Visitation Street (36 page)

Ren had no choice but to get in the water now. He was terrified of going in too deep, so he waded chest high, until the bottom gave out. He kicked his legs, fighting to stay afloat. He felt the current grip him. Water flew up his nose and ran down the back of his throat. Then a wave swamped him and washed Val’s body on top of his.

He looped an arm around her waist and began to drag her to shore. Blood trickled down her neck from a cut somewhere under her hair. He listened for her breath. Eventually it reached his ear, faint but even. Ren lifted Val and carried her to higher ground. He searched around for somewhere safe to stow her while he looked for her friend. He stumbled over the rocks toward the little beach. He propped her up against a pylon under the pier, praying she’d be all right until he could return.

Once more, he decided to follow the raft. He passed the rocky outcrop, the cruise terminal, and the container terminal. Half a mile up the shore, at the border of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens, he spotted the pink raft, washed up in a stand of rusted and disused pylons. A few feet farther on, he glimpsed the other girl’s body, floating facedown. Ren rolled her over, slapped her face a few times, blew into her cold mouth. He knew enough to know she was gone. He freed the raft from the pylons and placed June on top of it. He waded into the water and floated her back to Valentino Pier.

Ren was a nobody, a ghost with no name. He could disappear from Red Hook and no one would have known he had been back in the first place. He could leave June for someone else to find and be done with it. But Cree was a different story.

The boy thought he was a master sleuth, that he snuck in and out of his hiding places unobserved, that no one saw him tiptoeing around the waterfront. The kid believed he had Red Hook to himself. But Ren knew better. Someone might have seen Cree by the water that night watching the girls on their raft. Someone might have seen him try to swim after them. Ren had heard enough stories in jail to know how these things play out. Chances were Cree would serve time for something he had nothing to do with. Life would slow to a standstill, and if he ever made it out everything would have passed him by, all because he’d foolishly tried to attach himself to a misguided adventure. So Ren hid June in the only place he knew no one would look. No body, no crime. It was as simple as that.

He carried the girl to Bones Manor along side streets he hoped were abandoned. The only person he’d come across was the crackhead wino—but he hoped the little man was too strung out to notice his cargo. After he locked June away in the airtight storage container next to his, securing the door so no one could get in, he doubled back to the water’s edge where he sat with Val until the sun began hovering behind the Houses. Soon the dog walkers and joggers would appear near the pier and Val would be safe.

On his way back from the pier he’d nearly collided with a white dude in crumpled black clothes on his way down to the water. The guy was shuffling across the park either up all night or up too early—trailing a scent of smoke and booze. Fog had rolled in, smothering the river, hiding the distant bridges and other boroughs. Even New Jersey was out of sight. The white guy stared at the water as if it might tell him something.

At the edge of the park, Ren ducked behind some raggedy bushes. He watched the white guy on the pier, willing him to look down and see Val. The Staten Island ferry rolled into view. Some sound in the pylons caught the white guy’s attention. He looked.

Ren had planned to keep a low profile when he returned to Red Hook, hiding at the edges and never entering the Houses. But he couldn’t help himself from walking Monique home. There was something lost but adventurous about her, as if she’d purposefully allowed herself to get off the path in order to find a better route. He wanted to keep her safe, but he also wanted to follow her wherever she was going. After the CO lady started screaming, Ren knew it would only be a couple of hours before Cree came for him. He took his beating, told his story, knowing Cree would walk away.

When Ernesto and his tiny hoods checked in with him later that night, he told them he had one final job. They had to help him haul the boat down to the water. With or without Cree it was time for Ren to go.

Ren had painted the escapes he knew Cree dreamed of—electric pieces he hoped would entice the boy away. He’d wanted to show Cree, Fadi, the rest of them what they had—amp it up, draw attention to the everyday. Too bad folks insisted on dwelling on what they lacked, the adventures that were out of reach, the customers who didn’t come, the people who went missing, the people who got dropped. Ren wanted to shake them free. But some fools seemed destined to run in place.

Ren knows he has to get out before the CO lady starts asking questions. Soon someone will come down to his container. It won’t be long before they open up the one next to his.

After he let Cree pummel him, Ren sits up all night waiting for the boy to return, make good on the adventure they’d planned. He sits on the deck of the boat, watching the shore, willing Cree to appear. By the next morning, the boy hasn’t shown. Ren gets ready to leave. Soon the sky is fading from black to gray. Cree isn’t coming. It’s time to get going.

The small boat is surprisingly powerful and sways under Ren’s inexperienced command. He tips left and right, trying to find balance in the water. He is afraid to pick up speed. He inches out into the Erie Basin.

Cree hadn’t needed to tell Ren that a captain returns to haunt his ship. Ren knows Marcus is with him on the boat. Hell, Marcus has been with him ever since he dropped the gun onto the windowsill of that second-story apartment in the Houses. The man had jumped up off the ground and flown into Ren’s heart, took up residence in his mind, infected and informed each of Ren’s ideas, each of his dreams. He was the ghost in Ren’s reflection, the shadow he cast on the sidewalk. As Ren guides the boat away from shore, he hopes he’s doing Marcus proud.

At first the chop of the water unsettles him. He clenches the wheel, jerking and bucking with the waves. But soon he relaxes his grip and dares to accelerate. And suddenly he understands that the boat is more powerful than the slight waves and the current.

The sun is rising over Brooklyn, and the bay blazes like a vivid burner—the kind Ren would have like to have painted on a subway or a billboard. But instead of painting it, Ren is part of it, sailing into it—all the colors in his cans come to life. As he passes below the Verrazano, crossing out of the borough, he feels Marcus take the wheel, guiding him into deeper waters where he hopes Cree will have the sense to find him.

June crosses from the Manor to the pier, fluid and slow. She pushes through the world that has grown as heavy as mud. From habit she reaches out to touch people she passes but catches nothing. She absorbs the wind, grass, benches, and flagpoles. Distances that once took her minutes to cover now take hours. She is unaware of the sun’s touch and the woodwind sounds of fall. Her world is drained of color and sound.

It wasn’t always this way. Initially, she had clung to life. That first month after she’d drowned in the dark, chilly bay, she’d tried to latch onto others, hovering near the action, hoping to be brought back. She had been drawn to the bright world around the Houses—the music from the tabernacle, the parties in Coffey Park. She haunted the cookouts, seeing whether there was a place for her between the clusters of grills that shimmered with heat and smoke. She wondered if she might come back to life as someone was opening a bag of chips or squeezing ketchup. June stood watch, as solid as the smoke that rose from the coals. She tried to lend a hand, but she was as ineffectual as air.

She fell into step with girls who had ignored her when she was alive. She lingered in the pizza parlor, soundlessly flirting and chatting with the fine boys she was too chicken to approach in life. She lay out by the pool, untroubled by the heat of the sun, trying to remember the music that came from the boom boxes. She stared from the pier to Manhattan, still dreaming of checking the place out on her own, imagining that one day she’d float across the water, fly up and down the streets, capable of more in death than in life.

Things began to fade. Music was the first thing to go. Then the sound of voices. Soon talk became pantomime. June’s memory lost shape like a stratus cloud. She became an imperfect chronicler of the past, cataloging the days of her life in obsessive detail. Listing birthday gifts, family meals, favorite shoes, what she carried in her purse. Turning her life into a litany of possessions and events, replacing her memories with the objects that comprised them. The day she cut out of school and walked to Bay Ridge—
bridge, wind, rocks, expressway
. Her last birthday—
cannoli, sleepover, dance music
. Soon words lost their significance and she forgot the importance she once attached to “lip gloss” and “perfume.”

June knew that Val came with offerings—teenage magazines, pieces of jewelry, ribbons, things she thinks June misses. When Val left, June forced her fingers into the real world, the old place of weight and substance, and pulled these trinkets over to her side, objects she barely recognized and could not remember.

Eventually, June stopped trying to work her way back to the other side. She gave up on Val’s offerings. During the day, she folded herself inward, pulling herself away from what had made her old life electric and loud. She stopped wandering Red Hook. She forgot the resonance of things, the allure of pizza, the beat of music, the comfort of sprawling on a towel by the pool. But today something is breaking through the fortress of silence that encloses June. And she feels drawn to the pier.

After school, Val lies on her bed. A week has passed since Jonathan saved her for the second time. Although she knows that he is gone, she stares up at his apartment when she passes on her way home.

That afternoon one of the detectives who visited Val in the hospital pulled her out of history. Val watched him rub his ruddy neck as he told her that June’s body had been discovered in a sealed shipping container. The detective’s hand kept working his dry skin as he explained to Val that, despite the condition of the body, the medical examiner could see no signs of foul play. June drowned and someone hid her. Crazy people often think they are doing God’s work by burying a body, he explained. It’s not unusual for folks to cover up crimes they didn’t commit.

Val stares at her ceiling, trying not to think of June falling apart in a forgotten corner of the neighborhood. When did she stop being June and become June’s body, her remains?

“Valerie. Yo, Valerie!”

Val pulls the curtain back. Monique is standing across the street, not far from the spot where Mr. Sprouse used to stare into her window.

“Yo, Valerie, you wanna come down for a minute?”

“Why don’t you come up?”

“I got something to show you. Don’t leave me hanging out here.”

Val slips on her shoes and meets Monique on the sidewalk.

“You still have all those costumes in your basement?” Monique asks.

“You remember that?”

“I remember stuff,” Monique says, heading for Van Brunt. “Like all those games you made up.”

“All that make-believe was for babies.”

“It was dope,” Monique says.

Val checks Monique’s face to see if she’s messing with her.

“Honest,” Monique says. “You made up some crazy fun games.”

“Where are we going?” Val says.

“Valentino Pier.” Monique takes hold of Val’s wrist. “Listen, you asked me to do something once, you remember? You wanted me to sing for June.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You know, I was jealous of you with your raft. But I just sat there like that damn bench might carry me away.” Monique begins to lead them toward the water. “If I tell you something, you promise not to ask any questions? I’m going to sing for June, and she’s going to be listening. I know she’s going to be listening.”

The girls walk to Valentino Pier. Val doesn’t look at the tattered memorial to June. She refuses to glance at the rocky beach where Jonathan found her unconscious. She tries to ignore the spot on the pier where she’d let the music teacher hold her while she cried in her underwear. She does not pick out the place in the bay where June’s hand last slipped from hers. The water is darker now that the weather is getting colder. Val sits on a bench at the far end. Monique faces the Port of Jersey. She puts her hands on the railing and leans out over the water like a ship’s figurehead.

Val recognizes the song from tabernacle. There’s no way that Monique could have known that it was one of June’s favorites, “Prayer Changes Things.” When Monique gets to the line “I’ve been out on the stormy raging sea,” her voice deepens. She repeats the phrase. Her voice rises and falls with the waves. It goes out into the bay, then breaks back onto the shore. “I’ve been way out on the stormy, Lord, Lord, raging sea.”

Val listens to Monique’s hymn and tries to believe that June is nearby. When Monique is done, she sits down next to Val and they watch as the massive cruise ship that’s been docked all week begins to pull out of the terminal.

“Sing another,” Val says.

Monique stands up and goes to the rail.

Val knows that June is listening.

Ever since Fadi found June and received the reward from Mrs. Giatto, his bodega is popular again. He clips the articles about the discovery but only because they have pictures of Ren’s murals—the one on the shipping container and the one on his store. He filed these away to show Ren if he ever sees the kid again. But as days pass, he starts losing hope that this will ever happen.

Fadi has stopped dreaming of improvements he wants to make to his store. Ren’s mural is enough. One afternoon, he spots the little hoodlum Ren had deputized into his errand boy. The kid gives Fadi the address where he’d been delivering the groceries Ren put aside. Fadi cashes his reward check and tucks a fat envelope into the waistband of his pants.

Cree answers the door. Two women are sitting at the kitchen table. The smaller one, with long gray braids, is rubbing oil into the palms of her companion.