“Scotch what?” Jesse lit her cigarette and eyed the stairs behind his back.
“She just wants company, you hear what I’m saying?”
“OK.” Jesse shrugged. Her lack of reaction worried Lorenzo; she was trying too hard to be cool.
“Listen to me. There’s that little kid out there, right? So whatever she says to you, I want you to run it by me before you use it, OK? I let you up there, you’re in the catbird seat—we both know that but we got to have a contract on this. I read one thing I didn’t know before I read it? You and me … I’m gonna cut you off at the knees.”
“Lorenzo.” She turned her head to blow out a stream of smoke. “Tell me one time I didn’t play by the rules.”
“That’s my line. Do we have a contract?”
“You have my number?” she offered, touching the phone bulging from her pocket. She wore her T-shirt untucked to try to hide it the way a plainclothes cop would hide his gun.
“No, I don’t,” he said sullenly. He studied her as she removed the jacker sketch from around her phone and using her thigh as a desk, scribbled down the information.
“So what you promise Bump?” he asked.
“Bump?” She rewrote her number more legibly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lorenzo left the building trying to convince himself that Jesse’s being up there was a good idea—that she could ask Brenda things that he couldn’t, could size her up, put in the man-hours needed to read this woman accurately, maybe even feed her lines supplied by him if it started to go that way. He also told himself that if Jesse burned Brenda, and by extension burned him, she would quickly find out that it’s a long, long life in a small, small city.
He walked across the lot to Jesse’s brother’s Chrysler. Ben was huge—square-headed, straight-faced, and polite. He looked to be in his early thirties. No one Lorenzo knew could figure out what Ben’s story was. He had owned a bar, been a talent scout, bitten someone’s finger off, done fund-raising for Jerry’s Kids, did some time, served subpoenas, repoed cars. He was ex-CIA, he was dying, he was a police informant, a genius, a black belt, a pusher. He’d gone to dental school. The only thing known for sure was that he was almost always at his sister’s side, a bodyguard, chauffeur, gofer.
“Nice to see you,” he said, shaking Lorenzo’s hand through the driver’s window and looking up at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
“Yeah, Ben. Your sister’s gonna be up there for a while, I think.”
“Good.” Ben nodded. “Anything I can do for you?”
Lorenzo always found his implacable willingness to help out a little unsettling. “Yeah, you see that door? I want that lady to get some sleep.”
“You got it.” Ben bobbed his head.
“Anybody coming over here—you know, reporters, you know who I’m saying—keep ’em out.”
“Absolutely.” Ben extended his paw through the window again, shook Lorenzo’s hand. “You have my number?”
Lorenzo backed away. “That’s OK, Ben. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Ben shot back, and started to roll the Chrysler closer to the building.
Before returning to Armstrong, Lorenzo looked up to the apartment and saw Brenda pacing from window to window, her hands on top of her head like a prisoner of war. Pulling out of the lot, he had to swerve sharply and stomp on his brakes to avoid that dark blue van swinging in, the driver bawling out his window, “Yo, sorry, sorry,” a photographer jumping out the passenger side and coming up to Lorenzo’s window. “Brenda Martin. You know what apartment?”
“Not here,” Lorenzo told him, noting in his rearview that Ben was trotting up to cut them off at the pass. Pulling out on Van Loon, Lorenzo was afraid to look back at that open window, afraid they’d be tracking his gaze, Lorenzo vibing out to Jesse, his officially sanctioned fox in the henhouse: At least pull down the goddamn shades.
8
Waiting until she was reasonably sure that both the blue van and Lorenzo had gone, Jesse phoned her brother from inside the vestibule, requesting a quick run for cigarettes, vitamins, and her makeup, then began climbing the stairs in a state of euphoric alertness, the sensory universe of the hallway, the various textures, the quality of light, the mingled aromas of food, sleep, and garbage all striking her so keenly as to feel more like memory than new information.
Halfway to the second floor, she stopped and attempted to punch in Jose, but the squeal of a door from above made her stuff the phone back in her pocket. Looking up, she saw Brenda floating in the gloom at the top of the stairs, her eyes lost to the shadows, but the hair—even through the spectral murk Jesse could make out the chopped, stiff splash that now crowned the gaunt planes of Brenda’s face like a halo of spikes.
“I’m so sorry,” Brenda said, almost cringing, stepping back as Jesse reached the landing.
“C’mon, no,” Jesse said soothingly, trying to touch her as she did out in the parking lot. “I know how you feel.”
“What do you mean?” Brenda asked, demanded, ignoring the laying on of hands this time. Jesse was thrown by her voracious eyes: there’d be very little small talk here.
“You know, to have a child, to be…” Jesse faltered, feeling like she had just stepped through a rotten board.
“Boy or a girl.” Another demand.
“What?” Jesse’s eyes strayed to the open door of Brenda’s apartment.
“What do you have?”
Jesse opened her mouth to set the record straight, but, panicking at the possibility of being ejected, she heard herself answer, “Boy” this woman bulling her into a lie from the jump, Jesse having no child, no husband, no lover, no constant friends, just a brother and a job.
“How old is he?” Brenda asked.
Jesse hesitated, seeing one last chance to tell it true. But she folded, afraid her hesitation would expose the lie in too clumsy and humiliating a way.
“Three years. Three.” Then, “Mikey” she volunteered, “Michael.”
“Michael,” Brenda repeated.
Jesse nodded, experiencing a queasy mixture of revulsion and determination, so that when Brenda, without another word, turned and reentered her apartment, she remained in the hallway for a moment. If Brenda wanted, she could shut her out. But the door stayed ajar, and any lingering impulse toward self-examination that Jesse might have had was obliterated the moment she crossed the threshold—obliterated by an intoxicating rush of victory.
She was immediately struck by the air of impermanence about the place, a self-conscious striving for some kind of homeyness that just didn’t make it—the haphazard furniture, the posters and photos hung with pushpins, tidiness passing for cleanliness. Even the walls, a smudge-mottled light gray, gave off a transient quality.
Brenda stood by the window, at the other end of the room, her body jerking with a promise of movement though she remained rooted to the spot. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Please, Brenda,” Jesse said automatically as her eyes roamed the room, looking for reproducible photos. She liked a mother-and-son photo printed on a T-shirt, but it would never reproduce, and she rejected the one of the kid with the Hamburgler and the one with Brenda at what she assumed was the Liberty Science Center—too much shadow. But the group photo with the black kids—probably from the Study Club—that one was on the money because the cops were hitting Strongarm so hard. Brenda’s own brother had broken some kid’s jaw, or so she had heard.
Having made her choice, she focused again on Brenda, who was rocking from side to side. Jesse took her by the elbow and steered her to the couch, going knee to knee, a hand lightly resting on Brenda’s arm like the homicide cops had taught her. “I’m Jesse Haus,” she said, ducking her head to get into those gray-starred eyes. “I’m with the Register. You know that, right?”
She waited for an acknowledgment. Brenda finally nodded, looking off.
“Is there anything I can do for you right now?”
“Can you bring him back?” she answered lifelessly.
Jesse gave it a minute, then said, “What’s his name?” She knew, but wanted to hear it in the mother’s mouth, read how she would say it.
“Cody.” It came out soft, crushed.
“Cody. OK. Now, all right, now, this is what I want you to do. I want you to give me a photo of him. Let me pass it on to my paper, OK? You give me something good, something with heart, something—” Brenda startled her by abruptly rising to her feet and looking around, a little wild-eyed, until she spied some videos on top of the television. Giving Jesse her back, she walked over and began sorting them out, slipping them into their cloudy plastic rental cases—having a hard time of it because of the bandages.
Jesse plowed on, slightly off balance. “You give me something with some kind of essence, and I swear to you, we’re going to have thousands of people looking for him by lunchtime. That’s how it works.”
Brenda kept at her sorting—Splash, Pocahontas, Rumble in the Bronx, Jesse reading a Fuck Off in the activity, knowing that she was coming on all wrong right now, writing in her head: “Helpless, trapped in a whirlpool of despair, the mother resorted to the most timeless of women’s tasks,” deciding in that moment that sorting out cassettes would fall into the category of domestic arts, telling herself, Get the photo, then calm down.
She rose from the couch and picked up the Study Club shot. “This would be perfect. Can we use this? And if you have one of just you and him. I can’t tell you how important this is.”
Brenda stacked the videos as if she were going right out to return them, save that extra-day charge. Jesse watched her, surfed another wave of self-disgust, then spied a photo of Cody feeding a goat at some petting zoo. She picked that one up too. “Look, I’m sorry I’m coming across all business, but I’m telling you, speed—”
“What do you think is going to happen?” Brenda cut her off again, standing there holding the videos.
“I think we’re going to get him back. I think if you listen to me you’re going to have the best of both worlds working on this.” As Brenda put down the videos and moved to the bathroom, Jesse slipped the photos out of their frames, taking Brenda’s silence on the subject as permission to print. Through the open bathroom door, she watched Brenda pry open the medicine cabinet and clumsily try to extract a prescription bottle, accidentally batting it into the sink. Jesse stepped in to help, taking one of the caplets out of the amber plastic vial nesting in all that cut hair: Tylenol with codeine, prescribed almost two years ago. Jesse hoped that they were too old and that Brenda wouldn’t conk out.
Brenda couldn’t take the pill in her swaddled hands, and after an awkward, fumbling moment, Jesse had to place it on her tongue, looking away as she did it, scanning the open medicine cabinet—no Prozac, no Valium, no diaphragm, no Dutch cap, nothing of interest that she could see. There was a bottle of pink amoxicillin for the kid, and she debated whether to tell Brenda that it should be refrigerated. The absurdity of the precaution, given the circumstances, eluded her at first, her nerves getting in the way of her sense of irony.
As Brenda gulped water from the faucet, Jesse took in the rest of the room—the blue-on-blue coordinated curtains, towels, and toilet covers, the Transformer toys. There were three Yahrzeit candles, short and fat, resting in their glasses on top of black cocktail napkins, one on the side of the sink and two on either side of the bathtub faucet. Jesse saw them as an effort to create an exotic, intimate mood; she was fairly sure that Brenda had no idea they were candles used by Jews to memorialize the dead. They would make a good detail for Jose, but Jesse was just superstitious enough to avoid committing to print anything that could jinx the hunt, be taken as a portent.
“You just cut your hair?” she asked, not knowing how else to phrase the question, thinking, “In a gesture as timeless as Greek tragedy…” Brenda didn’t respond.
“Brenda, can I see his room?” Brenda escorted her as far as the threshold, then turned and walked away without looking in. Jesse remained in the doorway, absorbing the bunk beds, the wrestlers on the walls, picking up a talcy smell, a comfortable messiness. The room felt more real, less provisional than the others.
Suddenly Brenda reappeared at Jesse’s back. Without saying anything and without actually setting foot inside the room, she reached over Jesse’s shoulder, snaked a hand around the door frame, and turned facedown a photo standing on the kid’s chest of drawers. She walked away again.
Jesse gave it a minute or so before asking, “Where do you sleep?”
“On the couch,” Brenda answered from the kitchen.
“Can I ask where the father is?”
“Out of the country.”
“Really.” Jesse heard the tick and whoosh of an ignited burner. “What’s he doing?” Brenda didn’t answer. “Huh.” Jesse finally stepped inside the room and casually lifted the downed photo. It was a generic yearbook portrait of Brenda—eyes glazed, smile lifeless, head cocked at that typical and unnatural yearbook angle. Jesse became the kid now, looking at that picture: My Pretty Mommy. Then she was Brenda, experiencing the slap down as an act of self-banishment; she tried to imagine the sense of failure that Brenda must be feeling.
Jesse walked over to the bedroom window. At five-fifteen, dawn was starting to break, dead white, more the absence of darkness than the presence of light. Ben was already back. He stood guard down below, under his arm a Finast grocery bag, Jesse’s preferred brand of luggage. She also saw two more reporters, looking pissed, striding toward a Taurus with rental plates. Jesse loved her brother at that moment, his bulldog devotion, but also felt gripped by a sadness for Ben, the pain of his love for her, the absence of other people in his life. The feeling began to expand into a sadness for herself, a frightening, stoned loneliness that was married to this unreal hour, this grievous place, the mad woman in the kitchen. Jesse shook it off, opening the window an inch, tapping the glass with a fingernail, the sound distinct enough in the zero-hour stillness to get him to look up. She slid both photos through the crack, watching them swoop to the parking lot. Benny knew what to do, raising the grocery bag and pointing to the vestibule before chasing after the pictures.
“Brenda?” Jesse joined her in the kitchen, where both of them watched water boil. “Brenda,” she said again, but the woman seemed transfixed by the roiling water. She wanted to ask if it was OK to call in to her editor but feared that Brenda might say no, or say yes and shut down even tighter on her, so she simply backed out of the kitchen and headed for the bathroom.
In her anxiety to make the call, Jesse closed the bathroom door before locating the light switch. She found herself in darkness punctuated by fluorescent letters that were stuck haphazardly on the walls, on the side of the sink, the mirror. Childish alphabet stickers glowed a pale green, the handiwork of the boy his surprise presence scaring her for a moment. Without turning on the light, she opened her cell phone. The green of the illuminated numbers almost matched the green of the scattered letters. “Give me Jose.” Jesse waited, turning on the water in the sink to drown out the conversation.
“Yo.”
“Hey. I’m in the house.”
“Whose.”
“The woman. Brenda Martin.”
“Jesus.” Then, to someone in his office, “Jesse’s in the house.” Then, back to her, he said, “Jesse’s in the house,” giving it a homeboy spin. Her editor was happy. “Get us a picture.”
“My brother’s running it over right now.”
“Lurch?”
“Fuck you.”
She dipped her fingers in the running water. The sink was clogged, slow to drain, and the feel of the cut hair swirling around her hand made her stomach jump.
“All right, listen, just stay there, OK?” Jose said. “Don’t let anybody else… How the hell did you get in?”
“Whatever, I’m in.”
“Hang on.” Jose addressed whoever was in his office again. After a two-second skull session, he said, “Jess? I want you to call back, start dumping in an hour, OK?”
“Whoa, whoa, give me a little elbow room here. I’ll dump when I can dump, all right? And don’t call me or you’ll fuck everything up, OK? We’re all alone here, so—”
“She talking?”
“I’ll call you later.” Jesse put her phone back in her jeans pocket, turned off the water, and flushed the toilet for coverage, realizing after she had done it that she really did have to go to the bathroom. Too late. She opened the door. Brenda was standing right outside. Jesse jumped, wondering if she’d been listening in.
“Hey,” Jesse said tentatively, bracing herself.
Brenda looked off, then tonelessly inquired, “What kind of music do you like?”
“96 Tears” blasted the walls from a boom box on the dining table as Brenda paced loopily in front of the drawn windowshade, which was doing a poor job of shutting out the morning’s early light. Brenda was staggering more than marching, periodically casting a glance down at the growing mob outside: media vans, but also a few of the old Ukrainian ladies, already up and about, and one or two red-eyed brown baggers swaying in place and staring back up at her for a little spontaneous entertainment.
“This song.” Brenda stopped moving for a second, speaking to Jesse, who was watching her from the couch. “Did you ever get nostalgic for a song you’ve never heard before? ‘96 Tears’—it’s like from before I was born. I don’t know what it is.”
“I guess good music is timeless,” Jesse said emptily, trying to keep it together. From the moment she had come out of the bathroom nearly an hour ago, it was as if she and Brenda had reversed roles. Brenda had taken over, spinning out an anguished line of chatter punctuated by musical commentary and the scrabbled gestures of someone facing a no-coke-left sunrise. Jesse had fallen into mute witness, struggling to absorb, to retain and compose the essence of this vigil without benefit of phone or notepad.
The buzzer rang and Brenda jerked, looking to Jesse. “If it’s the cops they’d just come up,” Jesse said.
Ben was still down there playing doorman. Periodically his sister peeked out and watched him straight-arm the competition, most likely telling people he was family. Occasionally the buzzer would ring anyway, some reporter, climbing in through a basement window and coming upstairs via the laundry room, or maybe doing a little roof hopping, attempting to crawl down to the apartment like Spiderman.
Freedomland Page 17
