Visitation Street (27 page)

“Fenwick Island,” Cree says.

“What?” Ren is silhouetted behind him, his flashlight dancing in the remains of the cabin.

“It’s in Delaware. That’s where my dad said we’d spent our first night on our way to Florida. He died before we made the trip.”

“So that’s where we’ll go. First stop.”

“What makes you so sure we’re going anywhere?”

Ren shrugs. His flashlight rises and falls. “You got a boat. You got a first mate. Why would we stay put.”

“You think I can just up and leave?”

“I’m not saying relocate. I’m saying adventure.”

Cree looks over the side of the boat, deeper into the dark water. Two months had passed since he’d seen those girls on their raft and believed adventure had been within reach.

Ren follows Cree’s gaze. “Proactive man. That’s what we’re after.”

Ren has Marcus’s talent for making everything sound easy—as if shipping out is no big deal. The wind gusts. The abandoned boats sway.

“Fenwick Island,” Cree says. “And then the Keys. We were always planning to head down to the Keys. My moms would fly and meet us there for a family vacation. But the real vacation would have been the trip down.”

They begin to move the scrap and parts. By the end of the night, both boys have an animal scent—a barnyard musk of mud and sweat as well as the murky stale odor of stagnant water. It takes them three round trips to the car to load all the materials Ren’s salvaged.

They drive back to Brooklyn, their haul bumping and clattering in the trunk. Cree parks in front of the lot where his father’s boat is moored.

“That was a trip,” Cree says. He and Ren bump fists. “Want to come back to mine, get cleaned up?”

“Go on,” Ren says. “I got work to do.” He looks at the scrap at his feet. “Give me a couple of days. Then we’ll take her out for a ride. See if we can get to Jersey and back.”

Cree wants to take Ren to a place where they can drink beer and talk girls. He wants to walk side by side into the courtyards or the park, claim one of the benches, laugh louder than necessary, prove that he’s not alone.

He wants to hang in the pizza parlor, grab takeout from the bulletproof Chinese. He wants Ren to come with him to one of those house parties he no longer braves alone.

But Ren seems to dodge the Houses in favor of the empty backstreets. Maybe out on the water he will shed his secrets, let them go as they pass beneath the Verrazano and head toward the Atlantic.

I
t sounds to Monique as if June is giving up. Her voice has lost some of its confidence and grown flat and robotic. Sometimes she confuses words, mispronouncing simple things, adding syllables or tripping over vowels.
Kitchen. Breakfast. Pancake. Fryingpanhandle
. Her memory is fading, taking with it her certainty of how and who she was.

Hammer. Workshop. Homeworked. Noterbook
.

Even at this uncertain register, June’s voice rings in Monique’s ears. It wakes her from her dreams. It nags her during school. She skips tabernacle, worried that the congregation will suspect that she’s possessed.

The reverend shows up at Monique and Celia’s apartment. Monique watches him through the peephole. She holds her breath. She can feel her heartbeat against the metal. The reverend’s head balloons over his foreshortened body. The distorting glass makes his eyes bulge. He leans into the door, pressing his eye to the wrong side of the peephole as if he can see in, the dark of his iris inches from Monique’s own.

He calls her name. He bangs on the door—deep blows that vibrate in Monique’s chest. Somewhere down the hall a door opens and a voice calls out to quit his racket. He straightens his jacket and walks down the dim hall to the stairs.

In the projects she is besieged by voices of those who died in the towers and in the courtyards. She hears the cries of old ladies who died all alone as well as the gangbangers and drug slingers caught in their own cross fire. She cups her hands over her ears, but it only makes the noise louder. She drops her hands and catches sight of a couple of kids watching her.
Monique’s buggin’
, one of them says.
Yo, Monique, how come you’re buggin’? You smoke the bad shit?

Her gang is in their usual place in Coffey Park clustered around two benches, making pointless trouble for anyone who passes. Shawna, Monique’s shadow, has risen in the ranks, and now sits in Monique’s place.

Yo, girl, where you been?

You missing out, Mo. How come you weren’t at Dee’s crib last night? That shit was phat. We look it late. Till dawn
.

Shawna got down
.

Shawna’s doing a poor job of seeming uninterested in the boys’ attention. She lets them tease her too long. She takes too many gibes and punches. She acts hungry for notice, especially at Monique’s expense.

Didn’t know we interested you anymore
, Shawna says.
Thought you were hunting the rough stuff with Raneem’s boys
.

Only three weeks ago, Shawna couldn’t get her hair done without calling Monique for advice. Now she’s ribbing her. But that’s what happens—the boys tease the girls, then the girls trash the girls. It’s a drop-down system, and Monique’s fallen to the bottom.

Monique knows how to put Shawna in her place. It would be simple to remind the crew that Shawna had accidentally gotten with a twelve-year-old at the beginning of the summer, mistaking the kid for his older brother.

What’s the matter with her?

She’s tripping.

She’s high
.

She’s high on Raneem’s shit
.

Their words hardly register.

Monique heads toward the waterside. It’s quieter on the cobbled streets. Next door to Val’s house a woman in a long purple skirt is sweeping her stoop. She looks up as Monique passes. Monique is almost at Van Brunt when she stops and backtracks to the bottom step. “Is my father shacked up here?”

The woman leans on her broom.

“Ray, my dad. His boys tell me he’s shacked up in this house.”

The woman pushes up the sleeves of her white blouse, revealing slashes of black paint or pen on her forearms. Her hair—light brown turning gray—is frizzy, framing her head in a wedge. She doesn’t wear any makeup. Two small dogs are yapping in the doorway behind her, springing up and banging against the glass.

Monique can’t believe that Ray prefers this woman to Celia. It makes her wonder what they’re preaching in his recovery meeting.

This woman reminds Monique of the volunteers who sometimes visit her high school to teach creative writing, women who seem to pity the students for the first half of class and then spend the second half glancing at the clock.

“Monique? I’m Maureen,” the woman says. “I was wondering when we’d meet.” She comes down the steps, places a hand on Monique’s shoulder, and draws her inside.

The interior of the small row house is dark and smells like turpentine. Large pieces of paper with smudged charcoal drawings of women’s bodies are taped to the walls in the hallway. Women’s arms, legs, thighs, butts. Women’s breasts spilling over their prostrate figures.

Maureen leads Monique into the living room. The walls are covered with more sketches. Women with their legs gaping open. Women crawling into bathtubs. Women considering themselves in the mirror. Women with their fingers creeping down to their privates. In the middle of the room is a large easel with a half-finished drawing of three female figures—two bursting from the body of the first.

“You do all these?” Monique asks. She averts her eyes from the vaginas that stare at her from all sides. “You’re working on that now?” She points at the easel.

“Those are my selves,” Maureen says.

“Your what?”

“The three aspects of my nature. They’re born from me.”

The couch is covered with magazines and sketchbooks. Two hanging plants are dying in their planters, their brown tendrils curling and withering.

“Ray’s at work,” Maureen says. “He’ll be back around five.”

“I know what time my dad gets off work.”

“Of course you do.” Maureen slides art books and sketchbooks from the couch onto the floor. “Sit.”

Monique perches on the edge of the couch with her knees together and her hands clasped. She can feel the springs poking into the backs of her thighs. She can’t imagine Ray in this place. She can’t see him without his booming TV and his animated fights with Celia.

“So my father’s living here now? Like permanent?”

“He and I are learning about new parts of our selves,” Maureen says.

“So there’s more than one of him now too?”

“This must be difficult for you,” Maureen says.

“My father running out? It happens all the time.” Monique stands up. The voices, which had subsided when she entered the house, are starting again. She walks around the room, lifting drawings, poking through coffee cans crammed with charcoal pencils and china markers. She enters the small kitchen. Maureen’s shelves are filled with grains and beans stored in glass jars.

From the kitchen window, Monique looks into the garden, then over the wall that divides the Marinos’ backyard from Maureen’s. She can see the top of the white-and-blue swing set Val and June would make-believe into outer space and fantastical lands Monique didn’t quite grasp. The other girls always took the lead on these imaginary adventures, bringing to life stories from books Monique hadn’t read and movies she hadn’t seen. She’d tagged along, drugged by the exotic-sounding names, the complicated rules and customs of these imaginary places.

Rust has crept onto the swing set. The crossbar sags in the middle.

“I don’t know anyone who has a garden,” Monique says. “It must be a trip.”

“I don’t spend that much time out there,” Maureen says.

“You don’t have kids?”

Maureen shakes her head.

“This big house and no kids? How come you don’t have kids?”

“I never wanted them.”

“Cramps your style, I guess,” Monique says. “So is my dad coming home or what?”

“You should talk to him about that.”

“I’m talking about it with you.”

“Let’s have this discussion when Ray’s here,” Maureen says.

Monique looks around the kitchen. She doesn’t want to hang around until Ray comes back. The Ray who stays in this house is not her father—at least not in any way recognizable to Monique. Without making excuses, she heads for the hall.

On her way out she passes Val, who’s got a funky new haircut.

“Hey, Monique.”

Monique tries to speak, but June’s voice is pounding in her ears, saying Val’s name.

“You hanging out with Maureen?”

Monique opens and shuts her mouth like a nutcracker.

“Monique? Is everything cool?”

Monique wants to follow Val inside her house, go down to the basement, and pull out the old costumes and scarves. She wants Val to invent one of her complicated adventures set in a kingdom far away. She wonders if Val still remembers these places, if perhaps that’s what she was looking for that night on the raft, a world that hovers just out of reach.

“Um, okay. Whatever,” Val says.

Monique struggles to sort out her own thoughts from June’s chattering. “Val!” she says. Her voice is not her own.

“What?” Val says.

Monique clamps her hand over her mouth, then lets it go. “Shut up.” She twitches, trying to break free of June.

“Are you talking to me?” Val looks more confused than angry.

Monique shakes her head. She looks past Val into the homey interior of the Marinos’ house. No amount of make-believe will get June to let her be.

She rushes away.

“Monique, wait!”

She heads for the desolate streets on the tip of Red Hook. June’s voice is still a rhythmic chant but she’s no longer just saying Val’s name. She’s incanting a whole host of names, some Monique recognizes, some she doesn’t, and others she’s sure are nonsense.

Halfway up the block the corrugated siding that hides Bones Manor from the street begins. As she passes, a slight wind lifts from the water, rattling the fence. She slips through a gap and enters the Manor’s barren empire.

She’s standing at the edge of a large pond filled with rushes that bow and sway. The top of the water ripples, distorting her reflection. All around her are makeshift shelters, concrete foundations with tarps as roofs, shipping containers with laundry lines strung across their short ends, and shopping carts for storage. Battered chairs sit in a semicircle under a sheet hung between four stripped saplings. Trash rolls like tumbleweed.

The highest point of the Manor is a blue building that looks like two stacked trailers. They are balanced on a staggered cinder-block platform. The top trailer has smudged windows, one of them partially blocked by a ragged curtain. As Monique looks up the curtain is pulled back.

A chorus of new voices joins June’s. They are rough and eroded. They sound like the ache of the wind in a charred forest, the rattle of a can rolling down an empty street, the whisper of dust in a gutted building—hollow noises unaccustomed to an audience. They suggest a loneliness worse than pain.

This is what people become, Monique thinks, voices crying out in an abandoned lot, groping the forgotten air of an old boneyard, hoping for someone to hear them and reaching a person who won’t listen. So what does it matter if Ray runs off with Maureen, and Shawna becomes queen of the benches? Everyone’s heading in the same direction.

Still, there is charm in the desolation of the Manor, invention in the ruin. It’s as close to make-believe as Red Hook gets, a world created out of scrap—containers transformed into mansions, a muddy puddle into a lake. Monique imagines she’d like a shipping container of her own, a shelter from the madness of the Houses where people will let her be.

“Boo!”

A hand claps over her eyes. She jumps.

“I said,
boo
. Did I scare you? Or were you waiting for me?” The hand lifts. Monique turns to face Raneem. His boys are behind him. “Did you come looking for me?”

“No,” Monique says.

Raneem stands back. His jeans are slung low, revealing three inches of his boxers. He’s capped two of his front teeth in gold.