by Lisa Unger
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To Joe and Jen Pamlanye
Thank you for the blessing of your friendship and for the precious gift you gave me
—space and time.
today
There’s nothing about me that you would ever notice. I am neither especially thin, nor overweight. My face will not be one you remember. With dark eyes and pale skin, hair the color of straw, cheeks round and just rosy enough that you won’t wonder if I’m ill, I will blend into the sea of other plain faces you saw before and after as you went about your day. Nothing about my clothes will capture your notice. No brands that incite jealousy, or anything revealing, no stains, maybe just wrinkled or worn enough that you’ll dismiss me as someone without much money, though not poor enough to be in need. If I’m wearing a uniform, I don’t even exist. I am the checkout clerk at the grocery store, or the maid that cleans your hotel room, the girl who answered the phone, or the young lady at the information desk. No, you would say later, you can’t recall her name or what she looked like, not really. The truth is you don’t see me; your eyes glance over me, never coming to rest. But I see you.
Today I am trying not to emit the energy of excitement. I use my breath to control the pulse of adrenaline, just as I have been taught. I keep my head bent and my pace easy as I trail behind him. He moves slowly, haltingly, relying heavily on his cane, pauses long at the curbs, edging down cautiously. Occasionally, I have to slow my stride or stop altogether, glance at clothing I wouldn’t buy in windows that cast back my reflection, someone narrow and still amid the bustle of city dwellers shuttling through their frenetic lives.
My hands are small and soft but stronger than you would imagine. Where I train we smack our palms and knuckles against cinderblocks. This action creates tiny fissures in the bones. When those fissures heal, the bone is stronger. I can put the blade of my palm through a two-by-four. But my hands are not calloused in the way of the fighter; they are smooth and hard as beach stones. Because I am not big, I must be fast. Because I am not big, I must come in close and hard, use elbows, knees, deliver unflinching blows to kidneys and groin, the soft notch at the base of the throat, the jugular. Eyes are good, too. Eyes can be a fight ender if you get it right.
A fight, when you must fight, is a dance. You can prepare but not strategize. You are married to your opponent, his movements dictating your own; his weaknesses are your strengths, his mistakes, your opportunities. You must be present, focused, and—most of all—you must breathe. No panic. No anger. Just the breath.
His right hand grips the cane. In his left, he clutches a green reusable sack. It’s Wednesday, his day to go to the farmers’ market where he buys berries, bread, honey, kale, carrots, and a tub of hummus. The vendors know him, but he is rarely greeted with smiles. He is cantankerous, unfriendly, and something more. Maybe others can smell what I know to be true about him. They catch the scent but can’t place it. They recoil ever so slightly, want to draw their hands back quickly when they give over his purchase or change. Only the old woman at the hummus stand openly scowls at him. You only know it if you’ve seen it before. It’s death. There’s a rot inside that sweats from his pores, stares back at you from the abyss of his eyes. Whether you can name it or not, if you’re sensitive to such things, it repels you.
He crosses the street. Once he reaches the far curb, I follow quickly just as the light is about to change. He wears a frayed tweed jacket and a mud-colored fedora, khakis, and brown walking shoes. Though he is decently turned out, no one looks at him. No one sees the old, the frail, the infirm; they are invisible like me. No one looks as he turns off Broadway onto Twenty-Sixth Street. He stands in front of the metal door, loops his hand through the handles of the bag, and fishes his key from his pocket. With the key in the lock, leaning on the cane, he struggles to push open the door. This is his moment of vulnerability.
“Can I help you with that, sir?” I ask coming up behind him, pushing the door open easily from over his shoulder.
“I don’t need any help,” he says, not even glancing at me. I dance around him and step inside the small vestibule. There’s another door. I need him to give me the key.
“It’s no trouble,” I say brightly. “I’m Eve? From the third floor?”
I am not Eve. I do not live on the third floor. I take the sack from his hand.
“Give that back,” he says. A little spittle travels from his lip to my cheek. I wipe it away. “Leave me alone.”
“Give me the key,” I say. “I’ll let you in.”
He doesn’t hand it over, so I reach and take the key from him. His grip is weak and shaky, and his face is getting red from anger, from a kind of twitching powerlessness. I remember him as a powerful man, with a steely grip and cruel smile, blank eyes—which is all I ever saw of his face. And this moment in the vestibule gives me the briefest pause, a stuttering disconnect between the past and the present. He’s just an old man. Helpless. Weak. Then, I remember the vise of his stony fingers on the soft flesh of my arm. I remember my mother shrieking my name, a wobbling pitch and tenor I’d never heard before and would never, all my life after, forget. I remember him. But he does not remember me. Once, I was afraid of him. He was, in fact, my worst nightmare. Today, it’s almost too easy.
I put the key in the lock and push open the interior door. It’s here that I experience another moment of doubt, a hollow that opens through my middle. This is wrong. Part of you knows that.
“Number 103, right?” I say.
He’s staring at me now. There’s a slight tremor to his head, almost like he’s shaking it no. His eyes are a watery brown, still blank, but weak, not strong and cold like I remembered. His body has failed him. Years in prison, hard living, and illness have aged him terribly. I’ve seen men his age look fit, robust. Not him.
He doesn’t have much longer, and his life is grim and lonely. I could just leave him be. The possibility hovers, a flicker of light teasing in the periphery of my consciousness. I could take another path.
But. He doesn’t deserve to eat fresh berries and spend the morning watching television, does he? He doesn’t get to go to the park later and feed his stale bread to the pigeons. He’s doesn’t deserve those simple human pleasures at the end of life.
You don’t get to decide who deserves what.
Oh, but I do.
I unlock the door to his apartment and walk inside. It’s dark and bare, just an old recliner and a television on a stand. A bed in the corner, neatly made. A picture of a woman in a frame, a paperback novel, and a glass of water sitting on a wobbly end table. And, of all things, a Bible open on the kitchen counter by the phone.
“Have you found Jesus?” I ask him. “Are you saved?”
“Get out of here,” he says, snatching the groceries from my hand, pushing past me. “Go on now. Get out.”
I close the door. He turns and takes me in with those eyes.
There he is.
The monster I remember.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Don’t you know me?” I ask with a smile. It has been many years, and a lot has happened between then and now. A whole lifetime really.
But he does know me. He does. I can see it as he starts to back away.
“You.”
“That’s right,” I say. “M
e.”
He stumbles back a little more, as I lock and chain the door. He falls heavily into his old recliner. His breathing is labored, filling the room with its wheeze. It’s lung cancer, I have learned.
“Where is it?” I say.
“What?” he asks. But his glance over toward the bed gives him away. I reach under the mattress and retrieve the gun I was sure he had. I put it on the counter, well out of his reach.
I have something of my own. I take it out of my pocket and hold it up so that he can see. I wonder if he recognizes it. He used it on me once. I still bear its marks. Outside and in. A single tear trails down his cheek. His lips are moving in a whisper. It takes me a second to realize he’s praying.
Is this who you want to be?
It’s my uncle’s voice, the uncle who is not an uncle and somehow more like a father because he took me in, loved me, taught me everything I know.
I take a step toward the man. A faint skein of music leaks in from the apartment next door. There are things I need to say. Questions I want to ask, but they are lost in the red fog that crowds my thoughts.
Yes, it is, I answer to the voice in my head. It is precisely who I want to be.
part one
TWO GRAVES
one
Raven looked repentant, but Claudia knew that she wasn’t. The girl had her head bent, and the sheets of her blue-black hair, thick and impossibly glossy, fell to hide her face. It was October. A week from Halloween, and this was Claudia’s second time in the principal’s office since school began. The first one was about grades. Raven was already struggling. We can see from her test scores that she’s capable of more, the desperate math teacher said. But it’s like she’s just not here. Not paying attention. Leaving answers blank on her test. Mrs. Bishop, she’s not even trying.
Claudia could already see it on Principal Blake’s face: The Look. It was the expression that careful people, kind people got when they started to wonder if there was something wrong with Raven.
“It’s difficult to start a new school,” said Principal Blake. “But here at Lost Valley Central we have a zero-tolerance policy for physical violence.”
Physical violence? That was new. Claudia still wasn’t sure what Raven had done. She’d raced in as soon as Principal Blake had called. A bland man with a soft voice and graying head of hair, he had greeted her in the office with an understanding smile. We’ve had a problem in the cafeteria. A girl has gone home.
“Oh, really?” said Raven. “So, it’s okay for her to be verbally abusive to me, and I just have to sit there and take it?”
“That’s enough, Raven,” said Claudia. She wondered if she sounded as exhausted by her daughter as she felt. The kid’s capacity for outrage was endless.
“There are other ways to solve your problems that don’t involve flipping a lunch tray onto someone,” said the principal easily. “What did she say to you exactly? What made you so angry?”
Raven shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
The principal answered her with a quick nod, like he got it, like he knew how cruel kids could be and how words could hurt as badly as any blow.
“I understand that bullying can be verbal and emotional as well as physical. And Clara Parker has had her moments; she’s sat here with me more than once. Still, when we step over that line into the physical, that can’t be tolerated.”
Oh, god, thought Claudia. She’s going to be suspended—expelled. She could just hear her sister Martha crowing, I told you that changing schools wasn’t the solution. You can’t just keep running away.
“I need a clearer picture of what happened,” said Claudia. She looked at Raven. who had turned her head away.
“Apparently, Clara and a friend had some unkind words for Raven. I am not sure what was said since neither Raven, Clara, or her friend Beth will say. But, in response, Raven flipped a tray that was in front of them, covering both the girls with food.”
Claudia felt the tug of a smile but bit it back.
“It was an accident,” said Raven unconvincingly. “I was picking it up to walk away and finish my lunch elsewhere.”
“It was meatball and spaghetti day at school today, so it made quite a mess.”
“So it’s not that she hit anyone,” said Claudia. She didn’t want to be one of those parents, the kind that rushed to the defense of her obnoxious, misbehaved child. But it was important that she be clear on exactly what happened.
“I didn’t hit anyone,” Raven said. “It was an accident. Clara went home because I ruined her outfit, not because I hurt her.”
Principal Blake nodded carefully, cocking his head and wrinkling his eyes a little. “People around the girls said that it seemed like Raven purposely dumped the tray onto Clara.”
“Yeah,” said Raven, sitting up a little. “All her friends, who were laughing while she was verbally abusing me.”
Claudia struggled against a flush of anger, a surge of protectiveness for Raven. “So, basically,” she said, trying to keep her voice mild. “A group of girls surrounded Raven, saying unkind words—to use your phrase—and when Raven got up to leave, she tipped her tray either by accident or on purpose and ruined another girl’s outfit. Is that right?”
Raven gave a light nod. “It was an accident.”
Claudia was reasonably sure that it wasn’t an accident. She knew Raven’s temper was a flash flood, surging against everything in its path and then quickly receding, leaving regret in its wake.
“That’s what I gather,” said the principal reasonably. He seemed like a nice man, trying to do his job.
“Were the other girls reprimanded?” asked Claudia.
“It’s unclear what was said,” said the principal. “So it’s difficult to address.”
“Okay,” said Claudia. She took and released a breath. “So where are we with this? Is Raven going to be punished?”
“Look . . . it’s Thursday,” said Principle Blake. He had nice hands, long thin fingers, and a white-gold wedding band, clean, pink nails. You could tell a lot about a person by his hands. He was careful, responsible, tried to follow the rules. He laced his fingers in front of him on the green desk blotter.
“I’m not going to suspend Raven; it’s not going on her record,” he went on. “Let’s just have her take the day off tomorrow and we can all start fresh on Monday, let her think about what happened and reflect on how she could have handled things better. Maybe on Monday we can have a conference with each girl and her parents to discuss how we can better handle conflict. How does that sound?”
It sounded like shit actually. A “day off” was a suspension, even if it didn’t go on her permanent record. She would have to attend the conference alone while Raven sulked unapologetic, and Principal Blake played benevolent mediator. This Clara and her parents The Parkers would play the injured party, and Claudia and Raven would be the outsiders. But she found herself nodding.
Claudia wanted to say something. She wanted to say thank you, and assure him that she was going to make sure that Raven understood the seriousness of her actions, but also ask that this Clara be made to understand the power of words.
Instead, there was a big sob stuck in her throat, a bulb of anger and frustration and sadness. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t be able to contain it. So, instead, she just kept nodding and rose. She felt Raven’s dark eyes on her. Only her daughter, and maybe her sister, knew that silence from Claudia was more serious than yelling—which she didn’t do very often either.
“Ms. Bishop?” said Principal Blake. He was staring at her with concern. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she managed. “Thank you for your patience with Raven. She and I will talk over the weekend, and of course, there will be consequences at home.”
There. She didn’t burst into tears. Was there any more vulnerable position than being the single parent of a badly behaved child, sitting in the principal’s office? Weren’t you the one being reprimanded, re
ally? Because wasn’t it, after all, your fault that your child couldn’t control herself?
“Raven,” she said. “Do you have something you want to say to Principal Blake?”
“I’m sorry,” she said dutifully. “I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have.”
The principal smiled warmly. “It takes a big person to admit when she’s wrong. I think that’s a good start. Write me an email over the weekend, okay? With your reflections?”
Raven nodded. “I will.”
Claudia draped an arm around her daughter’s slender shoulders as the girl stood, gave her a little squeeze, then nudged her out the door.
• • •
CLAUDIA STOOD BESIDE RAVEN’S LOCKER while the girl stuffed her belongings—iPad, binder, dirty gym clothes—into her knapsack. Claudia had hated school—the ugly lights, the cafeteria smells, gym class, the pathetic social hierarchy where looks and athleticism trumped brains and character (not that that ever changed). The scent of the hallway—what was that smell?—brought it back vividly.
“It’s not my fault,” said Raven, slamming shut the locker door.
“It never is, is it?” said Claudia.
That glare, those dark eyes in that ivory skin. That full, pink mouth and ridiculously long eyelashes. Raven’s beauty was shocking, frightening in its intensity, in her utter obliviousness to it. We need to get a burka on that kid, Martha had joked. A body like that? On a fifteen-year-old? It should be illegal.
Luckily, Raven’s gorgeousness was tempered by the boyish way she carried herself. She loped. If Claudia didn’t insist on showers and hair brushing, the girl would look most of the time as if she’d been dragged through a bush. And still, the way they stared. Men, boys, the same stunned goofy expression, eyes wide, smile wolfish on male faces young and old. Raven didn’t even see. Claudia took to carrying pepper spray in her bag. She’s a baby, Claudia had to keep herself from screaming. Don’t you look at her like that!
