Visitation Street (20 page)

When she was done, Monique rushed up the aisle. Val had been there. She’d stopped Monique and asked her to sing something for June, as if June would come back if Monique sang a damn song.

Monique brushed her off like she had June. It wasn’t until she was halfway home that she took the time to consider how that had worked out. Brush a girl off and it comes back to haunt you. Literally.

She dreads returning to the tabernacle. Sunday morning, before the worship, she heads out of the apartment before Ray gets up. Celia’s been staying over at Gloria’s and most nights, Ray doesn’t even bother to come home. Rumor has it he’s creeping around the waterside with a white divorcée he met at his AA meeting. He’s been spotted down at Valentino Pier tossing a tennis ball to the lady’s scrappy dogs.

Monique’s not much of a smoker, but if it takes getting high before tabernacle to silence June, so be it. She knows what doors to knock on in the Houses to score a dime bag, but she doesn’t want word getting out that she’s looking. She hustles to the park hoping to catch the crew of boys up early and up to no good, but the only people out are a couple of joggers from across the expressway and a few shaggy-headed white guys walking their mutts.

Monique crosses Van Brunt and heads down Coffey Street. This is the nicest street in all of Red Hook. Single-family brownstones with front yards and backyards and wide stoops flank both sides of the block. A few of them seem abandoned; others overstuffed with too much living—yards filled with stoves and baby carriages.

Irish Mikey is riding his stoop as Monique hoped he would be. What Monique has always wanted is a stoop of her own, an open space in the world to sit and relax and not be bothered.

The few times Monique’s been on the waterside of late she’s noticed Mikey sitting out, sometimes alone, sometimes with a couple of the Puerto Rican dealers. She knows he sells dime bags and quarters—nothing that would attract too much notice from the heavyweight dealers in the projects.

Dressed in a blue basketball jersey and matching shorts, he’s presiding over Coffey Street, legs spread, elbows on his knees. Behind him, the parlor floor window’s open, and Frank Sinatra’s pouring into the street.

“Remember me?” Monique says.

“No doubt.”

“You got anything?”

“Such as?”

Monique glances into the open window. A woman in a pink housedress is brushing the leaves of a houseplant with a feather duster.

“You know,” Monique says.

Mikey cracks a half smile and rubs the peach fuzz above his lips. “Maybe I don’t know.”

“Man,” Monique says. “Why you gotta make this difficult. Weed. Not a lot, just a dime or a joint.”

Mikey makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “I read you,” he says. “Must be a million boys over the Houses who could have helped you out.”

“Didn’t want to ask.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mikey says. “Trouble is, I’m not going be called out for stealing their business. So I’m not going to be able to help you. Let’s just say my hands are tied.” He holds out his palms to Monique like a supplicant.

“Man, a joint,” Monique says. “It’s not like I’m asking you to cut me in on some business.”

“No can do,” Mikey says. “But I gotta ask, what’s a girl like you doing getting high before church?”

“None of your damn business,” Monique says. “Thanks for nothing.”

“Call it a favor. I’m keeping you clean. Doing my part for the community.”

Monique turns and heads off. She doesn’t look around when Mikey whistles long and low at her back.

Sometimes the tougher hoods, who don’t cluster in the park for fear of being seen by the 76’s squad cars, who keep out of the courtyards until dark, hang near the abandoned lot called Bones Manor. Girls don’t go near the Manor unless they’re turning tricks, that much Monique knows. But she’s latched on to the idea of a joint, just one quick hit, something to silence June.

It’s quiet over by the Manor. The corrugated iron fence is a patchwork of overlapping tags and pieces. There’s something grim in the graffiti—drab colors and stiff letters. Part of the iron fence is bent back. Monique peeks in as she passes, catching sight of a giant puddle of water, the size of a small pond. Shipping containers and piles of cinder blocks surround it.

Partway up the street, she checks a group of guys, huddled with their backs to her. She knows the leader, Raneem Bennett. He’s a little older than Cree. His crew isn’t much of a gang, more like a posse of freelance criminals, every man for himself. Raneem tried to summon some notoriety for them by recruiting a few young hoods from Monique’s school, handing them each a can of spray paint, and telling them to hit Red Hook with the tag “RFC,” which he claimed stood for a new gang he’d formed called “Running From the Cops.” A few weeks later the little hoodlums found out they’d been played and had thrown up dozens of “Raneem Fan Club” tags over Red Hook.

Monique crosses the street, passing the crew at a distance. At the corner, she crosses back, turns, and comes at them on their side.

“S’up girl?” Raneem says, as she passes.

“Hey yourself,” Monique says.

“Looking for something?” Raneem says.

“Maybe,” Monique says.

“Bet I got what you need,” one of Raneem’s friends says, grabbing the sagging crotch of his baggy shorts.

“I don’t need that,” Monique says.

“How you know if you haven’t tried?”

“So what you looking for?” Raneem says.

“Got a little smoke?”

“Got a little smoke?” Raneem says, making his voice girly high.

“I don’t talk like that,” Monique says.

“I don’t talk like that,” Raneem mimics.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.” It’s a cheap tease, but it makes his boys double over.

“Never mind,” Monique says, turning away.

“Not so fast,” one of Raneem’s boys says, grabbing her arm. “Where you running off to?”

“Church.”

He jerks Monique’s arm and yanks her so she hits the iron fence.

“You been a bad girl? You got something to confess?” He squeezes Monique tight. In his free hand is a soda bottle. He begins to trace the bottle along her collarbone, down between her breasts, over her stomach, and onto the waistband of her shorts.

She wriggles in his grasp. “Let me go.”

“Let me go,” Raneem mimics.

She tenses her body. Her limbs tingle and go numb. She fights the urge to shut her eyes, as if that could prevent what’s coming. There’s a screaming in her ears. June’s yelling at her from the inside. Her voice is panicked, frantic. Her listing is manic, places and objects tumbling one on top of the other.

Raneem’s friend taps her elastic waistband three times with the bottle. Then he digs the cap in hard.

“Stop,” Monique says.

The boy with the bottle smiles. “I’m just playing.” He thrusts the bottle into her crotch and grunts. He places his crotch against the bottom of the bottle and thrusts toward Monique, driving the cap in hard. Now that he’s anchoring the bottle with his body, his hands are free. He reaches down the back of Monique’s shorts, underneath her underwear. He grabs her butt with sticky hands and pulls her toward him, grinding her into the bottle. The boy is breathing heavily, grunting and panting. His breath seems viscous. Monique feels it settle onto her collar and chin like film.

She doubles over, folding into herself to keep him at bay. She wants to cover her ears, make June’s screaming stop. It’s all she can do to stop from shouting to cover the noise in her head. Suddenly, the boy lets go. “You see. No harm, no foul.”

Monique rushes up the street. She’s surprised that her legs work. Her breath feels trapped. Finally it emerges in tight bursts. At the corner, she huddles in a doorway and lets herself cry.

Ray’s out when Monique gets home. She can smell Raneem’s friend on her skin—a sour, meaty scent of stale sex and malt liquor. She takes a long shower. Her pelvic bone is sore. She can barely pass a washcloth over it.

She wraps herself in a towel and sits on her bed. Through the window she can see into other apartments where people are gathering for Sunday meals. She knows the courtyards are filled and the park benches are getting going.

June’s calmed down.
Movie. Bus. Hot chocolate. Snow
.

Monique knows June would listen if she dared to talk. But she keeps quiet.

F
or the first time in years, the shrine has been tidied. The flowers in the vases are changed every couple of days. A new photo of Marcus sits in a durable plastic frame. The bench has been painted with a coat of forest green. Small plants are arranged in the patch of soil between the bench and the concrete path. One of them has managed a small purple flower. At first Cree thought this was his mom’s doing, though he’s never known her to care about the shrine before.

Cree puts down his community college application when he hears his mother leave the house for her afternoon shift. He goes to the window in time to see Gloria cross the courtyard and settle on the bench. She doesn’t seem surprised by the fresh bouquet of pink and blue carnations in the vase.

School has let out. The courtyards are filled with kids slowing time until they are called in for dinner. As Cree watches, the baby-faced kid Ren pounded a few weeks back emerges from the opposite tower with one of his sidekicks. They look at their feet as they walk. The baby-faced kid is carrying a shopping bag and a two-liter bottle of Sprite. Cree tenses as they approach his mother’s bench. He tugs on the window, wrestling it up. He leans his head out and is about to call down.

Then the baby-faced boy places the shopping bag on the ground. He hands the bottle of Sprite to his friend who uncaps it. Gloria slides down the bench a few inches. The boy with the bottle kneels and waters the plants. When he is finished, he empties the contents of the bottle into the flower vase and shuffles the flowers, withdrawing a limp carnation and placing it in the brown bag.

While his friend is watering, the baby-faced kid takes a cloth out of the bag and wipes grit from the picture frame. He tips out the dirt that has collected in the prayer candles before lighting them. The boys pick up the paper bag and empty bottle and stand in front of Gloria. Cree can’t hear what they say to her, but she smiles and they shuffle off.

When they are gone, Cree rushes to the bench.

“What business do you have with those boys?” Cree asks.

“What boys?”

“The boys who were just messing with you.”

“Who’s messing?”

“They’re messing with me by bugging you.”

“Baby, nobody’s messing with you. How come you’re staring at the courtyard when you should be finishing your application?”

“I’m working on it.”

Cree sits on the bench. He looks around to see if those boys are lingering. “Marcus thinks that this maritime program is going to be the best thing for you, baby. You’re going to make him so proud,” Gloria says. She reaches into her handbag and pulls out a packet of stamps. “Mail it today. I’m going to miss you when you’re sailing up that river.”

“Maybe I’ll get a job out of state. Maybe I’ll take you to live somewhere else.”

“You know Marcus wants me to stay right here.”

“You’re hearing him wrong. When I was little, he always told me that we’d go live in Florida. Take his boat down there and everything. How come he changed his mind?”

“Your father isn’t going down to Florida. Neither am I.”

Cree leaves Gloria on her bench. In the apartment, Celia’s suitcase is still open on the living room floor. A hot pink nightgown is draped over the arm of the couch. The cordless phone is missing from the base—probably hurled somewhere after her late-night blowup with Ray.

Cree’s tired of this place. It’s not just the apartment that’s bugging him; it’s the entire neighborhood. It’s the cops who’ve kept their eye on him ever since June Giatto went missing. It’s the white girls who cross the street as if he might make them vanish too. It’s the hoods who cut him dead because he isn’t affiliated even though those days are over. It’s the rumors that Monique is too messed up to sing at the tabernacle. It’s the boys screwing with his mom on her bench and screwing with him at the same time.

Cree gathers the materials for his application and seals them in an envelope. Although Kingsborough Community College is still in Brooklyn, it feels like it’s in a different world—east of the Coney Island boardwalk, surrounded by the water. But Cree worries that it’s not far enough away, that it will take him years of study to actually make it up the Hudson or out toward where the water gives way to horizon.

He runs down the stairs and dashes through the courtyards. This envelope is too important to trust to the mailboxes near the Houses where kids drop half-empty soda cans, cigarettes, and sandwich wrappers.

He crosses to the waterside, rushes down Visitation, forgetting to look in Val’s window. At the corner of Van Brunt, he drops the envelope into the mailbox that is in full view of the bus stop, the bar, the Greek café, and two bodegas—a mailbox he imagines no one would dare to screw with. He lets the blue metal door slam back into place. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and heads into the bodega.

Normally, Cree doesn’t think to buy beer. It’s always been easy enough to snag a bottle from someone else’s six-pack. But now he’s got something to celebrate. Cree knows the bodega owner by sight, not by name. He used to keep the
Daily News
article about the small memorial held on the fifth anniversary of Marcus’s death taped to the plexiglass case filled with bread rolls. This story has now been replaced with other news.

Cree goes to the refrigerators and stares at the beer. Because malt liquor is the last thing Cree would normally drink, he reaches for a bottle of Olde English. He takes it to the register. The man behind the counter gives Cree the once-over.

“You of age?”

Cree shuffles his feet.

“You don’t want a better beer?”

“I don’t really drink beer,” Cree says. “It’s a special occasion. Finished my application to college.”

The bodega guy slides the bottle toward Cree. “Problem is I can’t sell this to you. Let’s just say you took it without my knowledge.”