Lucretia and the Kroons

by Victor Lavalle

  “And Sunny?”

  “If something bad happens I’ll call your cell phone,” Loochie pleaded.

  Really she was embarrassed by her mother. But she couldn’t say that out loud. It would hurt her feelings.

  “Just let us have the apartment for a little,” Loochie said. “I want to show her my Christmas presents.”

  Mom finished her piece of ice-cream cake and wiped her face with a paper napkin. Then she reached over and wiped Loochie’s face, too. Loochie didn’t resist the touch.

  “How long?” Mom finally asked.

  “Four hours,” Loochie said.

  “Two hours.”

  Loochie could tell there’d be no further negotiation and she’d gotten so much already. “Two hours,” she agreed. And she felt confident about what she’d said. What bad things could really happen in so little time?

  Sunny and Loochie’s playdate was made through go-betweens. Loochie’s mother and Sunny’s grandmother. Sunny would come down to Loochie’s second try at a twelfth birthday party on a Saturday, the last in December. Loochie had done a little better than normal with gifts that year because her mother felt so bad that Loochie had spent so much time alone, waiting on her sick friend. Loochie even got a new bike. No training wheels and emerald green, just like her dress had been. It was her favorite color. Loochie knew that Sunny’s grandmother would likely tackle the pair before she let her sick granddaughter ride around on the sidewalk. But Loochie and Sunny could pedal the bike back and forth in the living room. The night before she and her mother had rearranged the furniture in the living room. They’d pushed the dining table against one wall. Moved the coffee table from in front of the sofa. This turned the living room into one twenty-foot-long, carpeted track. Loochie couldn’t wait to see Sunny holding the handlebars. And best of all, she and Sunny were going to be in the apartment alone! For two hours. A fact that hadn’t been shared with Sunny’s grandmother. If it had, Sunny grandmother would’ve been perched right there on the living room couch all afternoon, scowling while she watched everything, and what the hell kind of fun would that be?

  Loochie’s mother was in the bathroom, getting prepared to go out with Louis. Loochie found her in front of the bathroom sink and watched her, perched at the threshold.

  “Louis is late,” Loochie said.

  “Your brother always is,” her mother said absently.

  She and Loochie were the primary team these days. And Louis was like an alternate member. He was ten years older than Loochie and had moved out of the apartment to Brooklyn when she was seven. She loved him but didn’t really know him anymore. Loochie’s mother, of course, had a different relationship with Louis. She had wrestled and cajoled him into seeing her that day. He didn’t want to come to Queens, but their mother could be persistent. She’d been pestering him to come home for months now.

  “Now you don’t tell Louis where I’m taking him, right?” Her mother stopped applying her foundation and looked at Loochie directly.

  “Debt counseling,” Loochie said, though she didn’t know what it meant.

  “I’m taking him to lunch,” Loochie’s mother instructed. “Because I miss him.”

  Loochie and her mother nodded conspiratorially. Then Mom brushed Loochie back, out of the doorway. She grabbed the door handle and pushed the door. “Mom needs to be alone in here for a few minutes.”

  Loochie stepped farther back and the door shut and she heard the sound of her mother settling down onto the toilet. Loochie walked away from the bathroom and back into the living room. She went to the front door. She was too short to see through the peephole yet. They kept a footstool right by the door for this reason. Loochie pulled it over and stepped up and peeked out into the hall. Louis was late, but so was Sunny.

  Loochie wore a pair of jeans and a thin green sweater. Her kicks were bright white Keds. Her mother had done her hair that morning, tight little box braids. It was her sporty look. Even though Loochie knew Sunny would never make fun of her she was too embarrassed to try showing off the green gown again.

  Loochie checked on the bike, parked at the far end of the living room. She rifled through the small stack of board games her mother had set out on the dining table. Life, Sorry, and Risk. (The last one was left over from her brother’s days in the apartment.) She set out a pillow and blanket on the couch in case Sunny would need to lie down at some point.

  She left the living room and went to the kitchen. She opened the freezer and found what was left of her birthday cake. Over the last two months, bit by bit, she and her mother had really chopped that cake down. Cookie Puss wasn’t looking so good. She and her mother had eaten its sugar-cone nose, its ice-cream chin and cheeks. All that was left was one of its big eyes. The “eye” was really just a Flying Saucer ice-cream sandwich. Loochie had guarded this last piece fiercely for the past week. It was for Sunny and no one else. Now she took it out of the freezer and out of the box. She set it on a plate and put the plate on the kitchen counter. She wanted the ice cream to soften enough that even Sunny could get it down. Sometimes she had trouble with solid foods.

  As she set the plate on the kitchen table she heard a clunking sound outside the kitchen window. Something small falling down the fire escape. She knew what that sound meant. She heard it again. She watched the window and saw a penny careening down. It pinged against her fire escape and slipped through the grating and fell to the third floor below. She didn’t need to wait for a third penny to drop.

  Loochie smiled and ran to the kitchen window, pulled open the security gate, lifted the sash, and peeked her head out. She saw a small hand dangling out of the window right above her own. Sunny! The hand went back inside the apartment slowly. Loochie looked over her shoulder for her mother, but her mother was still in the bathroom. When she looked out the window a second time the small hand was shaking slightly and holding another penny. The slim fingers parted and the penny fell. Loochie reached out to try to catch it but the penny hit the floor of her fire escape landing and shot off wildly, then fell four stories down to the ground. If it had been anything much heavier than a penny, like an egg, or a little girl, it would’ve cracked in two.

  Loochie spoke in a tense whisper. “I’m coming!”

  Then Loochie climbed out the window.

  Children who grow up in the suburbs learn to climb trees. Kids from Queens learn to climb fire escapes. In the summer Loochie’s fire escape was like a rusty balcony. If the apartment felt too warm she’d sneak out onto the fire escape to cool down. Some nights she even slept out there, calling it a Queens camping trip. Even now, in late December, with a dusting of snow on each step, she gripped the handrails and climbed fast. The hardest thing to take was the cold. By the time she’d made it to the fifth floor, only one flight up, she was shivering. But when she reached the landing of the floor above hers she forgot about the chill and being so high. There, in the window, framed like a photo, sat Zhao Hun Soong.

  “Sunny,” Loochie whispered.

  Her best friend looked so tiny. Or had Loochie just grown bigger?

  Sunny Soong had always been small for her age. If she and Loochie hadn’t lived only one floor apart Loochie likely would never have noticed the kid. Would’ve assumed Sunny was two grades behind her and therefore not friendship material. But when Loochie and her mother would head downstairs in the elevator each morning—first grade, second grade, third grade—Sunny and her uncommunicative grandmother would be in the elevator, too. They would walk the same route all the way to P.S. 120 and at a certain point the two girls began to talk with each other, even if the adults didn’t. If they’d lived in two different buildings, or even on two different sides of this building, they probably wouldn’t even have met. Sometimes Loochie just couldn’t believe the good luck of it.

  But Loochie had a hard time thinking of good luck just now. Sunny sat in a chair in the kitchen, her hands resting on the windowsill, and her skin seemed translucent. Veins were visible, tracing their way across the backs of her ha
nds, all the way to her knuckles. The veins weren’t even blue, but a deep, dark gray, the color of wet cement. Sunny’s face had become so fat and pale that her small nose, her tiny mouth, seemed to be floating in a bowl of custard. Her eyelids were red and puffy.

  The one touch of liveliness was a blue knit cap that she wore pulled down to her eyebrows. It was the blue of a bright sky. And attached to the top, by two short strings, were a pair of pompoms. They sat on her head like mouse’s ears. They were the kind of gift someone might give to make a sick child feel whimsical, to graft youth back onto a decaying body.

  “You look great,” Loochie lied.

  Sunny didn’t speak, just stared. Loochie could hear Sunny’s breathing, raspy and weak. Sunny inhaled deeply three times before she could gather the strength to respond.

  “This is what I look like,” Sunny said as she grabbed the top of the cap with an almost angry determination and yanked it off her head.

  Sunny’s hair had become so thin that Loochie could see her scalp, almost pale green like a honeydew melon. It was like she was fading right before Loochie’s eyes. Even at twelve years old, Loochie knew not to betray her sadness. She held her face still as best she could. She smiled weakly. “Your pajamas are cute,” she offered.

  The long-sleeved top of Sunny’s outfit was purple with a lime collar and cuffs. There was a giant green electric guitar and next to that four big pink letters: R-O-C-K. The pajama bottoms were pink with that same image printed all over them in a much smaller size. The green electric guitar and the word ROCK running up and down her legs. The ankles had lime cuffs, too. The pajamas were not cute and they both knew it. Under different circumstances they would’ve laughed about them, but not right then.

  “Welcome back,” Loochie said, just to change the subject, and though she didn’t want to do it she looked away from her friend because she was afraid she might cry.

  When Loochie looked back Sunny had put the blue cap back on. She’d pulled her hands back inside the window and they were in her lap. She was looking down at those hands and her face wore a look of serious concentration. One of her hands was closed in a fist. Sunny tried to lift it but each time she did the hand trembled and, a moment later, fell back into her lap. Loochie watched this happen twice. Sunny’s shoulders heaved now. She was wearing herself out just trying to do this simple thing, just trying to lift her hand. She was supposed to be getting better!

  But who had actually told Loochie that?

  Before Sunny got so sick she’d had this way of looking at people. She’d set her lips tight and squint her eyes and sort of lean forward, like she was about to jump right on their heads and stomp them. It made her look like the tiniest gangster ever. It intimidated everyone except her grandmother.

  One time, maybe four years back, the two of them had been at Flushing Meadows Park and wandered into one of the meadows so they could kick off their shoes and walk in the summer grass. They were having a pretty good time when suddenly this beast came galloping right at them. It was just a dog, a Doberman pinscher, but to those girls it might as well have been a horse. And it shot straight toward them. The owner was nowhere to be seen. The thing was coming for them and it started barking and Loochie cried right there. She thought it was going to tear off their heads. As the dog got closer, its face, with those high, pointy ears and the long, narrow snout, looked downright demonic. Even worse when it bared it teeth. Loochie was busy looking for her mother, or Sunny’s grandmother—where had they wandered off to? But then Sunny bore down in her gangster pose and, no lie, the girl growled at the dog. And do you know that dog actually changed direction? It bounded away from them. Sunny had scared it off. The whole time she didn’t even shiver. As far as Loochie was concerned, Sunny saved her life that day.

  So how could that hero in the park be the invalid here now? The one who couldn’t even lift her hand out of her lap?

  Finally Loochie leaned into the window and held Sunny’s hand and lifted it for her.

  Relieved, Sunny opened her fingers. “I’ve got something for us,” she said.

  Three brittle-looking little twists of paper sat in Sunny’s palm.

  “I took these from my grandmother,” Sunny said. “Take them.”

  Loochie snatched them with her free hand, then let Sunny’s hand go. It immediately dropped, as if it weighed a thousand pounds, and landed in her lap again.

  Sunny reached to a cup of water sitting on the kitchen table inside her apartment. She grabbed the plastic cup and inhaled deeply and lifted it to her lips. She sipped twice. The skin on Sunny’s neck was so thin. It was as if Loochie could actually see the water sliding down the inside of her best friend’s throat. Loochie turned away fast. She looked at her own palm. All three little white sticks. They weren’t much bigger than toothpicks.

  “Chinese cigarettes,” Sunny said, after she’d set the cup back down, almost out of breath from the action. “Hand rolled.” Another breath. “Strong stuff.”

  Cigarettes? It took a moment before Loochie could speak. “I thought we could ride my bike inside the apartment,” she said, and her voice sounded as small as her planned rebellion.

  Somewhere inside the apartment a woman’s voice called out in Cantonese. Sunny’s grandmother. Sunny looked over her shoulder, then back at Loochie. That move tired Sunny out, too. She winced and breathed heavily and Loochie just couldn’t believe that this was Sunny.

  “I’m going to sneak a lighter with me,” Sunny said. “But my grandmother would find these cigarettes if I tried to take them down. She’d probably smell them or something. You hold on to them. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

  Loochie closed her hand around the cigarettes. A cold wind rocked her as it passed and she squatted on the fire escape. They were at eye level. “I don’t want to do this,” Loochie whispered, shaking her hand. “I saved you some cake.”

  Sunny’s mouth squeezed tight and her eyes closed. She kept them closed when she spoke again. “I just want to do something fun with you, one more time.” She opened her eyes and looked at Loochie directly. “Just in case.”

  Loochie almost jumped through the window, almost tackled her sick friend. “In case what?” she barked. She felt angry suddenly and didn’t quite know why. “In case what?”

  Sunny’s eyes flared open. “My grandmother is going to hear you,” she wheezed.

  “You’re coming over for my birthday party,” Loochie said, sounding like she was giving orders. “That’s why you’re coming over.”

  “Okay,” Sunny said quietly. She watched Loochie a moment, opened her mouth to say one more thing, but Loochie raised the fist that held the cigarettes like she’d rather punch this sick kid than hear what more Sunny had to say. So Sunny didn’t say anything.

  Sunny reached up and pulled at the kitchen window to shut it but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the strength left. She’d tired herself out opening the window minutes ago. Loochie stuffed the three Chinese cigarettes into her pocket, then grabbed the bottom of the window and pulled it down. Sunny waved at Loochie through the window pane. Just then Sunny looked like a specimen slide under a microscope. Then she managed to slide the security gate shut and Loochie couldn’t see her at all anymore. Loochie crossed her arms and shivered from the cold.

  She stood at her full height again on the fire escape. Five floors below a few kids and adults walked along the sidewalk but none of them looked up. She watched them. Then she looked above her. The building had six floors. Loochie lived in 4D, and Sunny lived in 5D, but no one had lived in 6D for as long as Loochie had been alive. Sometimes boys in the building went on to the roof in groups and she didn’t have any idea what they did up there but even the boys—reckless and fearless and stupid sometimes—even the boys never messed with apartment 6D.

  Loochie crept down the fire escape stairs and slipped back into her apartment. She shut the window and closed and locked the security gate, just as she heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. Right after that her mother
walked into the kitchen.

  “Don’t go in there for a little while,” her mother said, smiling bashfully. Then she crossed her arms. “Why is it so cold in here?”

  But Loochie wouldn’t have to explain because the front door clicked, keys in the lock.

  Her brother had arrived.

  “Tell Louis I need ten more minutes to get ready!” Mom called and ran into her bedroom.

  3

  Louis was only twenty-two but already going bald. He kept his hair cut very low to try to disguise the fact, a style that emphasized the perfect roundness of his skull. That round head was one of Loochie’s favorite things about him. When she was younger, like three or four, he would walk her around on his shoulders and she slapped the top of that big old head and he didn’t mind at all. Even now, at twelve, when she saw her brother she still had the urge to give him a smack or two right on the noggin but she wouldn’t dare to do it because they didn’t know each other like they used to. Sometimes she really missed him. One of the reasons she’d taped the Mets pennant to her bedroom door was so that Louis would know, if he passed it, that it was important to her. That he was still important to her. So she felt quietly pleased that Louis wanted to sit and talk a little while he waited for their mother. Before they sat down Loochie rolled up the blanket and pillow she’d laid out for Sunny.

  “You know who put that bike together?” he said, pointing at it where it stood, kickstand out, right under the living room windows.

  “You did,” she said, rolling her eyes. She knew this because he’d told her on Christmas Eve, when her mother had wheeled it out. Then he told her again on Christmas Day, in case she’d somehow forgotten overnight.

  “That’s right,” Louis said. He scratched behind one ear, then looked over his shoulder. “So why don’t you tell me where Mom is taking me today.”

  Loochie grinned, giving nothing away. “To lunch,” she said.