“What? Why?”
“Please deposit twenty-five cents to continue this call,” the recorded voice instructed, but I knew she wouldn’t. Miss Chevy didn’t have a dime to her name, never mind a quarter.
Fifty-Five
Geneva and I had been on the train for about twenty minutes when we pulled into the Fourteenth Street station. Saturday commuters piled in, loaded down with Loehman’s, Banana Republic, and Gap shopping bags filled with new fall merchandise and the ragtag, half-priced last bits of summer attire.
I felt uncomfortable. My feet were wet, and since I hadn’t had a chance to change out of my jogging gear, the sweat I’d worked up during my run had dried sticky around my neck and deep inside my armpits. I kept my upper arms pressed tightly to my body as I prayed that my deodorant would hold out for at least another half hour until we got to Brooklyn. There I could take a shower and throw on something of Noah’s.
My eyes flitted over the faces that either looked back at me or studied the advertisements overhead. Some people were engrossed in paperback best sellers, while others bopped their heads to the music streaming from their Discmans.
I leaned back a little further into the seat, and that’s when I saw Chevy. Or at least it looked like Chevy. Standing at the far end of the car, back pressed up against the door, she wore an expression on her face that seemed strained. I squinted and then nudged Geneva.
Geneva nearly jumped out of her seat, and when she turned to look at me her eyes were as wide as saucers. “What?” she said breathlessly as she grabbed at her chest.
“What is wrong with you?”
“You just startled me,” she said, wiping the perspiration from her forehead.
“Doesn’t that look like Chevy standing over there?” I said, nodding my head in her direction. Geneva strained her neck this way and that and then shouted, “Chevy!” And a dozen eyes fell on us.
Geneva could be so uncouth at times.
“Sh,” I pleaded and nudged her again. “Do you have to be so loud?”
Chevy looked around quickly and I noticed that she had the same haunted look on her face that Geneva was sporting.
“Over here, Chevy!” Geneva shouted out again and shot her hand up into the air and began waving.
More eyes turned in our direction.
Chevy finally spotted us and started making her way over.
When she broke through the crowd and was standing in front of us, all Geneva and I could do was sit there with our mouths hanging open.
“Where y’all headed?” Chevy asked, offering us a nervous smile.
We couldn’t say a thing; our eyes were locked on Chevy’s belly, which was bulging out of her size-six pants like she was five months pregnant.
Chevy’s eyes followed ours, and then she quickly brought one hand up to rest on the protuberance. “I’m just bloated,” she said before we could compose ourselves to ask.
“Bloated?” Geneva said, reaching out and slowly pushing Chevy’s hand aside. “That looks more like a baby to me.”
Chevy slapped her hand away. “I ain’t pregnant. You crazy?” She laughed nervously. “Just retaining water.” She tried in vain to tug her waist-long shirt down over the swell of her belly.
“Really?” I asked. I wasn’t sure about that. Maybe this was why she had been AWOL.
“Yes, really,” she snapped back. Then she gave me a strange look.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said quickly and shifted her eyes to Geneva. “So where are you all going?”
“Brooklyn.” Geneva’s answer was curt as she continued to stare at Chevy’s belly.
“Brooklyn? For what?” Chevy was taken aback. “Y’all don’t ever go to Brooklyn.”
“Well, my apartment got flooded and—”
In the middle of my explanation we pulled into the Spring Street station and I looked up to see Chevy’s attention snatched away by boarding passengers. I looked over and saw that Geneva was distracted as well.
“What is going on with you two?” I bellowed. “What y’all got, the mob after you or something?”
Chevy’s eyes popped in their sockets. “Shh, don’t be saying shit like that.”
“Yeah, you don’t know who’s around,” Geneva said in a conspiratorial tone.
Utica Avenue couldn’t come soon enough.
Noah swung the door open and we were greeted by the scent of simmering oil and the mellow sounds of Luther Vandross.
“Hey!” he squealed when he saw all of us. “What a surprise!” He pressed quick kisses onto our cheeks. “What did I do to deserve this honor?” He beamed.
Chevy stepped quickly around me and came face-to-face with Noah. Her eyes swung angrily between the glass of wine he held and his face. “What’s wrong with you, Ms. Drama?” he asked.
“Have you forgotten what I called and told you on the phone?” she said from between clenched teeth.
The brightness in Noah’s face went dark. “Oh—oh my God, yes,” he said and hurriedly stepped around Chevy and came to me. “Oh, Ms. Crystal, you must be beside yourself.” He wrapped one arm around me and guided me to the living room.
“Well, yes, I mean, all of my stuff is ruined—” I began but then remembered that I hadn’t been able to reach Noah on my cell phone before I went down into the subway station, so how could he know about my apartment catastrophe?
“Stuff?” Noah said, his head jerking back.
Noah’s head swiveled to Chevy, whose mouth opened and closed like that of a fish out of water. “Ms. Drama said that Kendrick—” Noah began and then stopped and turned back to me. “Do you know about what Kendrick did?”
Yeah, I knew what he did. He flooded my apartment, and I was just about to voice that outwardly when Geneva, who was peering out the front window, spouted, “He flooded her damn apartment, that’s what he did.”
“Flooded your apartment!” Noah and Chevy cried out together, and then exchanged strange looks.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, feeling more and more like I had landed in the twilight zone.
Noah grimaced and threw Chevy a long, wicked look. “You see, Ms. Drama, you always starting some shit. Now, why you wanna lie—”
“I didn’t lie!” Chevy screamed. “I was there when he did it!”
“You were in my apartment?” I said stupidly.
“Not in your apartment. Down on Seventeenth Street at the loft—”
“What loft?”
“Ms. Drama called me up a wreck, saying she had just witnessed a murder—”
“What!” Geneva and I sounded together, and Geneva came running over and flopped down on the couch beside me.
“Who’d you see get murdered?” Geneva probed, her eyes wide.
Chevy took a breath. “This girl named Cassius,” she said slowly, all the while looking at me.
“What does that have to do with Kendrick?” I asked, confused.
“He’s the one that did it,” Chevy said.
Fifty-Six
First Crystal’s face went blank, and then she began to laugh hysterically.
Geneva laughed too, but she stopped when she saw that my lips hadn’t cracked a smile.
Noah’s face registered about twenty different emotions in just as many seconds; I knew he didn’t know what to believe.
“Your pregnancy must have you seeing things,” Crystal declared after she’d wiped the tears from her face.
“Pregnancy?” Noah piped, and his eyes fell on my swollen stomach. “No, you didn’t go and get yourself knocked up, Ms. Drama!” he shrieked and threw his hands over his mouth.
“I am not pregnant!” I screamed and marched over and snatched up Noah’s half-finished glass of wine and guzzled it.
Turning to Crystal, I said, “I know what I saw.” And then I turned my back on all three of their blank faces and stormed dramatically out of the living room and into the kitchen.
When I returned, wine bottle in hand, I tilted i
t to my mouth and drank deeply before I looked them in their eyes and said in my best “I see dead people” voice, “I saw her. She was dead, and Kendrick was the one that killed her!”
They looked at each other and then back at me before Crystal calmly said, “Okay, Chevy, sit down and start from the beginning.”
I told as much as I could without incriminating myself. I explained that Cassius and I were casual friends. That we’d worked together and she’d introduced me to her brother, who was visiting from Nigeria. I explained that I was at her loft for brunch and that her brother, Abimbola, had stepped out to get some eggs and that she and I were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee when the knock came at the door.
When she opened it, Kendrick stormed in looking like a madman and demanding drugs.
“Drugs?” Crystal said, and even though she sounded as if she didn’t believe it, I could see by the look on her face that she kind of did.
“She was a drug dealer?” Noah asked, in awe.
“Well, I didn’t know that until then,” I lied.
I went on to say that Cassius told him that she didn’t have any in the house, and that he’d better leave before her brother came back.
“And what were you doing all of this time?” Geneva said.
“Didn’t Kendrick recognize you?” Noah added, and Geneva, Crystal, and I looked at him like he had three heads.
“C’mon, Noah, Kendrick had met Chevy only three or four times to begin with,” Crystal said.
“And you know Chevy looks like someone different each time you see her,” Geneva added.
“True,” Noah said, nodding his head.
“So what were you doing while all of this was going on?” Geneva asked again.
“Well, like I said, I was in the kitchen, and when they took their little discussion into the living room, I ran out the front door.”
I’d fucked up somewhere. I could tell by the way they were looking at me. But I’d been talking so fast, I didn’t know where I’d made the wrong turn.
“So if you left, then how do you know that he killed her?” Crystal asked.
I turned the bottle up to my mouth again and drained it.
“What I meant to say was I left after he knocked her down.”
“In the living room?” Geneva said.
“Yeah,” I answered quickly and then said to Noah, “You got any more wine?”
“No, but there’s some Gray Goose in the freezer,” he said, and I was gone before he could hardly get all of the words out of his mouth.
I returned with a glass filled with vodka and ice.
Noah scratched at his chin and said, “On the phone you told me she was sprawled out on the kitchen floor.”
“Did I?” I took a long sip of my drink, swallowed, and made a face before speaking again. “I was nervous, Noah! Kitchen, living room, what does it matter—she was dead!” I shrieked and got up and started walking circles.
“Did you call the police?” Crystal asked, total belief blanketing her face.
“Hell, no!” I said.
“I told her to,” Noah said. “But you know she’s hard-headed.”
“Well, I’m going to call the police,” Crystal said and jumped up and started toward the kitchen. I scrambled in front of her and pressed one unsteady hand against her shoulder. “I don’t think you should.”
Crystal eyed me. “Wasn’t this Cassius a friend of yours?” Crystal cocked her head to one side. “Are you that coldhearted? Would you do one of us like that, Chevy?”
I looked around at the expectant faces, took another swig of my drink, and then said in a slurring voice, “She was just an acquaintance.”
Crystal sucked her teeth and shoved past me.
“What’s the address, Chevy?” Crystal yelled at me from the kitchen.
I looked stupidly around as if the answer was somewhere in the air. “What’s the address?” Noah pushed.
I could hear Crystal in the kitchen, saying, “Yes, I’d like to report a murder.”
“What’s the goddamn address!” Geneva screamed at me.
That finally snatched me out of my daze, and I answered: “Three hundred West Seventeenth Street, top floor loft.”
Crystal was repeating the address when a pain suddenly cut through my stomach. I doubled over and fell to my knees.
“Ugh, I don’t feel so good,” I said before I started puking wine and vodka all over Noah’s shiny hardwood floors.
Fifty-Seven
Needless to say, we had to rush Chevy to the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital. We were all convinced that she was pregnant and just in denial, because if you opened up the dictionary and looked up the word denial, you were sure to find her picture right next to it.
When they rolled her into the examination room, we followed— yes, all three of us—refusing to let Chevy out of our sight.
Chevy was green, and each time the doctor pressed down on her stomach she spewed more vodka and wine.
Dr. Chin was the attending physician’s name. He was a handsome, mocha-colored Trinidadian with slanted eyes and a long silky ponytail. If Chevy weren’t on her dying bed, she would have been pushing up on him.
Dr. Chin pressed some more and then asked Chevy, who seemed to be swinging in and out of consciousness, if she had fibroids.
Chevy just groaned and threw up. So he turned his attention to us. “Do you know if your friend has fibroids?”
Noah made a face and turned away. I shrugged: who knew what Chevy had? She was so secretive about shit.
Crystal was the one who said, “I don’t think so.”
The doctor considered us for a moment and then went back to examining Chevy. “Well, there are a lot of small lumps in her lower abdomen that could be fibroids, but the problem is that the lumps are also prevalent in her upper abdomen,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m going to have to send her down for X-rays.”
“You don’t think she’s pregnant?” Crystal asked.
The doctor snapped the gloves off his hands and discarded them into a nearby receptacle. “If she is, that will come up in the blood test.”
We were all then hustled out of the examining room and into the waiting area. “She should be done with the X-rays in about a half hour,” the doctor said before he disappeared behind the green curtain of another exam area.
We just sat there, quiet, for a while, watching people come and go, until finally Noah looked over at Crystal and me and said, “Miss Girls, I have a confession to make.”
It’s amazing what being around sickness and approaching death can do to a person. Noah spilled his guts about his heterosexual escapades.
At first we thought Noah was just being humorous, trying to shed some comedy on an otherwise dismal situation, but when we saw the tears in his eyes, we knew he was telling the truth.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Crystal said, digging into the pockets of her tracksuit in search of a tissue.
“How could I tell my girls something like that? It’s so embarrassing.” He sniffed.
“You should never feel embarrassed about telling us anything,” I said, and I meant it.
“You shouldn’t have had to go through something like that alone,” Crystal said, trying hard to keep a straight face.
Noah peered at her through his tears. “What’s so funny?”
Crystal’s face was twitching uncontrollably. She was fighting hard to remain serious. “What is so funny!” Noah demanded, his voice filling with anger.
“I’m sorry, Noah,” Crystal blurted out behind a roll of laughter. “I just can’t imagine you and a woman . . . you know, getting it on!”
Now I was laughing too—it was a funny mental picture.
“Well, I did,” Noah said, snapping his fingers and twirling his head on his neck. “And I was good!” he said before joining in on our laughter.
After we’d composed ourselves, Crystal turned her attention to me. “Now that we’re confessing here, do you have anything you want t
o clear your soul of?”
Noah’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “What you hiding?”
“Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly.
“Earlier today she was walking down the street like an escaped convict.”
“Whaaaaaaat!” Noah shouted. “Who you hiding from, Miss Girl?”
I really didn’t want to get into this. I mean, as fucked up as Noah’s situation was, mine was simply unbelievable.
I took a deep breath and said, “I got the head honcho of my weight-loss program chapter out to kill me.”
Noah and Crystal looked at me, back at each other, and then they doubled over with laughter.
“I’m serious,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and turning away from them.
Crystal wiped at her eyes and looked at me. “C’mon now, Geneva. I know you have a wild imagination, but out to kill you?” she said, and the giggles started up again.
“I think those brain freezes from all of that goddamn ice cream you’ve eaten have affected the part of your mind that separates fantasy from reality,” Noah whispered through a grin.
“Okay, don’t believe me,” I said and dug into my pocketbook for my pack of Newports. “I’m going outside to have a smoke.” I stormed off, leaving my snickering, insensitive friends behind me.
Three cigarettes later, I had resigned myself to the fact that Noah and Crystal were not insensitive. I mean, what I said did sound ridiculous. I laughed at my reaction, tossed the butt of the cigarette to the ground, and turned and started back toward the glass hospital doors.
As I stood waiting for the elevator, two large white men dressed in navy blue from head to toe suddenly appeared beside me.
The elevator doors opened and we stepped aside to allow an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair by a young woman to pass.
“After you,” one of the men said to me.
I mumbled a word of thanks as I stepped into the elevator and moved to the back wall.
The men stepped in and took up the space in front of me. They stood at attention, their shoulders touching.
“Floor?” one said to the other.
“Five,” the other responded and then turned around a bit and looked at me. “Ma’am?”
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