Uncle Janice (28 page)

“Not at all,” Brother said.

“You weren’t sitting here?” Tevis asked, pointing to the empty tea mug on the table.

“No, I was, but please go ahead.”

“No, no, no,” Tevis said. He pulled out the chair for him. “Here. Take it.”

“I’m fine. Really. I’ve been sitting all day.”

“No, no, no!”

“It’s fine!”

And so they both ended up standing, awkwardly, with their thumbs hooked into their waistbands. Fine by Janice: she kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the empty chair. Out on the porch she had
spent so much energy trying to read everyone’s reactions that she almost forgot to have one of her own.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Saw I had your house keys,” Brother told her. “Figured I oughtta drop them off. Save you a little hassle.”

“Let himself right in, too,” Vita said.

His arms spread out wide. “And we been catching up ever since.”

A policeman for seventeen years, accustomed to keeping his shoes on no matter what, Tevis swung his gaze from Brother’s hairy toes to Janice’s stocking feet. He said, “Should I take my boots off, or …”

“You don’t usually?” Brother said. “It’s called being polite.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Vita said as her fancy German knife sliced through another carnation stem. “You wanna leave your shoes on, leave your shoes on. However you’re comfortable. If you got your gun on you, you wanna shoot him, go ahead.”

Brother was the only one who laughed, probably because he was the only one who thought it was a joke. From a wooden bowl beneath the window, where the Itwarus kept—for reasons mysterious to even them—spare buttons and dead batteries, he pulled out Janice’s jangling house keys. He threw them at her and she caught them easily, just as she used to catch the clementines he tossed, the remote controls and tissue boxes, everything really except for the bottle he whipped into the wall behind Jimmy Gellar’s head.
DO NOT DUPLICATE
said the back-door key, but she imagined her father could’ve finagled his way around that without a problem.

“What time did you get here?” she asked him.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“Sorry, Officer. I don’t remember. That sorta thing happens when you get older.” He turned to Vita, whose shoulders had tightened over the cutting board. “Matter of fact, I’d say that happens to everybody. Right, Janny Bananny? Why I bet you couldn’t even tell us what you were up to last night.”

“Does Barbara know you’re here?” Janice asked.

“Oh yeah, she knows,” he said. “I don’t keep no secrets from Barbara.”

Vita cried out in pain. The fancy knife, flung away from her, clattered into the sink. At first Janice thought she was annoyed, or maybe her feelings were hurt, but then the blood arced across the cutting board. Janice was the first to reach her. On instinct, without thinking, she slipped her mother’s finger into her mouth. Then the boys crowded in with all their bullish concern: what happened, are you okay, does it hurt, let me see, run it under cold water, wrap it up in kitchen towels and hold it high above your heart. Janice staggered backward, feeling claustrophobic, swallowing blood. She dropped to the floor on her hands and knees. Despite all her emergency training, she couldn’t get her heart to slow down. The kitchen tiles gleamed brighter than they ever had. The smell of soap bubbles lingered. She crawled past Tevis’s boots and Brother’s feet to the baseboard beneath the dishwasher, where she at last found her mother’s severed fingertip. Its manicured nail was painted pink, its skin uniquely whorled. When she stood up, too fast, making herself dizzy, Vita thrust her hand out at her and blood more black than red splattered Janice’s chest.

Another knife, she thought. There were just too many of them in the world. Her father got ice. And a kitchen towel, which he knew to look for under the sink. Tevis, as he’d done earlier with the flowers, stole the fingertip out of Janice’s hands. Everyone was moving, scrambling. Everyone was in everyone else’s way. Janice retreated to the kitchen table to sit down and massage her temples. A rooster-shaped sugar bowl fell off the kitchen counter and shattered. It starts small with a fingertip, but next week maybe Vita forgets to wear an oven mitt and scorches her palm grabbing a cast-iron frying pan. After that, a broken bone stumbling down the stairs, her body coming apart in pieces like a vacant house. Outside on the porch someone was banging on the door. Somebody was hollering. The knob turned and the door flew open and raging in the entryway stood Mr. Hua, their lunatic neighbor.
Motherfucking car
, he said.
Blocking the motherfucking alley!
Completely insanely he was punching his own hip. He wore black waiter pants and a white shirt spotted with grease from the Chinese restaurant he owned in Bayside,
next to a police precinct actually, where he most likely hocked secret loogies into the wonton.
Motherfucking car
, he said again.
Inconsiderate people! No one can get fucking in or out of the alleyway!
He seemed ready to take another step into the house when he noticed the gun pointed at his chest.

“Jeez Christ,” he said. “It’s okay, no problem, no problem.”

Janice sat with her elbows on the table and her baby Glock in both hands. She told him to leave. She hadn’t pointed her gun at anyone in over a year, not since she’d worked Housing in Queensbridge, but unlike all those other times she rested her finger outside the trigger guard. Still, though. As Tevis would surely have told her, you shouldn’t point a gun at someone you have no intention of killing. For Mr. Hua, the barrel’s quarter-inch diameter must’ve looked like the world’s largest, hungriest mouth. To her shame, his pant leg darkened with urine. She laid the gun flat against the table with its barrel pointing toward the nearest wall, away from everybody, and he at last did as she’d asked: left the house, walking backward through the entryway, even pulling the door shut behind him. From the safety of the alleyway, he called her a crazy bitch psycho.

“Jeez Christ,” Brother said in a Charlie Chan accent, but once again he was the only one to laugh.

The checkered kitchen towel wrapped around Vita’s hand had thickened with blood. There wasn’t any time to ask Janice what she’d been thinking pointing a gun at a man she’d known since childhood, but there was, however, a dispute as to who should have the privilege of driving Vita to the hospital. Her fingertip sat atop ice cubes in a plastic sandwich baggie, ready to go. She wanted to call a cab, Janice an ambulance, both getting overruled on the grounds of unnecessary expense. Tevis promised to break all the traffic laws getting her there, but Brother promised the same, plus he said they wouldn’t have to wait once they arrived because he knew the Jamaica Hospital night guy, by which he probably meant a janitor.

“Let’s go,” Vita told him.

“You sure?” Tevis said. “I really don’t mind taking you.”

“Yeah, but I’d feel too guilty,” she said. She reached behind his neck with her good hand to tuck the tag back into his T-shirt. “It’s very sweet of you to offer,” she said, “but if I’m going to inconvenience somebody, I’d rather it be family.”

“Ex-family,” Janice said.

Brother made an exaggerated ouch face meant to demonstrate that her attempt to sting him had failed; meanwhile, she knew he wouldn’t have made the face at all—eyes scrunched, lips pursed—unless she’d actually stung him.

“It’s really not an inconvenience,” Tevis said.

“Of course it is,” Vita told him. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

Apparently she didn’t think it made any sense for Janice to accompany them either. For what? To sit in a hard metal chair for three hours, go into her buy day of work tomorrow with a possible nosocomial infection? You kidding? That would only make Vita more anxious. On general principle alone, she wouldn’t
allow
Janice to come with.

“Be good,” Vita said on her way out the door.

“Yeah,” Brother said. “Be good.”

After they left, Tevis at last took a seat next to her at the kitchen table. He eyed the baby Glock, as if tempted to put it back into her purse, or maybe even take it home with him before she put a bullet in somebody or swallowed one herself.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

“That’s your dad, huh? Has he been coming around a lot lately? Is that why you’ve been acting like a butthole?”

“Like a crazy bitch psycho, you mean?”

She’d driven drunk. She hit and ran. She was a criminal, and so was Marty who trained a pregnant pit bull to guard his stash, and so were his pals Korean Marty, who threw her into an alleyway, and Cerebral Pauly, who tried to cut out her tongue, and so was the black guy who sold heroin to her outside the meth clinic and the white DJ who sold her coke and the Mexican who sold her crack rocks from his mouth, and so too was Prondzinski, who threatened to demote her if she failed to reach her quota, and so was Sergeant Hart, who paid off CIs with drugs,
and so were the banks, and the baseball player who lied to Congress, the governor who slept with hookers, and so was Sean Bell, who got shot, or maybe the four cops who shot him were the criminals, or maybe none of them were criminals, it was just one of those things. Maybe she had rabies. Maybe her ghost bat was actually a real bat that had punctured her neck with its frothy fangs. Maybe a ghost had hexed her. She had, after all, made one guy piss himself and had piss dumped into her lap. She watched a little girl stab herself in the throat. Judith wasn’t talking to her. Her mother smoked weed, attacked her when she came home, and was quickly disappearing. Her partner ate fried chicken over the garbage can with his shirt off a day after breaking up with her. She missed positive signals, abandoned uncles, wore a burka, got arrested, flirted with a married man, and cut off all her hair. Investigators yelled at her to make buys, then parked so close to the set that she couldn’t make a buy. Her elbow was still bruised. Her nails were still a mess. This upcoming Monday she had what might have been construed as a date: to shoot freaks with a recovering drug addict, the creator of her alter ego. One of her alter egos. Maybe a recovering drug addict. She was going to get booted back to patrol. She spent seven hundred dollars on a cell phone. Her favorite
Rubí
character fell off a balcony and crashed through a glass coffee table. Her rumpus crush broke his hand on her rumpus enemy’s head. She pointed a gun at Mr. Hua! She worked with crackheads, alcoholics, exercise junkies, professional liars, a movie star, a paper-clip-hoarder, an ex-paratrooper, a woman who wore rubber Joker masks, and an inspector who hid all day under his desk, so yeah, fine, guilty, she was a crazy bitch psycho, but how could she not be?

“It’s been a tough couple of weeks,” she told Tevis.

The back door flew open again. Not Mr. Hua this time, in the entryway with a shotgun and a vengeful curl to his lip, but her father, out of breath, as if this supposed marathoner had exhausted himself climbing the porch’s four steps.

“My car,” Tevis said, understanding before she did.

“I can’t get around it,” Brother panted. “I tried. Couple different ways, but I’ll take your side mirror off if I get any closer.”

“You parked in the
garage
?” Janice asked.

“What?” he said. “Were you using it?”

Tevis told her he’d see her tomorrow at the rumpus. In other words, find your way there on your own. For the first time in their relationship, he bent down to kiss her on the cheek before leaving. He and her father walked out together through the back door. Left behind, afraid to sit still, she picked all the sugar bowl shards off the floor, vacuuming the bits she couldn’t see, along with the sugar itself, then wiped blood off the countertop and finished chopping the remaining flower stems. Without any proper vases in the house, she pulled pint glasses down from the cupboards. She arranged the flowers in threes and fours, never twos, because she didn’t want Vita to think they stood in for her and Brother, the carnations’ pairing a sign from the universe that she should reunite with her ex-husband. This was less Janice being crazy than it was Janice inhabiting the particular craziness of her mother. Upstairs in Vita’s bedroom, she placed a single flower on Vita’s nightstand, next to a book on mindful meditation and, God help her, two more lipstick-stained water glasses. She felt too tired to wash them. The porch and kitchen lights were both waiting for Vita to come home. To get an update, an expected time of arrival, Janice called her mother’s cell, half expecting it to ring somewhere in the bedroom, but it went directly to voice mail, a cheek-puckering taste of her own medicine. She stripped out of her pants and bloodied blouse. Under her mother’s covers, clutching a down pillow that smelled powerfully of henna, Janice fell asleep the only way she knew how, by pretending to be dead.

She woke up a full ten hours later with Vita snoring beside her and the carnation in full bloom. Some asshole downstairs kept ringing the doorbell. At the far end of the hall her alarm clock was honking. Somehow, after ten hours of sleep, she still felt exhausted. She had to pee, too, but first she threw on one of Vita’s short silk robes and clambered down the stairs to the front door, where through the peephole she saw the fish-bowled faces of two uniformed police officers.

“Who is it?” she asked ridiculously.

“Janice Itwaru?”

No
, she wanted to say.
I’m Janice Itwaru
.

Procedure dictated the patrols should have identified themselves as police right away, but maybe they saw her eye darkening the peephole and had assumed she could figure it out for herself. They were both men, both white, one a little tanner than the other. To flaunt his curly hair, the fairer-skinned officer kept his cap clipped to his belt, against regulations. Her name tumbled out of his mouth again. She was told to open the door, but humidity and obsolescence had kept the wood swollen in the frame. Already apologizing, on the defensive, she asked them to meet her on the back porch.

A stoic, uniformed Janice—pinned behind the glass of a mantelpiece picture frame—watched a skimpier, more frantic Janice race through the living room. She was fucked. Maybe. If it was just a single eyewitness who’d stepped forward, someone who’d seen
—thought
he’d seen—her hit-and-run the hatchback, then she could probably lie her way toward reasonable doubt and possibly retain her job, or at least avoid jail time. But if that Atlantic Avenue traffic cam had snapped a picture of her license plate … it wasn’t even worth thinking about. Eager to appear as if she was eager to cooperate, she had the back door open and was standing on the porch when she heard a loud thump, followed by some cursing. The fair-skinned cop came around the corner massaging the top of his capless head. He looked furious, ready to kill someone, or at the least chop down that alien fruit tree, but his partner could not have seemed happier. But then he did get happier, his smile widening when he saw Janice standing on the porch with her mother’s short robe wrapped tight around her body.