“See, he’s not like you with Ruby. You love her, it’s so obvious, your face gets all, alert when she’s around. You’re alive to her. Even with Nelson, I see it in you with my son, like just now, on the phone, telling me how bad he felt. I mean, he’s not even yours, but there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be a better father to him than his own. You’re not afraid of children, you’re not afraid to, to receive them. Freddy, for all the shit he deals with? Jail, cops, the business he’s in? He’s not like you. He’s an emotional coward.”
There were no words he could think of to describe how deeply moved and flattered he felt by the dry-eyed sureness of her observations.
“No, I tell you,” Danielle said. “You know who’s Nelson’s real second parent? My mother. And it’s sad because now, these days, people look at her, my mom, and what they see is this broke-down woman, all gone to fat, no sex in her, she’s what, three, four years older than you? It looks more like twenty. But she’s had a life; you don’t know what she’s had to overcome in her time.
“Like, I’m sure you remember her back in the sixties, all hot and made-up, looked like Rita Moreno, everybody says that, and she hates it when they do, but upstairs in that apartment? You cannot believe what she had to deal with back then. She was abused . . .”
“Sexually?” remembering rumors.
“No. Violently. My grandfather used to beat on her, my uncles and my grandmother. I don’t really remember him but I was told he drove a truck for Pepsi, drove from five in the morning till three in the afternoon, came home the same time as the kids from school, came home drunk, never said a word to anybody, just emptied his wallet on the dining room table for the, you know, for whatever was needed, then collapsed in his TV chair without ever turning the TV on. Used to sit there with his eyes open, maybe he’s asleep, maybe not. And my mother told me if anybody in that house made any kind of noise for the next hour or so? Or even if the phone should ring, he’d go off like a rocket, start whaling on people. My mother was in and out of Dempsy Medical Center she can’t even remember how many times, bruises, shiners, stitches, even for trying to kill herself, and my grandfather never got arrested for it because my grandmother was too afraid to press charges.”
“Jesus,” Ray breathed.
“Jesus didn’t have fuck-all to do with it,” Danielle said. “And so how does she get out of that house? How else . . . She marries the first idiot who asks her. Seventeen years old, drops out of school with like six months to graduation, married, pregnant, and guess what? The son of a bitch was just like her father, surprise surprise, except in addition to the beatings? She got one bonus extra—he didn’t drive a truck for Pepsi, my father, he sold drugs.”
Just like your husband, Ray thought—surprise, surprise.
“We lived in Jersey City, and our house used to get raided like clockwork, so they tell me, but he was pretty slick, my father, they never found anything until the one time they did. Then he got locked up, and me and my brothers, when I was very little, we were all placed in a foster home. I mean, I have no memory of this, I was three, four . . . But my mother, she didn’t deserve that kind of punishment because she didn’t do anything except put all her time and energy and wits into protecting us, you know, trying to keep us whole.”
“Why didn’t she just take the kids and leave?” Ray regretting the question the moment it came out of his mouth.
“To where,” Danielle rightfully snapped. “She had no money. Three kids and no money. Where was she supposed to move to, back to her prick father’s house? Life’s not about ‘Why didn’t she just do this, just do that.’ People don’t ‘just do’ things. There’s no ‘just do’ out there. It’s all about complications and bad habits and being afraid and wanting to be loved. I mean I read these, these textbooks, you know, Urban Studies, Sociology, Public Policy . . . I get ten pages into the author’s shit and I want, I want to strangle the bastard. And don’t get me wrong, half the time I want to strangle my mother too. Just because she had a hard life doesn’t qualify her for sainthood. She laid a dump truck of grief at my feet. But still, she’s my mother and she’s come through for me more than you’d have any right to expect.”
Danielle took a breath; Ray seized by what she was telling him and almost physically aching for more. It wasn’t only the secret history of Carla Powell that she was revealing here, or even the secret history of the Powell clan; it was the secret history of 1949 Rocker Drive, its hallways, elevators, apartments and smells; it was the secret history of his childhood world, the mouths, eyes, bodies and scents of others, of those he had brushed up against every day of his younger life, and therefore the secret history, marginally at least, of himself.
And the fact that Danielle was not only the gatekeeper of this intimate knowledge but its living offspring; not only the teller of the tale, but the tale itself made flesh—to Ray, an individual who saw personal history and anecdote and his ability to communicate through them as his lifeline to the rest of the world—his lifeline to love, expressing his love—for someone like Ray to be in the physical presence of memory incarnate, sentiment incarnate like this—intensified and complicated his hunger for her way beyond lust, which was painful enough, into something excruciatingly sublime.
“The thing is,” Danielle started up again, gazing past Ray, oblivious to the chaos she was unleashing in him, “the thing is, I know, right now, my mother blames herself for my brother’s death, for his life. She raised him in a dope house, then lost him to foster care for two years. Like I said, I have no memory of it, and Reggie was even younger than me, so, if any one of us was old enough to be scarred by it, it’s my older brother Harmon, who’s a pharmacist, owns two drugstores in Prince William County, Maryland, and me, I’m pretty much good to go, so Reggie . . . It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s like, whenever I try to say something to her about how she can’t blame herself? She just won’t hear it.”
Ray was tempted to say that the tattoo on her throat was there for life whether she remembered the visit to the tattoo parlor or not, but he had just enough self-control to keep his mouth shut.
“Anyways, when my father got locked up, in the two years it took for my mother to get us back from foster care? She got her GED and took a semester at Dempsy Community College—although nothing came of it, because the minute we were returned to her she had to go on public assistance. She couldn’t continue with her education or go find a job because she couldn’t afford a baby-sitter, and wouldn’t drop us off at our grandparents’ apartment because of her father.
“I mean, a few years later, two seconds after the bastard died, we moved right back in with my grandmother so my mom could finally look for a job, but it turned out she couldn’t really hack it, work, went through something like three gigs in six months, wound up on medication for depression, been battling that ever since, no wonder given her life, fighting diabetes too, a parting gift from my grandfather.
“The thing is, when we moved back into Hopewell to live with my grandmother? Nana was like my second parent. And after Nana died and my mother took over the apartment, and me and Reggie had kids? My mother’s Nelson’s second parent. Dante, David from Reggie—for them, she’s the sole parent. She embraces all the kids, never complains, never gets overwhelmed. Says it’s her second chance to get things right.
“And I say to her, ‘Mom, you did the best you could with us given the circumstances,’ but she just won’t hear it. Always says, ‘I fucked up with you.’ Gets all teary. ‘I fucked up.’ Won’t buy anything else in the store.
“And I’ll tell you one other thing she did for me, which is let me witness her life so I can say to myself, I will not have a life like that. I will be my own person, my own way, no apologies to anybody.”
“Huh,” Ray grunted; married to a dope dealer, in and out of living in that same apartment: he just could not understand how she didn’t see it, but was afraid to point it out to her, afraid of losing this woman lying in bed with him, even if she was here only for
an interlude, even at the price of some kind of future beatdown or worse. Made diplomatic by desire, all he could say to relieve the pressure of his perceptions was “So your husband, he doesn’t, he never laid a hand on you, right?”
“If he had, it would be me in County right now, not him. And I’ll tell you something else. My mother, when she was a teenager, before she left and got married? She was wild, did everything there was to do. But once she got pregnant and learned what it’s like to live with a dealer? To see junkies around the clock? To have their addictions, their, their self-destructiveness to thank for putting the food on your table? She stopped cold. To this day, she doesn’t drug, she doesn’t, hasn’t had so much as a can of beer. However, she smokes like a bonfire, takes medication for depression, for diabetes, high blood pressure, insomnia, asthma . . . She’s a walking drugstore. Can’t go to sleep or get out of bed without a fistful of pills and, once again, unfortunately by negative example, I see her and say to myself, Unh-uh. No way. I don’t drink, smoke or take so much as an aspirin. Same for Nelson. I don’t know that much about Christian Science, I mean, if Nelson needed an operation or lifesaving antibiotics, yeah, of course, but otherwise our bodies are our temples and we keep them pure.”
Ray nodded approvingly, thinking, You live, with a drug dealer.
The light coming through the bedroom window abruptly changed, a flotilla of clouds drifting across the afternoon, and impulsively, using the flattening gloom as cover, he reached for the clean swoop above her hip, but oblivious to his too little, too late move, she simultaneously slid to the foot of the bed, got up and walked to the window, Ray craving and mourning, mourning and craving every inch of her; the flexed tendons at the backs of her knees, the soft inverted triangle of flesh at the base of her spine, her earlobe, throat, mouth, and when she stepped back into her jeans he experienced a sense of loss that just tore him apart.
It wasn’t love as love—he didn’t want to have a child or grow old with her—but as the combination of lust and sentiment hunkered down in him, the afternoon finally evoked a sensation that he could recognize: a long-lost misery-hunger from the time in his life when girls still got to him, when they had the power to put him in bed in the middle of the afternoon with the shades drawn so that he could be alone with his punch-drunk heart. Basically, she made him feel like he was back in Hopewell—sixteen, suffering and home.
“The thing about Freddy?” She turned to him as she pulled on her T-shirt. “Well, let me . . . My father and my grandfather? They just did what they did because that’s what they did. They didn’t, they weren’t what you would call reflective individuals. They were more like . . . See, there’s no animal on earth that ponders or analyzes their own actions. And that’s what they were, animals. But Freddy . . . Whenever Freddy pulls any kind of Freddy shit? He feels bad after, he feels remorse, he’ll talk about it, for whatever that’s worth, which as I hear myself right now, is not much . . . But the fact is, he’s thirty-three, and he’s getting to the point of no return. He’s got to start doing some serious soul searching or he’s going to wind up being who he is for the rest of his life.”
Half-listening, nodding like a bobble-head doll in response to whatever, Ray slowly sat up and began to look around the room for his pants.
The thing to do here, he knew, was to end it. To be running with this woman right now was the equivalent of willfully standing on train tracks, the train out of sight so far, but the rails beneath his feet beginning to vibrate like mad.
On the other hand, Ray thought—for boys at least, nobody went through life without getting a little bloody now and then; he’d been unnaturally lucky on that score so far. But given that as more or less an inescapable, maybe the best he could hope for was to at least choose the time and circumstance.
“What’s wrong,” she asked, cocking her head.
“What?” Ray said, startled and vaguely embarrassed. “Nothing.”
“You look like you just lost your best friend in the entire world,” she said with benign amusement, reading him like a billboard as she unsnapped the top button of her jeans again.
Part II
Blue Dempsy
Chapter 19
Home—February 23
Four days after his last surgical procedure, Ray, wearing a Dempsy PD Crime Scene Unit baseball cap supplied by Nerese to cover his shaved and resutured scalp, shakily emerged from the passenger side of her sedan, and with thick tentative fingers began fishing in his pockets for his keys.
He had escaped any serious residual damage from the assault but sustained some minor, short-term impairment—his right hand tended to curl up until his fingertips were touching the inside of his wrist, his right-foot to land inward, the heel not quite touching the ground—and she had pulled up directly in front of his apartment to minimize the distance he had to cover.
Nerese had to believe the doctors wouldn’t have released him if they felt he was still in any kind of medical jeopardy. But she knew that head injuries like Ray’s tended to revisit—if he started experiencing headaches or became faint, it might signal a new bleed, a buildup of fluid. If his right-side extremities became any floppier, it meant that rebleed was compressing nerve tissue; if he passed out, if he developed a fever, if this, if that . . . All of which had to be interpreted through the usual shakiness, soreness and knock-knee characteristic of any ambulatory post-op reacquainting himself with the outside world.
Once he was free of the car—Nerese had to lean across again and reshut the passenger door after his weak shove—she drove the hundred yards or so to the nearest Little Venice parking lot, then walked back, not all that surprised to see Ray still outside the building waiting for her, the key in the lock unturned. Not many assault victims were too keen on revisiting the scene of the crime for the first time without some company.
Following him into his apartment, she wound up stepping on his heels when he froze at the sight of the EMS debris that littered the floor tiles closest to the door.
“Shit,” he whispered.
She sidled past him into the living room, Ray stuck in the doorway, glaring at the discarded rubber gloves, torn gauze wrappers and needle-sharp shards of vase.
“That’s the one thing I hate about paramedics,” she said, gazing out at the river. “When they come and save your life? They never tidy up after themselves.”
She had left the bloody scatter as she’d found it two weeks ago, wanting him to see it first thing over the threshold.
Without a word, Ray moved off toward the rear of the apartment, came shuffling back with a small trash basket, a plastic bristle brush, a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Tilex.
She made no move to help, just stood there leaning against the windowsill as he eased himself down and went to work.
He looked furious, tight-lipped. Nerese intuited that for Ray, the act of getting on his knees and cleaning up his own browned blood was a symbolic gesture to mark his resolve to be done with it, for now and evermore. But she had been an observer of moments like this too many times to count, and as she watched him attempt to obliterate the evidence of his own mortality, she began to speculate when the terror of being back here would truly start to kick in.
With his impatience and anxiety allowing him to do at best a half-assed job on the floor, Ray struggled to his feet, his right hand hugging his side, and began working on the black fingerprint powder that stippled his front door.
“Don’t forget those,” Nerese said, breaking the implosive silence as she gestured to the set of greasy handprints flush against the wall about ten feet down from where the forensic team had called it a day.
“Those what.” Ray swiveled, squinting, searching, then finally picking up on them, oily and luminous in the sunlight.
“What’s—” he began, then, “Oh . . . ,” turning ashen with some kind of memory hit and, forgetting about his smudged door, he set to work on the hands, going at them with a haunted determination.
Nerese imagined Ray r
ight now reexperiencing standing there up against that wall in frisk mode, alert yet helpless, waiting for it . . .
“Seconds seemed like hours, huh?”
“What?” Ray leaned into his work, half-listening.
“That guy must’ve had you up there like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre . . . Did he give you a little speech first about fucking with OPP? Or did he just go all home-run derby on you without a word.”
Ray turned to her. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“No,” he said, then, “No.”
Nerese pushed off from the radiator she had been perched on, walked over to the wall and, locating the remains of the prints, assumed the position, twisting her head to look at Ray over her shoulder. “Man, this had to be one of the worst moments of your life.”
At first, he seemed paralyzed, gawking at the re-creation with slack-jawed distress, but then he simply walked away. Soon after Nerese heard the sound of running water from behind the bathroom door, and envisioned him in there gripping the sides of the sink, too unmanned to even splash water on his face.
And when he finally returned to the living room a few minutes later, she was set up for him on the couch facing the TV: the mug shot of Freddy Martinez, and the framed photo of Ruby playing basketball that had a place of honor on one of the bookshelves, laid out side by side on the glass coffee table.
Ray staggered back on his heels. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Nah nah, I’m never going away on this one. Don’t you get that by now?” tapping a long artificial nail on the glass table.
“Tweetie.” Ray stood there—“Tweetie . . .”—then simply gave up, dropping onto the couch next to her, pinching the flesh at the inside corners of his eyes.
Samaritan Page 23
