by Ivy Pochoda
She fell into step with girls who had ignored her when she was alive. She lingered in the pizza parlor, soundlessly flirting and chatting with the fine boys she was too chicken to approach in life. She lay out by the pool, untroubled by the heat of the sun, trying to remember the music that came from the boom boxes. She stared from the pier to Manhattan, still dreaming of checking the place out on her own, imagining that one day she’d float across the water, fly up and down the streets, capable of more in death than in life.
Things began to fade. Music was the first thing to go. Then the sound of voices. Soon talk became pantomime. June’s memory lost shape like a stratus cloud. She became an imperfect chronicler of the past, cataloging the days of her life in obsessive detail. Listing birthday gifts, family meals, favorite shoes, what she carried in her purse. Turning her life into a litany of possessions and events, replacing her memories with the objects that comprised them. The day she cut out of school and walked to Bay Ridge—bridge, wind, rocks, expressway. Her last birthday—cannoli, sleepover, dance music. Soon words lost their significance and she forgot the importance she once attached to “lip gloss” and “perfume.”
June knew that Val came with offerings—teenage magazines, pieces of jewelry, ribbons, things she thinks June misses. When Val left, June forced her fingers into the real world, the old place of weight and substance, and pulled these trinkets over to her side, objects she barely recognized and could not remember.
Eventually, June stopped trying to work her way back to the other side. She gave up on Val’s offerings. During the day, she folded herself inward, pulling herself away from what had made her old life electric and loud. She stopped wandering Red Hook. She forgot the resonance of things, the allure of pizza, the beat of music, the comfort of sprawling on a towel by the pool. But today something is breaking through the fortress of silence that encloses June. And she feels drawn to the pier.
After school, Val lies on her bed. A week has passed since Jonathan saved her for the second time. Although she knows that he is gone, she stares up at his apartment when she passes on her way home.
That afternoon one of the detectives who visited Val in the hospital pulled her out of history. Val watched him rub his ruddy neck as he told her that June’s body had been discovered in a sealed shipping container. The detective’s hand kept working his dry skin as he explained to Val that, despite the condition of the body, the medical examiner could see no signs of foul play. June drowned and someone hid her. Crazy people often think they are doing God’s work by burying a body, he explained. It’s not unusual for folks to cover up crimes they didn’t commit.
Val stares at her ceiling, trying not to think of June falling apart in a forgotten corner of the neighborhood. When did she stop being June and become June’s body, her remains?
“Valerie. Yo, Valerie!”
Val pulls the curtain back. Monique is standing across the street, not far from the spot where Mr. Sprouse used to stare into her window.
“Yo, Valerie, you wanna come down for a minute?”
“Why don’t you come up?”
“I got something to show you. Don’t leave me hanging out here.”
Val slips on her shoes and meets Monique on the sidewalk.
“You still have all those costumes in your basement?” Monique asks.
“You remember that?”
“I remember stuff,” Monique says, heading for Van Brunt. “Like all those games you made up.”
“All that make-believe was for babies.”
“It was dope,” Monique says.
Val checks Monique’s face to see if she’s messing with her.
“Honest,” Monique says. “You made up some crazy fun games.”
“Where are we going?” Val says.
“Valentino Pier.” Monique takes hold of Val’s wrist. “Listen, you asked me to do something once, you remember? You wanted me to sing for June.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You know, I was jealous of you with your raft. But I just sat there like that damn bench might carry me away.” Monique begins to lead them toward the water. “If I tell you something, you promise not to ask any questions? I’m going to sing for June, and she’s going to be listening. I know she’s going to be listening.”
The girls walk to Valentino Pier. Val doesn’t look at the tattered memorial to June. She refuses to glance at the rocky beach where Jonathan found her unconscious. She tries to ignore the spot on the pier where she’d let the music teacher hold her while she cried in her underwear. She does not pick out the place in the bay where June’s hand last slipped from hers. The water is darker now that the weather is getting colder. Val sits on a bench at the far end. Monique faces the Port of Jersey. She puts her hands on the railing and leans out over the water like a ship’s figurehead.
Val recognizes the song from tabernacle. There’s no way that Monique could have known that it was one of June’s favorites, “Prayer Changes Things.” When Monique gets to the line “I’ve been out on the stormy raging sea,” her voice deepens. She repeats the phrase. Her voice rises and falls with the waves. It goes out into the bay, then breaks back onto the shore. “I’ve been way out on the stormy, Lord, Lord, raging sea.”
Val listens to Monique’s hymn and tries to believe that June is nearby. When Monique is done, she sits down next to Val and they watch as the massive cruise ship that’s been docked all week begins to pull out of the terminal.
“Sing another,” Val says.
Monique stands up and goes to the rail.
Val knows that June is listening.
Ever since Fadi found June and received the reward from Mrs. Giatto, his bodega is popular again. He clips the articles about the discovery but only because they have pictures of Ren’s murals—the one on the shipping container and the one on his store. He filed these away to show Ren if he ever sees the kid again. But as days pass, he starts losing hope that this will ever happen.
Fadi has stopped dreaming of improvements he wants to make to his store. Ren’s mural is enough. One afternoon, he spots the little hoodlum Ren had deputized into his errand boy. The kid gives Fadi the address where he’d been delivering the groceries Ren put aside. Fadi cashes his reward check and tucks a fat envelope into the waistband of his pants.
Cree answers the door. Two women are sitting at the kitchen table. The smaller one, with long gray braids, is rubbing oil into the palms of her companion.
“The bodega guy,” Cree says after a second.
“Fadi. My name is Fadi.”
The two women look over from the table.
Fadi takes the envelope out of his waistband. He taps it on his opposite hand, before passing it to Cree.
“From Ren,” Fadi says.
Cree takes the envelope. “Do you know where he is?” Cree asks.
Fadi shakes his head. “You don’t want to open it?”
The woman with the gray braids drops something small and shiny attached to a chain from her palm. It spins once. “He wants you to get moving,” she says, then looks up. “He was a good boy.”
Cree looks from the old woman to the envelope. He runs his thumb under the seal. His eyes widen as he looks inside. “Whoa.” He hands the envelope back to Fadi. “I can’t. You’re the one who found June, right?”
Fadi shakes his head. “Only officially. Ren was the one who really found her.”
“So this money belongs to Ren.”
“No,” Fadi says. “It belongs to you.”
“You going to do something useful with that?” the older woman asks. “Or are you going to sit around all day like your mother holding on to something that just isn’t there?”
The other woman wriggles her hands free from the older woman’s grasp. “He’s going to use it to go to college.” Her speech is slow but determined. “It’s a gift from Marcus. He just reached back into this world and handed this miracle over to Cree.”
“No Marcus. No miracle, Ma,” Cree says. “This is Ren’s
doing.”
With difficulty, Cree’s mother folds her arms over her chest. “Reward money for that dead girl isn’t going to make up for killing your daddy.”
“Nobody’s trying to make up for nothing,” Cree says. “Somebody’s just trying to be my friend.” He turns to Fadi. “Thank you.” Cree offers Fadi his hand. “And thank Ren if you ever see him again.”
When Fadi crosses back to the waterside, the foghorn is sounding for the Queen Mary’s departure. Even though the ship brought little business and no real change, Fadi wants to see her off. Jonathan got a job on board. “Show tunes and smorgasbords,” he said when he’d visited the store one final time to say good-bye. Fadi knows he won’t be back.
He heads down to Valentino Pier. It’s crowded with people watching the ship. The foghorn bellows three more times, then the Queen Mary begins to ease from the dock, four tugboats leading her out.
Fadi walks to the tip of the pier, trying to see if Jonathan is on the top deck as he said he would be. There are two girls at the end of the pier—Valerie and Monique, the girl from the Houses who came into his store to buy gum the same day June drowned. Val is sitting on a bench. Monique is standing at the railing, leaning out over the water. She is singing a gospel hymn. Val listens with her eyes closed.
Fadi sits on a nearby bench and watches the Queen Mary. Monique’s song drifts over to him—a story of hope and prayer and stormy seas. He imagines her voice carrying over the water to Jonathan, blessing him on his journey.
The Queen Mary slides away, revealing the edge of Manhattan it had obscured. Red Hook’s shoreline is restored. The last taxis and buses that had deposited passengers pull away.
Instead of returning to his store when he reaches Van Brunt, Fadi crosses to the Dockyard and goes inside.
Happy hour is gearing up. He pulls out a seat at the bar. He keeps his head down so other patrons don’t embarrass themselves by saying hello without remembering his name.
The bartender has a beard like Abraham Lincoln. He smokes American Spirits and drinks his coffee black. Twice a week he buys a tin of mints.
“Hero Man,” he says, placing a coaster in front of Fadi.
“Excuse me?”
“Hero Man, right? You found that girl’s body. First drink’s on the house.”
A few customers look in their direction. They raise their glasses.
The walls of the Dockyard are covered in memorabilia from a different Red Hook. Photos of sea captains, bustling docks, tall ships pulled up to the old warehouses, long decommissioned tugs and fishing boats. All these are interlaced with the strange junk the newcomers seem to relish—busted taxidermy, Christmas lights, nautical refuse. On these walls the old lives among the new, the true Red Hook with the imagined one.
“Hero Man.” Someone slaps Fadi on the back. It’s the redheaded bartender, the woman Fadi often sees walking home alone as he’s opening up, the sad echo of her footfalls welcoming him to work. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever join us,” she says, sliding behind the bar.
The redhead pours Fadi another beer. It’s the same brew he sells for half the price, but it tastes better here. He looks over his shoulder to the glow of his shop across the street.
Hero Man. Maestro. RunDown. We let people invent us as they please, he thinks. The truth we keep to ourselves. Fadi sips his beer and thinks of Jonathan on the boat, disappearing underneath the span of the Verrazano. He will no longer have the musician to transform the neighborhood into one of his songs. Fadi will do this himself, listening for the melody of the local noise, the grinding, rattling, slamming, and silence. The music leaking from the bar, from passing cars, from open windows. The sad moan of the telephone wires on Van Brunt. The voices over his shoulder and outside the Dockyard’s window coming into concert, finding their own harmony to lift this place up and carry it along.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gratitude unmeasured to my teachers Doug Bauer, David Gates, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Thanks to my wonderful agent, Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell Management, as well as to Lyndsey Blessing and the incomparable William Callahan.
I know I’m punching above my weight to have had the amazing fortune to work with an editor such as Lee Boudreaux, likewise Michael McKenzie, Ashley Garland, Karen Maine, and Dan Halpern at Ecco. And Dennis Lehane, my gosh, thanks. In the UK, thanks to Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White and Suzie Dooré and Francine Toon at Sceptre.
To everyone at the James Merrill House—especially Lynn Callahan, Sibby Lynch, and Stuart Vyse—thank you for giving me a magical place to begin this book. Much love to Tiffany Briere, Sandra Ramirez, Lisa Fetchko, Carlin Wing, and of course, Louisa Hall for their advice and assistance. It goes without saying, but thanks to Justin Nowell, Matt Stewart, Mary Kelley, and Judyth van Amringe for their love and enthusiasm.
Most important, thanks to my parents, Philip and Elizabeth Pochoda, who are the best and most careful readers (in entirely different ways) whom I could have asked for. You might have had reason to worry when I was up all night in Red Hook—but, look, it worked out in the end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © by Justin Nowell
IVY POCHODA grew up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and lived in Red Hook for serveral years. She is the author of The Art of Disappearing. A former professional squash player, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
WWW.IVYPOCHODA.COM
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CREDITS
Cover design by Steve Attardo
Cover photographs: New York City skyline
© by Eli Reed/Magnum Photos; water © by Erin Trieb
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
VISITATION STREET. Copyright © 2013 by Ivy Pochoda. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-224989-0
EPub Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN 9780062249913
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