“Anyways,” she said, “guess who’s not a cop anymore.”
He turned to her and waited for more.
“I used my accrued sick days to get out early. Put in my papers yesterday afternoon.”
“What?” Ray came upright off the rail.
“I’m going down to Florida in a few days, oversee the guys rehabbing my house.”
“So now it begins for you, huh?” he managed, his voice still clogged.
“Well, yes and no,” she said, baring her teeth. “I’m kind of taking that ninety-seven-year-old man with me. There’s nobody up here that I feel comfortable leaving him with. Besides, he doesn’t have all that much time left, so I can’t see him cramping my style down there for too long. The good news is I got my mother and uncle going into the same old-age home that I’m taking him out of, so it’s like one way or another, everybody’s covered.”
“How about your son?” he asked, breathing through his mouth.
“Darren? Darren’s in charge of the house up here until he graduates, and then we’ll see.
“I got him applying to this community college about twenty miles from the new house down there? It isn’t Harvard, but neither is he. He can live in the dorms if he gets accepted. Or . . . I mean I have a finished basement in the new place, but . . . I don’t know, we’ll see, we’ll see.”
“The new you’s shaping up a lot like the old you.”
Nerese shrugged, not wanting to think that one through, telling herself, I am blessed . . .
“Anyways,” she said. “It’s time for me to book.”
“Actually, I’m kind of heading out of here myself,” he said.
“Meaning . . .” She hauled her bag up on her shoulder.
His mouth and eyes began working in such a way that she knew whatever he was about to say would almost be as much of a news flash to him as to her.
“I’m going back to Los Angeles.”
“Really . . .”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, as if feeling his way. “I’ll see, I’ll see this writing class thing through to the end, but basically I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here. I mean, writing for some TV show is dopey but it’s work, it’s life. It’s no worse than being a real estate lawyer or an advertising executive or whatever. Maybe it’s not fighting the good fight, but . . . I just can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.
“I mean, I’ll try my hardest not to leave anyone else in the lurch, but . . .”
Although his words were becoming increasingly lucid and thought out, their tone had become almost pleading.
“It’s what you said, Tweetie. I don’t have the discipline. I don’t have . . . People like me”—he held his nerve-curled right hand against his chest, the gesture enhancing the aura of supplication—“I need to be beholden to something or someone up the ladder, no matter how stupid the finished product is. I’m just not strong enough for anything else.”
“What about Ruby?” Nerese almost hating to bring up the kid’s name in the face of Ray’s pitch, his use of the word beholden.
“Tweetie, I’m not doing her any favors just hanging around here like this. I have to live,” straight-out begging her. “I have to have a
life.
”
“Hey, you do what you got to do,” she said, hands in the air. “You don’t have to sell me.” Then: “How’d she take the news?”
Ray put all ten fingers to his temples and widened his eyes, as if to get more air around the sockets. “I haven’t really figured out how to tell her yet.”
“You will,” Nerese said, just to say it, coming at him with bowed arms, embracing him. “I got to go.”
At the door she turned to face him one last time.
“You know, Ray, in terms of what put you in the hospital, I’ll tell you one thing that you might want to take as the silver lining on the cloud . . . You were very lucky that it was little Nelson who took that whack at you.
“Because if it was your boy Salim? That’s a grown man, and he’d’ve taken your head clean off your shoulders. I mean, all due respect to what you said about not wanting to leave anybody else in the lurch around here? But if I were you, I’d cut that half-a-headcase loose today.”
Chapter 33
Take Our Daughters to Work—March 5
Ray’s first day back teaching since the assault coincided with Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Although the event was primarily designed for working mothers, Ruby had agreed to sit in on the class, and so despite the neurologist’s warning against driving these days, he found himself behind the wheel again, heading into the city at the height of the morning crush in order to pick her up at St. Simon’s and bring her back over to Dempsy.
Actually, the pickup wasn’t necessary; with his right-side extremities still dragging, his head still singing and his stamina tentative at best, he had arranged for this, his comeback class, to be something of a half-assed field trip. Mrs. Bondo was taking the kids by bus to Little Venice, where they would have lunch and read their work out on his terrace. And Ruby made her own way from lower Manhattan to his place all the time. But, anxious about breaking the news to her of his fairly impending return to Los Angeles—in a month, he figured—he felt like he needed to see her as soon as possible.
Walking from his car to St. Simon’s, he caught sight of Ruby from a block away, hanging with a bunch of kids her age, thirteen, fourteen, in front of a deli around the corner from the school.
There were roughly half a dozen of them goofing around before the eight a.m. bell, the boys slap-boxing, miming jump shots and honking like geese; the girls a little more in control of their physicality but as noisy as the boys.
A cigarette was being passed around, and Ray was transfixed by the sight of his daughter taking a deep drag—no coughing, no darting glances—then flicking the butt into the gutter.
Settling himself down on a car hood out of their sight lines, he continued to watch, as Ruby snatched a loose-knit Rasta cap off a blond boy’s head, then took off in an evasive zigzag, the kid happily grabbing her from behind, Ruby squawking “What the fuck are you
doing
?” but not trying all that hard to get free. In fact, after a few token wriggles she more or less settled into the clinch, the boy, still hugging her from behind, placidly resting his chin on her shoulder.
Ruby took another drag on a fresh cigarette being passed around, then, with a languid feline ease that left Ray floored, raised it to the lips of the boy holding her, allowing him his taste before returning it to general circulation.
Smoking, cursing, public lewdness: Ray found himself thrilled by this kid of his, lifted by this other Ruby that he had never seen before, her secret vices, secret powers; the only queasiness was evoked by the notion that it was as if she had intuitively decided to leave him, to leave his idea of who she was, before he could literally leave her.
“So this guy White Tom?” Ray said as they entered the Holland Tunnel. “If and when they bust this grocery, he wants to buy it and make it into kind of a candy store–luncheonette for the Hopewell kids. Frankly I think he’s talking air castles, he’s a bit of a whack-job, but if he manages to pull this off? He’s supposed to call me, because I would very much like to be a little part of that, you know? What do you think?”
Ruby shrugged noncommittally.
“What.”
“Where are the people going to buy groceries then?”
“There’s a supermarket a block away,” Ray said. “Better stuff, half the price.”
Ruby threw him another discomfited shrug; something still bothering her.
“What.”
“I feel bad for the grocery store guy.”
“He’s a drug dealer.”
“I know,” she said halfheartedly; something else.
“Anyways,” Ray mumbled as the car broke into Jersey-side sunlight, “it’s probably all bullshit, so, whatever.”
A burdened silence came down on them as he made a long slow arc around Jersey City, then ascended the ramp onto the southbound turnpike.
Ruby, it’s time for me to go back to . . .
Ruby, how would you feel if I . . .
Ruby, I need to work at a real job, I need . . .
Ruby . . .
Honey . . .
Sweetie . . .
There were two tentative offers out there already: one for a series gearing up about the Secret Service, the other about a detective agency in which all the gumshoes were certified, whatever that meant, psychics.
“So, did you bring a story with you?”
“I forgot,” she said, looking out the window at a gaggle of waterfront derricks.
“You
forgot
?,” Ray honestly upset. “I thought you were going to read some stuff today.”
“I forgot. I’m sorry,” a bit of an edge creeping into her voice.
“I can’t believe you forgot. The kids would’ve loved it.
I
would have loved it.”
“
Dad
!” The edge turning jagged. “I said I
forgot,
OK? I’m
sorry.
”
“OK. OK. No problem.”
But once I get set up out there . . .
Ray exited the turnpike as the Statue of Liberty came into view.
“No, I think it’s a good idea,” she said faintly as if drained, breaking this second silence.
“What is.”
“Helping White Tom.”
“Oh yeah?” Ray eyed her. “Good.”
She leaned her head into the passenger-side window, her face cinched tight as a purse.
Definitely something else.
The small school bus, squat as a concertina, was unable to enter the grounds of Little Venice—something about insurance restrictions regarding private property—so Ray and Ruby had to meet the class at the security gate and hoof it back to the apartment, a half-mile walk past the overgrown construction mounds and beneath the spiraling cruciform shadows of the gulls. The trudge was a happy one, though, the boys periodically popping straight up in the air for no reason he could discern save for the anarchy of being so far from school on a late Wednesday morning—that, and/or the presence of the girls.
“What grade are you in?” Altagracia asked Ruby, who lagged behind Ray just enough to be disaffiliated from him.
“They don’t have grades in my school,” Ruby said.
“What?”
Ray briefly glanced behind him, but too briefly, nothing registering.
“Then how do you get promoted?”
“They just promote us,” Ruby said, Ray envisioning her shrugging. “What grade are you in?”
“Ninth,” Altagracia said. Ray was dying to turn around.
“I like your hair,” Ruby said. “How do you do that?”
“I don’t have time enough to tell you.”
“Hey Ruby.” Ray wheeled, walking backward now, but the sunlight was a dagger in his left eye and he forgot whatever little piece of rehearsed banter he had in mind to justify his joining in.
Despite waving them in from the middle of the living room, the kids lingered in Ray’s doorway as if the floor tiles were sewn with land mines; not until Rashaad caught sight of the TV—“Dag, a flat screen,” the kid making a beeline for it—did the others tentatively file in after him, Mrs. Bondo and Ruby after-you-ing each other to death in order to be last.
“It’s
broke
?” Rashaad reared back from his own question.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “For today.”
Shaking off the setback, Rashaad discovered the funhouse mirror, and within seconds the three boys were jockeying for center stage, throwing elbows and shouting incoherently.
The girls, blocked from viewing themselves, settled for inspecting the CDs and videos in the wall unit; Ruby and Mrs. Bondo standing side by side like edgy museum guards waiting for something bad to happen.
“Ruby, you OK?”
“Yeah,” more of a yip than a word, Ray feeling her sense of invasion.
“
Boys
!” Mrs. Bondo snapped at the mirror crew.
“It’s OK.” Ray shrugged. “That’s what it’s there for.”
But then Jamaal discovered the miniature basketball hoop that Ray had tacked up over the hallway entrance for Ruby right after he moved in. The kid whipped out his wallet for use as a ball, and a three-way game of one-on-one began, the floors now shaking like thunder.
“Guys, guys,” Ray waded into them, handing Jamaal back his wallet. “My neighbors are like a thousand years old.”
Three of the girls were in front of the funhouse mirror now, their turn to whoop it up, Altagracia begging Mrs. Bondo to come over and cast a freaky reflection—nothing doing—while Ruby and Myra wandered off in separate spheres, Myra checking out his book collection, Ruby holding up a wall, the poor kid striving for impassive but mainly coming off as overwhelmed.
Crossing the room, Ray took his daughter by the hand and dragged her over to the bookshelves.
Myra was studying his framed Emmy nomination now, open-mouthed, river light flashing off her glasses.
“That’s an Oscar?” she asked.
“It’s for TV.”
“You have so many books. I’d love having books like this, you know, everywhere you looked, books, books.”
“Well here,” Ray, still holding Ruby’s hand, impulsively plucked a collection of William Carlos Williams poems from a high shelf and gave it to her. “Here’s one to grow on.”
“What?” she said, meaning, Thank you, and immediately started reading.
Ruby jerked her hand free.
“Myra, did you meet my daughter, Ruby?”
“Hey,” Myra said minutely.
“Hey,” Ruby’s voice even tinier.
“Myra’s a killer writer,” he said, then, “Ruby’s a killer writer, too. She was supposed to bring stuff to read today, but . . .”
“
Dad,
” the word dripping with grief.
“Mr. Mitchell,” Myra said, “would it be OK if I didn’t read today either? I felt like I needed to give my mind a rest this week.”
“Sure, absolutely,” Ray even a little charmed by the phrasing of her excuses.
Mrs. Bondo caught his eye and tapped her wristwatch.
“OK,” Ray announced. “Grab your lunches and come see the greatest view in New Jersey,” sliding open the terrace door. “Mainly the view of New York.”
The kids filed out, rushing to the railing in a way that made his gut flutter.
“Hang on, hang on,” herding them back, then pointing to the Statue of Liberty. “Check it out.”
“That’s the Declaration of Independence?” Rashaad asked. The others blew up with laughter. “Naw naw naw, I mean . . .” Rashaad at least having the good humor to laugh too.
As the kids and Mrs. Bondo broke out their sandwiches and sodas, Ray looked back into the apartment and saw Ruby sitting by herself on the couch, poring over one of his baseball-card albums.
Stepping back into the living room, he eased himself down next to her. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said in a near-whisper, eyes still on the cards.
“Why don’t you come out?”
“It’s too cold.”
“Ruby, what’s wrong.” Ray felt a wave of sandy exhaustion in his joints, his skull humming like a hive.
“
Nothing,
I said.”
“Ruby, I was so excited to have you here today,” vindictively using the past tense. “Tell me what’s wrong. It’s not
fair.
”
“I don’t know,” she said through near-motionless lips. “I’m embarrassed.”
“About
what.
You’re not reading anything. All’s you got to do is sit there and listen. What’s the big deal?”
Ruby shrugged and looked away, “embarrassed” a euphemism for God knows what.
He fleetingly wondered if perhaps she was feeling self-conscious about being the only white kid, but he wasn’t really picking that up.
“Just come out. Please?”
“When my uncle was in high school he beat up a kid who was beating up him and the kid had got a concussion from it and even though it wasn’t his fault the judge said he had to go into the army where there was a war going on.”
Ray eyed Ruby sitting against the railing behind the other kids. She looked open to the story, though, and he let her be.
“He spent a year in the war and was in a lot of firefights.”
Rashaad looked up. “That’s what he called it. Firefights.
“Even though a lot of people and soldiers got killed all around him, or wounded, he didn’t even have a scratch on him when he finally came home and was even given an award for bravery.”
Rashaad looked up again. “OK, here’s where it gets . . . You’ll see.”
“Then two days after he came back to Dempsy, he went over to the public swimming pool that used to be on Libatore Street, dove into the water and broke his neck. Ever since he’s been in a wheelchair.”
Winces and “dag”s all around.
“Comments?”
“Can I read?” Efram raised his hand.
“No comments?”
“It was sad,” said Jamaal, Ray surprised by that adjective coming out of a boy’s mouth.
“OK,” Efram grinned, “you’re gonna like this,” then,
“King Efram the First . . .”
And that was as far as he got, the class blowing up as usual. Ruby seemed intrigued but out of the loop.
“King Efram the First guided his laser beam refractor unit through the porthole of his warship at the planet Venus, which was populated by gorgeous ten-foot-tall women.”
Another wave of chaos, Efram waiting it out.
“‘Put down your arms,’ he telepathically announced, ‘or Venus will be reduced to a lump of coal.’
“The Venusian Queen telepathically returned his command: ‘If you won’t come to our planet and have our babies we just as soon be smoked because there are no men here and we’re going crazy.’”
The kids were howling, Ruby finally cracking up too, shrugging helplessly at Ray—What a maroon.
“OK. Stop, stop,” Ray reared back, not sure who he was addressing.
“They’re gonna make
him
pregnant?” Rashaad said.
“No, no.” Efram fended him off.
“Yeah! You said, ‘Come and have our babies!’”
“What?” Efram scanned his pages, then, “Oh, shit.”
“
Hey
!” Ray and Bondo said together.
“He’s a
bitch,
” Rashaad crowed.
“Hey!” Another tandem bark, the terrace threatening to fall into the river.
“Aaah,” Rashaad gurgled with glee.
After Felicia and Mercedes read, two painfully stiff recitations which as usual were interesting despite themselves, Ray scanned the terrace and saw that they were done.
“OK, usually Myra gives us a taste right about now, but apparently she’s on a brain break this week, so . . .”