The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  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 talk 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.

  Then her next thought, before she could stop it: But if he had, someone would come for him. Someone would take him away.

  Charlie and Bennie, smelling like men, sat on the couch half watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. The two of them overwhelmed the room. Their flopping arms and spread-eagle. Their vile mouths, open and chewing. Their uproarious stink.

  Jo’s son was on full blast: “Man, you hear about that crazy nigger killed his mother? And his sisters? With a razor, then burned them up. Nigga got some balls though. Cut his own throat, too. Gotta give him credit for going out tough like that. Musta not liked his mama. Bitch musta been ridin’ his fuckin’ nerves. He took her out.”

  Bennie snorted as Charlie pointedly met his mother’s eyes and grinned. He raised a dirty glass of something clear.

  Whenever he was home now, which was less and less, Jo folded herself into the smallest corner of the place, stitched her lips shut, and learned to nod. She fried huge slabs of fatty meat, mashed mounds of potatoes, and became a regular at Mexico Supermarket. (She couldn’t shop at the Port Richmond store anymore because of the light-blue bags.) She crammed her basket with honey buns, jalapeño chips, taquitos, powdered doughnuts, Red Bull, ice cream, cigarettes, pork rinds, and moon pies, then slathered everything with butter and served it up to her ravenous ass of a son.

  She wouldn’t give him time or room to want for anything. She didn’t want him to realize that she’d already served her purpose. She wouldn’t give him reason to open her throat, burn her down.

  All Charlie did was eat, sleep off highs, and grow taller and wider. His pores leaked poison and stained the walls. Jo cooked and nodded, answered promptly to “Hey, bitch,” and hid her new notebook, a smaller one, behind a row of vases on a high shelf in her room. When she was sure that Charlie was out, she wrote poems to her new dead friend Leisa, who had a son who killed her.

  When they are done with us

  When they are done with us

  When there is no longer a road

  From our blood to theirs

  All we do is remind them

  of need

  And it is us who taught them

  never to need

  anything

  Suddenly there is no river deep enough

  for us

  No fire blue enough to strain for our bone

  No love

  at all

  Jo tried not to imagine what Charlie w
ould do if he found this notebook, if he saw how she held whole conversations with a woman she did not know. She had lived for years just across the street. Jo wished she had spoken to her past the occasional nod, wished she hadn’t assumed they’d have nothing in common because the woman was black and Jo was white.

  No. Not the woman. Leisa.

  They could have shopped together at the market, waddling home laden with light-blue plastic bags filled with cans of tuna, spongy white bread, brown fruit. And when the moment was right, Jo could have taken Leisa’s hand and said, gently, Describe your son’s eyes.

  They could have saved each other.

  One morning Jo copied a poem she’d worked on the whole day before, trying to make it perfect.

  Leisa, it is hard to admit

  the poison that burned through our bodies

  and became them

  Hard to recite this crooked alphabet

  Hard to know we can no longer

  circle them with our arms

  and contain their whole lives

  Their horrible secret is how they

  burst like flowers from our bodies

  They damn us for remembering

  They damn us for wanting

  to sing

  that story

  It still wasn’t perfect, but there was something Jo felt she needed to do.

  She pulled the page carefully from the notebook, folded it four times, and wrote Leisa in her best flowing cursive. Then she crossed the street to the makeshift altar, a raggedy explosion of blooms and mildewing stuffed animals in front of 302 Richmond’s scarred shell. There had been people milling around the altar every day, but now there was no one. She studied it for a minute, then tucked the poem beneath a bug-eyed duck. She whispered a run-on sentence that may have been prayer.

  Then she walked down to the bodega to pick up coffee and copies of the Advance and the Post. Reading both the Staten Island and NYC papers was her entertainment, akin to watching Maury and Springer in the mornings. Wallowing in the grime and drama, she was reminded that she lived both in and close to a cesspool.

  The place was packed with people, which was unusual for the hour. There was that tragic hum again, that sad tangle of different languages in stages of disbelief. Jo wondered if something had happened during the night.

  At the newspaper rack, she read the headline and the first graph of the Post’s front-page story before she even picked it up.

  IT WAS MOM IN STATEN ISLAND MASSACRE HORROR

  The mother did it. The horrific murder-suicide that ended in an arson on Staten Island was committed by the deranged mom, who slit three of her kids’ throats before she killed herself and her baby in the blaze, law enforcement sources said yesterday.

  Autopsies showed that C.J., Melonie, and Brittney had pills in their stomachs. They were dead before the fire. They hadn’t just lined up and waited to be killed. They’d been drugged first.

  And the note: they’d found Leisa’s diary and compared the handwriting. She had written am sorry. She had left the note close to her son’s body, which was like putting a smoking gun in his hand.

  Jo felt a needle traveling in her blood. She picked up the paper and left, without talking to anyone, without paying. She didn’t remember her walk back home, but when she looked up, she was there. And so was Al, the ex-cop, hovering around her door, grinning like a Cheshire and, as always, leading with his zipper.

  “Hey, Jo-bean,” he hissed. “Been thinkin’ about you like craaaazzy. Came by as soon as I got a break.” His chapped lips brushed the side of her face, then his tongue touched. Jo thought maybe the heat of another body would burn away the rest of the day. Wordlessly, she let him in. Then, as soon as the door was closed, she blurted her usual fears, the fears a man was supposed to take care of. The fears were Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

  “You know, that kid needs a father to keep his ass in line.” That was always Al the ex-cop’s first suggestion, although he never hinted at who that father might be. “You want, I’ll have some of the guys pick him up, scare the shit out of him.”

  Al seemed to have forgotten again that he was an ex-cop for a reason. Al seemed to have forgotten that once, sick with drink and aimlessly speeding in his cruiser, he’d scraped a sizable stretch of concrete barrier along the entry ramp from 440 to 278, stopped, and was promptly hit from behind by a grandmother in a Subaru station wagon. Two squad cars showed up to sort through the mess. They secured the silence of the terrified granny, scrubbed the scene clear of Al’s airplane miniatures, and concocted a cover-up tale that would move a hardened judge to tears.

  But later, when Al was oh-so-vaguely pressed on the details, he caved and admitted . . . well, everything. Swilling in his cruiser. Shooting sparks as he hugged the barrier. Getting rammed from behind. And being helped by his pals in blue. Babbling, he even named the pals.

  Of course, he was fired. Even cooled his heels in the slammer for a bit.

  So none of “the guys” he spoke of so lovingly would be inclined to do any favors for good ol’ Al. Jo didn’t bother reminding him about the circumstances of his ex-ness. He liked playing cop, so she let him.

  He even fucked like one. Like he was alone. Everything he said to Jo—at Jo—was addressed to Al, the ex-cop: “Oh, you’re hitting that pussy today, boy.” “She’s gonna remember this.” “She’s gon’ be calling your name for days.”

  Jo had hoped that a body against hers would blur the day, dim the smell of fire. But not this body.

  When he left, her room smelled like his deluded monologue, his miserable spurt. The newspaper sat on the bedside table. The mother did it. Leisa had killed herself and her children. Tell me why, Jo tried to beg her dead friend. But what came out was Tell me how.

  Maybe the smiling C.J. she’d seen playing with his siblings and lugging home groceries was just another kind of Charlie, one who’d learned to paint his snarling face with light. Maybe Leisa was crazy, out of her mind, her head crammed with the kind of wounding Jo was beginning to know.

  Jo started to cry. She wept from bone, from memory, from loss. She wept for Leisa, for C.J., for the stranger who’d escaped her body and named her Bitch. She wept from lack of love, unleashed wracking sobs that hung wet in the air. She wept for the shadows that were Staten Island, the prison she lived in. She wept past the pushing open of her bedroom door, the brash boy who suddenly stood there.

  “Fuck you cryin’ for?”

  Jo’s head drooped as Charlie filled the door, swaying, smelling like he’d drunk something with blades. “It smells like ass in here,” he slurred. “Like your ass mixed with somebody else’s ass.” He laughed then. “Was the dick that good? It made you cry? Hell, if it wasn’t nasty sick, I’d hit that. Make you call my name. Give you some shit to cry about.”

  He lumbered off. Jo heard him fall into bed in the other bedroom, still laughing, snorting. Soon he would rock the house with snotty snores. He would sleep deep into the night as poison spilled from his pores. He would wake up hungry, snarling, looking to be fed up in this bitch.

  She pulled the notebook down from its hiding place, found her pen, and wrote another poem for Leisa, the mother, the murderer.

  Where did it seep into you,

  the ghost of the only answer?

  How did you pull it in,

  breathe it in, own it?

  How did you find the teeth

  you needed to take back your

  own body, to build a revolution

  in darkness? And how brave

  of you

  to take all of them

  with you

  There was more she wanted to say, but Jo was afraid that writing more would lead her to a road she couldn’t travel. Not the why, but the how. She craved Leisa’s strength (the how), not her weakness (the why).

  She went to the kitchen and pulled down a note Charlie had written and taped to the fridge months ago: DAMN GO BY SOME FOOD. Already she could hear his drunken snoring. She took the note back to her room,
sat down, and began her work.

  Going back and forth between her son’s scrawled note and a page in her notebook, she worked for hours to get it right. The fat O. The swirl of the S. The strangely elegant Y. She felt Leisa gently guiding her hand as she traced the letters, traced the letters, mirrored the letters.

  Down the hall, Charlie sang razors. But in Jo’s room, he was writing an apology for what he was about to do. He was saying, I’m sorry, finishing with that strangely elegant Y.

  This time the dead boy would sign his name.

  BEN STROUD

  The Don’s Cinnamon

  FROM Antioch Review

  WHEN BURKE RETURNED to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given over to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.