Visitation Street

by Ivy Pochoda

  Cree stands alone in the room, listening to the whir of the instruments, the static of the intercom. He’s been around the hospital enough to know not to follow when they take Gloria for tests.

  Gloria’s room has a view of the river, the tip of Manhattan and Jersey. Cree can see the rectangular silhouettes of the Houses—a few windows lit with weak light. The nurses bring Gloria back, hooked up to more tubes and more machines. Her breathing and heartbeat are underscored by short beeps and the rhythmic compression of air.

  The doctor, a middle-aged Indian with dead eyes, tells Cree that Gloria is stable. It could be months before they know how much damage has been done. So maybe Cree would like to wait somewhere else, at home, perhaps, where he can sleep.

  Cree says nothing and Carmen explains that he will be waiting right here. She’s brought him blankets and pillows and converted three chairs into a makeshift bed.

  When Cree and Gloria are alone, he takes her hand. Her face is twisted into its painful smile. He squeezes her fingers, careful not to jostle her IV. He wipes the tear that slides down her cheek.

  The lights of Manhattan drop their reflections into the river. The taillights of cars on the expressway flow west. Cree watches the boats cut wakes on the dark water. He sees two tugs disappear upriver.

  He knows he won’t sleep. He goes down to the lobby for a soda. He takes his drink outside, inhaling the Brooklyn scent and expelling the antiseptic hospital air. He steps to the side of the revolving door, making way for patients who stagger in and out.

  “Yo. Yo, my man.”

  Cree turns but can’t tell who’s calling to him.

  “Yo, Cree. Cree James.”

  Cree glances across the street where a tiered parking garage casts checkered light onto the street. Standing in one illuminated square is Ren. Cree crosses to him.

  “You still following me?”

  “I heard about your moms. I brought you something,” Ren says.

  “I don’t need it.”

  Ren hands over a long package wrapped in newspaper. “Your telescope. I thought you might want it to keep tabs. You know, from her window and all.” He jams his hands in his pockets and turns. He pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his tufts of hair. “Be well.”

  Cree watches him walk down the street, then bolts back into the building, and runs up the eight flights of stairs and rushes to Gloria’s window. He trains the telescope on the street, trying to locate Ren. But the boy is ghost.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Val feels Mr. Sprouse watching her in the cafeteria. He’s standing by the door near the lunch line, a small Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand. Recently, she’s noticed the music teacher’s eyes on her in the hallway or on the steps of the school—a gaze that lingers long after she expected him to look away.

  Ever since Anna’s party, Val has eaten lunch alone. The girls at the surrounding tables don’t bother to keep their gossip to a whisper. They talk about her breaking the mirror. They exaggerate the story, confident she won’t come over and correct them. Irish Mikey becomes her boyfriend, her pimp, a hard-core slinger of crack, a gun-carrying lowlife. She doesn’t have the courage to remind her classmates that Anna was the one who summoned Mikey, hoping for something stronger than the dimes of schwag he sells. But even worse, they talk about June.

  Val looks up from her lunch and sees Mr. Sprouse walking toward her table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The girls at the neighboring table slow their chatter to watch the music teacher and Val—a girl so lame only a teacher is willing to eat with her. It could be worse, she thinks. The teacher standing in front of her table waiting for her reply could have been Mr. Landers, the geometry teacher who scatters seed to pigeons on his way from the subway, or it could have been Mrs. Bloodworth who everyone is sure likes her students more than she should. At least Mr. Sprouse is good-looking. Even the bitchiest of her classmates would agree.

  “Go ahead,” Val says. “They’ll run their mouths anyway.”

  Her classmates’ rumors keep June alive. Somebody’s heard that June was spotted near the seedy strip clubs underneath the expressway in Sunset Park. Someone said she ran away with her older boyfriend. Someone is sure she’s living in a halfway house upstate.

  “Now that June’s missing, everybody knows everything about her. They make her up as they go along.”

  “Ignore it,” Mr. Sprouse says.

  “Easy for you to say. It’s not like I have a million other friends to distract me.”

  “People prefer a good story to a real tragedy,” Mr. Sprouse says. “Don’t listen to them.” He splays his hands on the table, transforming the scarred Formica into piano keys. His eyelids drop as he bangs out a song audible only in his head.

  “What are you doing?” Val asks.

  “Tuning them out.” He plays another string of invisible notes. “It’s Bach. Can’t you hear?”

  “No.”

  “Listen.” He inclines his head toward the table. Val does the same. She hears the pads of his fingers drumming the plastic, then a four-bar melody whistled into her ear that matches the notes. His lips brush her earlobe, electrifying the fine hairs. Mr. Sprouse pulls his hands back and drops them into his lap.

  “You cheated. You whistled,” Val says.

  “It worked. Ignoring people is an art. I do it all the time. On the other hand, I’m often ignored. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Erin Medina, a bottle blonde in the class above Val’s, starts talking loudly, raising her voice so it carries through the crowded lunchroom. “So last weekend, you know, I had to go to New Jersey because of my little brother and whatever. He wanted to go to this lame theme park.”

  Val turns.

  “Ignore,” Mr. Sprouse says.

  “The park was supersad, but you’ll never guess who I saw.” Erin pauses and sips her can of iced tea. “June.”

  Val stiffens. “Ignore her,” the music teacher repeats. Val looks at him, wondering if he’ll play his invisible piano for her, lower his lips to her ear once more.

  “She was kinda beat-up looking, street kid style.”

  “You’re sure it was her?” one of Erin’s classmates asks.

  “What kind of question is that? I’m not blind. Of course it was her. She’d dyed her hair black. So I went up to her and I was, like, ‘Hey, I like your hair.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, whatever. Thanks.’”

  “You didn’t ask her anything else?” the same classmate says.

  “Like what? No, she was with this creepy older guy,” Erin says.

  Val stands up. She ignores Mr. Sprouse who’s trying to draw her back into her seat. She marches over to Erin’s table. The girls look up from their lunches. Val grips Erin by the shoulder, tugging so Erin must wheel round to face her.

  “You’re a liar,” Val says. “You’re a liar and you know it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Erin says, “and everyone knows it.” She looks to her companions for backup.

  Val’s face feels hot. Her nose stings with the threat of tears. “You’re liars,” she says. She’s shouting now, at this table of girls and the surrounding ones.

  “You’re lying about June. You didn’t even know her. She’d never do any of the things you say.”

  Erin and her friends inch back in their seats, as if they are worried Val’s going to strike or spit.

  There’s no way to hold back her tears. June isn’t running around with a dangerous, older boyfriend. She isn’t waiting on line for a roller coaster. She hasn’t started wearing Goth makeup. She hasn’t cut or dyed her hair.

  “June’s dead,” Val shouts. “She’s dead.” The cafeteria falls silent. Several teachers stand up and start making their way toward Val.

  June is dead. That’s that. The moment Val says this, she knows it’s true. It doesn’t matter how many vigils are held, how many special assemblies. It doesn’t matter how many of her classmates write themselves into June’s life, how many of them try to reinvent June for the
ir own pleasure. There are no songs, rituals, shrines, or prayers that will change this. June is dead. She’s swollen, bloated, rigid, decaying. She exactly as she appeared to Val in the mirror, except real. And it’s Val’s fault.

  “And none of your stupid lies are going to change that,” Val screams, swiping Erin’s lunch tray to the floor. She rushes toward the door of the cafeteria. No one stops her. No one prevents her from leaving the school. At the end of the street she turns back to see if Mr. Sprouse is following her, but the street is empty. Then she rounds the corner and heads toward Red Hook.

  Val doesn’t bother to keep an eye out for Cree. He’s kept away from her long enough for her not to get her hopes up. She winds up in the park near Valentino Pier. She stops in front of the shrine to June at the foot of the pier. June’s school photo is streaked and pale. The glass jars holding the seven-day candles are filled with rain. How stupid was she to have imagined her babyish rituals would bring June back, that her dumb games, her ordering and organizing, had any significance over an event that happened months ago?

  Val picks up a photo of June. She wipes the dirt from the cracked glass. She punches the frame, splintering the glass, reopening the wounds on her knuckles.

  She runs to the end of the pier. She holds the frame like a Frisbee and hurls it into the water in the direction of Governors Island. It wobbles, before stabilizing, cresting through the air in a neat arc, then crashing into the water.

  On the way back home, she passes by the Dockyard. The windows are fogged and when the door swings open, it reveals a dangerously dark interior that smells of rotting wood and stale beer. She knows Mr. Sprouse hangs out in there. She’s seen him outside smoking and talking to a couple of the disheveled artist types who drive Paulie nuts. Her father would kill her if she ever went in there—not that she’d have the courage to push open the door anyway. But she wants Mr. Sprouse to whisper to her again, so that she cannot just ignore her classmates, but push thoughts of June below the surface and figure out a way to move on without her.

  At home Val cleans her bloody knuckles. Then she grabs Rita’s nail scissors and begins to cut her hair. She watches the strands hit the sink. She cuts what she imagines will be choppy bangs. Then she goes to work on the back, removing chunks and dropping them in the toilet. Her arms ache. Her thumb and middle finger chafe against the scissors’s small loops.

  Since Anna DeSimone’s party, Val has avoided the mirror. She washes her face and brushes her teeth keeping her eyes on the sink. She does not want to see June staring back at her. Val drops the scissors and rubs her hands through the jagged remains of her hair. She is startled by her reflection, how the choppy strands make her neck look long, her ears jump out, her forehead widen.

  Her parents are sitting in the living room watching a police procedural.

  “Jesus, fuck!” Paulie says when he sees Val standing in the doorway to the living room.

  She scuttles into the kitchen, but he catches her. He wheels her around so they are face-to-face. “You look like you escaped the nuthouse.”

  Val shakes off her father’s grip. He smells like aftershave.

  “How come you want everyone thinking you’re a little bit crazy?” Paulie runs a hand over Val’s hair. “Fuck I’m gonna do with this?”

  “You don’t have to do anything with it.”

  “I’m gonna have a daughter running around looking like a schizo? You think I want people in this neighborhood thinking Paulie Marino’s got a girl looks like a junkie?”

  “I don’t look like a junkie.”

  “You do. Like one of those crazy girls who stays up all night in the bar. You want that to be your life? I’m not having a low-life barfly for a kid. You’re a beautiful girl. My beautiful girl.” He tugs her hair again. “But I’m fixing this mess.”

  Paulie is famous at his firehouse for giving good haircuts. The boys used to call him Vidal Sassoon until he told them exactly who they could call Vidal Sassoon and it wasn’t him. But he kept cutting hair, giving the regulation crops a little something extra that the boys could be proud of.

  Val waits until Paulie returns with his clippers, scissors, a towel, and a bowl of water. He opens the door to the stoop and pushes Val out.

  “You’re going to cut my hair here?” She looks up and down the street.

  Maureen, the art therapist who inherited the house next door from her grandmother, is watering her plants. She’s got two yappy dogs that look like grimy lambs. Paulie keeps her at a distance. It doesn’t matter that her father was a longshoreman and VFW member. It doesn’t matter than her grandmother organized the rummage sales at the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Maureen’s been keeping company with a flashy customer from the Houses, a sleek, black man who’s been visiting her late and staying until morning. It’s about boundaries, Paulie explains. There’s the projects and there’s the neighborhood.

  Paulie ignores Maureen as he makes Val sit on the bottom step. He takes a seat a couple of steps up, puts a hand on her head, cupping it in his rough palm, bowing it to her chest. He turns on the clippers and runs them along the base of Val’s scalp. Her ears vibrate and the shaved skin prickles.

  Val likes the feel of her father’s fingers on her head, the pleasurable pain when they tug the longer strands of her hair. She likes how his large hands probe her scalp, searching for symmetry in the mess she’s made. Finally he stands up and walks in front of her to even her tiny bangs.

  “You look a little like a boy but you don’t look nuts.”

  Maureen has finished watering her plants. “Nice haircut,” she says.

  Val stares at her, trying to figure out if this woman with her messy salt-and-pepper curls and long batik skirt is fooling with her.

  “I said, nice haircut,” Maureen says. “Not a lot of girls can pull off short hair. You’re lucky.”

  Lucky? Maureen is crazier than Val thought.

  After dark it begins to rain. Val lies on her bed, tugging at the remains of her hair, listening to the wind whipped up by the water. The windowpane rattles. Val pulls back the curtain to watch the storm.

  There is someone is standing in front of the converted church across the street. Val can feel the person staring into her window. At first she thinks she has summoned June home—that by giving up on her she had brought her back. She pulls back the curtain wider. There’s an adjustment in the vines as the watcher pulls back out of sight.

  Val drops the curtain and turns off her bedroom light, then she peeks through the small gap where the curtain doesn’t reach the sill. The watcher steps forward. Val cannot make out a face. Then in the quick, tapered flame of a lighter, she sees Mr. Sprouse. The light goes out, replaced by the ember of a cigarette. Val crouches on the ground, not daring to disturb the curtain as she watches her watcher, thrilled that he will stand guard even in the rain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the mornings, Fadi no longer walks from the subway, but takes the bus, riding close to the window on the right-hand side, hoping the driver maintains the speed necessary to bring Renton’s work to life.

  When his cousin Heba helps him out in the store, Fadi hurries through the Houses to Smith Street. He stands across from the painted columns and squints, jerking his head from right to left, trying to make Ren’s jumper leap across the wall. He tries jogging down the block. At the corner, he has to sit down to recover his breath. Eventually a woman pokes her head out from the candy factory and glares at Fadi. In the daylight Renton’s painting is nothing more than a jigsaw of black on a white background.

  Fadi searches for a way to capture the mural for his newsletter but his digital camera only reveals the building’s dormant façade. So he writes a small item, telling the neighborhood about the mural, urging them to look for art among their buildings. “RunDown,” he writes, “captures the beauty of Red Hook.”

  Ever since the morning they ran into each other on Smith Street, Renton’s been hanging around the store. Fadi can’t ignore the kid’s hunger—the
way he looks at Fadi’s lunches, never asking, vanishing until Fadi has worked his way through fried rice and boneless ribs or a medium pepperoni pie, before reappearing in time to catch the leftovers.

  Fadi throws odd jobs Ren’s way. He offers him thirty bucks to mop up the back room—a job that allows Ren to make use of the sink to clean himself up. He gives him another twenty to restack the beer in the coolers, imports to the left, domestic to the right, pricey microbrews at eye level, cheap swill down low. Ren always refuses Fadi’s offer to let him work the register. “I keep my business behind the scenes,” Ren told him.

  Ren usually performs his tasks when the store is empty. If customers come in, he often finds something in the back room that needs doing. During an afternoon lull, Ren finds some Windex and begins cleaning the glass fronts of the coolers. When he’s finished, he climbs up on a stepladder, takes down all the toilet paper and paper towels so he can dust the tops of the refrigerators. When he’s done, he meticulously restacks the paper goods.

  “No one looks up there,” Fadi says.

  “The ship’s coming in, boss,” Ren says. “You can’t be too careful.” He’s a stickler for order, for making sure Fadi’s products are evenly spaced and neatly displayed. He’s even more fastidious than Fadi, double-checking the white squares of tile to make sure no dirt shows. The shop is cleaner than ever, the shelves more organized.

  Ren finishes reorganizing the toilet paper and paper towels and starts aligning the beer in the coolers. He makes sure not to get prints on the newly polished glass. He’s nearly done when the wino enters. When he sees Ren, he freezes. “Cerveza,” he says, pointing first to Fadi, then to the back of the store. “Quiero mi cerveza. Es tiempo.” He touches his wrist.

  “English,” Fadi says.

  “Cerveza. Beer.”

  “It’s always tiempo for cerveza. Go.” Fadi waves toward the back.

  “No.” The wino hops from foot to foot.

  “No?”

  “Tu.” He points at Fadi.