“What?” Nerese said faintly. She turned to face the kid, forgetting about Freddy, who hung up the phone mid-dial, then moved past her before she could stop him.
“You keep your mouth
shut,
” he said, grabbing his son’s wrist. But Nelson snatched his arm free with surprising speed and violence.
“Get away from me!” Nelson nearly shrieked then scrabbled to his feet. “What did I
do
! What did I
do
!” crying to Nerese, to his mother. Danielle stood in the dining alcove now, speechless, gripping the back of a chair with both hands.
Nelson.
Nerese stutter-stepped in place, a little dance of disorder, the information still hovering.
Nelson.
Did his parents know this all along?
No, Nerese decided. They were as poleaxed as she was. Freddy was just the first to grasp what was going on here, first to fly into action.
“I’m going to need for you to leave my home,” he said, nearly chest-bumping her backward to the door.
“Hang on, hold on . . .”
“
Now,
” his breath in her face.
Nerese abruptly dug in, so that he had to lurch to a stop.
“Yeah, you
lay
a hand on me. I’d
like
that.”
Nelson was gone.
“Where’d he go . . .”
Danielle, still in a daze, still working things out, wordlessly tilted her chin to the rear of the apartment, and Nerese found herself on the move.
Although she had never set foot in this house before, somehow she was the one who wound up leading Danielle and Freddy to Nelson’s room. It was narrow and fairly austere: two Eminem posters and a small plank-and-cinder-block bookcase half-filled with creased paperbacks and some extraterrestrial action figures.
The boy was sitting on the edge of his bed, his shoulders slumped, his hands between his knees and his face to the wall.
The three of them stood in the doorway as if his misery had set up a force field.
“I don’t get it,” Nelson said, his face still averted. Then he turned to them, singling out Nerese and peering beseechingly into her eyes. “What did I do?” The boy as open-faced to her now as he had been closed off before.
At last, Danielle moved to her son. But as if animated by the threat of her touch, Nelson vehemently came to life, rearing away from her and swatting the air between them.
“Take him out of here,” Freddy said to his wife as he once again reached for a phone, this one on Nelson’s small desk.
“Hold on,” Nerese said quickly. “Did you hear me read him his Mirandas? Because I don’t believe I did, but if you’re calling a lawyer right now? Reading him his rights is gonna be the next thing out of my mouth, and then everybody’s got a problem.”
Freddy hesitated, desperately trying to figure out Nerese’s play.
“Just hang up the phone, Freddy.” Nerese saying it as if the receiver were a gun. “Hang it up. You don’t like what I’m about to say, you can get right back on the line.”
Freddy stood there, the receiver tentatively feathering its way down to the desk.
“Just hang it up.” Saying it as carefully as if she were talking to a jumper on a ledge. “Please.”
Freddy’s indecision pulled the room into a momentary silence, which was abruptly broken by his son.
“It’s
your
fault!” Nelson exploded at his mother. Danielle flinched, then glared at her husband, passing it on; Nerese thinking, While you’re at it, don’t forget Ray.
“Nelson.” Nerese knelt down before him on the edge of his bed, looking up into his eyes. “Nelson.” Reaching up and clearing away the tears with the sides of her thumbs. “Nelson, listen to me. You tell me what happened that day. You tell me how this all came about. You be
truthful,
you make me a believer . . .”
Racked with nervous exhaustion, he unwittingly cut loose with a spectacular yawn, then rubbed his eyes, Nerese sensing that if they all decided to tiptoe out of there, he’d be unconscious in two minutes.
“You make me a believer, Nelson.” Nerese squeezed his knee to keep him in the room, then looked at the parents. “And I think we can call it a day.”
Chapter 31
Nelson—February 7
The off-key blare of the intercom brought Ray in from the terrace, where, legal pad in hand, he had been thinking about a writing assignment for the kids. The class after this next one tomorrow would fall directly on Valentine’s Day and some of the challenge titles bouncing around in his head were “Dating Game,” “Blind Date” and “Prisoner of Love,” although nothing as yet had made its way onto paper.
“Yeah?” He leaned into the speaker, the scratch pad tucked under his arm.
There was no answer, just the ambient sound of outside, scattered and lax.
“Yes?”
The caw of a careening gull, and faint open-mouthed breathing.
“Yes?” Ray thinking, Freddy. “Who is this.” Thinking, 911. He turned to reach for the phone.
“It’s Nelson.” The kid’s voice came through thin and plaintive, Ray envisioning him down there with Freddy’s hand on the back of his neck.
Ray retrieved the portable phone, then returned to the intercom.
“Let me talk to your father, Nelson.”
Again the noisy silence.
“Let me talk to your father,” he repeated, then waited for some confirmation before he put through a false alarm and made a complete horse’s ass out of himself: a basso murmur, a mutter, a heavy shuffling tread, anything.
“You tell him—”
“It’s
Nel
son!” the boy’s voice breaking high with frustration.
“Nelson, give me your phone number.”
“What?”
“Give me the phone number of your home.”
Freddy picked up on the second ring and Ray killed the call without a word.
A moment later, rising from the murk of the stairwell into the river light streaming into the hallway from Ray’s open apartment door, Nelson’s face appeared, vaguely swollen, his features both puffed and slitted with sullen determination.
And once again, he was carrying the baseball glove.
“What’s up, Nelson?” Ray asked lightly, casually blocking access to the apartment.
“I want to stay here.” The kid’s voice was reedy but determined.
“What?” Ray blinked.
“I want to stay with you.”
“Nelson, no, you can’t.” But then, absorbing the kid’s misery, he took it down a peg, “You can’t, Nelson, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t
want
him to be home,” Nelson declared, clutching the doorknob and dipping into an emphatic crouch.
Unconsciously wincing, Ray reached out and lightly touched the boy’s arms, nudging him upright again.
“What happened,” he asked. “Did anything happen?”
“Stay out of my sight,” Nelson said.
“What?” Ray took a step back into the apartment. Nelson followed him in.
“You go to school, you come home, you go to your room, you do your homework, you come out, you eat your dinner, you go back to your room. You
stay
out of my
sight.
” Nelson aped his father as if possessed, then dropped onto one of the couches.
“
Why
?,” Ray asked. The only reason he could imagine was that Nelson had been a witness to Freddy’s being cheated on.
“I didn’t
do
anything!” Nelson wailed, hitting his leg with the baseball glove.
Ray had never heard or seen him so nakedly expressive before, and it carried some of the slightly repulsive shock of seeing the puniness of a turtle extracted from its shell.
“Nelson, you have to go home,” Ray said as gently as he could, easing himself down on the couch next to him.
Nelson sank deeper into the upholstery, his face clenched with resolution.
Ray anxiously batted the narrow gap between his own knees with the writing pad, then flipped it to the floor.
“You have to go home, Nelson,” he said, laying a hand on the kid’s shoulder as if it might be hot.
Nelson started to cry, a stingy high-pitched keen.
“Look,” Ray began, then just faded. “How did you get here?” he asked. “Did you take a bus from school?”
But Nelson had gone off into some deeper permutation of his own blues and Ray might as well have been talking to himself. “Nelson . . .”
“Everybody
hates
me,” he wailed abruptly through those ruined lips, Ray taken once again by how much this almost-thirteen-year-old boy was still so much a child.
“Nobody hates you, Nelson.” Ray put a hand on his arm. “But you have to go home.”
“I want to have a catch,” he announced desperately, but with a knowing touch of hopelessness; the kid apparently not so immature that he didn’t in some way understand the bottom line here.
“We can’t, sweetheart.”
“Why
not,
” Nelson demanded of the far wall, still refusing to meet Ray’s eye.
“Nelson, I’m sorry, but your parents are your parents.” Then, “Does anybody know you came here?”
The kid refused to answer, his face bunching up again, blurry and red, as he mutely railed against the desolating unfairness of it all.
“I want to see your baseball cards again,” he declared.
“My what?” Ray took his head out of his hands. “Hey, I’ll do you one better.”
He began to rise, ready to just give the kid one of his albums, but then sank back into the couch as he envisioned Nelson bringing this consolation prize home, Freddy asking him where he got it. Besides, that wasn’t what Nelson was after.
Sitting side by side, both of them staring straight ahead at the far wall as if they were watching a tragic movie, Ray found himself burning with the desire to give this kid something both enduring and in some way consoling, but there was nothing that Nelson could leave this apartment with, absolutely nothing that couldn’t in some way come back to snap Ray’s neck.
“Can’t I even see your baseball cards?” Nelson said brokenly.
Ray slid up to the edge of the couch and dropped his head beneath his hunched shoulders.
“Nelson,” Ray began, intending to offer him a ride but, no, he couldn’t even risk doing that. “Nelson, I’m going to call you a cab to take you home. I’m sorry, I wish I could . . .”
Ray rose to his feet and retrieved the portable phone from across the room, then went into the kitchen to get the phone number for Garden State Taxi taped to the side of the refrigerator. Returning to sit by Nelson on the couch, he began to dial, but he was overcome once again with that urge, near-irresistible, to just
give
the damn kid something, anything; and wound up killing the call before it rang through, opting instead to reach into his pocket and fish out two twenties, which he pressed into Nelson’s hand.
“This is for the cab. Whatever’s left over, that’s yours. Buy yourself something stupid, whatever you want.”
Nelson stared at the bills in his palm as if he’d never seen money before, his hand remaining open. Then his face darkened.
At first Ray thought the kid was silently demanding more, and for an instant he entertained the notion that this whole visit was a carefully scripted attempt at blackmail. But then he decided that the sudden rush of color was about confusion, Nelson having a hard time processing the significance of the forty dollars.
Pulsing with shame, Ray rose to his feet and with his back to Nelson on the couch, put the call through to Garden State.
“Yeah, how soon can you get a cab to Little Venice?”
“Where you going,” the dispatcher said, chewing something as he spoke.
“Hang on.” Ray turned to face Nelson and get his address.
The blow announced itself as an odor and as a sound—a singed-smelling, high-pitched whine, dog-whistle high, followed by a blind tumble to the floor, a cascade of Ray, images and words and limbs and then out.
Chapter 32
Nerese—February 28
Ray and Nerese stood at the railing of his terrace, staring out at the wind-ripped Hudson as if they were waiting for Neptune to rise from the deep and make an announcement.
“Well, I can’t say I don’t see where you were coming from on this,” she said.
“So what did you do,” Ray asked. It was cold as hell, but he made no move to head back inside.
“I did my job,” she said.
“Meaning what.”
“The Youth House.”
“No,” Ray hissed, gray-faced. “Oh please, you didn’t.”
Nerese cut him a long dry look.
“Jesus,” he said, a hand on his heart. “Why’d you just fuck with me like that?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nerese said. “Did you just get fucked with?”
Ray looked away.
“I called Danielle this morning with the names of a few therapists I know through Family Services. That kid definitely needs to get himself an out-of-the-house ally.”
“Good,” Ray said, still avoiding her eyes. “That’s a good idea.”
“And I also suggested a few names for her, too, but I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere.”
“You say anything else to her?”
A flatbed barge the size of a football field made its way toward the bay, Ray staring at it as if he would give anything just to be the cabin boy on that thing right now.
“You mean did I read her the riot act?” Nerese studied him. “That’s not my job.”
“OK.”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“OK.”
“Not that I didn’t want to.”
“I hear you,” he said, finally venturing a quick glance her way.
Nerese inhaled the clammy low-tide stench from the bay and was momentarily saddened that this would be her last visit here.
“If I had spoke my mind? I would have most likely said something way too hot and uncalled for.”
“Really.”
“Because I have my own personal history with this stuff to contend with, and . . .” Nerese retreated, staring out at the water and silently sliding her hands over each other as if washing them in wind.
“What,” Ray asked with as much dread as curiosity. And when she continued to hold back, he asked again, “What,” the second time more emphatically, suddenly staring at her full on, offering himself up.
“Look, as a rule I don’t ever talk about my son on the job. I just don’t, but . . .”
Ray continued to stare at her as if afraid, now, to look away.
“It’s like, his father? Darren’s father?” Nerese eased back in. “He cut out a few months after Darren was born. It was drugs, a lot of it, but even if he had been clean, he still wasn’t . . . He would’ve split sooner or later. And frankly, sooner was better. I mean, if you’re gonna go, go.”
“Absolutely.”
“Ray, just shut up and listen,” she said without rancor. “And it was hard for me, raising a child by myself, plus, you know, being a rookie cop and all. But I did it. And at first, when he was real little? I had a series of boyfriends. They’d sleep over the house, walk around morning noon night. None of them bad guys, mean to Darren or whatever, but it was a series of guys who wound up kind of half-living with me. Some were married, some not, about four maybe five guys since Darren’s father had skipped.
“Now, all this was going on when my son was a crawler, a toddler, a runner, a put-together kid as far as I could tell, pretty happy . . .
“But when he was in first grade, he started acting up in school, fighting, crying, throwing things, wound up hitting another kid with a rock, no stitches thank God, but he drew blood. So I get called in for a conference by his teacher, Miss Hanley, nice, nice woman, asks me if anything’s going on at home she should know about, you know, anything stressful, I say, ‘Not, not really.’
“But Miss Hanley, she had apparently talked to Darren the day before, and now she calls him over, says, ‘Honey? Do you want to tell your mommy what you told me?’ Darren’s like, ‘Unh-uh. Nope. No way.’ So she sends him back to the play yard.
“Once he’s out of earshot, she tells me that Darren had said to her the day before that he didn’t like the ‘new daddy’ he had now.
“Not
his
daddy. The
new
daddy.
“The woman asks me about the guy, who at the time was this cop Ernie Howard, decent man, a little gruff, drank a bit, but decent. She asks me how he is with Darren, et cetera, et cetera. But I thought she missed the point. It wasn’t that this guy was a bad player. It was the fact that Darren had called him his new daddy. Had called him
any
kind of daddy.
“See, I had been oblivious to this, that my son saw these men in my life as a succession of fathers, each of which disappeared on him as soon as our romance went sour . . . That, that Darren, whose biological father had bailed on him and never looked back, needed a father in
any
kind of way.
“It was like, as a parent, I thought I was doing good. And my sex life was behind the bedroom door. Plus, I would never hook up with a man who was in any way unkind to children in general, let alone my own child.
“Now, I didn’t know if Ernie had been short with Darren one time, expressed irritation with him, gave him a dirty look or if Darren just didn’t like his face, but it didn’t matter, because Ernie wasn’t the problem. You see what I’m saying?
“Well, I went home that day and I swore that I would never bring any man into my house save for the one that would in fact
be
Darren’s new daddy.”
Nerese straightened up from her hunched-over stance at the terrace rail, a fist pressed into the small of her back.
“What was that, twelve years ago?” She snorted. “My son is approaching his eighteenth birthday and I have kept that promise. In the last twelve years he has never woken up
once
in his own home come morning to see some guy in boxer shorts raiding the refrigerator. In the last twelve years, he has never been told what to do
once
in his own home by some man whose only claim to authority would be that he was sleeping with his mother.
“I have kept that promise and I have suffered for it, but my son is
intact.
“I didn’t give up sex, didn’t give up men, but my love life for the past twelve years has been largely a matter of motels, which are not really conducive to romance, or intimacy or even conversation. Once in a blue moon there’s been the odd getaway weekend but not for a few years.
“Now, I’m not saying for sure that I would definitely be with a man today if things hadn’t been the way they were, but who knows, you know?
“And the hell of it is, now that Darren’s about to take off and I’m going to be a free agent again? I look in the mirror and what do I see . . . I see a forty-one-year-old woman whose weight fluctuates between a hundred and sixty and a hundred and seventy-five pounds . . . I see a woman whose hair is starting to streak up gray, I see . . .” Nerese took a fuming breath, scowled at her nails. “Who’s gonna want me now . . .”
“Aw c’mon, Tweetie,” Ray said weakly.
“Do
you
?” Just saying it.
“Do I what.”
“Do you want to try and get something going with me? See where it takes us?”
She had never seen someone go literally speechless before, and it pained her to have made her point so easily.
“Anyways, that’s what Florida’s all about. My turn. I just hope to God it’s not too late.”
“Tweetie,” Ray pleaded, still snagged in the brambles. But Nerese was past it.
“And if I look back on the last twelve or so years, you know, all the, the love, the possibilities for love that never came to pass, am I angry at my son? Probably. Did making that sacrifice mean I was a good parent? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I fuck up with that kid every time I open my mouth. Say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. He’s definitely a mama’s boy, but I guess given the other males in my family tree he could have turned out a hell of a lot worse . . . If I had to do it all over again, would I make the same sacrifice? I wouldn’t be happy about it, but yeah, I would.
“My child was starved for a father so no way, once I understood that, would I torment him with a parade of boyfriends and that was that.”
“Tweetie, I had no idea . . .”
“Of course you had no idea. Why would you have?”
“I’m just saying . . .” He trailed off.
“The point I’m trying to get at here is, given all this I just told you? With Nelson’s mother yesterday, I had to be careful of what I said, otherwise it would’ve gotten way too personal, you know, judgmental. I mean what the hell was she doing dragging along that kid to your house like that. I mean fuck who you want, but that’s a
child.
”
Ray nodded, his face ruddy with shame.
“Which brings me to you,” she said mildly, worried a little bit now about coming off self-righteous but no way after she had been put through the hoops on this one was she
not
going to have her say.
“Remember that day I got caught spray-painting that shit on Eleven Building? Those two cops had me bookended, walked me all the way through Hopewell to the management office, all those little shitheels following us, woofing me out, made me feel like Dumbo leading the circus into town . . . Hands down the worst moment of my life. Well, you were there for that part of things.
“Anyways, here’s what you didn’t see. They get me in the management office, one cop goes and calls my mother to come pick me up, then disappears to do the arrest report, right?
“The other cop? That white cop? He’s sitting next to me on the lobby bench, we’re waiting for my mother, people coming in and out of the office to pay their rent or whatnot, everybody’s looking at me, knowing what I did.
“We’re waiting, waiting . . . That white cop’s reading the
Dispatch,
not talking all that much, but when he comes to the comics section, he folds it back and passes me the paper, although I was too far gone to get into Li’l Abner just then . . .
“Do you know how long I had to wait for my mother to come pick me up? Forty-five minutes. Forty-five motherfucking minutes to make it over from three buildings away. Forty-five minutes of me just sitting there with everybody staring at me like I was the lowest piece of shit on earth. And when she finally came in to get me? I’m talking three o’clock in the afternoon, now—she comes shuffling into the management office in a
house
coat. A two-buttons-missing housecoat, got slippers on, her hair’s up in rollers, got a pack of Larks in a vinyl cigarette case in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Comes into the office like that in the middle of the afternoon before, the
housing
manager . . .” Nerese began ticking off on her fingers, pinky first. “Before, the, the
clerks,
the
cops,
the
neighbors
. . .
“I just wanted to curl up and die right on that bench.
“But then something happened, Ray, something amazing. Something . . .
“That white cop sitting next to me? He took a long look at my mother when she came in, just like, absorbed her, and then without even turning to me, he just put his hand on my back, up between my neck and shoulder . . .
“And all he did was squeeze. Give me a little squeeze of sympathy, then kind of rubbed that same spot with his palm for maybe two, three seconds, and that was it.
“But I swear to you, nobody, in my entire life up to that point had
ever
touched me with that kind of tenderness. I had never experienced a sympathetic hand like that, and Ray, it felt like
lightning.
“I mean, the guy did it without thinking, I’m sure. And when dinnertime rolled around he had probably forgotten all about it. Forgot about me, too, for that matter . . . But
I
didn’t forget.
“I didn’t walk around thinking about it nonstop either, but something like seven years later when I was at the community college? The recruiting officer for the PD came on campus for Career Day, and I didn’t really like college all that much to begin with, so I took the test for the academy, scored high, quit school and never looked back.
“And usually when I tell people why I became a cop I say because it would keep Butchie and Antoine out of my life, and there’s some truth in that.
“But I think the real reason was because that recruiting officer on campus that day reminded me, in some way, you know, conscious or not, of that housing cop who had sat on the bench with me when I was thirteen.
“In fact, I don’t think it, I
know
it. As sure as I’m standing here, I
know
I became a cop because of him.
For
him. To
be
like him. God as my witness Ray, the man put his hand on my back for three seconds and it rerouted my life for the next twenty-nine years.
“It’s the enormity of small things . . . Adults, grown-ups,
us,
we have so much power . . . And sometimes when we find ourselves coming into contact with certain kinds of kids? Needy kids? We have to be ever so careful . . .”
“Yup,” Ray whispered.
“When I first saw you in the hospital and you didn’t want to cooperate? I went through my checklist. He likes the boys, he likes the girls, he likes men, he’s into the needle, the powder, the pipe. He’s into loan sharks, he’s a degenerate gambler, something humiliating like that, because I could smell the shame coming off you like body odor.”
Ray slowly sucked air through clenched teeth as if he’d been waiting for her to lay into him like this from the first time they’d met.
“Nelson,” she said. “What did you think, that kid would just stop thinking about you after he went home like you stopped thinking about him? You reach out in any way to a child like that, you can
not
be oblivious to what you might be unleashing.
“I mean, you’re a good guy, Ray, you have good intentions and all, but you need too much to be liked and that’s a bad weakness to have. It makes you reckless. And it makes you dangerous . . .”
Nerese then turned to him and smiled. “That’s it. I’m done.”
At first she thought Ray was just smothering a series of explosive sneezes, but then the tears came and he turned away.
Nerese studied the New York skyline across the river, a fortress inside a fortress inside a fortress, a deep thicket of spires, gleaming in the late winter light.