by Ivy Pochoda
You don’t remember anything? Anyone?
Val shakes her head, eyes closed.
Nothing? Nothing at all? It sounds like an accusation.
Val flinches and curls tighter.
Nothing? Nothing? You’re sure, nothing? What knocked you off the raft? You don’t know? You’re sure you don’t know?
“I don’t know,” Val says, her face buried in the crinkly pillow.
And you wound up on shore and June just disappeared? Was she swept away? Did you see her? You didn’t see what happened? Nothing? Nothing at all? Nothing?
“Nothing.”
Your friend is missing, Valerie. You’re the last person who saw her. You can’t help us? You can’t help at all?
Val shakes her head. The pillow cracks and rustles. She squeezes her eyes tight, so tight that she needs to hold her breath. If she can hold her breath for a minute, the detectives will leave her alone. If she can hold her breath for two minutes, she will rewind back to the raft and June will not slip away.
You can’t help? Do you know something? Something you’re not telling us?
Her stomach turns and plummets. She reaches out to grab June’s hand, but all she catches is the frayed edge of her brown polyester blanket.
Eventually the detectives leave. Her panic subsides to a simmer. Five, four, three, two, one. Val counts backward, willing herself to sleep. When she wakes, this will be over.
Her parents arrive from a weekend at the beach cut short, bringing with them the artificial coconut smell Val associates with her uncle’s place on Long Island. Val sits up in bed so she can focus on the view—the million-dollar lookout over South Brooklyn down to Red Hook with its grids of town houses, white and brown and brick. The view reveals a hidden rooftop world—kiddie pools, putting greens, barbecue grills, lawn furniture, beach towels, laundry lines, pigeon coops. A tar beach paradise.
Between the roofs, Val can see the dips that hint at vest pocket parks and community gardens—squares of green and shade. The sunken expressway is clogged with cars, bolts of sunlight bouncing off their chrome and paint. She watches the piers and warehouses, the waterfront world demystified in the daylight. Beyond these lie the tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the industrial port of New Jersey, the suggestion of Staten Island. But most of all there is the water—the river and the bay where she last saw June.
From up here, the water is a startling cornflower blue that darkens as it reaches the piers and waterfront. It’s crosscut with white wakes from tugs and ferries. A stripe of sunlight runs down the middle of the bay, so bright it swallows the boats as they cross it, momentarily hiding them from view.
If the red tug with the “M” on its smokestack crosses the stripe of sunlight before the orange ferry, they will find June this afternoon.
Val’s mother wears a beach cover-up over her jeans and jelly sandals. Jo’s a short, round woman and her shapeless terry-cloth top makes her look like a ball of toweling. Her skin is shiny with aloe and suntan lotion. She places a plastic figurine of the Virgin next to the bed.
“You pray for that angel, Val,” she says. “You pray for Juney every minute. Even when you’re sleeping, you pray for her.” She taps the Virgin with a peachy nail. “You talk to her. You tell her to bring Juney back. You tell her.”
“Sure, Mama.”
“At the church I’m gonna light candles. One from each of us.” Jo shakes her head. “And we’ll have a potluck at VFW. You better pray for June to be back before then. I don’t know what I’m gonna say when I see her grandmother.”
“You want to tell me what happened out there?” Paulie Marino says. He’s a broad man with a tight brush cut. He keeps his forearms crossed over his stomach. A tattoo showing his firehouse shield sneaks out from the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“You’re out on the raft? You banged in the head? And none of these doctors or police can tell me if it’s an accident or an attack.”
“I don’t know,” Val says.
“What don’t you know? Tell me this scheme wasn’t your idea,” Paulie says.
“I had the raft,” Val says.
“And what? Then what? June wanted to go out on the water?”
Although Val had done her best to ignore it, June had grown tired of the adventure. Val had been able to feel her mounting irritation, her restless need to be elsewhere with others. “I guess,” she says, turning away from the window, blocking out the view of the bay and basin.
“You know the kinds of sicknesses you get from that water?” Paulie says. “Not even the homeless wash themselves down there.” He takes a lock of her hair and combs it out with his fingers. “Jesus,” he says. “What if it’d been you?”
“No,” Jo says. “Don’t say that, Paulie. Don’t you say that.”
Jo has her telephone pressed to her ear, keeping tabs on Red Hook. She cups her hand over the phone and says, “They’re building a shrine to June. They’re sweeping the projects.”
Paulie stands by the window, scowling first at the distant shapes of the Red Hook Houses, then focusing his wrath on the river. “No one lies underneath one of the piers unmolested. I know Red Hook. You were out cold for hours,” he says. “Anything could of happened. There’s no reason for you to be down there. No reason for my kid to be creeping around at night. And those drunks from the Dockyard. Who knows what they’re capable of.”
“We weren’t creeping. We were floating.”
“Floating? You just thought you’d float around the waterfront.”
“Leave her alone, Paulie,” Jo says.
“I just want to understand, that’s all. Kid’s in a hospital bed and I have no answers.”
It’s useless to tell her parents about the sunken tugboat. Something glimmering in the wheelhouse. Something else hiding behind the portholes. The skyline reflected in the river, an unreal, melting city. The strange pulse of the water, the river’s heartbeat.
“And then what?” Paulie says. “June decides to swim away from you?”
Val’s breath catches in her throat. She senses her stomach preparing to go into free fall.
“She doesn’t remember,” Rita says. “God.”
“You’re the one who was supposed to be watching her,” Paulie says to Rita.
“She’s fifteen,” Rita says.
“And?” Paulie says. “I don’t seem to remember you being an angel at fifteen. We left you in charge. Which means, you watch her.”
“I can’t help what she does when she goes out.”
“Who said she is allowed to go out?”
Rita goes to the small mirror outside the bathroom and wipes last night’s makeup from the corners of her eyes.
“They’re done with the Houses,” Jo says. “They’re taking out police boats.” She turns to Val. “You better be praying for June every second you’re not talking. You better pray for her in your sleep.”
“I am,” Val says.
Val groans and rolls over. Jo mistakes her daughter’s anxiety for pain. She summons the nurse who shines a flashlight in Val’s eyes and instructs her to sit up. The nurse holds a finger in front of Val’s nose. She moves the finger back and forth, front and back. She asks Val to say her name, her age, what year it is, what year she was born. Val glances at her mother, sitting forward on her chair, mouthing the answers to the nurse’s questions, worried that Val is going to fail this test. The nurse reprimands Val for taking her eyes off her finger. She makes notes on a clipboard and leaves.
Val’s concentration is broken. Although her parents beg her to, she won’t try to piece together the hours after she fell from the raft. Instead she tries to recall all that happened before. To turn it around, examine it from all sides, shake it up like a kaleidoscope then let it fall back into place.
But all she can think of is June falling into the water. Each time she sinks into her memory, lowering herself back onto the raft with June behind her, sliding into the slick water at the edge of the first pier, she sees June slipping away.
> Throughout the afternoon Jo’s questioning gaze lingers on Val’s face. “Anything, sweetie?” she says.
“Anything what?” Val says.
“Anything else you want to tell us about Juney?”
“Jesus, Mama.”
Visiting hours end and the Marinos leave. A nurse disconnects Val’s IV. The hospital grows quiet as the sun begins to fall behind the skyline, throwing the buildings into silhouette, making the sky burn four shades of orange and pink. The river goes from blue to black. Only a hemline of sun remains behind Manhattan skyscrapers.
Now the hospital is whirr and whisper. The nurses creep along the halls, poking their heads in from room to room, adjusting machines, checking IVs. Val tries to imagine that she is in June’s bed and that June is next to her. She pretends they are sleeping head to toe—a habit June’s grandmother believed would prevent spreading colds.
She tries listening for the familiar sounds of June’s bedroom—the hiss of Mrs. Giatto’s humidifier, the whine of the neighborhood’s gate, the rumble of the school buses pulling into their parking lot across the street. The girls were forbidden to play in this lot. This hadn’t stopped them. After they’d heard a rumor about a boy who was left overnight in a school bus and died, they sneaked into the lot, trying the doors of all the buses, attempting to see if there were any forgotten children. Back in bed the girls tried to spook each other by tapping on June’s window, pretending to be the school bus ghost. They’d compete to see who could catch the other off guard, at the cusp of sleep. Who could make the other scream.
During the night, the nurses shine flashlights in Val’s eyes so often that she gives up on sleep. She wanders the halls. The hospital is a freestanding building and her ward takes up the tenth floor. It’s laid out like a donut—the nurses’ station and the elevators in the middle, the patients’ rooms on the outer edge. At least the views belong to the sick.
Except for an elderly man with drooping shoulders doing laps with his drip pole, Val is the only patient in the halls. From one end of the floor she looks deeper into landlocked Brooklyn to the fortresses of projects looming over middle-class neighborhoods. From another side, she stares out at the affluent brownstones of the Heights and the outline of the Brooklyn Bridge poised at the neighborhood’s back. Val calls June from a waiting room that overlooks Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the water below alive with their reflections.
The phone goes straight to voice mail. An automated voice tells Val that June’s mailbox is full. She crosses her fingers, holds her breath, counts backward from ten. She calls again and again, listening to June’s message, which she knows by heart, trying to believe that June will “get right back” to her.
Val dials Rita.
“Because of you I’m stuck at home tonight,” her sister says. “They say I’m responsible for you. Like I can keep track of every one of your crappy ideas.”
“What about June—”
“Nothing,” Rita says.
Val hangs up. The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs in the waiting room makes her head hurt. She fingers the bump on the back of her skull, tracing her stitches through the bandage. She closes her eyes. She counts to ten. Then she calls June until she exhausts her phone’s battery.
She presses her head against the window. From behind the heavy glass she watches New York stream and flicker—taxis shooting up the river-side drive, the blank-faced office buildings still lit up at night. She turns one of the handles on the window but it’s painted shut. She pulls the handle trying to shake the window loose. She barely rattles the glass. She turns and presses a shoulder against the pane but nothing happens.
Val wanders through the hospital, passing the incubated glow of the maternity wards and the locked double doors of the psych unit. She takes the elevator to the ground floor and finds herself amid the chaos of the emergency room where patients clutch and groan and sleep until someone notices.
She lingers by the desk, watching relatives and friends demand care, demand to see doctors, demand to talk to the person in charge and the person in charge of that person.
She heads into the lobby where there’s a Taco Bell and an Au Bon Pain, and beyond these a revolving door that leads to the street. No one is watching her. No one would notice if she slipped out. It would be simple to leave and start looking for June.
When she takes a step toward the exit, the door revolves, bringing in a hot gust of Brooklyn night. It spins again. And then three paramedics burst through the wheelchair entrance, pushing a gurney carrying a female figure into the hospital. They shove Val aside.
One of the paramedics heads to the admitting desk while the other two go to work on the figure on the gurney. All Val can make out are matted reddish-brown curls and a face smeared with blood. A thin sheet poorly disguises the ample curves of the body beneath it.
“I know her,” Val says, pushing her way toward the gurney. A nurse takes Val by the arm and pulls her out of range.
“June,” Val screams.
The paramedics make room for a doctor and two nurses. All of them are yelling at once, speaking in code. They wheel the gurney out of the waiting room and into a hallway.
The doctor grabs a set of paddles from the paramedic and presses them onto the patient’s chest. Her body heaves and flops. He jolts her again.
They are doing something to her throat, cutting, inserting a tube. They are pounding on her as if she is incapable of feeling.
No one notices Val. “June,” she says. “June!”
All the girls’ minor transgressions and small truancies fly into Val’s head, their childhood misdemeanors and thoughtless disobediences. Val runs the numbers on these, desperately calculating if a cigarette, a stolen magazine could have brought June here.
In eighth grade the girls skipped school for the first time. They took the back stairs. They shed their uniforms, revealing tank tops and shorts. They planned on taking the subway into the city, but they lost their nerve. Instead, they walked deeper into Brooklyn than they ever had been before.
They crossed from Red Hook into Sunset Park, stomping through the wilds of its industrial waterfront. They found a maze of train and trolley tracks—some stopped dead in the middle of cobblestone causeways, and others dove into the water. They skidded on the mossy overgrowth on an abandoned pier. They passed through an apple orchard. They waded across murky marshland and through shoulder-high weeds. They hurried past empty warehouses and tried to ignore the hollow strike of phantom footfalls.
It took them two hours to reach Bay Ridge, at Brooklyn’s far corner. The waterfront there was tame and vast. A manicured causeway for pedestrians and bicycles ran parallel to an expressway. The girls skipped over the concrete of the Sixty-Ninth Street Pier and headed up the seawall promenade until they came to the Verrazano Bridge.
Wind rushed over the open promenade, inciting the water and twisting the girls’ hair into knots. Bicycles and joggers passed them while cars accelerated on the adjacent expressway. The bridge loomed overhead. Its color and ribbed underbelly reminded Val of the giant blue whale that towered over the girls during a class trip to the Museum of Natural History. And standing underneath the bridge, she was filled with the same panic she had felt in the Hall of Ocean Life in the museum—an undeniable awareness of the unknown.
The Bay Ridge waterfront was the farthest either of the girls had ever been from home unaccompanied. Val insisted they keep going. When June wanted to head back, Val leaped over the promenade’s fence and scrambled onto the rocks at the water’s edge. She tiptoed along the rocks, daring June to follow.
June sat on the railing, watching Val, calling to her that if she didn’t turn around in two seconds, she was out of there. And then Val slipped, wedging her foot between two rocks where the suction of mud and water would not let her go.
June picked her way down and calmed her, told her to stop struggling or it would cause her foot to swell and they’d never get her free. She knelt on the slimy rocks and stuck her hands into the crevice
without complaining about the filth and mud as she dug to free Val’s foot. She’d worked patiently, shredding her fingers. And then when Val’s foot was free, she fell backward, landing on her wrist and spraining it.
The doctor charges the paddles once more. The body tenses and falls limp. He replaces the paddles and walks away. One of the nurses writes something on a clipboard. They discuss where to move the dead girl.
Val approaches the stretcher. The body is turned away from her. All she can see is blood-matted curls.
She places her fingers on the girl’s forehead, rotating it toward her. The skin is cool and clammy. The head falls toward Val. She understands that this is not June behind the mask of blood. Val returns to her room.
She sits by the window clutching the figurine of the Virgin. She rocks back and forth in her chair, then leans her head on the glass. The expressway rumbles. Sirens roll in the distance. A woman in an apartment building across from the hospital is sitting on her fire escape. On another fire escape above her two men are lying on a mattress holding hands, watching the sky. On the next roof over three women and a man are sitting in a kiddie pool tossing a beach ball. In the window below them an older man with a telescope is looking at the sky.
On the river two tugs pull a container ship into dock. A bouquet of fireworks explodes from a small fishing boat lit up with red and orange Christmas lights.
Val waits for the moon to slide across the water, showing her where June slipped from her grasp.
The city and river wink and glimmer. Taillights dwindle to beady red points and wide-eyed headlamps draw close then disappear. The water cups the skyline’s reflection—a ghost city. Val clutches the plastic figurine until it begins to cut into her skin. She counts backward from ten, and then she begins to pray for the pink raft to appear in the river below.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Seventy-Sixth Precinct smells of burned coffee. The vinyl tile is the color of a murky swimming pool. The windows are double-thick glass and don’t look out on much besides the blank stucco of a neighboring town house.