This Side of Providence (20 page)

“I really don't get that involved with my tenants,” I say, turning to go back to work.

“Of course, yes, I understand. It's just that it's hard to make a determination about whether or not these people are suitable caretakers, without getting a few more impressions from people who actually knew them.”

I begin painting the wall in smooth, even strokes. “I wouldn't say I knew them. I saw them around, that's it.”

“Recently?” She clicks her pen again.

“I can't say for sure.” I keep painting.

“Do you have any reason to believe the children shouldn't be reunited with their mother, assuming she passes random drug tests and finds suitable housing?”

“That's not my call to make. Isn't that your job?”

“Ideally my job wouldn't need to exist. If every parent was a reliable, law-abiding citizen.”

“Sorry, lady, but I can't help you.” I move around the room, using the ladder to reach the high parts of the wall. She watches me for a while, before losing interest and walking around the apartment to peer into the empty rooms. When she returns, her pen is once again hovering over the clipboard.

“Listen, Mister…” she pauses, wanting me to fill in my name, but I ignore her. “Listen, we're not trying to get anyone in trouble here. We just want to do what's best for the children. And the family.”

I rest the paintbrush on the edge of the can and turn around to face her. “And how do you know what that is?” I peel dried paint from my hands and roll the gummy drops into a ball.

“That's a very good question,” she says. She bites down on the stem of her eyeglasses. “How do you know the best color for this room? The best price for this apartment?” She puts her glasses back on her face. She looks almost pretty now, or
at least smart. “We all struggle to uphold the standards in any line of work.”

“I'm dealing with a rental unit, not someone's life,” I tell her. “I don't have to worry about the best, I worry about good enough.”

“Hmmm,” she says, with exaggerated thoughtfulness, “I guess we're not that dissimilar after all.” She leans into the doorway to examine the trim, which is covered in layers of old paint. “It must be a lot of work, to cover up all the lead paint in these old houses. But that's what you have to do, isn't it, in order to follow the law?” She touches a loose part with her fingernail and a large chip of paint breaks off.

“That trim's next on my list,” I say. “A little more work and this place will look new again.”

“I'm sure it will,” she says, nodding her head firmly. “Either way, I doubt you'll have trouble renting it. As long as everything's up to code.”

I try to read her face but I can't get much from across the room. I wonder if she really has the nerve to threaten me.

“Do you happen to know if she has any other family in town?” she asks, changing her voice to sound like we're talking about a friend we have in common.

“Nope.”

“I'm trying to track down her cousin, but all of his contact information seems to have changed. These people move around so much.”

I look at her. “
These
people? What kind of people is that?”

She clears her throat. “You know what I mean. All the foreigners, and the Spanish people on state aid. It's hard for them to find steady work and keep up with the rent. You must know that better than anyone.”

“There was a time when we were all foreign,” I tell her.

“Yes, of course. But that was a long time ago. My family has been here for three generations. All in Fox Point.”

“And my family came here in chains—what's your point, lady?”

She puts up her hand, shielding her eyes as if I'm too bright to look at.

“I'm sorry, I've overstayed my welcome. I'll let you get back to your work.” She places her business card on the counter, and backs out of the room. “Thank you for your time,” she calls out, closing the door behind her. “Please get in touch if you remember anything else.”

There's just enough daylight left for me to finish painting the ceiling and the front half of the living room. The paint is a bright white acrylic that dries quickly, and when I walk back into the room it doesn't look like I painted at all. It looks like I just washed the dirt from half the walls. The unpainted part looks so dingy I force myself to quickly finish the room, painting in the half-dark with large, sloppy strokes just to cover it all up. I rinse out my roller in the kitchen, leaving white droplets in the sink that look like spilt milk.

Before I leave, I walk through the darkening rooms, trying to imagine living in this apartment myself. I wonder if I would feel comfortable and safe, if I would think of it as my home. I try to imagine being Cristo, or being any kid really, and coming here after school and eating dinner, doing my homework, and falling asleep. I see myself at eight or ten, standing on the ripped linoleum floor in my bare feet, lying down to watch TV on the matted carpet, counting watermarks on the ceiling instead of saying my prayers. I see Justin. At four, six, eight—ages when I no longer knew him—and wonder, what would be good enough for him?

I remember the home I grew up in, how it smelled like Pine Sol, lilacs, and cornbread all at the same time. How big and clean it was, how silent. I walk into the smaller bedroom, where Cristo and his sisters lived in an eight-by-eight-foot space, and lift up a corner of the carpet to check the hardwood floors. They're old and dirty, but they can be salvaged, I realize, and if I have them sanded and refinished they would look almost new again. I glance around the room. A ceiling fan would help, and a new pane of glass in the front window. I could do that for the next family that moves in here. It doesn't have to be the best, but it can be better than it was. It can be good.

When I move the dresser to tear up more carpet, I come across a wall covered with pencil marks. I look closer and see
that it's handwriting: the word
Luz
written over and over again in a flowery script, like an after-school punishment on a chalkboard. My walls were tagged by a ten-year-old. Either this kid is an egomaniac, or she's proving to someone somewhere that she does exist.

Cristo once told me that his sister's name means “light” in Spanish, but that everything about her is dark. He said her hair is black, and her eyes are the color of Coca-Cola. I move the dresser back to its place and return her name to the darkness for one more night.

Luz

W
hen I get back from school on a rainy day after Thanksgiving there's a package waiting for me. A small, flat square with my name written on the outside in black magic marker, a mix of upper and lowercase letters like how a child would write it. It's from my mother, no surprise there, but I'm not sure if it's a very late birthday present or an early Christmas gift. I can instantly tell it's a book, which makes me feel like there's a flower blooming in my chest. But then I read the title:
A Cat's Meow, Sounds and Shapes for Your Toddler
. My flower dies before I can pick it.

Even my own mother doesn't know me.

There's a letter inside, handwritten on a small sheet of lined paper. I go outside to the porch to read it, careful to stay under the roof so I don't get wet. It says she's thinking about me every day, and that she sees me in her dreams. I wonder what she can dream of from a locked cell. She asks about my brother and sister and tells me to give them each a kiss from her. She asks about school and the weather and what we're watching on TV. She asks about Lucho. What she forgets to ask is what we're eating, how we're sleeping, and if our clothes still fit. She also forgets to ask about anyone else, which is good because I don't know how to say that Chino is gone, that Sammy only talks to the Nintendo machine, and that Kim doesn't leave her room for more than ten minutes every night.

If she wanted to know more than that, I'd have to tell her that Sammy's
gordito
now because all he does is sit in front of the
TV eating Pringles by the can, claiming it's a vegetable. None of his clothes fit, which Kim hasn't noticed, so he wears an old pair of sweatpants that Chino left behind, rolled up at the bottom so he doesn't trip. He says he eats a balanced diet—his meat is Slim Jim's, his fruit, cherry-flavored Twizzlers. When he has money from his grandmother he eats a bag a day, otherwise he steals them from the Dumpster behind the movie theater on Academy. His teeth are always a shade of light pink. I tell him they're going to all fall out if he doesn't brush them more, but he tells me to mind my own business. “If you knew as much as you think you do,” he says to me one night when we're home by ourselves, “you wouldn't be living on somebody else's couch eating fortune cookies for dinner.” I guess he has a point.

If she wanted anything close to the truth, I'd have to tell her that all Kim does is work, sleep, and drink boxes of wine that look like pink lemonade. That's what she said it was when she poured it over ice and drank it with a straw. I believed her until I found a half-empty glass she left in the bathroom and it tasted sour like vinegar. When Cristo tried it he said it's either wine or vodka or maybe both. When she's lying down she's okay, but when she stumbles into the kitchen to freshen her drink she talks funny and her hands shake. Sometimes she forgets our names. Her eyes are always red, so she tries to hide them behind sunglasses. She stopped using the oven on Halloween, when she started a fire by putting two whole frozen pizzas inside, boxes included. That small oversight left half the kitchen looking like a crash site. Now she leaves all food preparation to us.

The last thing my mother writes is a promise:
I promise to tell you the truth when I get home.
Just imagining my mother's version of the truth makes my neck itch. I heard a teacher once say, “Careful what you wish for—you just might get it.” Now I understand what she meant. I don't really want to know the truth, especially if it means I have to turn around and tell the truth back to her. Thanks, but no thanks.

I tuck the letter into one of the books I'm reading. I don't use many bookmarks since I finish them so fast, but at least I can look at her handwriting and maybe feel like she's close by.

It's still raining when I go outside to throw the package away. I hate rain, especially when it's freezing out, and I hate being wet. Winters here are the worst. They're cold and gray and we never have enough snow to make it fun. And the schools around here never get cancelled, even when it dumps like a foot of snow overnight. Which it never does, no matter how much they promise it's coming.

The garbage cans live at the top of the driveway, below a rusted-out basketball hoop that's missing the net. When he takes out the garbage, Cristo likes to shoot the small bags into the hoop and watch them fall into the open cans below. He's good at making things fun, so they don't feel like work. Since I'm alone, I throw out the package the easy way. I wonder if I should toss the book as well, since Trini's not here for me to read it to. I've got the book in one hand and the metal lid to the garbage in the other when I notice Kim's car in the driveway. The lights are off but the car's still running. The windows are foggy but I can see her inside, leaning over the passenger seat. She looks like she's picking her nose with her pinkie finger. Then she sniffs and pinches her nose together. She leans back in her seat and rolls her head in my direction. Her eyes are closed.

I stand perfectly still, careful not to make a sound, and wait for two full minutes before I put the lid back on the garbage can and sneak inside. When the boys get home, I don't tell them what I saw. She comes in through the kitchen almost an hour later and gives the room a tight smile. Sammy waves to her and Cristo nods, but I don't look at her. She keeps walking, like she doesn't see any of us. Nobody in this house talks anymore.

After Sammy goes to sleep I tell Cristo what I saw. We wait till Kim's asleep and then sneak into her room. I watch the door while he grabs her purse. We search through it in the bathroom, huddled around a Tweety Bird night-light. In a small pocket meant to hold lipstick, Cristo finds a prescription bottle filled with round green pills that say “OC” on one side and “80” on the other. The label says it's OxyContin, which means nothing to me, but the name on the bottle does: Scottie Collazo.

“What the hell is Kim doing with Scottie's pills?” Cristo asks, but I know he doesn't expect me to answer.

I grab the bottle, looking for clues. “What's it for anyway?”

“I bet they're pain meds. Remember how Scottie hurt his back last year?”

“Yeah, but look at the date. These pills are new.” I turn the bottle around and point out the date. It was filled last week. “Maybe she got hurt,” I say.

Cristo looks at me funny.

“Nobody snorts medicine,” he finally says.

I remember walking into the bathroom last year and finding a man with a straw in his nose, sniffing a light-brown powder off a picture frame. He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. When he looked up at me, he smiled and said, “I know you.” Then he tilted the picture frame in my direction, flashing a photograph of Cristo and me standing in front of the airport the day he arrived in New York. We were holding hands in the picture, but I remember not wanting to touch a stranger. My mother grabbed my arm, saying, “This is your brother, now hold his hand,” so I did. The man held the picture frame up to his face and licked the residue from the glass. Then he made a sound that twisted my stomach, a growl-laugh I could still hear when I closed the door and ran back to my room.

When I look at Cristo now, his face half shadowed in the dim light, I realize he's sometimes still a stranger to me.

“It's bad, huh, what she's doing.”

He looks at me like I'm stupid. “All drugs are bad.”

I want to ask if he thinks our mother is bad, but I can't make myself say it. I know stories are always showing how good people do bad things, but it's hard to believe when it's your own mother.

“At school they say snorting them is really bad. That's how people lose their jobs and houses and stuff.” I wrap my hair around my finger, tight enough to cut off circulation.

Cristo puts the bottle back and zips up her purse. My finger starts to throb.

“If that bad stuff happens to Kim, then where will we go?”

“Don't worry about it,” he says. “It's not going to happen.”

I want to ask him how he knows but he already seems pissed.

“Did Mami do that?” I finally say. My finger looks bruised like a dark plum.

“I never saw her,” he says, his hand on the doorknob. He looks at me for a long time before opening the door.

We both know it's not the same thing as saying no.

I find a pizza box under the couch when I'm looking for a lost Hello Kitty mitten a few days later. It says
Allessandro's Pizzeria
along the side, a place I've never heard of. There's no address or phone number on it, just the name and picture of a man tossing a pizza crust as big as a table. I feel the top, to see if it's warm. It's not. The corner of the box has a footprint on it, one from a very large boot. I know there's no pizza inside, since food doesn't last long in this house, but I open it away, hoping for a miracle. What I see doesn't make sense to me.

Tiny boxes the size of matchbooks are stacked on their sides and tied together with rubber bands. There is no writing anywhere on them. I pick up a bundle, surprised that it's heavier than it looks, like a block of cheese. I shake it and hear what sounds like broken pieces of candy inside. Something hard like peanut brittle. I fight the urge to open one, to taste the sharp candied slivers. Something makes me bring it to my nose and sniff. All I can smell is the gummy newness of the rubber bands and a sharp scent like rubbing alcohol.

“Luz, what the fuck? Put that away.” Cristo runs into the room and kicks the pizza box closed. I scoot backward on the carpeted floor, dropping the bundle.

“Gimme that,” he says, snatching it off the carpet. “I could get my ass kicked if something was missing.” He inspects the bundle.

I move closer to him, looking over his shoulder. “What is it anyway?”

“Don't ask stupid questions,” he says. From how he's acting, I can tell he doesn't know what it is either. “It ain't your business, that's what it is.” He opens the pizza box and neatly
places the bundle back inside. He checks the rest of the bundles before closing the box.

“Is it yours?”

“Course not.”

He smells his fingers. I want to ask if he recognizes the smell but I don't.

“Then how'd it get here?”

“I brought it here, but it ain't mine. I'm just making a delivery.”

“You think it's smart to deliver something if you don't know what it is?”

“I think it's a lot smarter than asking too many questions.” He stands up, holding the pizza box out in front of his body like he doesn't want it to touch him.

“Where you going?”

“I just told you. I gotta make a delivery.”

“It's almost midnight.”

“So?” He puts the pizza box on the couch and sits down to pull on his sneakers.

“Can't you do it in the morning?”

“We got school in the morning.”

“That's what I'm saying, you should go to sleep.”

He looks at me. “Okay, Mom.”

“I'm serious.”

He zips another sweatshirt over the one he's already wearing and grabs his hat off the carpet. “It's a job, Luz. The guy needs it tonight. Why do you suddenly care so much?”

“I care when Snowman has you delivering pizza boxes in the middle of the night. You could get mugged by some drunk college kids.”

“Ha ha.” He pinches me on the cheek. “Good one,
chuleta
. But I never said this was for him.”

He smiles, like he's proud of himself for keeping a secret from me.

“How many jobs you got?” I ask.

“A few.”

“That's not an answer.”

He exhales. “I don't work regular for this guy, just whenever
he gets a late-night delivery. His old lady won't let him out after second shift.”

“This guy got a name?”

He shrugs. “He's somebody Snowman knows.”

“So, what, like Frosty?”

He flashes that smile again. “You got a lotta jokes tonight.” He pulls his hat low over his face, almost covering his eyes. “His name's Charley.”

“Where you going for this Charley?”

He pulls up his hood, adding an extra layer of protection. “Not sure.”

“Don't lie. You know something.”

He stands up. “The Laundromat, okay? Jesus.”

“Which one?”

“On Manton.”

“Who you meeting?”

He bites the edge of his lip and won't look at me. He rubs his eyes. “Christ, Luz.”

I try to act casual, but I feel my belly start to bubble from nerves. I would never say it out loud, but I'm suddenly scared for my brother. “Consider it insurance. I won't have to say anything unless you go missing.”

“Stop being so dramatic.”

“Not a word, I promise.” I hold out my little finger. “Pinkie swear.” We haven't done one in years, but I figure I might win points for nostalgia.

He grabs my pinkie with his and we shake on it. “Some guy named Jimmy,” he finally says, reaching for the pizza box.