Mecca's Return

by Anna J.

Ruby looked at her holding a key in her hand. Puzzled, she looked at the key as Daphne held it out to her. Then she noticed the Mercedes-Benz insignia on the key.

  “Welcome home, Ruby.”

  “Get out of here. No, you didn’t!” Ruby screamed out.

  “Yes, I did! Now, get in it and go see your niece.”

  At the mention of her niece, Ruby’s smile quickly vanished. She knew she would have to toughen up and face what she felt she couldn’t. Her mind was filled with guilt: she blamed herself for Mecca’s condition. Every thought made her regret bringing her into this game. It had cost her years of freedom and almost the life of her beloved niece.

  “It’s not your fault, Ruby. It’s about get back. Now it’s your time,” Daphne said in a measured tone of reassurance.

  Ruby simply nodded her head and grabbed the keys.

  Immediately, she got in and inhaled the fresh smell of the beige leather interior. When she started the car, she became more excited at the sound of the engine. She hit a button, and the convertible roof mechanically drew back. All the while Daphne kept a smile on her face, happy that her friend was home and excited for her.

  Ruby looked over at Daphne, as the cars were parked parallel to each other. “You coming with me?” she asked while Daphne tossed her a CD.

  Ruby stared at the Alicia Keys CD while Daphne answered, “Spend time with your niece, and call me when you’re done. I’ll show you where you’re staying.”

  Ruby nodded. She placed the CD in the system and pulled off. It didn’t even matter to her that she didn’t have her license. It was the Brooklyn way!

  Karmen lay on her back, unsatisfied, as a casual sex partner of hers humped like a rabbit, dripping sweat on her dry skin. This was the last time she’d be giving this dude some pussy. He fucked like he had just lost his virginity! Even his grunting was irritating to her.

  “This pussy good, Ma. Who pussy is this?”

  “Are you done yet?” she asked instead of responding to his question, her tone filled with irritation.

  With his eyes closed, he held on to her thick hips and mumbled. After he released his fluid into the condom, Karmen quickly got up and walked to the small motel room bathroom, slamming the door.

  “It’s hard to find a good dick these days. All these cats think about themselves,” Karmen said to herself while standing in front of the mirror, fixing her long hair into a ponytail.

  Ever since her boyfriend was killed and her secret lover Shamel was murdered, Karmen had yet to find a man that could bring her to orgasm. Most of the men she dated were men she dealt with in her new hustle. Credit card scams.

  More often, the men in the scam were African immigrants, who were usually in the country illegally and used American women. They would take the women all over the country, getting thousands of dollars of merchandise with other people’s credit cards, then selling the merchandise at a cheaper price. Karmen was under the impression that these African men, with their Mandingo dicks, would be good lovers in bed. She was sorely disappointed. A lot of them were a waste of big dicks, and even if they were decent lovers, Karmen couldn’t get into it, because the guy didn’t believe in deodorant. She held her breath most of the time in bed.

  With the credit card scam, the money she made with her partners in crime was decent, but not enough to satisfy her thirst for the hottest and latest in fashion and a means of paying the bills. Gone were the days when her boyfriend, now dead, would give her money and Shamel, after dicking her down, would do the same.

  So her choice was easy. At Shamel’s grandmother’s funeral, Mecca’s aunt had offered her a job at a grocery store she was opening up, where groceries weren’t the only thing being sold. Karmen didn’t hesitate to take the offer.

  Meeting Mecca’s aunt felt like meeting a celebrity. Karmen had heard so much about her from Mecca and Shamel that she could barely believe it. She was a legend in Brownsville and East New York. She even noticed the resemblance between Mecca and her aunt, and she could also see where Mecca got her swagger.

  When Karmen first met Mecca, she immediately took a liking to her. She had style, and she commanded respect from men and women alike. At first Karmen didn’t feel guilty about having the affair with Shamel. They had known each other before Mecca met him. She was always at their grandmother’s house when she dealt with one of his two cousins, Kaheem and Born.

  The more she got to know Mecca, the more she felt guilty, but the good sex and money she was getting erased most of the guilt. Still, she was deeply saddened when she found out that Mecca had been shot and was in a coma. She visited her in the hospital often with Shamel’s grandmother, who also loved Mecca like her own. Mecca had tears in her eyes when she came out of it and Shamel’s grandmother told her that Shamel was dead. Her eyes just blinked. Now Karmen wondered how she would react when she was told about Grandma’s death.

  Karmen walked out of the bathroom, naked. The short charcoal black African guy who looked at her with lust in his eyes sat on the hotel bed, stroking his manhood, as if he was ready for another round of skin smacking. His look of lust turned into a gaze of disappointment when Karmen picked up her black thong and clothes and began to dress. He hated to see her cream-colored, gorgeously built body disappear in her clothes.

  “You want to leave already?” he asked as his manhood shrunk.

  Karmen rolled her eyes. “I’m outta here. Oh, I need that money, too.” She pulled her purse strap over her shoulder and placed one hand on her shapely hips, with the other held out.

  “We still have three hours left,” he sulked in his thick accent.

  Karmen walked over to his brown slacks, which were lying on the brown carpet, and went in his pockets.

  “Wait. I will get it for you.” He jumped up off the bed, but Karmen already held a wad of cash in her hands. She quickly counted a thousand dollars, then dropped the slacks and the rest of the cash on the floor and walked out of the room.

  Growing up on the rough streets of Bushwick, Karmen learned at an early age that you couldn’t wait around for things to just drop into your hands. You had to go out and take them with no fear. Fear was a hustler’s worst enemy. And Karmen, who grew up poor, living in a crowded tenement with four sisters and a mother and father strung out on dope, knew if you let fear take over, you would starve.

  Karmen hopped in a cab, smiling. Tomorrow she would head downtown to buy that Dolce & Gabbana blouse she had seen at Macy’s. She reminded herself that she would go to a sex shop, too. It was time for her to get a vibrator. If you couldn’t find someone to make you cum, might as well do it yourself. Nobody would treat you better than you would.

  When she got to her Bushwick apartment building, she rode up in the elevator alone. Once at her floor, she got off and noticed two suited white men in front of her door. Confusion was written all over her round, pretty face.

  “Can I help y’all?” she asked. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were police, but suited cops usually meant major problems.

  “Is your name Karmen Santiago?” one of them asked in a calm and even voice.

  “Yes, that’s me. What’s up?” Karmen asked, nervousness filling her thick Brooklyn accent.

  Both men flashed their badges. “Ms. Santiago, we are from Brooklyn North Homicide. We would like to ask you some questions concerning the murders of Kaheem and”—the cop speaking quickly looked at his pad—“his brother, whom they called Born. Can we come in, or would you like to take a ride to the station?”

  “I sense you’re not satisfied with the karma the people who’ve betrayed you are receiving,” Lou said while sitting with his feet propped up on a large oak wood desk in what appeared to be a doctor’s office.

  “Lou, how many times do I have to tell you I’m not thinking about revenge? I just wanna move on with my life,” Mecca replied, trying to sound sincere as she paced the office, staring at the paintings on the walls. She would say whatever she needed to say to Lou for him to release his hold on
her and let her out of the hospital. Intrigued by the paintings, she skipped right by some, while others she stared at a little longer. Some of them, Mecca realized, were of her as a baby, her at eight, then her as a teenager, and finally there was a painting of her as the adult she was.

  “Mecca, Mecca, my dear Mecca. Just how am I supposed to believe that after all you have seen and know about your so-called friends and family? That you just forgave and forgot?” Lou asked, sitting up, with his feet on the black carpeted floor.

  For a moment, she stood in front of the painting of her at eight, hiding under a bed. “I’ve always been a grateful person, and now that I have a second chance at life, I want to show my gratitude. And you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.”

  Lou walked over to Mecca. Standing next to her, he stared at the painting. He shook his head before saying, “Childhood is a golden age for mankind. So innocent and full of misunderstanding of this cruel world. To think it was Sigmund Freud who said that childhood is a time of uninterrupted bliss. Don’t you wish you could have it back, Mecca?”

  Suddenly, her dream state switched to the painting on the wall. Eight-year-old Mecca remembered hiding under the bed, with tears running down her face. She looked back and forth at her mother’s and father’s eyes, which held fear. Their voices were muffled due to the tape around them. Two men with guns barked menacingly at her father, while her mother cried.

  The words the men said couldn’t be heard in the dream. One of them removed the tape from around her father’s mouth and was talking intimately with him. For the first time in her eight years she saw fear on her father’s face. She remembered him as a fearless man who would stand up to anyone. He was their protector, their hero. No one messed with her or her mother because they were Bobby Blast’s family.

  Her father’s fear heightened hers. Seeing the tears in her mother’s eyes made her cry even more. She hated to see her mother cry. She could still remember the first time she saw it, back when Mommy and Daddy were arguing and her father stormed out of the apartment, yelling that he would never come back. Mecca cried as she lay in bed with her mother, until the middle of the night, when she felt her father hug both of them. She heard his voice mumble, “I love you. I will never leave y’all.”

  Then the only sound Mecca heard in the dream was the gunshots that took her mother’s and father’s life. Little Mecca stayed under the bed, and the two men left. She heard the door slam, then the footsteps. It took a while for her to look out from under the bed when a person’s black, shiny shoes and the hem of his long trench coat came into view. She knew who it was. Then his face appeared, and he stretched out his hand.

  “Come out from under the bed, Mecca. I will protect you. I will never leave.”

  Mecca awoke from the dream as the sun shined through the blinds over the hospital window. The rays beamed in between the slats, making lines of long triangular light appear across the walls of the room and on the bed. For a moment, she looked at the print of her feet under the white sheets.

  Slowly, she pulled the sheets off of her body and placed her feet on the cold tiled floor. Instantly, she noticed the metal walker in front of a bedside table.

  Taking hold of it, she stood slowly. Her first steps after lying in bed almost six months were shaky and wobbly. Her legs responded slowly as she took baby steps, eventually moving quicker toward the window. Parting the blinds, she stared out at the sunny Brooklyn streets and smiled.

  “Mecca?” The voice made her turn and face the door. Ruby stood next to Karmen, who covered her mouth in shock. Her eyes watered, just as Ruby’s did. The smile left Mecca’s face, and she turned to stare back out at the Brooklyn scenery. Her only thought as she looked at the familiar streets was a simple one. These streets are mine.

  Chapter Three

  For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.

  —Proverbs 4:16

  Daphne hired five trusted women among Donovan’s relatives to bag up pounds of weed. She instructed them to put the different types of exotic weed in small glass jars, small twenty-dollar bags, and sandwich bags, which she would sell as weight broken down into quarters, ounces, and halves. After showing Ruby to a furnished brownstone apartment in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, she drove her to a gutted, abandoned store in Crown Heights.

  “I bought this place six months ago,” Daphne told her as they stood on the sidewalk, observing the bodega with its dirty yellow sign.

  “The money clean?” Ruby asked with her hands in her black Enyce velour jacket.

  “Of course. You know the feds still watching.”

  Both women entered the store after Daphne opened it up. Ruby looked around at the dusty interior. With nothing special standing out, it appeared to be an average bodega, which almost every corner in New York City’s neighborhoods had. Taking another step, Daphne crushed glass under her foot.

  “With your friend Karmen working here, it will look like any other bodega.”

  Within a month, the store had been up and running. Karmen had two of her sisters, Maria and Tina, help her run the place. They quickly got a lot of business. Guys in Crown Heights began to frequent the store just to try to kick it with the three Puerto Rican cuties that worked there. Karmen was kind to all the guys and was flattered by their compliments, but she gave none of them the time of day. Her sisters were another story. Not only did they flirt with the guys, but they even left the store at times for quickies in a guy’s car or apartment.

  Karmen scolded them about their activities, but she knew it fell on deaf ears. She realized they would have to learn how to deal with the opposite sex the way she did. Eventually, she thought, they would get burnt out spreading their legs for everyone that paid attention to them, leaving them with sore pussies and broke pockets. Karmen knew she had to pay attention to business and also the illegal business being run out of the store, in the back. Ruby gave Karmen bagged-up weed to sell with these instructions.

  “A person has to buy something like potato chips or a twenty-five-cent juice if they want some weed. Believe me, they will do it! This is some high-quality shit, better than any other spot in Brooklyn. I won’t have a lot of it in the store at one time, but before you run out, always call this number,” Ruby had instructed, handing her a small white card. “Just say, ‘Wassup, shorty? You coming over?’ and somebody will bring the next batch.”

  In no time, the word spread that the store in Crown Heights had some of the best smoke in town. Karmen and her sisters were enjoying the money they were making. The more money Ruby made, the more money she paid Karmen and her sisters, who did little with their money but shop for clothes and jewelry.

  “Stack your money. There will always be rainy days ahead,” Ruby had informed Karmen one day. Karmen knew that she was referring to her possibly going to jail. Karmen hated to think of that, and she really thought that the day would never come. It was just weed, but the thought of those homicide detectives still bothered her in the back of her mind. The cops found out from the landlord that her boyfriend, Kaheem, was killed in an apartment that was leased in her name, and right after the murder she moved.

  “I couldn’t sleep there anymore. It reminded me of him,” Karmen cried. However, what the cops did not know was that her tears were from fear of them thinking she had something to do with the murders, and were not for her dead boyfriend.

  “Where were you?” one of them asked while sitting on a wooden stool in her kitchen.

  “I was at a friend’s house in East New York,” she lied as the scene played in her mind. She hadn’t actually witnessed the murder. Shamel had ordered her to wait outside while he took care of his cousins, who were snakes. Murder, Karmen felt, Kaheem and Born deserved.

  “Who might that friend be? Can that friend verify that?” the other cop grunted.

  “She is in a hospital. She can’t talk at this point,” Karmen replied, referring to Mecca.

  The cops finally left the apartment, telling her th
at they would more than likely be back to talk to her and giving her their cards, with the usual, “If you find out anything that will bring the killers to Darnell, give us a ring.”

  “I’ll definitely do that.”

  Karmen figured they wouldn’t get anything. Shamel was dead, and the only other person that knew about it was Mecca, and she couldn’t talk. Even if she could, Karmen doubted she would talk to the cops about it. Then she figured that, hopefully, that bullet to the head had taken her memory. She was damn lucky that that bullet had only cracked her skull, just barely grazing her brain.

  Still, she was shocked when they entered Mecca’s room and saw her standing at the window with the aid of a walker. It seemed like a miracle to her. For months now, Mecca had lain in a coma, only to come out of it and not talk or move out of the bed. The doctors said that she wasn’t paralyzed, that it was like a person coming out of a mild stroke, and that it would take time for the brain to recuperate from the trauma.

  But she was still beautiful. Her hair grew back from when the doctors cut it to operate, but it wasn’t long like it used to be. Her skin was no longer too pale and had gained some of its natural color back. Now all she had to do was gain her weight back and the old Mecca would emerge.

  Still, this was the hardest time. During the following weeks, Mecca went through physical and speech therapy. She quickly got her swagger back, and though she talked, it was slow and low. Most of the time, she barely talked; she just glared at people. Karmen could swear that every time Mecca looked at her and Ruby, there was a look of anger or hate in her eyes. It was like she wanted to lash out, but something was holding her back. When Karmen brought it up to Ruby, she waved it off.

  “She’s just stressed and frustrated. That therapy could stress a person out. Can you imagine being a grown person having to learn how to walk and talk again like you’re a baby?” Ruby tried to explain to Karmen so that she could understand. Though it made sense to Karmen, the look still left her shaken.