by Karen Ellis
The man smiles at Crisp and it’s a genuine smile but complicated with woe, regret, hope, yearning, so much emotion it almost rends his heart. Almost. Because fuck it, no way will he let this person, this father, waltz in and stand there with those furrows across his forehead and that dimple in his chin just like Crisp’s and that fizz of gray at his temples—stand there with that look in his brown eyes as if he’s been as fucking terrified as Crisp has been all these years, as if he’s been imagining and strenuously not imagining this homecoming for an entire lifetime.
Crisp looks away. Closes his eyes. Holds his mother tight, burrowing into her, yearning to flee the confusion but unable to locate an inner exit door. Eyes sealed: he will not look at the man again. But he can feel his father drinking him in and it disturbs him and he wants it to stop but he also wants it to continue forever.
He doesn’t know what he wants.
“Please leave,” Crisp hears himself saying. “I can’t do this right now.”
The same thin voice from the phone answers, simply, “Okay.” Then adds, “You can call me whenever you’re ready. Any time of the day or night. This time, I won’t hang up.”
Crisp listens until the front door closes.
He opens his eyes and his father is gone, just like that.
“Why was he here?” he asks his mother.
“Detective Cole tracked him down. He thought if we put our heads together we might be able to piece together what’s been going on—that it might help us find you. But here you are!” He’s never seen her face this red or her eyes this wet without actually crying—this woman who rarely cries in front of him if she can help it.
“What were you doing just now? You and him?”
“He wanted to see your room.”
“What for?”
“I think he wants to know you, Crisp.”
After that, no one says a word. Not Babu, who usually can’t stop commenting; not Dedu, who is a font of wisdom; not Mom, who rarely wastes an opportunity to defend her son against perceived trouble. They all stand there waiting to see what he’ll say, what he’ll do. His reaction, though, is inchoate, inexpressible.
Crisp leaves the foyer for the living room and sits alone on the couch. Just sits there and tries to think, but nothing comes. After a minute, Lex Cole joins him with the kind of placid smile meant to calm you in advance of something difficult. Crisp braces.
“How are you?” the detective asks.
“Fine,” Crisp tries. Then, “I don’t really know.”
“What happened?”
Words swirl without gathering into a simple, coherent explanation. “I’m not sure where to begin.”
“You know what they say.”
Crisp nods. “‘Begin at the beginning.’”
“It’s always a good place to start.”
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to ask for a lawyer?”
“If you want one, sure.”
“Yeah,” Crisp says. “I think I want one.”
Lex stands. “You’ll need to meet me at the station and I’ll get things started.”
“Thanks,” Crisp says. And then, “I didn’t shoot anyone.”
The detective nods. “See you in a bit.”
When Lex is back in the front hall, Crisp hears him say, “He wants a lawyer—smart kid. If you don’t have someone, I can get you in touch with legal aid.”
“That would be good,” Katya says. “Thank you.”
“Will you make sure he’s at the Eighty-Fourth Precinct within an hour?”
“Tonight?”
“Hopefully it won’t take too long.”
“Fine,” she says. “Thank you, Lex.”
The front door opens and closes and Lex Cole, too, is gone.
“Look at you,” Crisp hears Babu say. “So thin. How old are you?”
JJ answers, “Twelve.”
“You’re hungry,” Babu informs him.
Dedu says, “Of course he’s hungry!”
“Do your parents know you’re here?” Mom asks.
Crisp doesn’t hear JJ say anything but presumably the boy shakes his head no because Babu’s reaction is so strong.
“You need to tell them. Do you have a phone to call?”
Another pause.
“Use mine,” Katya offers.
Quietly, JJ says, “My parents are in Haiti.”
“For vacation?” Katya asks.
“No.”
“You’re living where?”
Nothing. No answer. Not the slightest sound.
Katya says, “Oh. Okay. I see.”
“Feed him!” Dedu orders.
Babu barks, “Like you need to tell us that?”
In a warm but unmistakably insistent tone, Katya assures JJ, “Don’t worry about them, it’s all in fun. Go ahead to the kitchen and eat what you want. If you need a place to stay, you’ll stay with us for now. We’ve got a comfy fold-up mattress that fits on Crisp’s floor.”
JJ’s silence at the invitation, the directive, is deep and broad as an ocean, his acquiescence inevitable.
Crisp inhales and holds it and exhales and his mind clears.
He’s home.
31
Lex stands on the boardwalk listening with half-cocked hearing to the steady beat of the tide against the shore. He allows a gust of wind to push hard against him and he doesn’t push back. He gives way to it, steps backward to make room, but it pursues him.
Walking along the Spielman-Crespo block toward the avenue, he pauses to glance up at the row of sixth-floor windows and pinpoint theirs at the far right of the building: two perfect rectangles of blazing yellow light. He wonders what’s going on in there now. He wonders how Crisp is doing with his mother and grandparents, if he’s telling them everything, if he’s realized yet that they forgave him before he even walked through the front door. Lex wonders, again, about the boy, Janjak, JJ, and hopes he’ll be all right when all this settles down. Lex doesn’t like to hold bets on how a case will come out, but he finds himself hoping that JJ won’t turn up anywhere in the realm of culpability for the gun dealer’s alleged murder. Or Crisp. Or even Glynnie, though that’s doubtful. Regardless of where the courts throw them down on the legal yardstick, or how many reckless choices they made last night, they’re basically still kids.
But murder is murder, and that’s a problem. And if the body is found, things could get worse for one of them or all of them. Glynnie, he guesses, all that evidence against her piling up.
At the corner, Lex raises his hand to a passing taxi. It swerves to a stop and he gets into the back. “You know where the Sixtieth Precinct station house is?”
The driver nods, turns on the meter, pulls into a lane.
The moment the car is in motion, the mere presence of the muted backseat TV starts to make Lex queasy. He reaches to turn it off as a news zipper moves across the bottom of the screen: Mideast talks to resume…Shooting at mall in Little Rock…First Lady issues rare tweet on Russia probe…Banksy strikes again…
32
The elevator in the lobby of the police station seems to take forever. Walking to the second floor would be faster, and the stairwell door is just over there. But Crisp knows better than to suggest it, not at this time of night and not with his grandparents and their crinky feet, knees, hips, lungs, hearts, and overall belief that since they’ve made it this far in life they “deserve a few extra sweets,” as Babu likes to say. And they do. And this, going through all this with their grandson, was never supposed to be on their menu.
JJ stands farthest from the elevator doors, as if an opportunity to slip away might present itself. Crisp veers from his family to herd the boy back into their fold. Looking into JJ’s terrified eyes, Crisp whispers, “It’s going to be okay, no matter what.” Almost believing it himself.
“No,” JJ whispers back. “It probably isn’t.”
The elevator rattles down to a stop. The dented metal doors scrape open.
Dedu steps aside as tho
ugh he’s the doorman, the conductor of this off-tune chamber piece. (“Time to face the music,” he said as they gathered themselves to head over here, the family unwilling to let Crisp out of their sight.) Dedu waits until everyone is inside the elevator, then he joins them. Babu waves a hand at the doors as if using her special magic to will them closed, and they do, they close, drawing together in a tight seam.
Detective Cole is waiting for them in the second-floor hall just outside the elevator, having been given a heads-up by the front desk. With him is a waistless young woman in a wrinkled blue dress, her messy hair balled into a topknot secured by a chopstick. Chipped polish on her fingernails. Battered sneakers. She smiles when she sees them and Crisp thinks, Don’t let this be my legal aid lawyer.
“Hiii.” She reaches a hand to Crisp, directly to Crisp, and Yes it is and Please no and How can this mess of a person help me? “I’m Marylouuu. I’m so happy to meet you, Janjaaak.” A drawl at the end of every phrase.
Realizing that this woman is not here for him, Crisp reflexively steps up beside JJ and slings a protective arm around the boy.
“No,” Lex corrects Marylou. “That’s Janjak.” Pointing now at JJ.
“Oooh, sorry. Hi, Janjak, I’m Marylouuu. With Social Serviceees. I’m your new caseworker, okaaay?” Her smile is flecked with bits of lettuce.
The elevator emits a cranking sound and the doors close; with a squeal, it begins a new descent.
Crisp glances at his mother, in whose eyes he recognizes a gleam of apprehension that always means she’s engaged in a difficult calculation. The tight face, burning focus, fixed mouth of an executioner before pushing the button, plunging the needle, flipping the switch. On the way over she leaned in and whispered, “What if JJ stays with us for a while?,” and he answered, “Great! How long?,” but she didn’t have a chance to go into her thinking before they arrived at the station.
His mother steps forward. “Marylou, I’m Katya Spielman and these are my parents, Joe and Galya Spielman. This is our son, Titus, who we call Crisp. We raised him all together, and now that he’s on his way to college, his bedroom will be empty. I would like to foster JJ in our home.”
“Oooh!” Marylou says. “Are you liceeensed?”
“Not yet. How long does it take?”
“There’s an application, a course, a whole proceeess. But let’s face it, we can use all the help we can get, so how about we talk about it and see how we can make this wooork? That is, if it’s okay with Janjaaak.”
JJ nods decisively.
“Okaaay,” Marylou says. “Detective, is there somewhere the family and I can go to taaalk?”
Lex, smiling, says, “Follow me.”
Just then, the elevator pulls in, the doors open, and a white cane taps a pattern on the floor, testing the perimeter of a safe exit. A tall black man wearing large sunglasses in round white plastic frames appears. He wears a white three-piece suit with a red tie and red pocket handkerchief. A red feather slants from the band of a white fedora. Carrying a briefcase in his free hand, he follows the tapping cane into the hall. An undercover investigator, Crisp assumes, posing as a pimp.
Lex steps forward to greet him. “Hi, Harry. Good to see you.”
“Good to see you too, Lex,” the blind man says without irony.
“Mind waiting here just a minute? I’ll be right back.”
“Will do.” Harry aligns his back with the wall, sets his briefcase on the floor, and rests both hands atop his cane.
Lex leads Crisp and his family around the corner to a door marked waiting, behind which is a small windowless room furnished with worn couches and chairs. Again, Dedu holds open the door and is the last to file in.
Before Crisp has a chance to sit, Lex looks at him and asks, “Come with me, okay?” Except it isn’t a question.
He glances at his mother, positioned stiffly on the couch. She nods, telling him to go. Crisp has a cold, sinking feeling and doesn’t like this at all. He accompanies Lex back into the hallway and asks, “Harry’s not an undercover pimp, is he?”
Lex chuckles. “He’s your lawyer. Crisp, he may be blind, and maybe he’s not the greatest dresser, but he’s a good attorney. Give him a chance.”
Crisp follows the detective down the hall but a thought nags and he stops walking. “Why did you bring my father to our apartment?”
Two steps ahead now, Lex turns. “He has roots with the people you got mixed up with, Crisp. We didn’t know where you were or if you were safe. I wanted him and your mother to brainstorm.”
“Brainstorm?” A bitter, unintended tone, but it fits; Crisp lifts his chin to own it. How could Mo Crespo possibly know anything about the life the Crespo-Spielmans built without him? How could he even begin to brainstorm with someone as smart and capable and loving and reliable as Crisp’s mother?
“Give him a chance.”
“Why?”
“He’s your father.”
“It’s none of your business. My mother never wanted to see him again, and neither did I.”
“Are you sure?”
No, Crisp isn’t, he isn’t sure of anything. For all he knows his mother is glad for the chance to have learned the truth about why Mo left them. Everything’s happened so fast and they haven’t talked about it yet.
Lex says, “He might have been a terrible father but he’s a really good artist—you have to admit that, at least.”
“Actually, I don’t.” When Crisp learned that Mo Crespo is in fact the Wilson Ramsey, his brain immediately tangled around the problem of what that means. For him. As that complicated man’s biological son. All it does is confuse things, as far as he can tell.
“Well, let’s not keep the lawyer waiting.” Lex starts walking again.
Crisp follows, mind spinning—the lawyer, the father, the artist—the ultimate roles of these men left up to him as if he knows anything about anything when now more than ever he feels he knows nothing at all.
Harry’s face turns at the first sound of their approach, the round glasses like portholes reflecting the overhead fluorescent glare.
“Crisp,” Lex says, “this is your attorney, Harry Johnson.”
Smiling in Crisp’s general direction, Harry says, “What do you say we get you out of trouble, son?”
Crisp shakes the lawyer’s hand, soft, firm, and hopes this man can help him.
“I understand there’s another team on this too,” Harry says. “So let’s head downstairs to confer. Tomorrow we’ll meet separately at my office and go over a battle plan.”
* * *
Glynnie looks up at the first crack of the conference room door opening. She can’t help staring at the big pimp guy who follows Lex Cole into the room. Two days ago she probably would have burst out laughing, but not now. At the sight of Crisp, her pulse gallops. She wishes she could talk to him alone, let him know that she plans to tell them everything. The actual truth.
Crisp looks around the long table at Glynnie and her crew: two men, both white with salty hair and business suits, one dark gray, one dark blue; and two women, the white one blonde and dressed in a silk blouse and pearl choker, the Asian one red-haired and wearing all black. Clearly the woman in pearls, the bony one, is Glynnie’s mother. He wonders which of the two men is her father. Sandwiched within the austere quartet, Glynnie looks washed out and, somehow, slighter than before. A new gravitas weighs around her eyes. They look at each other, just look, the way you’d take in someone you know too well and wish you’d never met.
But does he wish that? Is it her fault that last night happened? Or did he abandon his free will out of…what? Self-doubt. He doubted his perceptions and his instincts, overthought his way through the disastrously stacking hours. He has only himself to blame.
Glynnie wonders if maybe last night wouldn’t have happened if Crisp hadn’t shown up outside her house. If she hadn’t felt bad for him, the way he got arrested for diddly-squat on Wednesday. But as soon as she thinks that she knows it isn’t true, knows i
t was her own choices that hit the flipper every time they spun off in a wrong direction. Her insistence that they get high. Her insistence that they go find JJ. Her insistence that they buy a gun. And she pulled the trigger, no one else.
Glynnie offers Crisp what looks to him like a genuine smile.
Crisp offers one back, a small gesture that Glynnie appreciates immensely.
As if upset by how they smiled at each other, the mother looks sharply at the man seated immediately to her left, the one in the blue suit. Crisp notices their matching wedding rings. Then he realizes that the other man, in the gray suit, looks familiar but he doesn’t know why.
Harry finds the edge of the table, drops his briefcase onto it, scrapes out a chair, and arranges himself. Lex sits beside the lawyer. Crisp sits beside Lex, directly across from Glynnie’s lawyer—and then the gray suit, receding hairline, and hangdog face strike a chord and Crisp remembers seeing him on one of the TV news stations Dedu likes to watch.
“That you, Ben?” Harry asks.
Ben Brafman, the celebrity lawyer, answers, “Harry, how’d you know?”
“Your cologne.” The attorneys share a laugh.
Glynnie’s lawyer looks at his clients with a stiff smile that appears to warn them against reacting to the blind pimp’s appearance—at least that’s how Crisp reads it, like a secret code between rich people to always pretend you’re okay with whatever when really you almost never are.
Glynnie pretty much knows what her parents are thinking now. Her dad is figuring out how much it would cost to pay her lawyer to represent Crisp too, so as not to weaken her case; “The cost of doing business” is how he’d sum up the loss. Her mom is wishing she knew Harry when she cast The Deuce because sometimes hiring a nonactor who doesn’t fully understand his own gifts of authenticity can be a stroke of genius on the part of the casting director. Or maybe not—maybe they’re not thinking either of those things right now. Maybe her parents are just scared, like she is, and worried, like she is, that this time she might have pushed things too far. Maybe her parents just love her. Maybe if she could try not being such a prick to them all the time they could relax a little; maybe her dad would cut down on his drinking; maybe her mom would put on some weight. Maybe that’s why they signed her up for Outward Bound: because she’s the asshole, not them.
