This Side of Providence (17 page)

“You worried about tomorrow?”

“Nah. I'll sleep through most of the bad parts.”

“Plus you get to miss school. That alone should make it worth it.”

“Yeah.” César tries to smile.

A car speeding up the hill has to slam on the brakes when it finally sees us. We step to the side slowly, as the driver blasts the horn and waves her arms from behind the wheel. I drop my head and give her the finger as she drives away.

Once we're walking again César says, “They said I could lose the eye, though. Or I could keep the eye but lose my eyesight completely. I could be blind.”

“Or you could get it all back. Get rid of those damn headaches and stupid seizures and stop having to take all them pills. You gotta look on the bright side, kid.”

After pissing off another car, we end up cutting down a side street, one of the few that has working streetlights. The bulbs are almost burned out and they cast a spooky glow over the empty street.

In the half-dark I hear him say, “I don't want to die, Cristo.”

I knock him in the arm. “What the fuck are you talking about? You're not gonna die.”

“But I could. The doctors said there's like a twenty-percent chance. I heard them tell my grandmother last week.” He stops walking and turns to me.

“Fuck twenty percent. It's not gonna happen.”

“But it could.” He sounds like he's about to cry. “Last time it almost did.”

I grab him by the shoulders. “Listen. You're not going to die. You're a little kid, you got your whole life ahead of you.” I loosen my grip but keep my hands on him, holding him up. “If that bullet wanted your life it would have taken it back in June. You beat it then and you're going to beat it now, okay? You gotta believe that.”

He looks at me for a long time.

“Promise me,” he says.

I drop my head. “Come on, César.”

“Promise me.”

“I'm not God.” I look him in the good eye. “I'm not even your doctor.”

He looks at me, both eyes steady and unblinking, and doesn't say a word.

“I promise,” I finally say.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. I let go of him, and he falls back into the telephone pole, letting it catch him. Tears fall down his cheeks and he wipes them away without opening his eyes.

Neither one of us talks during the walk back to Anthony's. I tell César to wait outside while I run into the store for a minute, wishing I had time to go to a real store in the mall instead of this broke-down drugstore in Olneyville. I find the sunglasses rack near the checkout counter and try a bunch on, looking at myself in the plastic mirror that's no bigger than a deck of cards. I see the pair I want out of the corner of my eye, gold rims with big, round lenses dark enough to cover a flashlight, but I don't try them on. Instead, I look at the cheap plastic ones, pretending that I'm deciding on the color. I slip the gold pair into the sleeve of my sweatshirt with my left hand, and pick up a bright pink pair with my right and put them on.

“Hey, what do you think?” I ask the lady at the counter.

“I don't think that's your color,” she says. “Kinda girlie.”

“Yeah, you're right. I guess you don't have what I'm looking for.” And then I take the pink ones off in front of her and put them neatly back on the rack. I say good night and walk out of the store.

Once I'm on the sidewalk, I reach into my sleeve and pull out the gold sunglasses. I rip off the tag and hand the glasses to César. “Here, a good luck present. Either way you're going to have a big old bandage and one hell of a black eye.”

“
Gracias
,” he says, slipping the glasses onto his small face. They cover his eyes completely, from his eyebrows to the tops of his cheeks, and make him look even younger than he is. He takes them off and puts them in his pocket. “Thanks,” he says again, punching me softly in the shoulder.

“
De nada
.”

“Hey kid, come here a minute.”

A loud, rough voice calls out from the street. A white guy with a scruffy beard and a long, blond ponytail waves me over from the passenger side of a parked car. I look around, but the only other person on the street is an old lady folding newspaper from a broken recycling bin.

“What, you don't remember me?” He drops his sunglasses so I can see him better. “You brought me a package last week, on Atwells. You were right on time, too, as reliable as the fucking post office.”

“Sure, I remember now.” A late-night delivery for Snowman. I walk a few steps toward the car, a two-door Pontiac that looks older than I am. The color is a faded black, like it was spray-painted on. “How's it going?”

“Well that depends on you, and on your answer to my next question. You working tonight?”

“No.” I nod toward César. “I'm with a friend.”

“I'd make it worth your while.” He rubs his fingertips together, yellow from smoke.

I step up to the window. “What you need?”

He lifts a pizza box from his lap. “Take this to the address on this card.” He hands me a business card. “Memorize the address and then burn the card. When you go inside, ask for a
guy named Pincher. You think you can do that?”

“You want me to deliver a pizza?”

He laughs. “The pizza's gone. But you can buy another one with the twenty bucks I'll give you.”

“Twenty bucks to deliver an empty pizza box?”

He winks. “I never said it was empty.”

“Oh.” I look back at César, who's still messing with his hat. “Well…”

“You interested or not?” the guy says, pulling a crumpled twenty out of his front pocket. “We don't have time to wait around.”

“Forget about it,” the driver says, starting the car. “We shouldn't give this shit to a kid, Charley.”

“What are you talking about, that's the beauty of it,” Charley says, like I'm not even standing there. “They don't mess with kids.”

A passing bus lights up the inside of the car. The driver squints. “So why should we?” He bites his fingernails, spitting them onto the floor of the car. Something about him looks familiar.

“Come on, Jimmy,” Charley shrugs. “Snowman trusts him.”

“Oh, Christ.” Jimmy slaps the steering wheel. “You treat that guy like he's the fucking Dalai Lama.”

“Okay, I'll do it,” I say quickly, hoping to stop their argument before it becomes a fight.

Charley smiles, first at me, and then at Jimmy. He's missing one of his front teeth, and the rest look like they could fall out if he sneezed too hard. Jimmy pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his buzzed head and goes back to biting his nails. Charley turns back to me, his smile fading. He tucks the twenty into the front pocket of my jeans and pulls me against the car in one motion.

“I'm calling over there in forty-five minutes, and if they don't have it by then I'm coming back here to find you. It shouldn't be too hard to find a green-eyed Spanish kid with an Afro, now should it. But I hope it doesn't come to that.”

He pulls me closer for a quick second, and then pushes
me away from the car. I stumble, but I don't let myself fall. My heart is beating so fast I can hear it in my ears, but I try to stay calm. He hands me the pizza box, which is so heavy on one side I almost drop it.

“Use two hands,” he says. “And don't open it. I'll know if you do.” Charley drops low in his seat to light a cigarette. “One more thing: don't say anything to Snowman about this, okay? No point making him jealous.” He laughs hard, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth like a walrus tooth.

They drive away, leaving me standing there like I just had a pizza delivered to the sidewalk. I hold the box still, trying not to tempt myself by shaking it. I'm kinda curious, but then I remember rule #1: Don't ask questions. That way you won't have to lie if you ever get busted. One of the first things Snowman ever taught me.

César walks up to me, shaking his helmeted head. “Man, I don't know how you do it. You're always in the right place at the right time.”

“It's not what you think,” I say. “I've got to bring this home.”

“Come on, just give me one slice.” César reaches for the box.

“No, I'm serious. I gotta go.” I back away from him. “I'll see you later, okay?”

César zips up his fleece, covering his freckled face. “You're coming, right?” he calls after me. “To the hospital?”

“Of course,” I say. “I'll be the first face you see.”

“You better.” César pulls down his hat to cover the helmet. Then he takes off in the other direction. He runs quickly down the street, like he's memorized every bump and curve on Manton Avenue, every pothole, every piece of garbage, and has no fear of taking the wrong step, no fear of falling.

He runs like a boy who can see in the dark.

Miss Valentín

I
f every woman who wanted to get pregnant had to go through foster care classes first, the human race would come to an end. Not because the classes are hard, or boring, or even especially time-consuming—the problem is that they are thorough: incredibly, horrifyingly, overwhelmingly thorough. When I realize what it means to really parent someone, how all encompassing it will be, how much kids need (and how many things can go wrong), it's enough to make me want to give up right there. And maybe that's their plan. Like law schools, they're actually trying to get a third of us to quit in the first semester.

But I'm no quitter, even when it might be the smart thing to do. So I stick it out in the five-week course, fill out the proper papers, have all the interviews, list my principal and old professors as references, and begin to wait. Wait for the call that will change my life. Wait for my future to begin.

The first call I get is for an emergency placement. A three-year-old who was found in the backyard after a house fire killed his parents and two older sisters. He stays with me for three nights, until they can locate a second cousin in Connecticut, and he never speaks a word. He cries most of the first night, sobbing in my arms as I rock him for eight hours straight, cotton jammed into my ears to mute the sound. He sleeps the entire second day, and I finally have to wake him at dinnertime to give him milk and mashed potatoes, which he eats sitting up on the edge of the bed before falling back asleep at my side. The third day, as we wait for the social worker to pick him up, he
stares at me from the couch and eats Halloween candy straight from the bag. He won't talk or play with any of the toys I've bought; he won't even watch TV.

When the doorbell rings, he runs back to the guest bedroom and jumps onto the bed. He buries his head in the comforter and kicks the social worker in the face as she tries to pull him off. It surprises me that he doesn't want to leave, but she says it's a normal reaction. It's not that he's grown attached to me personally, he's just used to the environment; he doesn't want to have to adjust again.

After they leave, the apartment is quiet. Not any quieter than when he was here, but it still feels different. Now I know how the boy felt: I don't want to adjust again either. I don't really want
him
back, although I'm sure with time he would have warmed up, I just want the situation back. I want my life to be constant, the players to remain the same. I call up my caseworker and ask her to take me off of the “emergency” list. She says I might not get called for a while if I do that and I say that's fine. It's hard, but I know I'm making the right decision for my own sanity, and I'm following my instincts. The rest—who, if, and when I get a child—is out of my hands, and it feels good to finally give up any pretense of control.

When I get to school the following Monday I can tell something is wrong. The playground is deserted, which is rare even in the winter, and the hallways are eerily quiet. The kids I do see stand together in small packs, whispering to each other with their hands over their mouths. I go to the teacher's lounge looking for answers, and run into Mrs. Reed, Cristo's teacher. She walks over to me quickly, shaking her head.

“It's so sad,” she says.

“What is? What happened?”

“César,” she whispers his name. “The surgery failed. He lost the eye.”

I cover my mouth, as if to quiet a scream, but no sound comes out.

“I thought you might have been there, at the hospital.”

I shake my head. “Cristo didn't call me.”

“Well, here, sign this card we got for him. I'll bring it by his grandmother's house after school.”

“He's home already?”

“Today, I heard.” She hands me a pen, already uncapped.

I lean over the card, reading it again and again to make sense of the words.
Hey Kid, Get Well Soon! School Is Not the Same Without You!
There is a dog on the cover, who wears a baseball cap and stands up on his hind legs like he's human. His smile shows a row of perfect teeth. The inside of the card is mostly bare, except for a few signatures from the secretaries and the janitorial staff floating around the edges of the card. I want to say more than just my name but I can't think of something that sounds sincere. I want to apologize—for the accident, the surgery, even this pathetic card. Why a card, anyway, when he'll hardly be able to read it?

I quickly sign
Love, Miss Valentín
, and hand the card back to Mrs. Reed.

“So the left eye is okay?”

“The same. Thirty percent last I heard.”

“Thirty percent,” I repeat, nodding as if I know what that means. Does he see everything with just thirty percent of the brightness, or does he only see thirty percent of all things? Or maybe he sees everything perfectly, but only thirty percent of the time?

“I know it's horrible to say, but I wonder if this is it for him now.” She stops herself and looks around the empty room. The coffee pot gurgles in the corner, but otherwise it's silent. She lowers her voice. “I don't want to give up on him, but you know how he is. How will he ever catch up?”

I shake my head. “I don't know.”

“It seems so unfair, to cripple a kid who's barely making it to begin with.”

“Barely making it?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do. And I also know that this school is barely making it. His grandmother is barely making it.” I can't hide my
anger as my voice begins to rise. “The projects, this city, our country is barely making it. He's just following suit.”

She backs up, as if afraid of me. “I'm not blaming him, Vanessa, if that's what you think. I know what these kids are up against, all of them. Even the ones with parents. I've taught here longer than you, remember.”

“I know, I know.” I lower my voice and touch her shoulder as a peace offering. “I'm sorry, I'm just upset.”

She puts her arm around me and squeezes softly. “We'll get through this.” And I know she means a career spent teaching, not just César losing his eye.

“I keep thinking about Cristo,” she finally says. “This is going to devastate him.” She looks at me over her glasses. “Have you seen him lately?”

“Not enough. I've tried, but…I think he's avoiding me.”

“He avoids me all the time, and I'm his actual teacher.” She tries to keep the resentment out of her voice but it doesn't work. She softens her tone. “He's not doing well, Vanessa.”

I lean against the filing cabinet, which shakes under my weight.

“Tell me,” I say.

“His grades are in the toilet.”

“How bad?”

“Cs and Ds mostly, Fs if I didn't like him so much. He falls asleep in class and never turns in homework. He used to give me all these crazy excuses why he didn't have it, but now he just shrugs and says he forgot.”

“
Dios mio
, I don't know what to do with that boy.” I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly feeling cold. “Have you talked to Chino or Kim?”

“Chino's a sweet guy, but he's not living there anymore. And if I call the social worker…well, you know what happens after that.”

“Wait a minute, so they're living with Kim? Their mother's cousin's ex-girlfriend?” A feeling of dread sets in, as I realize I should have checked in sooner.

“It could be worse. At least she hasn't kicked them out. And she has a job.”

“And her own kid to watch after,” I add, suddenly feeling sick to my stomach. I shouldn't have backed so far away, trusting everyone else to handle it.

“Will you talk to him, Vanessa? See if you can get through to him…”

“I try all the time, when I see him in the hallway—”

“No, not here, not in passing,” she says. “I think he'd take it more seriously if it was outside of school, on his own turf. His own terms.” She taps César's card against her clipboard. “He just tunes out here, like this is some practice life, while his real life is taking place outside these doors. Find him in that world and talk to him there.”

I don't know what to say, so I simply nod my head, accepting the responsibility that's once again been handed to me. What else can I do?

“Good. I'm glad we talked.” She sounds relieved, as if we have already solved the problem. She's halfway to the door when she turns back to me. “You may be the only thing that boy has left, the only thing that can keep him from becoming another statistic. Another César.”

I listen to the click of her heels as she walks out of the room, leaving me alone in the teacher's lounge, wondering if I'm qualified for any of the jobs I actually perform.

I find Cristo easily enough, standing on the corner outside Anthony's Drugs. It's the same spot where six months before I had seen his mother sell Ecstasy to a carful of students from Providence College. She used to sit on top of the covered garbage cans so she could see the cars coming in every direction. If she made eye contact and someone was interested, she'd hop down quickly and approach the car window, taking only a few seconds to decide whether to slide in or head back to her post.

Her son stands with his back to the street, leaning against a telephone pole. There are two older guys next to him, late teens, maybe early twenties, and they look like they just stepped out of a rap video. The darker one wears a gold chain with a
huge #1 around his neck, which jumps from his chest as he gesticulates; he is telling a story that has Cristo and the other guy bent over laughing. I park my car and walk over to them slowly, the same way I used to walk up to stray cats I wanted to bring home as a child.

Cristo stops laughing as soon as he sees me, but the other two keep going, oblivious to my presence. The lighter man has a tattoo of a girl's face on his neck; her hands are clasped together like she's praying, right underneath the man's earlobe.

“
Hola
,” I call out, testing the waters.
“¿C
o
mo est
á
s?”

“Hi,” he says in English.

“Can we talk?”

“Sure.” He crosses his arms. “What's up?”

“Alone.”

He looks at each of the men and then back to me. “Later,” he says to no one in particular.

“You want us to wait?” The lighter man scratches at his neck as if the tattoo still itches.

“Nah, she's cool.” Cristo steps away from the telephone pole, strolling in my direction. He can't contain his smile. “She's just my teacher.”

“Cool,” I hear the man say as we walk away. “A teacher who makes house calls.”

We walk across the parking lot, stopping next to a small vacant lot. The grass hasn't been cut in months, and it grows in wild, dry patches.

“Nice tattoo,” I say, once we're out of earshot.

Cristo shrugs. “He's all right.”

“A prince, I'm sure.”

He stops short. “You come here to bust up my friends?”

“You think those guys are your friends? Those men?”

“Why not?”

“Those thugs are twice your age, Cristo. What about Marco and César? I thought they were your friends.”

He shrugs. “I never see Marco anymore. Not since you switched him to Regular Ed.”

“I didn't switch him, Cristo, he was ready to move.”

“Whatever.”

“And César?”

“He don't need me.” He picks up a bottle cap and throws it into the overgrown grass.

“Doesn't need you,” I correct.

He glares at me but I ignore it.

“How can you say that? Of course he needs you.”

“He needed a good doctor. And a fucking miracle. But he didn't get either one.” He blinks quickly, and I can tell he's holding back tears.

“Please don't swear in front of me.”

“Swear? Come on, Teacher. My friend just lost his eye but you want me to watch my mouth?”

“You have every right to be upset. To be angry and to yell and scream, to want to break things. Nobody's going to blame you for any of that.”