Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Who the hell are you?” asked the man in the entryway.

  The Latina, her own voice rising now, hollered out for somebody named Rose Marie. It must’ve been her sister. The woman who came out of the kitchen—unlatching the safety gate, holding a wooden spoon coated in red sauce—looked exactly like her, a little younger and thinner maybe, but with the same burst-capillary expression more commonly found on the faces of new parents and combat soldiers. Her slumped shoulders asked the world what impossible weight it expected her to burden now; as if in response, K-Lo held up eight of his fingers. She waved him toward the balcony with her spoon. Red sauce dripped onto the carpet, which seemed to bother her less than it did Janice. Everything about this place, but perhaps especially its disorder, Janice found frightening.

  “What the hell?” said the black guy.

  Puffed up now, he filled the entryway in its entirety, his hand braced against the door to keep Rose Marie’s sister from slamming it in his face. He wanted to know what list those people was on. They continued to argue, he and the Latina, until a neighbor lady came into the hall to complain. Pots and pans, or at least what sounded like pots and pans, clattered across the kitchen floor, followed by Rose Marie crying out for Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the whole gang. The little girl, though, continued to quietly tattoo her arm. Without any hope of getting her to look up, Janice followed K-Lo onto the balcony, but she left the sliding-glass door open a bit just in case.

  Fifteen stories above the ground, she thought the moon seemed almost snatchable. A whirling wind stung her face. Typically for her, whenever she found herself at these great heights, she imagined leaping over the edge. She didn’t want to—leap or imagine it—but there it was, an image of her tumbling off the balcony with her arms outstretched and the dark ground rising to swallow her. Down in the street, cars as small as armored insects made a slow circuit of the block, the investigators’ Impala somewhere among them. Her hands gripped the icy railing.

  “You recognize that little girl in there?” K-Lo asked. To try to keep warm, he was stomping his feet on what she hoped was an exceedingly stable balcony floor. “Remember a couple years ago?” he asked. “The kid that shot her cousin by accident? Just playing around?”

  To see inside the apartment, past the yellow glare of the city’s lights, Janice had to press her face to the glass. The girl was up now, following Rose Marie around the living room. She’d ditched the wooden spoon for a cell phone, which she cradled against her shoulder. When she stopped at an end table to search through its drawers, the girl stopped, too, and tenderly rubbed the back of Rose Marie’s knee through her sweatpants. Behind them in the apartment’s entryway, the sister and the black guy and the neighbor lady all continued to argue, their features eventually dissolving behind the white mist of Janice’s breath.

  “What’s she doing here?” she asked.

  “The little girl?” K-Lo said. “I don’t know. I guess she goes to day care here.”

  Janice slowly turned around to look at him. In the TAC meeting back at the rumpus, the investigators had asked him to draw a layout of the apartment. He complied, no problem. They brought him a cup of coffee. They asked him if he wanted anything from the vending machine, their treat. Skittles, please. Sure, great, Skittles. Next question: how many people should they expect? Oh, just two ladies, but he couldn’t remember their names. That, too, was no problem. He dumped the bag of Skittles onto Cataroni’s desk and ate all the orange ones first, then the greens. When Hart called him a lunatic, K-Lo raised his candy-stained hands in the air, guilty as charged. They all laughed except for Janice, who asked about guns in the apartment. What about dogs? Any dogs? No, no. Great, great. What about M&M’s? Hart asked. You eat M&M’s like you eat Skittles? That was the last question they asked K-Lo, because they stupidly assumed he’d told them everything worth knowing.

  “This is a day care?” Janice said.

  “Well,” he said, “yeah, technically. But only like during the day.”

  Rose Marie stepped alone out onto the balcony with the cell phone still wedged against her shoulder. Dressed only in those sweatpants and a PROPERTY OF HOGWARTS hoodie, she seemed poorly prepared for the whirling winds up here, but she didn’t start shivering or anything, didn’t stomp her feet like K-Lo or tuck her hands under her armpits. Probably she still felt warm from the kitchen. She passed K-Lo a tiny manila envelope, just like the one the DJ had given Janice, except this one bulged with crack rocks, presumably eight of them as per K-Lo’s eight-fingered request. Or maybe they were fake crack rocks, made out of baking soda and Anbesol. Didn’t matter. Selling fake drugs was a felony all on its own. More to the point for Janice, it would still count as a buy. When K-Lo handed her the envelope, she slipped it into her back pocket, even patting it a couple of times to make sure it hadn’t immediately disappeared. Three down, Lieutenant Prondzinski. Only one more to go.

  “What you want me to tell you?” Rose Marie was saying into the phone. “He’s got that order of protection on you, understand? You come through now, it’s the police all over again, and then where we at?”

  “How much?” Janice asked her.

  “Can I tell you the God’s honest truth?” Rose Marie said. She held up three fingers for Janice, one on her left hand, two on her right. “The God’s honest truth is that if you was here at four to pick her up like you was supposed to … well, I’m just putting that out there is all.”

  “One twenty,” said K-Lo, her interpreter.

  Prior to arriving in LeFrak, they’d spent a few minutes coming up with their cover story: despite his whiskey-colored skin, they couldn’t pretend to be related because that might come back to bite him in the ass—You didn’t know your fucking cousin was a cop?—and they couldn’t pretend to be lovers, either, because in an improvisational moment he might try to grab at her ass, and so they’d decided on coworkers at the Steinway Street Kinkos, where K-Lo really did have a part-time job. Janice felt she knew enough about photocopies to bluff her way through any potential questions—she’d even helped Cataroni scan the serial numbers on tonight’s buy money—but it seemed as if all that brainstormed backstory would prove irrelevant, a waste of energy like so much else. Questions? An interrogation? Please: Rose Marie had hardly bothered to look at her. In almost any other buy scenario that would’ve been fine, preferable really, but for once Janice wanted a dealer to remember her face. She wanted to return to this apartment the following week, without the complications of a CI buffer. A long-term drug case against a day care—a day care!—would guarantee her promotion. “Nursery Nightmare,” the Post’s headline would say. “Hero Cop Puts Drug-Dealing Nannies to Sleep.”

  “You got a scale?” she asked.

  “A scale?” Rose Marie said, her hand now on the receiver.

  “Yeah. A scale. You know, to weigh shit? I’m not trying to get ripped off here.”

  Before Rose Marie could complain to K-Lo or ask for the envelope back or tell Janice to just look at the rocks for fuck’s sake or go searching all over the apartment for a small enough scale or really even do anything at all, Janice had already jerked open the sliding-glass door. She crashed through the safety gate toward the little girl’s screaming. The Magic Marker had been abandoned. Her father was dragging her toward the door, yanking her off her feet. From somewhere deep down in her skinny chest, the girl howled with an entirely adult panic and rage.

  Half a lifetime ago, when Jimmy Gellar was writer’s-blocked, he had asked Janice why Gabby Guyana had decided to become Captain Richmond Hill—revenge? crushing guilt? childhood trauma? intergalactic responsibility?—but for Janice there was no one thing that could explain why she herself had joined the police force but instead an almost infinite number of things, a partial list of which might include that she bit her nails, tore up coasters, peeled labels off bottles, guessed in record time the ending of Murder on the Orient Express, wanted the benefits of a purposeful life, wanted the benefits of a city job, wanted the automatic salary bumps, had
never seriously considered doing anything else, hated bullies, had assumed even before her father had started beating her mother that everyone harbored a dark and secret interior life, had crushed on Encyclopedia Brown as a young girl and Agent Mulder as a teenager, was once called a nigger by two white cops in a patrol car, and, perhaps most important, she always, no matter what, took a definitive side in arguments, especially ones that had nothing to do with her, and in this LeFrak City living room the pickings were easy.

  While the neighbor lady hovered in the background, Rose Marie’s sister slapped at the man’s head. He kept his arm raised, to shield himself from her blows instead of knocking her across the living room as he easily could have. It was the one thing to be said in his defense. His other hand, though, was gripped unforgivably hard around the little girl’s elbow.

  In a voice she hadn’t used for over seventeen months, Janice said, “Hold it.”

  He did the opposite and let the girl go. A small yellow dandelion pierced his lapel button, something Janice had failed to notice earlier. In the struggle—which had momentarily stopped, the woman no longer slapping at the man’s head but tensed to resume at any moment—some of the weaker petals had come loose and lay curled on the carpet. Cold air from the balcony riffled Janice’s hair. She stepped farther into the living room. Because she didn’t have a badge pinned to her chest, the others didn’t actually have to listen to her, but nobody seemed to realize that yet except for the girl. Seeing her chance, with everyone around her collectively paused, she sprinted into the kitchen through the left-open safety gate.

  Janice caught up to her easily, but the girl had already grabbed a paring knife off the countertop. A baby carrot went skittering across the tiles. One of them must have accidentally kicked it running in here. Without pausing to consider the consequences, desperate only to escape from her father, the girl—who had already killed one child—plunged the paring knife into the tiny hollow between her chest and her throat. She stumbled forward as if an invisible hand had slapped her viciously between the shoulder blades. An involuntary gurgling opened her mouth. Instantly regretful, hoping to undo the hurt, she reached for the knife to pull it out, but Janice got to it first and kept the blade in the girl’s neck as a plug for the wound. The blood loss would’ve killed her in minutes. Together they sat themselves down on the floor, her head in Janice’s lap. An exhaust fan spun loudly. Barely visible against the girl’s skin, purple ink cobwebbed her arms. As she kept trying to exhale a breath that wasn’t there, Janices filled the kitchen. There was the Janice who barked at Rose Marie to call the police, the Janice who told the sister to fetch towels, the Janice who hoped K-Lo had enough sense to run to the investigators, the Janice who watched the father chewing on the flap of skin at the base of his thumb, the Janice who gripped the knife handle, the Janice who pressed her fingertips beneath the girl’s one good eye to trap the tears, and the final Janice, the liar Janice who kept whispering, You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.

  Afterward she went downstairs to sit in the parked Impala’s backseat. Her calves ached from walking down all those steps. Crusted in blood, her nails were unchewable. Uncharacteristically for McCarthy and Duckenfield, they both sat with their knees pressed together to give her more room, and Cataroni had twisted himself around in his shotgun seat to look at her. Sergeant Hart’s eye contact, however, came exclusively through the rearview. K-Lo, before going home, had told the investigators everything he knew, and now Janice told them the rest: that the paramedics took the girl away with a tracheotomy tube bobbing in her throat, that when the uniforms arrived Janice showed them her fake Janice Singh driver’s license, that in all the confusion she’d forgotten to pay Rose Marie for the drugs.

  “It’s technically not a buy, then,” Hart said.

  “I know, I’m sorry, it was just so—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said quickly. “Nobody’s mad at you.”

  She snapped at the hair tie around her wrist until the little knobby bone there went numb. “Can we just get out of here?” she asked. “I’d just really like to get out of here.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Hart said. He pulled out of the LeFrak parking lot, and when he saw an opening in the traffic he turned onto Junction Boulevard, skipping the expressways and taking the long route back to Flushing, past 24/7 check-cashing joints and a shop that sold safes. After a few blocks of silence, he said, “So what do you want to do?”

  He’d asked the windshield, but she knew he was talking to her. “Go home,” she told him. “Take a sleeping pill, take a shower.”

  “No, I mean what do you want to do with the drugs?” he asked. “We can write it up as a buy … if you want. We can put in the paperwork that you paid for the rocks, and just figure out what to do with the cash later. Or? We can all stay late filling out forms explaining why you got the rocks but no buy. Or just get rid of the shit, fuck it, whatever you want, it’s up to you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “No, no, no,” Duckenfield said. “It’s got to be your call. Right?”

  “It’s got to be her call,” McCarthy agreed.

  She thought of Pablo Rivera, the rumpus’s town crier. Despite the investigators’ soft tones and apparent goodwill—surely temporary, a possible by-product of the blood dried on her cheeks—Pablo Rivera would have warned that all this might be an integrity test, that one of these men might work undercover for Internal Affairs. Probably not, but she knew too well the pitfalls of insufficient paranoia, what happens when safety gates are left open and dealers sell to strangers. She passed Cataroni the manila envelope and all the buy money.

  “Do what you want,” she said. “But for me? I don’t want to lie on any of my paperwork.”

  She saw Hart nod at her through the rearview. At the next red light, he poured all eight crack rocks into his Altoids tin. He left the money with Cataroni, who’d return it to the department’s considerable coffers. The manila envelope went out the window. She didn’t know if she’d passed the test or failed it, but she did know that Hart would write up tonight as an unsuccessful mission. Uncle botched an untouchable buy. The drugs she took away from LeFrak no longer existed. She wished she knew the little girl’s name. When asked if she’d survive, one of the paramedics had said she seemed tough.

  Saturday morning the Post headline read, “Bad News Bear: Fed Bails Out Wall St. Giant.” The fat Sunday edition covered a crane collapse that sliced through three buildings, rubbled another, and killed four construction workers in midtown Manhattan. No mention of the little girl, though, thank God, nor did she appear in the Times, Newsday, or Daily News. Janice was too afraid to call the hospitals. On Monday—“Let the Madness Begin!” said the Post—needing a change, something drastic, she asked Fiorella to come with her to a fancy hair salon in Forest Hills. Hector the Magnificent, with only a half day at school, tagged along to raid the lollipop jar. While Fiorella tried to maintain a neutral expression, an Argentinean stylist named Beto got so worked up describing his operatic love life that he accidentally chopped off almost all of Janice’s hair. When he spun her around to face the mirror, she cried. She’d wanted drastic, not drastic. But to make Beto feel better, she lied and said she’d never once in her life gotten a major haircut without weeping immediately afterward. It didn’t work. He started weeping himself. Hector, truly magnificent, said he preferred the shorter hair, as did Fiorella, but when Janice got home her mother hadn’t even seemed to notice her arrival, much less that she’d gotten a new pixie cut. Vita was sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed, at last shredding her junk mail, not with a proper shredder like a normal paranoiac, but with an X-Acto knife, one strip, one credit card offer at a time. Even more disconcerting, the whiteboard read JIMMY GELLER, misspelled, in her shaky new handwriting.

  “Was he here?” Janice said. “Did he come by the house?”

  “Was who here?” Vita asked, cutting another line down the page. When she finally looked up, she said, “What did you do?”r />
  “Don’t even. I hate it.” Janice chin-pointed to the whiteboard. “What’d he want? You didn’t tell him I live here, did you?”

  Vita stared at the board for a few long moments before giving up.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, did he call or—”

  “I don’t know! I’ve got my own stuff going on, okay? I can’t be keeping track of your every little thing.”

  She reached for an envelope promising more affordable auto insurance. It was one thing for her to call the remote control the picture-stick, but yesterday lipstick had become the mouth-painter. Lipstick! You kidding? She had no use for affordable auto insurance. With deteriorating motor skills, both literally and figuratively, she’d already donated her car to the Alzheimer’s Association. Three piles of junk-mail confetti lay on the table, as if she planned to throw them away in three separate garbage cans scattered throughout the neighborhood. Jimmy’s name might as well have been written in invisible ink. And yet, on these otherwise mind-befogged days, there would be moments simultaneously hopeful and heartbreaking when she’d remember it was Mrs. Hua’s birthday and pop over next door with a tinful of breakfast bake. Or when, within seconds of Vanna White turning over the first few consonants, Vita would shout out, Chairman of the board games or Beloved family pet peeve! How do you reconcile that? How can both these Vitas occupy the same body? Janice sat down at the kitchen table to take hold of her mother’s lavender-scented hands.

  “Is he somebody from work?” Vita asked her. “Did I screw up something important?”

  “No, not at all.” Janice slid her mother’s hands up into her new haircut and held them there, the palms perfectly warm against her scalp. “What do you think?” she said. “Too short?”

  “To be honest?”

  “No,” Janice said.

  “I like it better long.”

  “Like yours.”