by Elle Johnson
With my father by my side, I wasn’t expected to think about where we were going; he led the way.
Once we got to the Door, my father would wait two hours for me on one of the couches by the entrance. He kept his sunglasses on and sat with his legs crossed to reveal the gun in his ankle holster. He would open a book on his lap, sometimes reading, but mostly surveilling everybody with a critical eye. Meanwhile I was tucked away in the big black box theater, improvising dramatic scenes, free to act like somebody else for a couple of hours.
My mother and father had worked out a plan for how I would safely get downtown on the subway. My mother would give me one subway token from my father’s stash inside his dresser drawer. I needed only one because my father would meet me on the subway, take me to class, wait for me, then take me home when class was over. My mother would drive me to Hillside Avenue, double-park at the curb with the hazards blinking, watch me descend into the subway station, then wait just in case there was a problem and she had to drive me home.
A slight panic always set in as I rushed down the dimly lit stairs to the desolate walkway, lined with grimy white tiled walls on one side and, on the other, steel bars fencing in a maze of dank stairways leading down to the platform.
My father instructed me to wait for the train by the newsstand, near the front of the station, so that I could ride in the first car with the subway driver. I was to sit facing out, so that I could see the rest of the car and not be surprised by anyone approaching from behind. My back to a wall, not a window, never next to the door, where someone could slash my face or grab my bag. If anyone tried anything, my father said, “Fight back. Make as much noise as possible. Kick, scream, they won’t be expecting that. Then they’ll leave you alone.”
My father was always standing right where the train doors opened. When the train stopped and he saw me, the brooding scowl on his face relaxed into a broad, toothy smile. He’d kiss me on the cheek and say, “Here, here,” guiding me toward a pair of empty seats. He would squeeze my hand, relieved that I had made it in one piece, then launch into a story about his day, something small and inconsequential. Maybe the post office was coming out with a good stamp or he’d finally found those two-dollar bills and brought one home for my mother, my sister, and me. Maybe he had run into a former neighbor from the block; he’d say to me, “You were too young to remember Mr. So-and-So.” He delighted in the boring, non–life threatening details of everyday life. The small miracle of things not going wrong.
Then one night I got lost.
We were late getting to the subway. I sprang out of the car. Long legs straining, hair trailing behind me in a frizzy mass of curls, I raced down to the subway platform. Without looking to see which train it was, I sprinted to the front of the platform, waving at the conductor to hold the doors open. The PA warned to “watch the closing doors.” An electronic bell bing-bonged, the doors closed, the train pulled out. I was on my way.
But that night I missed the 42nd Street station. In my memory the train didn’t stop, it whizzed by on a middle track too fast and too far away from the platform for me to even catch a glimpse of my father. I might have gotten on the wrong train or been busy doing homework and not paid attention. When the doors opened at the next station I found a pay phone and called my mother, collect. The sound of her voice nearly brought me to tears.
“Mommy,” I blurted out, “I don’t know where I am.”
My mother didn’t know the subways any better than I did. I could hear the panic shortening her breath.
“Okay. Your father called me to find out where you were. He wants you to take a train back to 42nd Street, okay? And call me as soon as you find him.”
I hung up and was overwhelmed by the unfamiliar surroundings. There was a boarded-up newsstand, maps and complicated schedules enclosed in a glass display, dirty wooden benches, and people standing every which way. I was confused by the signs for Downtown-, Uptown-, Brooklyn-, and Bronx-bound trains. I rushed up and down stairs, across walkways, through pedestrian tunnels, until I finally spotted a Queens-bound train. I sprinted toward the front car and jumped in just as the doors closed. I held my breath as we approached the 42nd Street station, and exhaled as the train slowed, the metal wheels grinding against the rails and screeching to a stop. I peered out the grimy subway car window, but I didn’t see my father.
The doors opened. Passengers streamed out past me, filled up the empty station, then receded like the tide into the distant exits. I stepped one foot out onto the platform for a better look and put a hand on the door to stop it from closing. My stomach churned.
My father was nowhere in sight.
I was afraid to get off the train, in the wrong place again. I was afraid to stay on the train and disobey my father’s instructions. He had to be somewhere in the station. I heard “Watch the closing doors” and the electronic bell. I hopped out onto the platform. I hoped I’d made the right decision as the train doors closed behind me. Then I saw a sign announcing my location—Port Authority. The infamous bus terminal. Teeming with pimps, prostitutes, and pedophiles. Overrun by crime. Next door to my father’s office, the meeting place for thousands of parolees. I realized I was on 42nd Street, but at 8th Avenue, a world away from the 6th Avenue stop where my father was waiting for me.
Panicked, I found a pay phone and called my mother collect again. She was flustered.
“Okay, your father’s angry, but don’t you worry about that. You just do what he says. Okay? Everything’s going to be all right.” She was trying to convince herself as she spoke. “He wants you to stay where you are. So don’t move. Do you hear me? When he calls me back, I’ll tell him where to find you.”
I described where I was standing.
Fifteen minutes later I saw my father coming down the stairs. He wasn’t wearing a suit. He was dressed like an undercover officer in a light blue windbreaker, sunglasses, a black plastic bag clutched under his arm. I almost didn’t recognize him, but I knew the walk. That menacing swagger. Proud and threatening all at once. Part square-shouldered soldier, part boxer stepping to an opponent in the ring. My father had been both. I shrank as he came closer.
“Daddy,” I started.
He shifted the plastic bag from his right hand to his left and slapped me hard and fast across my face. Our skin smack sounded like the tip of a whip catching air. My hand flew to my cheek. My face stung with shame and salty tears.
A train pulled into the station. The doors opened. My father said, “Come on. We’re going home.” He grabbed my elbow and pulled me on board. I crumpled onto the hard plastic seat.
“Didn’t I tell you where to stand?”
I nodded.
“Do you know where we’re supposed to meet?”
I thought I said yes, but the word didn’t make a sound.
“Speak up when I ask you a question,” he shouted. The passengers around us looked away, quickly busying themselves with other things. I couldn’t bear to meet my father’s angry gaze. I closed my eyes, lifted my chin, and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Yes, Daddy.”
“Stupid,” he said and shook his head—disgusted, disappointed, definitely angry. We didn’t speak the rest of the way home. My father stared straight ahead. I was afraid of what he might do. To me. To my mother if she tried to defend me for making a mistake, if they got into a fight.
My mother made excuses for what my father had done. “It only happened six times,” she always said. I remembered only three. Though not completely. Flashes would come back to me in snippets like the images of vampires and ghosts, or scenes from horror movies I’d watched through the fingers on my hand covering my face. It always happened at night. My father sprawled out on the couch, in the clothes he wore to do work around the house, soft heather-gray sweatpants with a drawstring and an old white cotton shirt that showed his boxer biceps. My mother at the desk, in a housedress and slippers. Lips pursed, angry. The second time she was pacing in and out, from the kitchen to the living room. “And a
nother thing,” she started, then recited her recent grievances. He looked straight ahead at the TV or he sat in the chair in the dining room, quietly reading. Silent. Still. Suddenly he would stand up and move toward her. Arm raised, then swinging down. Brutal and relentless. She was hunched, shielding her face and body with her hands, fending off blows. Scratching back when she could.
“Ricky, no. Stop it. Stop.”
Once he pushed her down, onto the stair landing. Once he caught her in the dining room, behind the slatted swinging cowboy doors. The worst was when he pummeled her in the bathroom. Her body crammed into the small tub upstairs, brown ankles kicking over the side, black hair clinging to white tiles like creeping vine. He was in pajamas, she was naked under a robe that came undone, indelicately. She said it was with an open hand, always with an open hand. But I know I saw a fist and the darkness in his eyes.
“No, no.” She’d break away. “Uh-uh. No. You’re not doing this to me.”
The first time my sister and I were little. She called us into the room.
“I want them to see what’s happening. See what your father is doing?” My sister and I stood next to each other, leaning on our hands, backs against the wall.
“Call the police,” she said to my older sister. “Dial 911.”
My father looked at my mother, shocked and hurt.
“That’s right, you heard me,” she said to him.
Next thing I knew there were red and blue lights flashing, whirling around the living room walls. A white police officer took off his hat, tucked it under his arm as he talked to my mother. “You don’t want to do this, ma’am.”
“He hit me.”
“So you say.”
“I’m not going to let him hit me.”
“I understand. But you don’t want to do this. He’s a parole officer?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll lose his job. You want him to lose his job? To be out of work? ’Cause that’s what’s gonna happen. That’s no good. That’s not gonna make things better. Come on. You got two little girls, a beautiful family.”
My mother’s face crumpled. Tears rolled out of her eyes.
“Okay. It’s okay,” the officer said. “I’m gonna do you a favor. I’m not going to file a report. You two work it out. You think you can do that?”
My mother glared at the officer. Through tight lips, she said, “Fine.”
My father walked the officer out of the house, stood with him by the front gate. They talked, then laughed, and stole glances back at the house until the police officer put on his hat. My father shook his hand and strode back inside. He stopped in front of my mother, who stood braced, arms folded across her chest. “You made my child call the police on me,” he said.
“You better not hit me again.” She stared him down until he walked away.
My mother didn’t keep these incidents with my father to herself. Over the years she told her sister and her friends, then balked when they responded with pity and said she should take us girls and leave.
She didn’t want to leave, she wanted him to stop.
Once my sister and I were teens she told Grandma, my father’s mother, whose advice was that the three of us could surely take my father down. It never occurred to me to fight back. My father was in control. And I was too afraid. But now that Karen had been killed, I wondered what the point was of being a good girl.
Chapter Nine
I don’t remember going to church that Sunday after Karen was killed, even though I’m sure I did. I’m sure I sat next to my mother in a pew toward the back. I’m sure during the call to prayer my mother asked the congregation to pray for Karen and Karen’s family. I’m sure on the way out the reverend clasped my mother’s hand in his and said, “Sister Johnson, if there’s anything the church can do.”
In my box of keepsakes I found a gold sheriff’s badge from the Christian sleepaway camp I went to when I was ten. The name of the camp, Word of Life, was etched into the metal along with a tiny blue Bible painted into the top star point. That was my upbringing in a nutshell—the law and religion. Rules. Control. I was raised to have respect for authority and blind faith in God. Even though my mother was Presbyterian and my father a devout atheist, from kindergarten to eighth grade I went to the Chapel of the Redeemer Lutheran elementary school in Flushing, Queens. Every Monday I was asked if I had gone to church on Sunday. I always had. We had chapel every Wednesday before class. And on Fridays we sang Christian songs accompanied by the hippie-dippy fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Baldinger, on an acoustic guitar. Every school day we had an hour of Bible study and were assigned verses to memorize for homework and recite out loud the next day. We said grace before every lunch. And every school day ended with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance to the American and Christian flags.
My father made fun of religion. He said church was for the fat, the old, and the ugly. His go-to joke was about the archangel Gabriel finally meeting God at the pearly gates of heaven and reporting back that “she’s Black.” His favorite poem was about a man named Abou Ben Adhem who didn’t love the Lord but instead loved his fellow man. I would learn that my father’s dislike of the church might have been fueled by his own anger at God and his followers.
When my father was in his twenties he fathered a child, a daughter, out of wedlock. He tried to marry the girl’s mother, who had glimpsed my father’s controlling ways and declared that she wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. Instead of support from the parishioners at his mother’s church, my father was whispered about and then finally shunned.
I felt a pang for my father—he was just a young man—and protective of his feelings. The disappointment he must have felt having Denice (that was his daughter’s name) taken away from him and missing out on her life. I was disappointed, too; she was my half sister and I would never know her. Family was important to my father, and maybe this rending was why. I was angered by the insult, the injury, and the hypocrisy of a Christian congregation turning its back on him. My father stopped going to church and, according to my mother, never forgave them.
Forgiveness wasn’t part of my father’s way of thinking. Actions had consequences. He tried to control relationships with the threat of punishment and revenge. He wanted us to fight back, just not against him. Expressing anger wasn’t encouraged or allowed. But that made it easier to merge my father’s way of thinking with my teachers’ at Redeemer, where I learned to turn the other cheek. To accept whatever was done to me and move on.
When Karen was killed, I kept the pain to myself. I didn’t turn to God for comfort. I didn’t ask God to help me, to make it easier. I wasn’t angry with God, either. God hadn’t pulled the trigger. Karen’s murder was the result of the free will of a man. It was a choice to do wrong, to go against God’s will. So I didn’t ask God why. What was done was done. Unlike Lazarus, Karen wasn’t coming back from the dead. The church, religion, God couldn’t help me. I was on my own.
Chapter Ten
April 6, 1981
When I woke up Monday morning, the world was still spinning. I lay in bed and tried to feel Karen. To conjure up her spectral presence, the haunting soul that had visited me. I tried to coax her out with prayers and focused thoughts of Please, please. But the words disappeared like stones into the hollow of my sorrow. Karen’s ghost was gone. The space in me that I wanted her to fill was larger now, harder to ignore.
I looked up at the ceiling and listened to my breathing. Ribbons of air threaded in through my nostrils, then knotted up in my chest. My arms and legs were numb. It was as though I had been thrown down a flight of stairs. I was broken and raw, like a burlap sack full of shattered glass.
Downstairs the kitchen fan churned sounds together—the pop of hot bacon grease in a pan with radio waves from 1010 WINS and the high-pitched whine of my father’s electric razor. I stood in the doorway and watched my mother stomp around. Her robe flew open at the knees, the scent of Shalimar dusting powder swirled from her skin. A blue net held
spongy pink curlers in place on her head. Her heels hung off the backs of worn-down house shoes. She bumped into the edges of things, out of sorts, annoyed by my hovering, bemoaning “how late it is already.” She asked if I was still going to school. I was puzzled but—as with most things between my mother and my teenage self—it came out in a scowl. “Because of Karen,” she said. “It’s all right if you want to stay home.” She looked at me when I didn’t answer, tilted her head to the side. Annoyed and impatient.
Since kindergarten, I’d never missed a day of school. Not when I was sick with the flu or on crutches with a broken toe. Not when the increasingly baffling science classes made my head ache with panic. Not even when I was sure to do poorly on a test. I refused to cheat like the other kids; I was prepared to go down with honor. Always determined to do better next time.
I looked forward to the end of endless summer days. Of waiting for my parents to take me to the movies or the beach, of listening to the laughter of the neighborhood kids playing in the street, of enduring Billy’s garage band down the block rehearsing “Smoke on the Water” in a never-ending loop.
Going back to school meant a new outfit and a new pair of shoes, new teachers, maybe even new friends. But most important, it meant new classes. I believed Mr. Farbstein, my ninth-grade science teacher, when he told us that the true purpose of life was to keep learning until the day we died.
If I didn’t go to school because of Karen, I didn’t know what else I would do.
I dressed quickly and didn’t worry about how I looked. I pulled my frizzy hair back into two barrettes. I walked to the bus stop with my head bowed and watched the concrete underfoot. The sidewalk was unbroken, scored into perfect squares—though the farther I walked from home, the more cracks I could see. The shallow lines were thicker, went deeper. Entire sections were broken, crashed through by angry roots demanding attention and caution. At the bus stop whole chunks of cement were missing, exposing the darkest, blackest dirt underneath.
