Ruby raised her hand.
“Yeah, Ruby,” Ray on his toes.
“Can I . . .”
“Read?”
She nodded.
“But I thought . . .” he said, then, “Sure. Absolutely.”
The other kids twisted around and wordlessly sized Ruby up as she extracted from her hip-slung fanny-pack two intensely wrinkled pages, looking as if they had been obsessively crumpled then flattened, crumpled then flattened . . .
“I didn’t know if there was an assignment for today?” Ruby addressed the Astroturf. “But I wrote something for the assignment you had where you were a dead person talking about his life.”
She coughed, smoothed out the sheets.
“It’s called ‘In My Grave.’
“If I had just decided not to visit my wife and daughter that last time I would still be walking the earth. I would still be free, I would still be alive.
“But even before that, if I had decided years ago that drugs weren’t my true love in life I would never even have
had
to visit them, because I would still be sharing a home with them, but that wasn’t the case.
“Oh sure, I cared for them in some way, but even my own flesh and blood was no match for the white powder.
“It made me crazy for more and I couldn’t ignore the demand no matter what.
“My wife kicked me out of the house when my daughter was little and she saw that I wouldn’t stop, and although part of me was sad to say good-bye like that, there was another part of me that felt free, free at last.
“I wandered the Earth over the years, always looking for more and more white powder, and sometimes at night I would lie in my cheap bed in some hotel and think about my wife and child, think about divorcing myself from drugs instead of my family, but when the morning came, I always changed my mind.
“Even though I thought my wife was a real bitch she was still right to kick me out but I kept thinking of my kid growing up without me and it drove me crazy.
“What did she think of me? What did she look like now? How did she like school? Was she popular? I had no answers.
“Finally one day I returned to New York, snorted up a huge amount of the white powder and got my nerve up to go back, knock on the door and finally see them for better or worse.
“It was about midnight and although I banged on the door like a crazy man, no one answered. Then I realized I still had my key from when that bitch kicked me out years ago, so I let myself in.
“The house was dark and I couldn’t find the lights so I just bumped into everything calling out my daughter’s name, which was Denise.
“Finally I saw someone standing in the doorway of my old bedroom. At the same time I found the light, which I turned on and saw in front of me a tall young woman I didn’t know.
“Then it hit me. It was my daughter Denise who I hadn’t seen since she was little.
“‘Denise!’ I yelled joyously as I came at her with open arms.
“I didn’t see the gun in her hands until it went off, shooting me in the chest.
“As I lay dying on the floor, I realized that she didn’t know who I was and shot me because she thought I was a burglar or a rapist.
“When my wife came home, although she recognized me, she didn’t tell Denise that I was her father, just some criminal that had broken in.
“My wife called up her new boyfriend, who came over, rolled me up in a carpet and dumped me in the bottom of a river, which is where I lie now, talking to you. The end.”
She had delivered the story in a thin yet determined monotone, her eyes never leaving the page.
Shattered, Ray numbly watched as the tremor in Ruby’s hands traveled up her arms to her back and shoulders like electricity, culminating in a single fishtail ripple of the upper body, Ruby coming to rest after that, although her eyes were still fixed on the pages before her.
“I like that surprise ending,” Altagracia said quietly.
“That was really good,” Myra offered in her small voice, then added, nodding to Ray’s framed one-fifth Emmy nomination, “That should be on TV.”
Chapter 34
Nerese—March 5
Having surrendered her car for its annual inspection before driving it down to Florida, Nerese descended the stairs from the arcade level of the main PATH station in Dempsy to the tracks, where she immediately encountered a crouched-over piss-bum holding on to a pay phone stanchion and crooning to his shoes.
She walked to the far end of the platform in order to keep her distance and waited for the train that would take her home to Jersey City.
It was the dinner hour, the station deserted except for the drunk and herself, and she began drifting off into her worries: Darren taking over the house up here until his graduation—could he handle the responsibility, keep it presentable for prospective buyers? Although the type of people who at this point would be house shopping in a neighborhood like hers . . .
She didn’t think he’d turn it into Bubble Hill in her absence, but for sure his girlfriend Patrice would be moving in the minute Nerese pulled away from the curb.
And how would Darren deal with Butchie and Antoine when they showed up without a reservation come the middle of the night?
Darren got along with Queen Toni pretty well, but Butchie, with his furrowed silences and lightless eyes, had always terrified him.
And telling either uncle to keep his distance was about as effective as pissing on a forest fire. Well, if things got out of hand she’d only be a long-distance phone call away.
“Yo, whoa, this right here.”
The hissy communiqué snapped her back into the present, two hoodies having materialized twenty feet away while she was drifting in Darrensville, one of them eyeing her handbag through half-mast eyes, the other up on his toes checking out the drunk at the opposite end of the platform.
“Right here, right here,” the first kid all but pointing at Nerese’s bag.
“No him, him.”
“He too close to the stair, this right here. Here.” Still not looking at Nerese herself, just her bag.
“Hold on, hang on.”
“
Hey
!” she exploded, both kids jumping. “Do I look fucking
deaf
to you?”
Exchanging glances, the two of them simply shrugged and walked away, leaving her standing there, trembling with insult.
They were most definitely going after the drunk now, Nerese groaning with the hassle of it all, obliged to follow them.
They traversed the platform at a leisurely pace for the first two-thirds of the journey, but when they came within a hundred feet of the vic, a disheveled young black man, they suddenly exploded forward, swooping like hawks; leaving Nerese standing there flatfooted.
But before she could get herself together, three plainclothes PATH cops materialized out of nowhere, the drunk himself whipping an arm around one kid’s throat and twisting the hand—it now held a box cutter—behind the kid’s back, that kid quickly going down in a flurry of police.
The other one though, was a little faster on his feet, wheeling and racing back toward Nerese, who, having no time to reach for her gun, braced herself to straighten him up with a forearm shiver.
But it never came to that: before he could get into striking range, he was taken down from behind by two of the cops.
Nerese stepped back as they pressed the side of his face into the litter-strewn platform and stripped him of his arsenal, a butter knife and a pair of homemade brass knuckles.
“You OK, miss?” one of the cops, flush-faced with victory, asked her from his kneeling position alongside the downed mugger.
“I’m good,” she said mildly, refraining from identifying herself—not her table—and headed for the street, intending to spring for a cab.
But halfway up the stairs she stopped and came back down a few steps to watch these guys finish frisking and cuffing their grabs.
There were four of them including the decoy drunk; two white, two black, all young, fit and utterly alive to the Job.
Standing there observing the postaction mop-up, a ritual that she had partaken in hundreds of times, usually as part of a team but occasionally alone, she found herself pondering the fact that not once, on her many trips to Florida over the years, had she ever checked out the various law enforcement agencies, state, county or local, operating around where she would be settling.
And not for nothing; she still intended to finish up college and check out the social services job market down there, but just thinking the thought for now, any police force in the Florida panhandle would have to be out of its mind not to want a twenty-year veteran of the New York–New Jersey iron triangle on their team.
“Miss, you sure you’re OK?” that same flush-faced cop asked her once he noticed that she hadn’t left the scene after all.
“I’m fine,” Nerese said, turning for good this time, and ascending to the street.
Chapter 35
Ghost Story—March 5
Unable to take the tension of spending the rest of the day alone in a room with his daughter, a few hours after the class had left the apartment Ray found himself driving her through the twilight streets of Dempsy, the two of them sitting next to each other like a pair of unexploded bombs.
It wasn’t her night to stay with him, and he had to get her back to the city, but on impulse he decided to take a small detour past Hopewell, just to do a drive-by on White Tom’s alleged future candy store, see what was happening.
Earlier, back in the apartment, in a desperate attempt to distract himself from thinking about what she had read to the class, he had the bright idea to call the guy rather than wait for his own phone to ring, and was not surprised to discover that the number for Thomas Potenza given to him by information was no longer in service.
“My guess is the bodega is still going full steam,” he said, his throat dry with self-consciousness as they flew under the elevated PATH tracks along Rocker Drive.
“If he’s selling drugs in there, don’t get out of the car,” Ruby said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” he said, touched by her protective fretfulness. “But do me a favor, if you’re going in? Could you pick me up an eight-ball?”
Ruby stared at him as if slapped, Ray wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.
“It was a joke,” he said weakly. “I was joking.”
Slowing down as they approached Hopewell, Ray managed to cruise past his old building without turning his head, then slowed even further as they approached the far end of the projects, finally rolling to a double-parked stop in front of the bodega directly across the street from the Big Playground basketball courts.
It was barely six in the evening but to his astonishment, the store was dark.
Without thinking, he left the car, left Ruby and stepped under the red-and-yellow metal awning.
There was no padlock, but the door was sealed along the frame with multiple neon orange posters fairly shouting that the Del-Roy Mini-Mart had been shut down by order of the Dempsy County Prosecutor’s Office.
“Ruby!” Inexplicably elated, he called back to the car, “It’s closed!”
Ruby and Ray sat huddled side by side on the top slat of the bench in Little Playground. The cement seals and crawl-through barrels were bare of snow this time around, and near-phosphorescent in the climbing moonlight.
Ray wasn’t quite sure what they were doing back here; it was at Ruby’s request that they had walked over from the bodega. Nor could he say why the bodega being shut down as White Tom had foretold picked up his spirits so much. It still didn’t mean that the guy was going to pull off buying the place, let alone transform it into a ghetto Candy Land. Maybe it was simply bearing witness to someone, anyone, being as good as his word, even partially.
“So who else lived here,” Ruby asked, as she calmly tracked a rat or a mouse as it shot out of one of the striped play-barrels and disappeared through the mesh fence into the bushes.
“Who else, meaning kids I grew up with?”
“Yeah.”
Ray opened his mouth to begin another roll call of two-bit legends, then, “Better yet, you want to hear a ghost story?”
“Sure,” she said, briefly jackknifing against the cold.
“It has to do with your great-grandmother.”
“The one who used to take you wrestling?”
Two kids with a boom box blasting Power 105.1 walked along the footpath that ran behind Little Playground. Ray had to wait for the DJ jabber to fade before answering, “Yeah, my grandma Ceil.”
“OK.”
He hunched forward, elbows on knees. “OK, when I was about eleven, twelve? She got very sick, my grandmother, very bad, and, at the time, she was living with my grandfather who you never met, and he just couldn’t deal with it, so instead of going to a hospital like she should have, she moved here into Hopewell with us for about a week.”
“They relocated me to the couch in the living room and she lay in my bed for seven days and seven nights with undiagnosed diabetes.”
“Why didn’t she go to the doctor?”
“Why? Because she thought doctors made you sick. That’s how they got rich. But anyways, you know how crazy I was about her, right?”
“She took you to monster movies, too,” Ruby said.
“What?” Ray faltered as he watched two young boys smack the crap out of each other in a low-story bedroom window of the building directly across the playground from them. “Yeah, exactly. So, every afternoon that week, I’d come running home from school and sit with her, talk to her, listen to the radio together, do my homework on the foot of the bed, whatever . . . And she was in bad shape, Ruby. Getting worse day by day, but she wouldn’t let my mother anywhere near the phone to call for help.”
“Why didn’t she call anyhow?” Ruby said with heat. “
I
would have.”
“Well, she could be pretty intimidating. I definitely got the impression that it was much better to be her grandchild than her child.”
“Go on,” Ruby said.
“So we’re freaked, me and my parents, and one day, the last day actually, I’m in the bedroom with her, listening to the radio, she’s going in and out of being awake, or conscious, and this song comes on, a jazzy kind of instrumental called ‘Midnight in Moscow,’ a clarinet thing, and my grandmother, she opens her eyes, says, ‘I
love
this. What is this.’ Then conks out again.”
Ray became aware of three small kids watching them from a ground-floor window in that same line of bedroom windows, their heads in an unblinking pyramid.
“Well, I jump up like a jack-in-the-box and decide that I’m going to run out and buy her that record. I go downstairs, race over to a record store, find out ‘Midnight in Moscow’ is an oldie, they don’t have it. I hit all three record stores in Dempsy, no dice. I wind up in Newark, a Sam Goody’s there, by the time I get back to the house with the damn thing it’s three hours later and she’s gone.”
“
Dead
?”
“No. Taken to the hospital by ambulance. Just made it, too. Doctors said another day would’ve been too late. Ruby, look.”
Ray pointed out the solemn pyramid of little kids. Ruby gave them a small wave and the heads vanished.
“What’s the ghost part?” she asked.
“This record I bought? ‘Midnight in Moscow’? I never got to play it for her. Obviously you can’t play it in a hospital, and when she went home, she didn’t have a record player in her house, so I pretty much forgot all about it.
“OK. Eight years later, I’m in college, my grandmother passes away, finally, and life goes on.”
“That’s sad,” Ruby said.
“Wait. Twelve years after that, OK? Twenty years after she was sick and living with us? I’m thirty years old, driving a cab, and you’re born.”
“Me?” Ruby fought back a smile.
“I see you the morning you were born, Ruby, you were so . . .” Ray stumbled, remembering the cocaine funk, jumping out of his skin.
“You were so . . .” He tried again, sucker-punched by his own story. “But I have to get to work, drive, driving a cab; so I leave you . . .” He looked off. “I leave you at the hospital, with Mom, and . . .”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Ray coughed. “So I leave you. All that day, all that night I’m driving, got the radio on low, driving and, at some point, I found myself talking to her, my grandmother, you know, in my imagination,” Ray coughed again, “about you. I say, ‘Grandma, you should see her, she’s so beautiful, she’s so . . .’” Ray palmed his face, hid his eyes. “‘She’s so precious, so . . . I wish you were here. I wish you could hold her, I wish . . .’”
“And I swear to God, Ruby, right then and there on the radio they played ‘Midnight in Moscow.’ I had not heard that fucking thing since I bought it twenty years earlier, but it was like she was reaching out to me, telling me she was still here, that she would always look out for you, that she would protect . . .”
Ray fell silent.
“Dad . . .”
“Ruby, I’m so . . .” He cut himself off.
That fucking story of hers . . .
“You’re so
what
. . . ” Ruby demanded.
“Nothing.”
“
Tell
me.” Ruby’s voice was both angry and pleading. “You always make me tell
you.
”
“I said,
nothing.
”
“Are you leaving?” she asked, suddenly breathless.
“What?” Ray felt shock like a cream creeping along his scalp.
“Are you
leaving,
” she repeated, her voice growing tremulous. “Are you going back to California.”
“What?” he said again, then, “No.”
“No?” Her voice still shaking as she searched his eyes.
“No,” he said more calmly, then again, “No,” just to hear himself say it.
She took another moment to anxiously scan his face, then said, “Good,” in a tone of nearly muscular relief that sealed the deal for him.
“I’m staying right here,” he said more to himself than to her. “Right here.”
He’d sweat the details later.
“Hey, look . . .” And to change the subject, he pointed to the three small heads that had reappeared in the ground-floor window.
They sat in relative silence for a while, Ray feeling his daughter gradually subsiding into herself as ragged plastic whispered in the branches above their heads.
“Do you think she would have liked me?” Ruby finally said.
“Who.”
“Your grandmother.”
“Are you serious?” He bumped her with his shoulder. “She would have adored you.”
“Good,” she said once again, more softly this time, bobbing her head in satisfaction.
Ray leaned back and took in all the bedroom windows of the building facing them, all the various shadow plays, the sagas writ small; this place so never-ending.
“So go on,” Ruby said.
“Go on where.” He turned to her.
“Tell me another one.”