Visitation Street

by Ivy Pochoda

  “My friend?”

  “Don’t tell me her name.” Gloria takes a deep breath and looks up at the ceiling. “I remember now. June. We’ll try and talk to June.” She flutters her fingers.

  If you want to talk to the dead, talk to Cree’s mom.

  Before Val can object, Gloria grasps her hands and squeezes. A low-watt current passes between them. Val doesn’t close her eyes. Instead she takes in the grocery list held to the fridge by an orange magnet, the wire fruit basket hanging over the sink, a coffee cup with a lipstick mark waiting to be washed. She clings to everything mundane to fight back the extraordinary.

  Gloria’s grip tightens. The light hasn’t changed, but shadows have crept over her face, making caverns of her eyes. Although Gloria is only a few feet away, Val knows she’d have trouble reaching her.

  Despite all the rituals she’s invented to summon June home, Val doesn’t want June to appear here. She does not want to hear her voice come out from Cree’s mother’s mouth. Until this moment, Val always thought of June’s return in the abstract, a miraculous homecoming, a joyful celebration. But in reality, what would June say? What accusations would she make?

  It’s your fault.

  Gloria’s face contracts and resettles. Her lips part. Val’s breath catches. She doesn’t want to hear what Gloria is about to say. She snatches her hands out of Gloria’s grasp and covers her ears.

  “No!” Val’s cry raises a metallic echo among the flatware and pots drying on the counter.

  Gloria’s eyes snap open. The shadows blow back from her face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t find her.”

  “Okay,” Val says. “That’s okay.” She cups her hand over her mouth and exhales into it, trying to catch her jagged breath.

  Gloria leans over the table. “You don’t believe she’s dead. For this to work, you have to believe she’s dead. Do you believe it? Or are you still hoping?”

  “Is she dead?”

  “That’s not for me to say. If you think she’s dead, I can try and reach her. But only if that’s what you believe. It has to start with you. Sometimes we hold on too long. Sometimes with good reason. Do you know your reason?”

  “I just want to know where she is,” Val says. “I want her to come back.”

  “You’ll find her, either with my help or with someone else’s. You just have to decide how and where to look.” Gloria switches to a chair closer to Val and takes her hand. There is nothing probing or searching in her touch this time. “Baby, there’s hundreds of people around us we don’t see. It’s up to you to open your eyes. You have to choose that this is where you want to find June.” Gloria gives her hand a squeeze.

  “So it’s up to me to decide if she is dead?”

  “There’s a difference between dead and forgotten.”

  Val stands up. She rummages in her pocket for money but Gloria waves her off.

  They walk to the door. Gloria keeps an arm draped around Val’s shoulder. At the threshold she pulls Val into a warm, soft hug. Val closes her eyes. With her face buried in Gloria’s shoulder, she sees the raft and the river, the pink rubber buoyed by the water’s pulse. She does not see June.

  “I’ll tell Cree you were here,” Gloria says, closing the door behind Val.

  This is how you walk home. This is how you look for June—you follow the precise route that led you to the water that night. You see yourself from above—a player moving through a video-game maze. At Coffey Park you turn left. You walk along Lorraine Street, over to the abandoned lot with the boat. You look for Cree among the weeds. You continue down to the Beard Street Pier. You dip your toes into the water at the exact place where you and June launched the raft. You get on your knees, soaking your shorts. You tip your head, lowering your ear into the water. If you can hear the water speak, it will tell you where to find June. You listen for June. The water has no voice. Its heartbeat, the one audible that night from the raft, is silent.

  You walk home along the rocks, keeping your eyes on the water, tracing the precise path of the raft, looking below the surface. You pick up trash as you go. If you pick up trash, if you clean the rocks, June will come home.

  Val follows these commands that pop into her head, letting them guide her out onto a jetty, as close as she can get to the place where she last saw June. The sulfuric mud between the rocks is charcoal gray, iridescent with an oily film.

  Val slides her bag from her shoulder. She dumps the contents onto the rocks—a set of barrettes the girls shared in middle school, her half of a friendship necklace, a potholder from a fourth-grade craft project, and a handful of other sacred objects that she’s transformed into talismans of June’s return. One by one she hurls them into the water. She watches as some sink while others are carried away, bobbing and pinwheeling on the surface. If these things mean anything to June, she’ll come back.

  She sits on the rocks and drops her chin to her chest. She clasps her hands and places them in her lap. Then she prays to God or the river to shake June free, cough her up, spit her out, send her home.

  Starting tenth grade is like being the new girl again, except this time June isn’t there to help. Here is what Val overhears during her first week at school. She was raped by a stranger from the Houses and left for dead under the pier. She and June had been high on E when June fell into the water and drowned. They had been turning tricks down by the water when June was abducted.

  She does not contradict these wild stories, but allows her classmates to spin their tales, hoping that soon they will forget the story of June’s disappearance and notice her presence. Because Val cannot imagine going through high school without a friend to whisper to in the hall, pass notes with in class. So instead of calling her schoolmates out for their lies and speculation, she lets them slide.

  In class, she allows her mind to wander from June to Cree, hoping that he will validate her, that his friendship will pardon her. If he likes her—if one person likes her—she can begin to forgive herself for June.

  During the second week of school, in the middle of geometry she sees him—a hooded figure pacing beneath the scaffolding underneath the abandoned public school that is being converted into apartments. His face is obscured by his hood. But she recognizes Cree’s slouch, his noncommittal gangster walk. She glances at the clock. There are twenty minutes left.

  The teacher is drawing a line down the middle of the rhombus. He begins to write a formula on the board. Val watches Cree pace to the corner and return. Then she watches him pace to the corner and disappear. Her heart feels as if it’s beating against stone. It’s a minute before he returns, loping into view like he’s walking in jelly. He pauses, then turns toward the corner.

  Val grabs her backpack. Her feet echo in the hall. Her bag thwacks a bank of lockers as she cuts a corner too close. She skips the bottom four steps and hits the lobby. Her knees buckle under the weight of her jump. The impact lurches into her chest. Then she’s through the doors.

  She sees him rounding the corner, heading back in her direction.

  “Cree,” Val says.

  He drops the hood of his sweatshirt. It takes Val a moment to realize that it’s not Cree, but a ghost-gray boy in a baseball cap.

  “Wrong man.” He takes off his cap, revealing twisted cones of black hair. His lips are cracked. The cheekbones are hollow. Val can envision the shape of his skull.

  “I thought you were … never mind.” Val glances over her shoulder to see if anyone is watching her from the classroom window. “I should go.”

  “Got to get back to class?”

  She can sense the tempered noise in the classrooms stacked up inside like shipping containers. After geometry is history. “I don’t have to.”

  “It’s good to get an education.”

  “You never skipped school?” The air feels crisp and illicitly fresh. The street is quiet, as if in deference to the classes in session across the street.

  “I’m a different story.”

  “Why’s that
?”

  “I skipped school until I couldn’t.” The kid puts his cap back on. “You stare out the window too much. Teacher’s at the front of the room.”

  “You’ve been watching me?”

  “You’ve been watching me. What’s the difference?”

  “Only because I thought you were somebody else.”

  “I know precisely who you are.” He pulls a beat-up cigarette from a crumpled soft pack in the pocket of his sweatshirt. “The girl who took the raft out in the water. Big adventure for a young kid.”

  “I’m almost sixteen.”

  “Nevertheless. You shouldn’t go around blaming others for your own foolishness.”

  “Who am I blaming? Everyone’s blaming me.”

  “You snitch out the only black kid you know?” The kid flicks his cigarette away. “Careful what you tell the cops. Especially if it’s not true.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The kid rubs his lips and chin. “You caused Cree enough trouble. No need to be checking for him out the classroom window all afternoon.”

  “You know Cree?”

  “I do. And I know you’ve been looking for him. But I’m watching out for my boy. A considerate kid like that doesn’t need people like you spoiling his chances and ruining his outlook.” He smiles, spreading the cracks in his lips until Val worries they are going to bleed.

  “I didn’t do anything. Cree and I … we. Never mind.”

  “That’s right. Never mind. Never you mind about Cree.” He turns and heads away from Bernardette’s in the direction of Red Hook. “Now get back to class.”

  Val glances at her watch. There are a few minutes left to fifth period. She needs to make it back inside before the bell rings and a teacher catches her reentering the building before dismissal. She is about to head up the school’s steps when the doors open and Mr. Sprouse appears. Val freezes, one foot on the bottom step, the other on the sidewalk.

  The music teacher is dressed in black and carries a battered leather shoulder bag. June would probably have accused him of trying too hard to be cool instead of just being cool. If it weren’t for the shadows beneath his eyes, he would seem boyish. But his distracted, troubled expression ages him, undermines his sharp cheekbones and full lips.

  Val lowers her face. It seems impossible to her that she cried in his arms in her underwear and let him hug her nearly naked body.

  But now she wants to hide. She feels exposed, caught outside of school during class. She wonders if Mr. Sprouse saw the boy she’d been talking to and made the same mistake she had, taking him for the person he’d seen her making out with in the bay. He probably thinks she dipped out for a quick kiss or worse.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It was an emergency.”

  Val is already planning what to say to the headmistress when she’s hauled into her office. She wonders how long June’s disappearance will excuse her behavior.

  Mr. Sprouse looks both amused and startled. He smiles and shakes his head. Then he waves her on, away from the school. He puts a finger over his lips. “Go,” he says. “Go.”

  Val hesitates, unsure whether or not to follow his instructions.

  “Go,” Mr. Sprouse says, waving in the direction of Red Hook.

  Halfway down the block, Val looks over her shoulder to see whether anyone from Bernardette’s is following, but she is alone.

  Val has become a curiosity in school—someone to have around but to keep at arm’s distance. She sits silently, hoping the other girls will forget why she is with them and only accept that she is there. She tries to trick herself into forgetting why she is eating at a table of relative strangers instead of with June. She goes out of her way to avoid mentioning her best friend, distancing herself from her disappearance, avoiding memories of her part in it. The problem is, among her more worldly classmates, Val needs June more than ever. Without June, she fears she’ll do the wrong thing, expose her inexperience, and be exiled permanently.

  Two upperclassmen invite Val to a house party one of the seniors is throwing, the kind of party June would have killed to attend, a party Val is only invited to because June is gone. She can imagine June nagging her all week, planning her outfits, dreaming about the boys who might be there. If she goes to the party, does exactly what June would have wanted her to do, June will come back.

  Val kisses the mirror, squares the hand towels in the bathroom, doubles back to rearrange the guest soaps. She kisses the mirror again. If she kisses the mirror, if she goes to the party, if the girls at her school will like her. If the girls at school like her, June will come home.

  Her parents seem relieved that she is going out. Jo compliments Val’s outfit and sprays her with perfume on her way out the door. Paulie hands her a ten for a cab ride home. “Midnight,” he says, kissing the top of her head. “Midnight and no messing around.”

  The party is in Brooklyn Heights on the best block where the houses back onto the promenade overlooking the water across to Manhattan. The six-story house with bay windows, the glittering river and city just behind its back garden, belongs to the parents of Anna DeSimone, who went to prep school in the Heights until she started hanging out in bars with her teachers and her parents sent her to Bernardette’s. Anna takes a car service to school—a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows.

  The front door is propped open by a brick. Val stands in a vestibule wider than her parents’ bathroom, listening to the party behind the second set of doors. Through their frosted, etched, and beveled glass she can see distorted figures streaming along the hallway and up and down the stairs.

  One group is clustered in the kitchen sitting on the marble counters, pressing their heels into the butcher-block island. The counters are littered with red and blue Solo cups half filled with brown and pink drinks and the pummeled skins of lemons and limes.

  Two girls are sitting on the railing of the back deck, smoking and flinging their butts into a barrel planted with herbs. A boy rushes up to one of them and wraps his arms around her waist. He lowers her over the railing, her long hair dangling toward the garden twenty feet below. He bends her farther and her bottom slides from the railing until he is only holding her legs. The girl screams and the boy reels her in.

  This is how people die, Val thinks. And tomorrow no one will blame these kids for tiptoeing toward disaster.

  Val tours the parlor floor. There are two rooms that open onto each other and neither looks lived in. The walls are creamy yellow and hung with paintings, each lit by its own light.

  Most of the faces are unfamiliar. The girls wear discreetly expensive outfits—high-waisted floral skirts, gold gladiator sandals, long cashmere sweaters. Others are dressed like designer versions of the women who loiter outside the Dockyard in cowboy boots and baggy cotton T-shirts. The boys wear khakis and frayed flannel. They help themselves to booze from a dark wooden bar.

  The girls from Bernardette’s are in the front parlor. They place their drinks on needlepoint coasters. In jeans, tank tops, and jewel-toned cardigans they look like Catholic school kids. Val perches on the arm of the sofa. If the girls from her school talk to her first, June will come back.

  Anna DeSimone in a short gold dress and no shoes is circulating. Her skin is smeared with sweat and makeup. She is drinking from a martini glass the size of a small vase and holding a fistful of bills, mostly twenties, in her other hand.

  “I’m taking a collection.” She holds out the hand with the money to Val. “Don’t tell me you don’t smoke?”

  If you act like you belong. If you make them like you. Val teases a five from her back pocket.

  “I guess you don’t smoke much,” Anna says. “Bless you anyway.” She tries to make the sign of the cross with her glass.

  When the doorbell rings, Anna slips on the parquet and two boys help her up. There’s an argument in the hallway.

  The group from the hall appears in the living room. Anna is clutching the money and listing to one side. Two boy
s are trying to take the cash from her to count it. Behind them is a lanky guy in midcalf red basketball shorts and a matching oversized jersey and cap. Val recognizes him and leans back against the wall to disappear.

  Irish Mikey is the waterside’s petty dealer, a small-time trafficker in dime bags and seeds, nothing anyone gets too worked up about. He’s the son of a former detective, which keeps him out of trouble. He used to hang with Rita back in middle school, but when he started spending more time over in the Houses, the Marinos put an end to that.

  “Take yo time,” Mikey says.

  Mikey has the same patchy fuzz he called a beard back when he and Rita were tight. It masks the sprinkling of pimples he hasn’t outgrown. He stands with his head cocked to one side, his cap off center, his shoulders slumped. Someone switches the music to hip-hop. The boys take the money from Anna and turn their backs on Mikey while they count it. They keep their shoulders hunched.

  “Take yo time,” Mikey says again.

  Val knows he’s laying on the accent, pretending he’s dangerous, like he doesn’t still live with his parents on one of Red Hook’s better streets.

  “Three hundred,” one of the boys says handing it over.

  “Now it’s my time to count,” Mikey says, taking the cash, counting it quickly with swift flicks of his thumb. He tucks it away, then fumbles in his pocket, pulling out three long Ziplocs of weed wrapped tight like cigars.

  One of the boys slides the weed in his pocket, then glances over his shoulder as if he is standing in the middle of the street not on a Persian carpet runner. Mikey laughs and shakes his head. He catches Val’s eye and she watches him dial her in.

  The boy with the weed glances from Mikey to the floor and shifts from foot to foot. He jams his hands in his pockets. “Man, can you get us anything harder?”

  Val is embarrassed for this kid twitching in his baggy khakis and two-hundred-dollar Nikes fronting like he has game. She knows that Mikey hates hard drugs, wouldn’t mess with them.