There wasn’t much in the fridge—various leftover pastas curling in Tupperware and cold cuts she could practically hear expiring. Ravenous, she spotted the pack of Luckies on the edge of the dinette table, and her whole mouth tingled with crave. Although the pack was half empty, she didn’t remember buying it. Just one, she thought. Just one, and maybe a little drinkie to follow. Instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shutting it out, and did what Katie had told her to do. She said the word poem out loud.
That’s it, she thought, scrambling for her wire-bound notebook and new pen. I’m going to write me a poem. From the flickering Panasonic, Maury asked, “When did you first suspect that Aurelio was sleeping with your mother?”
Poetry was Jo’s new medicine. During her last trip to the university hospital’s emergency room, her vague complaint that she had been “sleeping too long and smoking too much and maybe drinking a little harder and my kid is driving me crazy” earned her a useless nicotine patch and the advice of Katie McMahon, a perky community counselor, who suggested she put little bits of her life into lines. Rhyme or not, no matter. About anything she wanted it to be about. “If you call it a poem, then it is,” Katie had said.
Surprisingly, the little scrawlings helped. She’d written more than a few choice lines about Al, the ex-cop who showed up with his monthly hard-on to pound her into the mattress with something he called love. She wasted whole pages on Charlie, who’d inhabited her womb for nine months and now had no patience for her “stupid fuckin’ rules.” He dropped by occasionally to pilfer weed money from her wallet, gobble the contents of the refrigerator, or sleep off an encounter with too many shots of Jäger. On good days—or when she needed to remember that there had actually been good days—she wrote all pretty about a moment when she was full of light, strolling over the Bayonne Bridge like she was walking on water. From up there the island magically shed its dingy and became more than gossip, stench, and regret. The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and make the assholes as small as possible.
Flipping to a fresh page in the notebook, she clicked the top of her pen and licked the point the way she’d seen real writers do before they—
A key rattled in the lock and the front door was flung open with such force that it banged into the wall, knocking more mint-green chips from the plaster. Jo felt her heart go large and stone.
“Hey, what the hell is up, Jo?”
He refused to call her Mom. Or Mother. Sixteen years old, six feet, two inches of swaggering explosive. Her son.
“It’s hot as shit out there. What’s in this place to eat?”
“I think there’s some ham in the—”
“The same ham as last time? That shit’s old. Ain’t nuthin’ cooked in this bitch?”
Jo steeled herself. “Charlie, I told you not to come in here—”
“Cursing? Hungry? And you gon’ do what?”
Jo knew the answer. Nothing. She had never not been terrified of her son. Charlie had ripped her open at birth, glared at her as he bit her breast to demand milk, pinched and pummeled his kindergarten classmates, set fire to wastebaskets in school restrooms, been suspended from sixth grade for showing up plastered on a vile mix of Kool-Aid and vodka, and greeted all attempts to control and educate with a raised middle finger. He strutted and primped in Day-Glo Jordans, a too-big Yankees cap twisted sideways on his head, pants two sizes too wrong pulled down so far the waistband backed his ass. He adopted the lyric swagger of black boys, taking on their nuance and rhythms while hissing about “niggers” in the circle of his crew. While Jo watched in horror, Charlie grew as wide and high as a wall. He arced over her when she dared make mama noises, and huffed in her face with dead breath, which stank of cheap tobacco.
His eyes looked like someone had died behind them.
She wasn’t sure what he did during the day. It wasn’t school. She’d gotten letters and phone calls from Port Richmond High attesting to his continued absence. “He’s a dropout,” she finally blurted to one well-meaning guidance counselor, before hanging up the phone.
There were even rumors that Charlie had managed to father a child. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Jo could see him snarling, fully erect, a gum-cracking girl laid wide and waiting. His lovemaking would be thrust and spit. When she thought of a child built of Charlie and air, a thick shudder ripped through her.
“Did you hear me? Food! I’m fuckin’ hungry! I swear, Jo, don’t make me have to—”
She sprang from her chair and bolted for the kitchen with no idea what she would do once she got there.
He’d only hit her once.
One clouded August night, a week after Charlie turned sixteen, Jo saw him on the street just after finishing her part-time job at Bloomy Rose, a florist in Midland Beach. She’d worked late that night, helping with a huge order for the funeral of a local politician. As she wound her way toward her bus stop, a fierce rain needled her cheeks. Assuming the rain had driven everyone inside, she was surprised to see a dark human huddle on Father Capodanno Boulevard just before Midland Avenue, and even more surprised to see her son at its edges.
But there he was, hanging on yet another corner with Bennie Mahoney, a no-gooder from New Dorp, and two other boys she didn’t know. Their backs were hunched against the downpour, and she saw the orange flare of cigarettes. She wanted and didn’t want to know what they were up to.
The sign on the nearest building on Midland read Q.S.I.N.Y., and she could hear the guttural thump of dance music from inside. The letters made no sense to her until she realized where she’d seen them before. The island’s first openly gay club had launched on the Fourth of July weekend to much fanfare and trepidation. Staten Island wasn’t known for its tolerance, and there were worries that the patrons of the club would become targets for ham-handed haters.
The letters stood for Queer Staten Island New York.
Jo felt an ominous drop in her belly.
Charlie’s views on all things gay were well known and frequently bellowed. While Jo admitted a cringe when she thought about man-on-man, and a starkly uncomfortable curiosity when she considered girl-on-girl, Charlie’s florid vocabulary was peppered with references to “fuckin’ fags,” “cocklickers,” and “turd burglars.” Jo remembered a bespectacled whisperer from their block who had packed up and hightailed it off the island with his family after being on the receiving end of a vicious beatdown. He never identified his attackers, but Jo remembered how he would practically shrivel when he passed Charlie on the street.
The Charlie who now, for no good reason, was in the middle of a meeting outside a gay dance club. Afraid of what he might be planning, and before she thought about the consequences of doing so, Jo shouted his name.
The group stopped its conspiratorial grumbling. All eyes snapped to her, standing across the street from them, the wind crimping her cheap umbrella, her cotton blouse plastered to her breasts and darkening with rain.
Her son’s eyes bored holes into her. He did not move.
Bennie punched Charlie’s shoulder hard and laughed. “Hey, it’s your fuckin’ mommy.” The two other boys joined in the merriment. But Charles Liam Mulroy, his steel-gray eyes locked to his mother’s, did not speak. Jo couldn’t bring herself to utter his name again.
They stood that way, three of the young men snickering, one son motionless and burning, one drenched mother craving the world of ten minutes ago. Finally Jo spotted the approaching bus spewing puddles. She scurried to the stop and boarded, never looking back.
Late that night, she woke from a fitful sleep to an angry wall in her room, a wall dripping rain and hissing through its teeth. After two deep glasses of screw-top wine, gulped to calm her nerves, Jo hadn’t heard Charlie come in.
“Don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again. You wanna be somebody’s mother, get your ass a dog. Don’t you ever admit you even fuckin’ know me. Not in front of my crew. You see me, you don’t say shit. You lucky I
didn’t lay your bitch ass flat right there on the street.”
She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until her head began to pound. Charlie was panting, fists clenched, backlit and glowing in the moonwash. She was just beginning to think how oddly beautiful the image was when it grabbed a fistful of pink pajama top, pulled her up from the pillow, and then knocked her back down with a slap that rattled her teeth.
“Don’t. You. Ever. Fuckin’. Embarrass. Me. Again.”
He dropped his body down on the side of the bed, waiting for Jo to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. She lay with her head flattened to the left, the way it had fallen after the slap. She felt his hard gaze. After a wet intake of breath, he slowly lifted the pajama top and clamped her bare right breast with a huge, calloused hand. Jo silently willed her spirit out of the room. Charlie squeezed rough, then pinched the tip of her nipple so hard she whimpered.
He laughed. “This some sick shit. Wow. Man. You done got my cock hard in this bitch.”
He popped up and strutted out of the bedroom, leaving behind the dead green smell of bad weather.
They never talked about it. She never called anyone, never thought about reporting him, never even mentioned it to Al, the ex-cop. From that day on, she never acknowledged him in public, no matter what he was doing, who he was with, where he was. And she stopped remembering the thick smear of blood she’d seen on his skinned knuckles that night. She stopped wondering whose it was.
“I am fuckin’ starvin’ up in this bitch!” Charlie screamed again.
Jo clawed through cabinets and the fridge, searching for something, anything, that wasn’t the same old ham. In the front room, Maury had probably morphed into another screechfest. She wanted to be back in that room, opening her notebook, finding that empty page, picking up her pen...
“Ooooohhhhh, godDAMN! What is this shit?”
Jo bolted for the living room and swallowed hard at the sight of Charlie holding the purple notebook, starkly focused on a particular page.
“Give that to me,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “That’s mine.”
“Oh, hell no. I’m seeing my name, so this shit is my business. I already read the one about you gettin’ naked and fuckin’ that cop. Mama’s a muthafuckin’ freak.”
His eyes scanned the page, and she saw it all take turns in his face—confusion, anger, embarrassment, confusion, realization, anger again. She wondered what poem he’d found. She wondered what she’d pay for writing it.
Charlie started reading, his voice all exaggerated white:
Charlie is not a son, not a boy, not a man
He is the way a day turns toward a storm
He is a star that screams before disappearing
He is night without a bottom
I can’t wake up from him, can’t give
him back, can’t even give him away,
can’t think of anyone who would even want
that kind of exploding. I can’t even say his
name without my heart stopping. I wish I
could remember giving him a home
in my body. I wonder if it would just
be easier to stop stop stop loving him
as easy as it was to stop loving me
Hearing the poem out loud, Jo couldn’t help noticing that she was using the word even too much. Concentrating on that kept her from focusing on the ominous silence that followed Charlie’s booming of the word me.
The silence was broken by a laughter Jo had never heard before. Charlie threw back his head and opened so wide she could see the collapsed gray teeth at the back of his mouth. He laughed so hard he sputtered, and when he could manage it, he spat out snippets of her poem. “Not a son! Give him back! Give him away! Home in your body! Stop, stop, stop!” He laughed until there were tears in his eyes. “Stop!”
Still snorting, he pushed past her into the kitchen, waving the notebook over his head. He slapped it flat on a burner of the gas stove and held Jo at arm’s length while he turned the knob up as far as it would go. Flames leaped up around the notebook and burrowed toward its heart. The smoke alarm started thin, warbled, then blared. Above the din, Charlie laughed maniacally.
As Jo’s poetry flared and sizzled, all those words she had scraped directly from the surface of her skin, Charlie turned the water on full blast in the kitchen sink, where last night’s dinner dishes were still soaking. With a pair of metal salad tongs, he lifted the blazing notebook and tossed it under the running water. Jo could swear she heard it moan.
“You are such a sensitive bitch,” a suddenly solemn Charlie hissed. “Getting in touch with your feeeeeeelings. Grow some fuckin’ balls.”
Jo fell to her knees on the tile and felt the day collapse around her. Before she could scream, she heard the front door squeal on its hinges and bang shut, so hard the smoke alarm hiccupped and died. And the laughter stopped.
No, it didn’t.
That night Jo woke to the sound of shouts and sirens outside her bedroom window. That wasn’t unusual for Port Richmond, but there was something jagged about it this time. For a moment she was disoriented. She had fallen asleep in her clothes, so tangled in her bed sheets that she couldn’t move right away. She smelled liquor somewhere—on her pillow? in her hair?—and remembered swilling Jack Daniel’s after Charlie stormed out, hoping to drop the curtain on one bitch of a day. She felt bleary. Her eyes opened behind a cloud. She peered at her alarm clock. Four-fifteen A.M.
Jo imagined that an acrid whisper of smoke was the dying breath of her poetry, still floating in the kitchen sink. Until now she hadn’t realized how important the pages had become to her, and nothing in the notebook could be salvaged. The heavy thought of beginning again made her head drop to the pillow, to the left, the way it had when her son slapped her. She wanted sleep to pull her under again. But the street noise grew louder and more insistent, the stench more disturbing than the island’s usual garbage-tinged funk.
Jo freed her legs from the sheets and lumbered to her window. Number 302, directly across Nicholas, was burning. Had burned. The two windows on the top floor were soft-sputtering black and orange. Her mouth hung open, torn between awe and panic. She’d slept through a damned fire? Had there been people inside? Were they okay? Why couldn’t she picture the people who lived there? Were they black or white? After all, they were right across the street. She must have seen them hundreds of times. Were there kids?
Where was Charlie?
The weight of the question sickened her. Was she concerned about the safety of her son, or worried that he could somehow be responsible for the blaze?
Jo pulled on her old CSI sweats and a T-shirt, slipped into her sneakers without tying the laces, and ran outside, careful to lock the door behind her.
Nicholas was clogged with fire trucks, firefighters, and people spilling excitedly from two-flats. Jo’s eyes darted wildly, searching the crowd for Charlie’s sneer, his chopped reddish hair. She wanted to cover her ears against the Oh my God, oh Jesus, Dios mío babble of panic. All those upturned faces, the shouting, the questions, that bladed smell.
And the screeching woman, suddenly flailing, throwing her body against a knot of people determined to hold her back. Grim-faced firemen hauling four body bags out of the still-smoking building. More screaming.
Jo squeezed her eyes shut then, and she saw them clearly, the people who lived on the second floor. A smiling black woman holding the hands of a toddler and a little girl. An older girl. A teenage boy trailing behind, lugging those light-blue plastic bags from the Port Richmond market. She saw them stop to climb the stairs at 302 Nicholas.
But the screeching was not that woman.
The screeching woman was the mother of the woman who died, the grandmother of the four children who died.
Jo found that out during breakfast at the New Dinette. Exhausted and shell-shocked, her clothes smelling vaguely of smoke, she gnawed a slice of bacon and slurped peppered eggs while listening to tragedy’s hum. No one could ta
lk about anything but. She half expected to hear her son’s name.
The woman Jo had seen behind her closed eyes was dead. So were the two boys, the two girls. They had all died, but it wasn’t the fire that killed them.
“That boy killed his brother and his sisters and his mama,” Marla, a waitress, said to everyone who would listen, and to a few people who wouldn’t. “Slit they throats, set that fire, then killed hisself.”
Jo hovered over days of congealing breakfasts at the New long enough to hear different versions of the same story, which meant it must be true. Or most of it. Melonie, seven, her throat sliced open, dead. Brittney, ten, throat slit, dead. The mother, Leisa, her throat not slit, smoke exploding her chest. The little one, Jermaine, still whole and unbloodied, clung to a chance but lost his fight at Richmond University Hospital. The fire had loved him so hard that when he first reached the emergency room, no one was sure if he was a girl or a boy.
Then there was C.J., manchild at fourteen, collapsed in a river of blood, an old-fashioned straight razor under his body. His own throat slit. The whisper was that he had a history of setting small fires. His charred note nearby: am sorry.
Jo couldn’t grasp the mathematics of it, the impossibility of killing your family, then sliding a blade across your own throat. She had seen that boy. She had seen him laughing, bouncing his little brother on his shoulders. She had seen him watching his sisters ride their bikes, barking like a big brother when they veered too close to the street. She had...
Charlie setting fires in the boys’ room.
Charlie burning the words that wondered what he was.
But C.J. wasn’t Charlie. Thank God. Her son hadn’t gone that far, hadn’t burned that house down, hadn’t killed anyone.
The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 43