Thread of Deceit (16 page)

Is this girl me? Am I seeing myself or someone else? Who is this child? Why is she here? Where has she come from?

The rose of her mouth does not open, and I stare at her. She knows nothing. She is like me, but she is not me, for I know everything. I know it all. I am filled to the brim with knowledge. She is empty. Empty of the evil and the pain. And she has not yet met fear.

The man walks across the room to her, and I see how it will be. I look at this girl with the rosebud mouth and the brown eyes. Then I stare up into the light. Fear quiets inside me. Fear knows my power over it. Fear understands that God has given me the light. And soon it must go back to its hiding place.

“We’re going to start with poetry.”

The chorus of groans confirmed Ana’s misgivings. Only three youngsters had shown up for her writers’ group—two of them boys. Tenisha, the little girl with cerebral palsy, sat across the small round table from her archnemesis, Gerald, whose buckteeth gleamed in his thin brown face. Between them sat the hulking Raydell Watson. He normally guarded the entrance to Haven, but he told Ana that on hearing about her writing class, he had signed up.

“I like poetry,” Raydell announced. “I write poems, Miss Burns. Rap, you know? That’s my thing.”

“Great.” She pasted a smile on her face, wishing she were anywhere but here. And yet she was determined to go on. The children had asked why she ran into Haven in such a frightening way with her hair hanging down and her arm bleeding. They wondered if someone had attacked her. But Ana refused to cater to their curiosity. She would show strength, control. Her assailants had not won.

As Ana stood before the little group, she reflected for a moment on the world outside Haven, the world beyond the hood. Things had been normal there. She had made sure of it. And she had decided to return to that world unchanged by this evening’s incident.

A couple of loads of laundry waited by her apartment door for her weekly trip to the dry cleaner. The plants on her balcony needed water, and she would see to that when she got home. A basket of vegetables she’d bought at the farmers’ market on Laclede’s Landing yesterday sat on her counter. She would steam them and stir them into pasta mixed with olive oil. Today, a man from work—someone in the advertising department—had invited her to take a stroll through the Botanical Gardens on Sunday afternoon. His name was Bill, and he was nice looking. Ana liked him well enough, and maybe she would take him up on his offer. Why not? Nothing had changed.

“You wanna hear one of my raps?” Raydell’s gold tooth gleamed. “I got it mesmerized.”

“Memorized.” Ana nodded. “Okay, but no obscenities. No cussing.”

“Here goes.” He stood and began to rock back and forth making deep drumlike sounds in his throat. His deep-set eyes fastened on her.

Raydell stumbled on, swaying, gesturing, rumbling out the words until he came to an abrupt halt. He paused and inhaled. “That’s all I got so far. How do you like it, Miss Burns?”

It’s you that I detest…
The words penetrated Ana’s brain. The folding chair was cool as she sat down suddenly, and she realized her legs ached. “It’s interesting,” she heard herself say, as though speaking through a tunnel. “I think you have good rhythm.”

“I got another one I was making up this morning when I was out at the front door.” Raydell began to swagger as he pumped out lyrics Ana couldn’t understand. The slang. The dialect. The pain in her arm.

“That’s all I got of that one, too,” he announced, dropping down into a chair. “What you think?”

“I think it’s good,” Tenisha piped up. “It’s about crack, like what the boys smoke in the alley down the street.”

“It’s about cocaine,” Raydell said.

“Crank,” Gerald put in. “That’s what it is.”

“Not crank,” Raydell snapped. “That’s speed.”

“I don’t like those boys,” Tenisha said. “They tease me when I go through the detector.”

“That’s ’cause you walk like a dork,” Gerald said. “You look like Frankenstein with your legs all stiff and jerky.”

“Gerald!” Ana cut in. Outrage forced her mind into gear again. “That’s enough. You have to be polite, or you can’t stay in the group.”

“I don’t wanna be in the group. Uncle Sam made me. I wanna play basketball, not write dumb poems.”

Ana’s sigh trembled as she glanced at her watch. Only ten minutes into the hour. The class was a waste of her time and everyone else’s, but she had made Sam a promise—and she would get her interviews. As for Flora, Ana had seen the girl sitting in her corner. She hadn’t looked up as Ana went into the classroom nearby.

“All right, let’s talk about poetry.” Ana had lost her lesson plan along with her purse, but she thought she could remember it. She brushed aside a strand of yarn left over from the crochet class and set her folded hands on the card table. Sam had found her a pair of large flip-flops in the lost-and-found box, and she studied her painted toenails as she began.

“Raydell recited a type of poetry known as rap,” she said. “There are many different kinds of poems. The one I want to talk about today is called a limerick. It’s kind of tricky, but it’s a lot of fun to write.”

“I want to write rap,” Raydell declared.

“You can, but tonight we’re going to learn about limericks.”

“Is that a kind of rap?”

She thought for a moment. “It could be, I guess. You could use the same themes anyway. Let’s talk about your first rap—the one where the guy thinks he’s cool, but he’s really a fool.”

“That’s not how it goes. Man!” He shook his head, obviously disgusted. “He’s cool, nobody’s fool.”

“Okay, let’s rewrite it as a limerick.” She passed out sheets of paper and pencils. And then she realized she could not remember the rules for limericks. She was blank. Empty.

The children stared at her, waiting for her to continue the instructions. And she had nothing to say. Her arm began to throb under the white bandage Terell had wrapped around it. Her mouth went dry. Her stomach churned.

“Give me a second, okay?”

While her little class waited, Ana stepped outside the room to try to collect herself. As she drank down a deep breath, she spotted a huddled shape next to the classroom door.
Flora.
The girl had left her corner and crept closer. She had come to the writing class after all.

Ana put her palms behind her against the wall, hoping for support. She could feel the child’s brown eyes on her.

“He did this thing,” Flora said in a low voice, her Spanish almost inaudible. “He did this thing to you.”

“I’m all right,” Ana said, and then she knew she couldn’t lie to those eyes. She shook her head. “It hurts.”

“Yes.” Flora got to her feet, opening up slowly like a cat. “I saw you come into this place. You were running.”

“I was afraid.”

“Did he catch you?”

“Yes, but I escaped.”

“What bad thing did he do?”

“He cut me on the arm with a knife.”

Ana could hear Gerald arguing with Tenisha in the classroom. Tenisha was on the verge of tears, and now Raydell spoke up in his deep voice. Ana knew she should go back in, but she couldn’t remember limerick rules or anything else.

“He is bad,” Flora said. “A very bad man.”

Ana wondered at the child’s matter-of-fact tone. Did Flora know about the attack? “There were two of them,” Ana told her.

“Two?” Flora looked up, startled. “The one with yellow hair also did this? Segundo? The Second Man? He is here, also, in this city?”

Ana frowned, wondering what she could mean. “Neither one had yellow hair. They both had black hair. They were boys, street boys, you understand?”

“I thought it was Primero, the First Man, who hurt you.” Flora’s face grew solemn. “Anyway, you shouldn’t come to this place. He’s here. You won’t be safe.”

Confused at the child’s rapidly whispered words, Ana gazed into the luminous eyes. “Then why do you come?”

“She tells me I must. Today, she brings me here, that one. Hipsy.”

“Hipsy? Is she your sister?”

“She’s my friend. Hipsy feeds me. We have a room and a bed.” Reaching out, Flora touched Ana’s arm with her small hand. “I like you, but you must not come here again. This place isn’t safe. He can catch you here, if he sees you. He’ll hurt you more the next time.”

“Who?” Ana’s heart hammered. “Who will hurt me?”

“Him. Primero—the First Man.” Flora moistened her lips. “I’m telling you the truth, and it’s for your own good. Do you understand? I cannot protect you from him. It’s impossible, even though I would try. You must not come back.”

Flora’s dark eyes glanced from side to side as though she expected someone to pounce from the shadows. Ana regarded the child, amazed that this young girl seemed so determined to protect her. But from whom? Who was this Primero? Did Flora know the boys who had attacked Ana? Or was it someone else?

“I must go now,” Flora whispered. “
Cuidado!
Take care!”

“Wait!” Ana caught her hand. She gave the child a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Why not come into my class, Flora? I want you to sit with the others. We’re writing poems.”

“Poems?” Flora’s face transformed for an instant. Light shone from her dark eyes. “Like school!”

“Yes,” Ana said. “A little bit like that. Please come.”

But clouds quickly covered the sunshine. “I cannot. They’re not like me. They don’t know La Ceiba.”

“What is La Ceiba? A tree?”

“No, it’s my home. My city. It’s far away. There, they speak another way.”

“Yes, but I’m like you, Flora. I can talk to you. Let me be your teacher. And your friend.”

The hesitation was palpable, as if the girl teetered on a narrow fence. And then she leaped away. “No. I must go.”

Before Ana could stop her, Flora hurried back to her corner and curled into the dark shadows. She leaned her forehead against the wall. Eyes fixed forward, she stared at the blank white plaster.

Ana hovered, listening to the three in the classroom and hearing words that meant nothing to her. An argument. Defiance. Swearing. Then she looked at Flora in her corner. A knot of green skirt and brown legs. Hipsy. La Ceiba. Primero. Segundo.

None of it made sense, and suddenly into Ana’s brain came a limerick by Ogden Nash, the silliest poet who ever lived. The rhyme scheme bounded out, and the rhythm began to patter with the beat of her heart. Limericks made sense. And above all else Ana’s lost lesson plan made sense. So she stepped back into her classroom to begin.

“A
limerick is a poem,” Ana began as she sat down again. “It has a pattern of rhythm and rhyme, usually in iambic meter.”

“I don’t get it,” Gerald announced, wadding his blank paper and tossing it to the floor.

Determined to get through this next hour with as little emotion as possible, Ana didn’t glance up. She felt sick inside, confused and off balance. In defying her editor and trying to refocus her series around children affected by lead paint, she had walked into a booby trap. But her urge to flee Haven ran up against her determination not to let her attackers know victory. So here she sat, numb and frightened, worried about Flora but certain she could do nothing to help, and trying to teach poetry to three children who didn’t give a rip about it.

She cleared her throat. “Iambic is the name for a kind of beat, like on a drum. It goes duh-
duh.
” She tapped the table in time to her voice. “Can you hear that?”

“I can hear the ref’s whistle.” Gerald’s chair screeched as he pushed it back across the concrete floor. “Let’s go see if the game is over.”

“Gerald, sit down.” She slapped her hand on the table again. “Did you hear the iambic beat? Sit-
down.
”

Tenisha giggled and whapped the table. “Sit-
down,
you-
fool.
”

Ana felt an urge to smile, but she kept the small triumph to herself. “Right, Tenisha. So limericks tend to have an iambic beat, although we’re not going to be picky about it. And they’re five lines long.”

“That’s all?” Raydell scowled. “I like my raps to be longer. Five lines ain’t nothin’.”

“Five lines is all you get with a limerick. I’ll draw you a diagram.” She sketched the meter and rhyme scheme on a sheet of blank paper. “It’s like a map, and if we follow it, we’ll be able to turn your rap into a limerick. Shall we try? I’ll do the first line, Raydell, and then you do the second.”

She thought for a moment. “You know I am really too cool.”

Raydell closed his eyes and worked his chin in and out for a moment. “Because I ain’t nobody’s fool.”

The grin felt awkward on Ana’s face, as though her mouth hadn’t expected it. “That’s it, Raydell. Now the next two lines are going to rhyme with each other. And they only have two beats each. Tenisha, want to try?”

“I can’t do it,” she whispered.

“Sure you can. I’ll do the first line of this pair, and you do the second. Here goes.” She paused. “You think you’re the best.”

“But it’s you I detest!” Raydell called out. “That’s it. That’s my rhyme, only with the limbrick.”

“It was my turn!” Tenisha wailed. “You already had your turn. You cut in! Miss Burns, Raydell took my turn!”

“Let Raydell have his rhyme,” Ana said. “You make up your own. Here’s my line: You think you’re the best.”

Tenisha wrung her hands, twisting her small brown fingers around each other. Finally, she burst out, “The best in the West!”

“Okay, that works great! Gerald, you get to do the ending. Here’s our limerick so far.

“And your line has to rhyme with cool and fool.”

Gerald frowned. “I don’t wanna write no stupid poems. And I don’t hafta. Uncle Sam made me come in here. I wanna play basketball.”

“Just try, Gerald,” Tenisha urged.

“Shut up, you idiot!”

“Miss Burns!”

“Hey, you!” Raydell grabbed Gerald by the neck of his white T-shirt and yanked him out of his seat. “Be nice to the girl, or I’ll wrench them ugly buckteeth right outta your face.”

He launched into a stream of profanities that caught at the back of Ana’s throat, as though she had suddenly swallowed an ice cube. Before she could react, a large form materialized in the classroom.

“That’s enough,” Sam commanded. “Raydell, you know that kind of talk is not allowed at Haven.”

The teenager flung Sam a look of defiance. “Gerald was messin’ with Tenisha. I was just defendin’ her.”

“By attacking Gerald? That’s not how I taught you to defend somebody, is it?” Sam sat down at the table, his long legs folding and his knees poking out like a frog’s on the low chair. “Raydell, you’re my main man. I set you up at the door because I trust you to know the rules and do things the right way. I expect you to be an example to the others.”

“Yes, sir.” Raydell hung his head.

“Who’s in charge in this room?”

The young man’s eyes darted to Ana, hostility burning in their dark depths. “Miss Burns is in charge, sir. But you told me you didn’t want her here. You said she was messin’ with Haven, tryin’ to shut us down. How come you let her teach a class?”

“I decided maybe she could help us out. And here you are, Raydell, learning about poems.”

“Huh. I don’t care about that. I came in here to keep a watch on
her.
”

“If there’s a problem, Terell or I will handle it. Have you ever seen me grab a boy by the throat and threaten him and cuss at him?” Sam paused, studying the youth. “That’s because we don’t do things that way at Haven.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that goes for you, too, Gerald.” Sam’s voice deepened as he turned to the child. “I’ve had it with you pestering Tenisha. You do it again, and I’m going to put you on the list at the front door.”

Gerald’s thin pale face crumpled around his protruding teeth. “And I won’t get to come to Haven no more?”

“That’s right.” Sam put a hand on the boy’s scrawny shoulder. “Be nice to Tenisha.”

“Okay.” He sniffled as a drop of moisture appeared under his nose. “But I don’t wanna write poems, Uncle Sam.”

Ana sat watching the interaction as though she were in another place—Jim Slater’s observation room, perhaps—looking through the glass mirror at those on the other side. How had Sam calmed the children so easily? What was his hold over them?

Raydell…who was this boy with the ropy muscles and gold tooth? Gerald…why hadn’t someone given him braces? He needed to go to an orthodontist. His appearance could hold him back his whole life. And Tenisha…with her crooked gait and timid manner, what could she ever become? What would any of them grow into, and why must they sit in this room and try to write limericks?

When Ana snapped back to the present, she realized that Sam had gone and the three in the room were bent over their paper scribbling furiously. Had Sam spoken to her before he went away? Had she answered?

The sense of disconnectedness felt all too familiar. She had been behind that glass window before, looking on things from a distance and not sure who she was or where. How many years had it taken to put away that hiding place? Ten…or was it twelve?

“Miss Burns?” Tenisha’s face wore a frown. “Miss Burns, I been tryin’ to tell you it’s time for activity change. Can me and Raydell and Gerald go now?”

Ana looked at her watch in surprise. Had an hour passed? Surely not. Where had she been all that time? “Of course. Yes, go on to basketball or whatever it is. Sure.”

“Do you want our limbricks?” Raydell asked. “I followed them ’structions you wrote out.”

She glanced at their outstretched hands, the pages covered with pencil scratches and erasures. But she wasn’t coming back to Haven. She would have no way to return their writings.

“No, I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “You can keep them. Show them to your parents.”

“You don’t wanna see what we wrote?” Gerald asked. “I wrote one. I did a poem.”

As he held it out to her, Ana comprehended the significance of the gesture. “Oh, yes, Gerald, that’s great. Of course, I’d love to see it. And yours, too, Tenisha. Raydell?”

“I wrote rap limbricks.”

“That’s fine.” She collected the poetry. “Thanks for coming.”

As the three left the room, Tenisha turned back. “So, you gonna be here again next Saturday, Miss Burns? Because I might write you some other limericks at home. I live with my grandma, and she don’t know how to read or even write her name, because she just puts down a big X instead, so I could bring them back here for you. And you could read them and tell me what you think.”

Ana nodded. “Maybe. If I’m not here, Uncle Sam could give them to me.”

“You shouldn’t let those boys scare you off,” Tenisha confided. “They try that stuff on me, like pushin’ me and sayin’ what they’ll do to me, but I don’t let myself get scared. If I was to get scared, I’d hide in the corner like that girl out there with the green skirt. Even though I got the palsy, I look at those boys like ‘Ha, don’t mess with me.’ T-Rex taught me that—to be brave and not scared—and he always tells me to keep on going. Just keep on going, Tenisha.”

“Terell says that?” Ana tried to focus.

“Yeah, ’cause he loves me. He gives me rides on his back when my legs get too tired. He lifts me up high so I can put the ball into the basket. Uncle Sam fixes the rules to keep everything safe here, and he cares about me. I know that. But T-Rex loves me.”

“Loves you…how?”

“Like a daddy.” She grinned. “Like God.”

Ana sat in silence, absorbing the child’s message. “You’re not scared of T-Rex? He’s so big. And maybe…maybe he touches you.”

“He hugs me. And I give him big kisses right on his cheek.”

“But does he touch you in other places? Like your private parts?”

Tenisha’s face looked stricken for a moment. “No!” she gasped. “T-Rex would never do nothing like that. That’s bad! Nobody supposed to touch you there!”

“That’s right,” Ana said. “But I—”

“Miss Burns, don’t you know better than to talk like that about T-Rex? He’s my friend. He tells me not to let anybody mess with me. T-Rex is the one who says I got to keep on going no matter what. You know?”

Ana did know. She knew how to keep on going. She smiled at the child. “Write some limericks, Tenisha. Write as many as you can. I’ll look forward to reading them.”

With a wave and a smile, Tenisha worked her way out of the classroom. Ana sat in silence for a moment, taking in the large flip-flops on her feet, the white bandage on her arm, the rip in her skirt. Her new white blouse had lost three buttons near the hem. And she had bled on the sleeve. She touched her hair and felt a chunk of glass in a tangle near her neck. The two boys had tried to defeat her. Tried and failed. But who were they, and would they try again?

And who had come to help her? Had it been one of those mighty male angels that Sam had told her about?

How should she interpret what Tenisha had said about Terell? Clearly, he had been only kind and loving to the child. Was Ana completely off base in her suspicions about the man?

Pushing up out of her chair, she gathered the poems and the pencils. As she stepped out into the main room where a new basketball game was already in full swing, she heard a voice call her name.

“Señorita Ana!” Flora had left her corner and was standing beside the door. She held out a sheet of paper folded into a tight square. In Spanish, she whispered, “It’s a poem. I wrote it for you.”

Ana took the paper. As she opened it, her eyes took in the carefully penciled Spanish words.

By the time Ana had digested each line, the meaning in each word, Flora was starting back to her corner. Ana reached out for her, caught her arm. “Wait,” she called. “Please! Tell me where you came from, Flora. Where is La Ceiba?”

The child hesitated only a moment. “Honduras,” she whispered, then she put her finger to her lips.

“Flora, wait,” Ana called, but Sam was striding toward her. He laid his hand firmly on her shoulder.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he announced. “Are you parked nearby? Do you have your keys?”

She looked up, trying to think beyond the small gift in her hand.
Hope,
Flora had told her.
Keep on going,
Tenisha had urged. They knew, these children who had endured so much. They saw her pain, and they understood it, and they knew the secret to victory.

“My purse,” she whispered. “The keys were in my purse.”

“Then I’ll drive you home.”

He was leading her toward the door, and she heard her flip-flops slapping the floor. “But my interviews. I didn’t get to talk to the kids.”

“Come back tomorrow. I’ll bring you. Do you have a set of spare car keys at home? Can you get into your house?”

“Apartment. I keep a key hidden in my mailbox. It has a combination lock.”

“Good. Let’s get you home, and then you can rest.”

“But wait.” She stopped and folded her arms around herself. “I don’t know you, Sam. Not really. I don’t want you to see where I live, because I…because…”

He was staring at her. “Ana, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I don’t know that. I thought I could trust…thought I had gotten to the place where it was okay…with people, you know? But I feel vulnerable again. I can’t lose my privacy.”