of the shootings, among the other neighbours watching quietly as the cops stood with Francis and me on the doorstep with Mother. She wore her hair bunched to the side of her head in a puffed and off-kilter ponytail, and she was standing with her father, who rested his hand on her shoulder. I risked a careful wave, but she didn’t return it. She was watching me, seeing me as if for the first time. And only after I gestured a second time did she respond. With a secret wave, hand close to her body.
The cops were explaining to Mother what had happened and why they had stopped us. There had been an altercation, perhaps a business deal gone bad. Guns were drawn. Two young men were hit but managed to stumble away. There was one fatality, someone known to police, but there were other casualties too, the cops now informed us. Bullets had flown through glass doors and windows. A bystander was shot in his arm. A stray bullet had pierced the thin wall of a unit and struck a sleeping seven-year-old girl.
“A girl,” said Mother, as if to herself. “A sleeping child.”
Since witnessing Anton get shot, Francis had been a zombie, his eyes glazed and evasive. But Mother’s words appeared to shake him awake. For a second he met my eyes, but then dropped his. Mother was now staring at him.
The cops reassured her that we were not under investigation. Already there were leads on the names and whereabouts of the suspects, but since we had been in the vicinity of the shooting, they might want to interview us as the case developed. They voiced concerns about Francis’s connections to some of the suspects. Mother nodded and said twice that her boys would cooperate fully. The cops encouraged her, also, to get in touch if she felt she could offer any relevant information. It would all be anonymous, they insisted. Our identities would be protected.
“We will cooperate,” said Mother again. “We promise. Thank you, officers.”
She continued thanking them as they walked away. And then she held the door open for Francis and me to go inside. She shut the door very carefully behind us and took her time letting go of the handle. She seemed to muster all of the energy in her body just to face us.
“You will…tell me…everything,” she said.
She was looking at Francis, but he didn’t meet her eyes. She repeated herself, and then asked Francis if he heard what she had said. He was biting his fingernails down to the quick. He inspected the ragged tip of his smallest finger, squeezed up a little red bead of blood.
“Francis!”
He backed up without looking, knocking over a side-table lamp as he rushed to our bedroom. Mother and I followed and stood in the doorway as he went to work. He grabbed his busted white-and-red Adidas bag and moved about the room stuffing into it whatever was easily at hand.
“What are you doing?” asked Mother.
He didn’t answer, just kept adding to his bag essential things like underwear and socks but also weird choices, like the reindeer-patterned sleeveless sweater that he’d refused to wear at least a decade ago. When he pulled a hoody from one of his drawers and tried to shove it into his bag, Mother gripped its sleeve.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” he said.
“I have asked you a question. Where?”
“Nowhere. Please let go.”
“You will tell me where you’re going.”
“Please let me go. Please.”
There was a brief struggle as Mother tried to pull the hoody away from him, and when Francis used his strength and weight to tug it from her grasp, she stumbled forward and struck her head hard on the bunk bed. There was silence and stillness as she looked at her eldest son, her hand on her forehead, her eyes wide and blinking.
For the first time since shots were fired that night, Francis wore an expression of pain on his wet face. Mother checked her hand for blood but found none. Francis said sorry. Sorry. And then he fled the room with his hoody and bag. The sound of the front door opening but not shutting, the tinkling of the security chain.
—
Mother and I waited up all night for Francis to come back. By three in the morning, she had moved to her bed, lying there in her stained uniform, her shoes still on, a small egg of a bruise on her forehead, purple ugly, which she wouldn’t allow me to tend. I put on the table beside her a glass of water, as well as some crackers and slices of banana, but she didn’t take a bite. I brought in the fan from the living room. She didn’t respond, she didn’t move or even seem to blink.
“Just rest,” I told her. “I’ll worry about Francis.”
She pressed her eyes tightly closed at the mention of his name, and then I did as I promised I would do, I worried about Francis. I thought as hard as I could about his new friends. I thought especially about a skinny kid named Jelly, who I knew lived in the same building as Anton and had become Francis’s closest friend. I knew that Jelly had been stopped by police, but so had many. I wondered where Francis might have gone, where he would have looked for safety.
A boy named Jelly. A barbershop called Desirea’s.
When the sky began to fill with a heavy orange light, you could tell that the heat was going to be just as oppressive as the day before. Mother went to the bathroom and then appeared in the kitchen wearing fresh work clothes. She sat at the kitchen table to eat her porridge, but when she tried to stand, she suddenly sat back down. I stared at her. She blinked, looked at me accusingly, and then stood.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I’m walking you to the stop.”
Cop cars and news vans still crowded our block. A small group of neighbours crammed into the slanted shade cast by the bus shelter. Women in cleaning uniforms, men in thick jeans and safety boots, everyone’s clothes already darkening with sweat around necks and underarms. These might have been the same people who had watched Francis and me brought home by the cops the night before, but I couldn’t tell. No one was willing to meet our eyes.
A full bus drove by, unable to pick up a single passenger. The temperature was rising by the minute, and though everyone was still quiet, there was an impatient shifting of feet, and a few glances our way.
“Thug youths,” one woman said. “Predators. Criminals.”
She pronounced “cri-mi-nals” the way Mother did. Nobody waiting for the bus even looked up. It was too hot to respond or to acknowledge such talk, which had not been directed at anyone in particular.
“Their parents,” she said. “Above all, their parents.”
Mother’s face seemed ready to break. It’s hard to describe. Like watching a glass ball being dropped in a slow-motion movie. That fraction of a second just after the glass hits the ground and it’s still a ball, but the cracks are everywhere, and you know it’s not going to be a ball much longer.
It took another ten minutes for the next bus to arrive, and, climbing on, Mother paused, gripping the bars, before recovering. The bus headed off, the cooked-up fumes of diesel and hot asphalt as it went. The shimmer of the street and the world all around, a deep-gut sickness, dizziness. I managed to avoid falling, sliding down the glass side of the shelter to the sidewalk.
—
Until that moment, my relationship with Aisha appeared to be based upon the most fragile and quiet of connections. I had certainly never before considered knocking on her door, and I knew that on that scorched morning after the chaos of the shootings
I had chosen the very worst time to do so. I walked around to her unit and rapped twice on her door. The yellow light in the peephole flickered as someone peered out at me, and then locks were undone, the safety chain unhitched, and the door opened by the very person I’d hoped not to see.
Aisha’s father wasn’t the only single father in the Park, but he was one of the most distinctive. Samuel was small and slim and quiet and very dark. He came from the same rural district in Trinidad as our mother. And it was rumoured that he had been a teacher there. But here, he worked as a security guard, his uniform always at least three sizes too big for him, his loose pants rustling in the wind. He moved “loitering” kids along from seats and doorways at malls and fast-food joints, and he’d had an encounter or two with Francis and me, but these weren’t at all on my mind as he stood before me on that sweltering morning, staring with all the uncertainty you’d expect after seeing me brought home by the cops the night before.
“Yes?” he asked tightly. “May I help you?”
Aisha rescued me by calling out, “It’s all right, Dad,” and then quickly appearing behind her father, stamping on some sandals. Her hair was wet, and she was wearing shorts and a tank top that showed her back and shoulders. I felt a foolish stab of desire as I watched the subtle negotiation play itself out between daughter and father, some hushed but intense exchange of words, and then a sharp look of warning from Aisha that seemed to make the man back down. Samuel tried cupping his hand on her shoulder as a final bit of persuasion, but she shrugged it off and pushed out the door and past me towards the sidewalk.
“The library,” she said.
We walked a dozen blocks to the green-glassed building. Stepping into it, I felt the sharpness of the air conditioning, felt the wet skin of my shirt clinging. Whenever we visited the library together, we would always try to get seats at a table beside a green-tinted window. And although the library was busy that day, we managed to score it, the plastic sticky beneath our bare legs. Around us were ordinary people from the Park. Mothers with restless young children, a young man frowning down at what looked to be a textbook, older men in their mismatched combinations of suit jackets and baseball caps, some reading newspapers in different languages. One held a paper with a headline story about the shooting the night before. Aisha grabbed a paperback from a swivel rack and riveted her eyes upon the pages, flipping randomly.
I spoke to her in a whisper. “Did you hear the cops caught the suspects? There were five. Most weren’t even from the Park. Anyway, I think it’s all over now. I think everyone’s safe.”
She kept flipping pages, her anger seething. In her haste, she had chosen one of those after-school-special books for teenaged girls, something I knew she hated.
“Aisha…?” I asked.
“It was Goose,” she said.
Her voice was sharp, and she had to give herself a moment before telling me what she had heard. Goose had been asleep in her bedroom when the shooting started, and after being hit by a bullet she dragged herself to her closet. She lost consciousness, unable to answer while her mother called and ran wildly through the house looking for her. A paramedic joining the search noticed the creep of red staining the carpet just outside the closet.
“They say she’s stable now,” Aisha said. “They’re calling her lucky.”
I knew Goose only a little. I didn’t know how she got her nickname, but I knew she rode a bike with purple streamers on the handlebars. I remember Francis once helped her put her bike chain back on because Goose didn’t want to get her hands “gweesy.”
“Aisha,” I said, “I know you saw the cops bring me and Francis home. I still don’t know everything. But me and Francis…You know us, right?”
She held my eyes for the first time that morning. She nodded, went back to reading, and I felt the first small relief in hours.
—
Aisha and I had been neighbours most of our lives, but for the years of childhood and the first years of high school we never really spoke. We were roughly the same age, but she had skipped grades and then entered a special enrichment program, which I imagined to be full of goofs all sloppy-mouthed with braces and classroom answers. As a child, mosquito-thin, she biked around haphazardly and wore asymmetrical ponytails. As a teenager, she wore tights and sweaters that revealed a bra strap and the brown points of her shoulders. Two months before we began something like a friendship, during her last semester of high school, I watched her receive a special achievement award for math and science during a school assembly. She had won an entrance scholarship to a university in Montreal and, according to the principal, would be going away by the end of the summer. She was the sort of girl the world considers “an example” or “the exception,” the sort of girl my mother described as having “a future.” She stood onstage in the auditorium, posing with a frozen smile for the photograph, and, somehow, she caught me looking at her from the crowd.
A month later, in July, I spotted her sitting behind the green-tinted glass of the public library. She was wearing shorts and reading a large book with a slight frown on her face. Dust motes hung lazily in the air, and her eyelashes were touched blue by the sunlight pouring down. There was a strange play of image and light on the glass. I watched my own reflection mingle with the sight of her reading. A many-limbed monster. And then something alarming happened: she saw me and smiled.
Francis had never been one to offer truths about girls or desire or the riddles of sex. Instead, he had usually seemed almost as confused as I was. Once, when we were both very young and sneaking peeks into a ground-level apartment of a neighbouring building, we saw a couple hunched naked into each other while, in the background, a television played the game show Definition. We watched their urgent struggling, the woman’s face out of view, the man’s face purple-bloated with effort. And at the end of their exercise, we caught what might have been one of the most haunting mysteries of childhood: the man’s face contorted not with pleasure but with pain.
“An orgasm,” Francis had whispered to me, once we had fled far from the scene. The glistening horror of that word.
A couple years later, Francis and I were approached by a man who lived far to the east of our home, in the “good” neighbourhood of Port Junction. He was arranging a showing of a porno film, an actual film in black and white projected on to a basement wall of his bungalow. For a dollar, we found ourselves on a couch in that darkened damp space with the man and eight other boys, all older than us. We sat together in the stink of their collective fear and excitement, our bare legs against each other, and I appeared to be the only one to notice our host discreetly pulling himself and only occasionally watching the images. Either the film had no volume or else the man had turned the sound off, and the quiet charged the brutal acts of the grey-white bodies on the wall with the same strange aura of meaningfulness and authority as old-fashioned silent movies.
Francis never gave me “the talk.” He provided no tips or warnings. He offered none of that information, urgently shared by many young men we knew, about the various “types” of girls and what they each would “do.” And this was all the more puzzling and sometimes disappointing because Francis, unlike most boys, who simply talked shit, had actually received real and positive attention. When he passed a group of girls on the street, they’d pull themselves close to whisper then laugh approvingly. Even the silent daughter at the convenience store counter would give him a sly smile when handing him change, her eyes on his ass as he walked away. But when I pressed him for stories of the wild encounters he was rumoured to have enjoyed (“Francis, dog,” some neighbourhood boys would shout out to him), he just shook his head. And once, when I cornered him about the three condoms I had seen in his bedroom drawer under his socks, he shouted at me for getting into his stuff, and then, knowing that an explanation was needed, he mumbled something about “fucking bitches” in a voice so obviously put on that it did nothing but humiliate us both.
I’d had no real experiences of my own. And so, on t
hat day in July, just a month before the shootings, when Aisha suddenly met my eyes through the glass of the library, I felt a sudden vulnerability. I pulled the chill metal handles of the glass doors and then jammed my hands deep into my pockets, my head down with the brim of my cap pulled over my eyes. I steeled myself when passing through those book detectors at the entrance, imagining that an alarm would sound, that everyone would see me trying to stroll in like it was nothing. There was no alarm, there were no snickers at the sight of me in this space, and I managed to vanish into one of the aisles of books.
I decided that I needed ammunition. I pulled from a display marked “Classics” a paperback copy of The Theban Plays, which showed on its cover a white mask with hollow eyes bleeding red, the mouth set open in an expression of terrible sorrow. Armed, I walked to the table where Aisha was sitting.
“Hey,” I said. “Can…May I sit?”
A group of neighbourhood kids seated nearby leaned their heads in together to giggle. Aisha shoved her pile of books and magazines aside to make room for me beside her. I noticed that the “example” of a girl wasn’t reading anything educational at all, but instead People magazine. I didn’t look at Aisha, but immediately opened my “classic” and studiously fixed my eyes on the page, the words swimming there unreadable. After long minutes, I nodded as if I had absorbed some timeless truth. I could feel Aisha looking at me, sense the growing ridiculousness of the situation, but I wouldn’t lift my attention from the page, wouldn’t abandon my performance. Until Aisha said it softly.
“Hey in there.”
—
Our relationship started this way, and the weather helped. As the heat intensified that summer, we took shelter in the air-conditioned cool of the library. For a short while, I continued choosing books I thought might impress her, mostly Penguin Classics, but once a book of anatomy. (Those unskinned bodies, that heart diagrammed all red and blue and ugly.) But Aisha was interested that summer only in trashy entertainment and music magazines. She’d touch my arm to read aloud some gossip about LL Cool J, guffawing in a way that drew stern looks from the small community of readers in the library. Her chair drawn closer to show me another bit of celebrity gossip, her bare calf lightly touching mine.
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