Visitation Street (17 page)

“Who am I blaming? Everyone’s blaming me.”

“You snitch out the only black kid you know?” The kid flicks his cigarette away. “Careful what you tell the cops. Especially if it’s not true.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The kid rubs his lips and chin. “You caused Cree enough trouble. No need to be checking for him out the classroom window all afternoon.”

“You know Cree?”

“I do. And I know you’ve been looking for him. But I’m watching out for my boy. A considerate kid like that doesn’t need people like you spoiling his chances and ruining his outlook.” He smiles, spreading the cracks in his lips until Val worries they are going to bleed.

“I didn’t do anything. Cree and I … we. Never mind.”

“That’s right. Never mind. Never you mind about Cree.” He turns and heads away from Bernardette’s in the direction of Red Hook. “Now get back to class.”

Val glances at her watch. There are a few minutes left to fifth period. She needs to make it back inside before the bell rings and a teacher catches her reentering the building before dismissal. She is about to head up the school’s steps when the doors open and Mr. Sprouse appears. Val freezes, one foot on the bottom step, the other on the sidewalk.

The music teacher is dressed in black and carries a battered leather shoulder bag. June would probably have accused him of trying too hard to be cool instead of just being cool. If it weren’t for the shadows beneath his eyes, he would seem boyish. But his distracted, troubled expression ages him, undermines his sharp cheekbones and full lips.

Val lowers her face. It seems impossible to her that she cried in his arms in her underwear and let him hug her nearly naked body.

But now she wants to hide. She feels exposed, caught outside of school during class. She wonders if Mr. Sprouse saw the boy she’d been talking to and made the same mistake she had, taking him for the person he’d seen her making out with in the bay. He probably thinks she dipped out for a quick kiss or worse.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It was an emergency.”

Val is already planning what to say to the headmistress when she’s hauled into her office. She wonders how long June’s disappearance will excuse her behavior.

Mr. Sprouse looks both amused and startled. He smiles and shakes his head. Then he waves her on, away from the school. He puts a finger over his lips. “Go,” he says. “Go.”

Val hesitates, unsure whether or not to follow his instructions.

“Go,” Mr. Sprouse says, waving in the direction of Red Hook.

Halfway down the block, Val looks over her shoulder to see whether anyone from Bernardette’s is following, but she is alone.

Val has become a curiosity in school—someone to have around but to keep at arm’s distance. She sits silently, hoping the other girls will forget why she is with them and only accept that she is there. She tries to trick herself into forgetting why she is eating at a table of relative strangers instead of with June. She goes out of her way to avoid mentioning her best friend, distancing herself from her disappearance, avoiding memories of her part in it. The problem is, among her more worldly classmates, Val needs June more than ever. Without June, she fears she’ll do the wrong thing, expose her inexperience, and be exiled permanently.

Two upperclassmen invite Val to a house party one of the seniors is throwing, the kind of party June would have killed to attend, a party Val is only invited to because June is gone. She can imagine June nagging her all week, planning her outfits, dreaming about the boys who might be there.
If she goes to the party, does exactly what June would have wanted her to do, June will come back
.

Val kisses the mirror, squares the hand towels in the bathroom, doubles back to rearrange the guest soaps. She kisses the mirror again.
If she kisses the mirror, if she goes to the party, if the girls at her school will like her. If the girls at school like her, June will come home
.

Her parents seem relieved that she is going out. Jo compliments Val’s outfit and sprays her with perfume on her way out the door. Paulie hands her a ten for a cab ride home. “Midnight,” he says, kissing the top of her head. “Midnight and no messing around.”

The party is in Brooklyn Heights on the best block where the houses back onto the promenade overlooking the water across to Manhattan. The six-story house with bay windows, the glittering river and city just behind its back garden, belongs to the parents of Anna DeSimone, who went to prep school in the Heights until she started hanging out in bars with her teachers and her parents sent her to Bernardette’s. Anna takes a car service to school—a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows.

The front door is propped open by a brick. Val stands in a vestibule wider than her parents’ bathroom, listening to the party behind the second set of doors. Through their frosted, etched, and beveled glass she can see distorted figures streaming along the hallway and up and down the stairs.

One group is clustered in the kitchen sitting on the marble counters, pressing their heels into the butcher-block island. The counters are littered with red and blue Solo cups half filled with brown and pink drinks and the pummeled skins of lemons and limes.

Two girls are sitting on the railing of the back deck, smoking and flinging their butts into a barrel planted with herbs. A boy rushes up to one of them and wraps his arms around her waist. He lowers her over the railing, her long hair dangling toward the garden twenty feet below. He bends her farther and her bottom slides from the railing until he is only holding her legs. The girl screams and the boy reels her in.

This is how people die
, Val thinks. And tomorrow no one will blame these kids for tiptoeing toward disaster.

Val tours the parlor floor. There are two rooms that open onto each other and neither looks lived in. The walls are creamy yellow and hung with paintings, each lit by its own light.

Most of the faces are unfamiliar. The girls wear discreetly expensive outfits—high-waisted floral skirts, gold gladiator sandals, long cashmere sweaters. Others are dressed like designer versions of the women who loiter outside the Dockyard in cowboy boots and baggy cotton T-shirts. The boys wear khakis and frayed flannel. They help themselves to booze from a dark wooden bar.

The girls from Bernardette’s are in the front parlor. They place their drinks on needlepoint coasters. In jeans, tank tops, and jewel-toned cardigans they look like Catholic school kids. Val perches on the arm of the sofa.
If the girls from her school talk to her first, June will come back
.

Anna DeSimone in a short gold dress and no shoes is circulating. Her skin is smeared with sweat and makeup. She is drinking from a martini glass the size of a small vase and holding a fistful of bills, mostly twenties, in her other hand.

“I’m taking a collection.” She holds out the hand with the money to Val. “Don’t tell me you don’t smoke?”

If you act like you belong. If you make them like you
. Val teases a five from her back pocket.

“I guess you don’t smoke much,” Anna says. “Bless you anyway.” She tries to make the sign of the cross with her glass.

When the doorbell rings, Anna slips on the parquet and two boys help her up. There’s an argument in the hallway.

The group from the hall appears in the living room. Anna is clutching the money and listing to one side. Two boys are trying to take the cash from her to count it. Behind them is a lanky guy in midcalf red basketball shorts and a matching oversized jersey and cap. Val recognizes him and leans back against the wall to disappear.

Irish Mikey is the waterside’s petty dealer, a small-time trafficker in dime bags and seeds, nothing anyone gets too worked up about. He’s the son of a former detective, which keeps him out of trouble. He used to hang with Rita back in middle school, but when he started spending more time over in the Houses, the Marinos put an end to that.

“Take yo time,” Mikey says.

Mikey has the same patchy fuzz he called a beard back when he and Rita were tight. It masks the sprinkling of pimples he hasn’t outgrown. He stands with his head cocked to one side, his cap off center, his shoulders slumped. Someone switches the music to hip-hop. The boys take the money from Anna and turn their backs on Mikey while they count it. They keep their shoulders hunched.

“Take yo time,” Mikey says again.

Val knows he’s laying on the accent, pretending he’s dangerous, like he doesn’t still live with his parents on one of Red Hook’s better streets.

“Three hundred,” one of the boys says handing it over.

“Now it’s my time to count,” Mikey says, taking the cash, counting it quickly with swift flicks of his thumb. He tucks it away, then fumbles in his pocket, pulling out three long Ziplocs of weed wrapped tight like cigars.

One of the boys slides the weed in his pocket, then glances over his shoulder as if he is standing in the middle of the street not on a Persian carpet runner. Mikey laughs and shakes his head. He catches Val’s eye and she watches him dial her in.

The boy with the weed glances from Mikey to the floor and shifts from foot to foot. He jams his hands in his pockets. “Man, can you get us anything harder?”

Val is embarrassed for this kid twitching in his baggy khakis and two-hundred-dollar Nikes fronting like he has game. She knows that Mikey hates hard drugs, wouldn’t mess with them.

Mikey raises his eyebrows and smiles at Val before giving the boys the once-over. Finally he purses his lips and looks to the side. “Yeah, I could get you some phials.”

The boy stares at him, half understanding.

“Crack, man. That what you want?” Mikey tries hard not to laugh. Then he looks at Val. “Valerie, your boy here thinks I make my bank selling crack.” He exhales, fluttering his lips. “Like I’m gonna sell crack to any of you kiddies. Like I’m gonna sell that shit period. You set these boys straight for me, Val.” Mikey turns back to the boys. “Anything else I can do for you gentlemen?”

The boy with the weed dances in place, then backtracks so quickly he nearly falls over his friend. “No. No thanks.”

Anna turns toward Val. “You know the dealer?”

“He was friends with my sister.”

“You know the dealer,” Anna says, turning away.

Two of the girls from St. Bernardette’s slide toward the far edge of the couch so they can get a better look at Val.

The boy with the weed approaches their group. “Your friend is a creep,” he says to Val.

“He’s not my friend.”

“Where do you live anyway?” the boy says.

The party moves upstairs. Some of the kids camp out in the bedrooms or in the walk-through closets that connect the rooms. Some chill on the third-story deck. A few disappear into the large bathrooms and lock the doors.

Val wanders to the third floor, joining a group of kids in the master bedroom who are sitting in the windows, dangling their legs over the garden and the river. They are smoking a joint that Val accepts.

For a while everything is cool and Val is able to drift in and out of the conversation. One of the girls makes room for her on the ledge. The air is fresh and reminds her of apples. She reaches her hand toward the dancing skyline, fluttering her fingers, blocking out the lights of one skyscraper at a time.

A boy comes into the room and hovers at Val’s back. The girls are sitting too close. They are nearly on top of her. She wants them to move away, to be quiet. She wants everyone to be quiet.

Val slides off the ledge and moves back into the room. She lies on the plush carpet. Each fiber is as thick as a caterpillar. She spreads her arms out like a snow angel digging her fingers deep into the carpet, holding on tight, anchoring herself.

She closes her eyes. The interior of each eyelid is a movie screen. The movie is rushing, fast-forwarding, the images blurring. She opens her eyes, but the movie retreats to her peripheral vision, rushing past just within sight. She shuts her eyes again, letting go of the carpet, pressing the heels of her palms over her lids. But the movie only runs quicker, draws closer. And Val feels that she’s falling through the carpet. She reaches for the floor, gripping the pile.

The group from the window is standing over her in a semicircle. They are funhouse tall. Their faces are receding. Although they look far away, their voices boom in Val’s head.

“Quiet,” she says, unable to hear her own voice over the others.

“Why is she yelling?”

“Man, she’s messed up.”

The heads gathered above Val shift like beads in a kaleidoscope. She raises an arm to shield her eyes. “Stop moving,” she says. “Please.”

“I didn’t move. Did any of you move?” a girl says. Then the whole crowd changes places, rotating like they’re playing musical chairs.

“Stop,” Val says.

“Someone make her stop shouting.”

Val wants people nearby, but nobody close. She wants someone to tell her she’s going to be all right, but she doesn’t want to hear anyone’s voice.

She gets to her feet. She remains bent at the waist as she lurches toward the bathroom. She steadies herself on the bed, then on the dresser, then opens the door and slides onto the cool tile.

“I’m not cleaning up after her,” someone says as she closes the door.

The bathroom is a relief. She presses her cheek into the floor, closes her eyes, and tries to make her mind still. But now someone’s rattling the doorknob, pulling, shaking the door.

“Take your fucking time,” a voice says.

Val lifts herself from the floor. She sits on the edge of the marble tub, cradling her head in her palms. A fist, an open palm, a shoulder slam the door.

“Come on!”

Val stands. She steadies herself, her arms on the sink. The room is spinning. The floor is out of sight. She turns on the water and wets her face, drenching her hair. Someone is pounding on the door.

The only light in the bathroom is the orange glow of a small nightlight plugged into a socket next to the sink.

Val looks up from the sink and into the mirror. Her reflection is a dark shadow in the dark glass. She leans forward, then lolls back, trying to find a distance that won’t nauseate her.