by Ivy Pochoda
Mikey raises his eyebrows and smiles at Val before giving the boys the once-over. Finally he purses his lips and looks to the side. “Yeah, I could get you some phials.”
The boy stares at him, half understanding.
“Crack, man. That what you want?” Mikey tries hard not to laugh. Then he looks at Val. “Valerie, your boy here thinks I make my bank selling crack.” He exhales, fluttering his lips. “Like I’m gonna sell crack to any of you kiddies. Like I’m gonna sell that shit period. You set these boys straight for me, Val.” Mikey turns back to the boys. “Anything else I can do for you gentlemen?”
The boy with the weed dances in place, then backtracks so quickly he nearly falls over his friend. “No. No thanks.”
Anna turns toward Val. “You know the dealer?”
“He was friends with my sister.”
“You know the dealer,” Anna says, turning away.
Two of the girls from St. Bernardette’s slide toward the far edge of the couch so they can get a better look at Val.
The boy with the weed approaches their group. “Your friend is a creep,” he says to Val.
“He’s not my friend.”
“Where do you live anyway?” the boy says.
The party moves upstairs. Some of the kids camp out in the bedrooms or in the walk-through closets that connect the rooms. Some chill on the third-story deck. A few disappear into the large bathrooms and lock the doors.
Val wanders to the third floor, joining a group of kids in the master bedroom who are sitting in the windows, dangling their legs over the garden and the river. They are smoking a joint that Val accepts.
For a while everything is cool and Val is able to drift in and out of the conversation. One of the girls makes room for her on the ledge. The air is fresh and reminds her of apples. She reaches her hand toward the dancing skyline, fluttering her fingers, blocking out the lights of one skyscraper at a time.
A boy comes into the room and hovers at Val’s back. The girls are sitting too close. They are nearly on top of her. She wants them to move away, to be quiet. She wants everyone to be quiet.
Val slides off the ledge and moves back into the room. She lies on the plush carpet. Each fiber is as thick as a caterpillar. She spreads her arms out like a snow angel digging her fingers deep into the carpet, holding on tight, anchoring herself.
She closes her eyes. The interior of each eyelid is a movie screen. The movie is rushing, fast-forwarding, the images blurring. She opens her eyes, but the movie retreats to her peripheral vision, rushing past just within sight. She shuts her eyes again, letting go of the carpet, pressing the heels of her palms over her lids. But the movie only runs quicker, draws closer. And Val feels that she’s falling through the carpet. She reaches for the floor, gripping the pile.
The group from the window is standing over her in a semicircle. They are funhouse tall. Their faces are receding. Although they look far away, their voices boom in Val’s head.
“Quiet,” she says, unable to hear her own voice over the others.
“Why is she yelling?”
“Man, she’s messed up.”
The heads gathered above Val shift like beads in a kaleidoscope. She raises an arm to shield her eyes. “Stop moving,” she says. “Please.”
“I didn’t move. Did any of you move?” a girl says. Then the whole crowd changes places, rotating like they’re playing musical chairs.
“Stop,” Val says.
“Someone make her stop shouting.”
Val wants people nearby, but nobody close. She wants someone to tell her she’s going to be all right, but she doesn’t want to hear anyone’s voice.
She gets to her feet. She remains bent at the waist as she lurches toward the bathroom. She steadies herself on the bed, then on the dresser, then opens the door and slides onto the cool tile.
“I’m not cleaning up after her,” someone says as she closes the door.
The bathroom is a relief. She presses her cheek into the floor, closes her eyes, and tries to make her mind still. But now someone’s rattling the doorknob, pulling, shaking the door.
“Take your fucking time,” a voice says.
Val lifts herself from the floor. She sits on the edge of the marble tub, cradling her head in her palms. A fist, an open palm, a shoulder slam the door.
“Come on!”
Val stands. She steadies herself, her arms on the sink. The room is spinning. The floor is out of sight. She turns on the water and wets her face, drenching her hair. Someone is pounding on the door.
The only light in the bathroom is the orange glow of a small nightlight plugged into a socket next to the sink.
Val looks up from the sink and into the mirror. Her reflection is a dark shadow in the dark glass. She leans forward, then lolls back, trying to find a distance that won’t nauseate her.
You fucked up, June says.
It’s June in the mirror, dripping wet, river soaked. Her eyes sunken, her hair plastered down. Her face is the color of dirty marble.
You’re a fuckup, June says. And then she slips away and Val is staring at her own face.
“Come back!” Val says. “Come back,” Val says again, lifting her hand, slamming it into the glass, watching her own reflection fragment and distort.
There is blood running down her arm. She lies down on the tile. Someone has opened the door. “Just leave her.”
Val has no idea how much time passes before the door opens again and a tall man lifts her to her feet, cradling her in his arms. Out in the master bedroom she realizes it’s Irish Mikey. He parts the cluster of teenagers, silencing them with some sort of gangster grimace, and shields Val’s face from the party as he leads her down the stairs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cree wakes up, his headphones around his neck and his music down low. He lifts the frayed blue curtain that covers the window next to his bed. The grit caked onto the outside of his window makes even bright summer days look overcast.
His mother is already on her bench in the courtyard. Gloria’s posture is erect, shoulders straight, knees pressed together. She wears her tight, white nurse’s uniform with her solid walking shoes. A bright yellow sweater is draped over her shoulders. She holds a cup of coffee, which she blows on, spreading the steam. She didn’t waste time this morning. She headed down to that bench the moment she was showered and dressed, taking her coffee with her. Cree puts his headphones back on, turns up his music, and cancels the sounds of the projects coming to life.
An hour later Gloria is still on her bench. The coffee cup is on the ground. She is sitting sideways, one arm thrown over the backrest, addressing someone who should be in sitting in a position exactly mirroring hers.
A couple of kids in no hurry to get to first period at the junior high pass the bench. They point at Gloria, snapping their fingers to punctuate their laughter. They double over, exaggerate the joke, then point and snap again. Cree knows what these boys are saying. Crazy lady talking all kinds of shit. Don’t care who sees her being all fucked up out in the wide open. Poke her with a stick, crazy lady ain’t gonna move—like she’s in a motherfuckin’ trance.
They are too young to remember what went down on that bench, how a couple of kids about their age shot Cree’s father in broad daylight for no damn reason—an aftershock of the dwindling drug violence. These boys are too young to remember the time before Marcus fell when you had to duck behind your couch as shots rang out, dodging stray bullets that lodged in the lower floors of the projects. They missed out on when their hood was the crack capital of America.
These boys have it easy. They don’t have to worry about gangs, crews, or getting jumped in. They don’t have to keep track of who owns what bench, what corner. Plenty of drugs are still sold in the Houses and on the streets, but the lifestyle doesn’t dominate Red Hook anymore.
So the neighborhood’s old ghosts don’t mean a thing to them. Cree doesn’t blame the boys for calling his mother out. Gloria is down on that bench too of
ten. But he guesses their mothers are among the women who climb the five flights of stairs and ask Gloria to reach out to their own dead.
Cree takes off his headphones and steps into the kitchen. An open suitcase is on the threshold of the kitchen and the living room. A pile of sequin tank tops, tight jeans, gold strappy sandals, pink pajamas, bright brassieres, and fussy thongs is strewn between the two rooms. Dance music is pumping out of the small radio. Cree can hear the shower running in the bathroom. He lowers the music. The bathroom door opens.
“Turn that damn station up,” his aunt Celia says. “Turn it up. Don’t make me come out there all naked and make you do it.”
Cree raises the volume. In a few minutes his aunt appears in the kitchen wearing a towel around her body and another around her hair. She is rubbing pink lotion into her elbows. The scent reminds Cree of air freshener.
“You and Ray have a fight?” Cree says.
“You think this is a decent time to get up?” Celia sits on one of the vinyl kitchen chairs. She wipes beads of water from her forehead.
Unlike her sister, Gloria, who has widened over the years, Celia’s slender with just the right amount of curve. Cree has to admit that she’s a sexier version of her daughter, Monique. She has high, polished cheekbones and wide-set eyes flecked with gold. Her lips are an exotic pink-brown color that reminds Cree of chocolate-covered cherries.
“I’ve been up. Just not standing. I remember a time when you didn’t get up till noon.”
“You were a baby then.”
Cree steps over the pile of clothes. “Is this an extended visit?”
Celia gives him a look, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, drawing her chin into her neck, squinting, pursing her lips. “I don’t need to tell you how it’s gonna be if Ray comes near me again.”
“I give it a week,” Cree says.
“Whatchu know about it?” Celia gets up from the table, digs through her suitcase, and ducks into Gloria’s room to change.
Celia and Ray have a relationship that fluctuates between a simmer and a rolling boil. They’ve been busting up for years—mad, passionate fights that last for days before resolving themselves with bouts of lust known throughout the Houses. Ray and Celia got together too young, and Monique was born before they figured that out.
Even after Monique, Celia remained the Houses’ queen bee, the girl on everybody’s mind. Shirts cut down to there, jeans that looked like they took a lot of getting into, earrings that could knock you flat. She traveled farther from the neighborhood than anyone Cree knew. Fast cars were always waiting to take her to clubs in Brighton Beach or Queens. Celia used to walk Cree and Monique home from school through a chorus of whistles and catcalls.
She wasn’t more than twenty when Monique was born. And it looked like she was going to stay wild long after that. But after her brother-in-law was killed, she got it in her head to become a corrections officer just like Marcus. The job suits Celia, giving her a useful outlet for her don’t-mess-with-me attitude that Cree figures comes from a lifetime of unwelcome attention on the streets.
“Monique know you’re here?” Cree asks.
“It was her choice to stay behind. She’s a daddy’s girl these days.”
“And you’ve talked to Ma?”
“Saw her on my way in. She still out there?”
Cree looks out the window.
“Maybe you should just dig that bench up and take it out of the Houses,” Celia says. “Maybe Marcus needs a change of scene.”
“Mom’s not moving.”
“We all like to reach back into the past. No use in getting stuck.”
“That’s what Grandma says.”
“You’ve been visiting with Lucy?” Celia dumps a pouch of makeup on the table.
“Maybe.”
“On what account?”
“There’s something I wanted to know about.”
“Something or someone?” Celia presses powder onto her cheeks, sending puffs of sparkly beige dust into the air.
“Someone,” Cree says.
“Dead or alive?”
Cree watches his aunt line her eyes, drawing their edges outward into the shape of almonds. “That was my question.”
“Lucy doesn’t give straight answers. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know them. In fact, the less answer you get, the more she knows.” Celia puts down her eyeliner and looks at Cree. “Anything you want to ask me, baby boy?”
“Nah, Cee. I’m cool.”
Cree knows that Celia’s no longer down with talking to the spirits. She’s been putting her gift to rest of late, apparently because she doesn’t want Monique burdened with a whole bunch of dead people. This is part of the reason she sends Monique to the tabernacle on Sunday—to weed out the family history of ghosts and spirits, crystals and divination.
Cree suspects that Gloria is the real reason Celia’s abandoning her gift. She’s watched her sister withdraw, choose the dead over the living. She’s seen her sit out on that bench too early and too late, unwilling to put Marcus’s pension to good use in order to live somewhere better.
Cree heads for the shower. The water is tepid and the pressure’s down. It’s been nearly three weeks since he jumped into the bay after Val. His thoughts keep returning to her, trying to square her vulnerability with her daring, her sadness with her spirit.
He’s been keeping an eye out for her, looping around her block, watching the light in her bedroom window go on and off. He’s thought of ringing the bell, but he knows the Marinos won’t welcome him.
Red Hook usually seems too small, bringing you face-to-face with people you want to avoid. But now that Cree’s looking for Val, the place seems to have expanded. The gap between the front and the back of the neighborhood has widened. For the first time, Cree feels conspicuous on the waterside’s streets. He feels as if people know who he’s looking for and why. And maybe they also know that he was down by the pier the night June disappeared. So he walks quickly, hoping that his gait will let everyone know he has his own plans, somewhere he needs to be.
Cree and Celia head out of the Houses together. Not much has changed about walking down the street with Celia, except teenagers are now too intimidated to hoot or call. They just whistle behind her back and shake their heads in appreciation. It’s the middle-aged men, the ones who don’t care that the lady’s a law officer, who still call out as she passes. Never mind she’s been living with Ray for years.
Midday and Coffey Park is quiet. Two kids about Cree’s age are shooting hoops. On the far side of the park a handful of hipsters are sprawled on the grass, letting their dogs mingle as they catch the late September sun through the webbed branches.
Celia’s swinging her hips. She’s talking something about a nightclub she might go to later. Talking about seeing what’s up with her old girlfriends. It’s going to be the perfect night for a little bit of crazy she tells her nephew.
Early arrivals for the methadone clinic have claimed the benches along the path through the park nearest the basketball courts. Cree’s almost through this gauntlet when he hears his name: “Acretius.”
He’d spotted his uncle when he’d entered the park but hoped the man was too strung out to notice him.
“Acretius.” Desmond’s voice sounds as if it’s been trapped inside rusty pipes—a grating, desperate sound. “Acretius, boy.”
“Leave him,” Celia says.
Celia and Gloria have no time for Marcus’s brother—an addict with a bad habit of making his problems everyone else’s. Des makes a little bank collecting the neighborhood’s empties. He can tell you which houses put out the most bottles, who drinks the good stuff and who sticks to swill.
Cree can smell his uncle behind him, a scent of sour sheets and Night Train. He turns. Junk has melted all family resemblance from Des’s face, leaving only the essentials—skin, bone, and raw need. “You got a dollar?”
“No, man.”
“Not even a dollar?”
; “I said no.”
Cree searches his uncle’s face for anything left of his father.
A dog that looks like the business end of a feather duster scurries over and starts licking Cree’s shoe.
“Leave the boy alone, Des,” Celia says. “Else I’ll have you written up for panhandling and loitering.”
“A dollar. It’s not like I’m asking him to win me the lottery,” Des says.
“I’ll write you up,” Celia says. “Don’t think I won’t.”
Cree can’t take his eyes off Des’s face. His skin is ashy black. There are pockmarks on his cheeks, hollow pockets that look like wormholes. His lips have thinned, vanishing into the pleats of his skin. Every time Cree sees Des he imagines that the world is out to erase every trace of Marcus.
“Traitor. Law man,” Des says, looking at Celia.
“I’m a C.O. just like your brother. You’d call him a traitor?”
“Marcus’d be good for the cash.”
A guy from the opposite side of the park with shaggy blond hair and wearing tight black jeans rushes over to collect his dog. Before he reaches Cree, Des coughs and spits, splattering the dog.
The rocker picks up the dog. “Fuck you, man,” he says to Des.
Des reaches out for Celia’s arm with one hand and points toward the rocker with the other. “You gonna write him up too, write him up for talking to me like he own the park?”
“You keep away from us, Des,” Celia says.
Cree and Celia leave the park. They head down Visitation. Even though it’s a schoolday, Cree keeps a lookout for Val. The parlor floor windows of the Marinos’ house are open. Paulie and Jo are settled on the couch.
“Hold up, Cree,” Celia says. “Something I got to do.”
Celia is standing in front of the stoop next to the Marinos’. She’s got her hands on her hips and is staring up at a second-floor window of the neighbor’s house. She tosses her head back, opens her mouth. It’s a moment before the word emerges. “Bitch.”
Cree rushes to his aunt and grabs her arm. She shakes him off.
“Bitch,” she calls, “I know you’re in there.”