One Death, Nine Stories

by Marc Aronson

  “I guess not,” she said.

  There was a long moment of dead airspace. “Look,” Sampson said, “do you need a ride somewhere?”

  She paused, then shrugged. “I was going to take the bus.”

  “With what you’re carrying, you’d better not,” he said.

  “Yeah. I thought of that.”

  He pointed to a nearby SUV, and they headed that way. “Guns are complicated,” he said as they walked. “Everything changes when you start packing. You start doing things you shouldn’t be doing. You walk down streets you shouldn’t be walking down. You go to parties you shouldn’t be going to—”

  “Hey, I’m a big girl,” she said.

  He looked sideways; his eyes went up and down her. “Here we are,” he said, and unlocked the Jeep Cherokee.

  She got in. The interior had leather seats and smelled like cigarettes, but it was not messy.

  “Where can I take you?”

  “Home. I live up on two hundred and seventeenth. Near the library.”

  He turned at the light. They drove along in silence for a while. “Hey, are you hungry or anything?” he asked.

  She was silent a moment. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  She shrugged. “Yes.”

  “There’s an ice-cream place on Hollis.”

  She nodded. “All right. As long as you don’t get creepy on me.”

  He grinned. He had very nice teeth. “Hey, I’m thirtyfour. You’re, what, nineteen? Maybe twenty?”

  “Twenty,” she lied.

  “So that settles that,” Sampson said. He looked over at her.

  When she didn’t reply, he concentrated on his driving.

  At the small and crowded ice-cream shop, they shared a small table, New York style, with a couple her age. They had backpacks, too, and looked vaguely familiar, as if they might be students at QCC. But they were in love and didn’t so much as look at Sampson and her.

  His thigh pressed against hers underneath the table. She didn’t move it. They took their time. Talked some. A little about Kevin. A little about Iraq. But back in the car they lurched toward each other and in seconds were kissing. Hard, even painful kissing. His hands were all over her breasts—she let him—and then one went to her crotch, which she arched toward him. The only thing that saved them from getting arrested for public indecency was the console and the gearshift between them.

  And it was Sampson who suddenly pulled free. “Sorry!” he said quickly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She touched his face.

  “I need to take you home, right now,” Sampson said.

  “Okay,” Lydia said easily.

  He let her out at the corner. After he drove off, she slung her backpack over her shoulder. Inside, the brass cartridges tinkled again, like tiny wind chimes from a sudden breeze. As if weather—maybe a storm of some kind—was moving in.

  THE DAY OF my friend Kevin’s wake, I put on my brand-new suit—the same one that’s for my sister’s confirmation.

  Except that Kevin wasn’t really my friend. And my sister isn’t my sister. Not by a mile. Not any day soon.

  I’m not being coy here. Not at all. Kevin was some guy I met in accounting class at York College. We both were, let’s say, taking the slow lane in college. Checking out a few classes here and there, heading for the exit ramp before the first assignment was due. Snatching grins at the back of the class. Both business majors, but who knows what that means. When the lady at registration asked me to pick a major, I just checked a box. It sounded good. Something that would get my father off my back.

  Oh, yeah. Papi. Another almost-connection. The guy who hauled off from Costa Rica when I was two, got himself some good jobs working crew for some Bangladeshis who renovated fancy brownstones in Brooklyn. Then one of them set up a trucking company at JFK Airport and made him inventory manager. My mother used to cash his checks at the farmacia and fold the bills in a flour jar at the back of the shelf, until I caught on. He sent postcards, birthday cards, checks for extra English classes, a package of Mets jerseys and shorts that puckered too tight against my legs.

  And the photos: Papi sitting in a backyard, his belly like a heavy rising moon, a scraggle of a beard around his chin. “Oh, looking so old,” Mami whispered. She had given herself to him when she was sixteen, and I think she believed that’s what they still were—sweethearts fingering each other’s new and surprised selves, doing all the wrong things at night in the soft mud of the coffee-bean fields; young newlyweds in her parents’ front room, she with a silver ring on her finger, he with a jaw shaved stubble-raw, a plane ticket to New York in his new denim jacket. Papi standing proud and upright in front of his beige-brick office in a uniform, his hair thinned and blowing up off his scalp, a thick fish of a gut sloping over his leather belt.

  When I turned fifteen and Mami was sick of me stealing from the flour jar, sick of me running in the streets, she began to pester him. It’s time. Your son. Tu hijo. You promised.

  So he sent for me. Dude’s got a nice tidy three-bedroom house in Queens Village, owns it even. A Weber barbecue on the concrete patio, freezer chock-full of dark, slender-necked cervezas.

  And get this?

  We ease up to the curb that first day, when I’m groggy and stiff from the frosted whoosh of plane air—my first and only plane ride—and lump chicken in a plastic tub, and the front door swings open. Out stumbles some six-, seven-year-old boy shouting, “Hermano! Hermano!” And then the other by the doorjamb, my half sister, Alicia, quivering thin and guarded as a greyhound, turning an icy cheek as I step up and try to give her a hug.

  Yeah, dude’s got another family.

  Funny how he didn’t mention that all those years. Ma kept working in the bakery, sliding those huge stainless-steel pans of buns and quivering flan, combing the buttery flakes from her long hair every night and winding the strands up tight again like a dark and shining secret, a knob of pain. I think she knew. That’s why, whenever I asked, “What about this Christmas? Is Papi coming?” she shook her head. Or the time I listened to her talk for a long time on an overseas call; after, I heard her sucking down her sad noises in her room.

  In ten seconds the story shears off like a cliff edge, not a word said. It all makes sense now: Papi’s hollow slap on my shoulder when I stepped through the airport gate. The frozen bracket of his mouth. The thump and tumble of my heart as we stood next to each other at the baggage claim, a rigid silence between us. Okay, you haven’t seen your father for thirteen years; it isn’t like some warm head nuzzle in his armpit will change all that. He isn’t your father. Not really. He’s just some guy. Some Yankee-made-good with a green Nissan, air freshener spinning on the rearview mirror, and a wife, standing shy and awkward down the hall at the kitchen counter.

  My father’s wife’s hair is dyed an improbable shade of gold-yellow. Her jeans, the seams studded with mirrored sequins, make huge half-moons of her butt. Neither of us knows what to say. I even feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for both of us. She’s folding meat on a platter. I’m stuck at the doorway, sniffing. I’ve never seen meat like that—white-pink as the underside of a pig’s belly. No bristle, no bone, just smooth as a plastic tongue. A chemical stink, like the air freshener in the car, sweats off the meat, comes spinning up my nostrils.

  Soon I’m all elbows and heaving motion as I stagger across the linoleum. “Over here!” she cries, and that makes it even worse—they’ve got a bathroom, with a tiny sink with taps like gold nuggets, and even this makes me sick. Then I’m heaving a bitter taste all over the guest towels.

  “Looking sharp!” Benny exclaims, glancing up from his bowl of Frosted Flakes. His eyes are two appreciative, shiny brown pennies. He shows a jagged set of baby and grown-in teeth, which give him a goofy, half-finished look. We share a bedroom, and the adoring waves Benny sends over sometimes ease me up.

  But Papi’s all scowls. “You can’t go.”

  “Wh
at do you mean?”

  “You can’t. It’s your sister’s confirmation.”

  He still calls her that. Alicia’s half. Not even half, since for almost all of my life I didn’t know she existed, that she lived in a room with one wall painted a pink so neon-bright it hurts my eyes, that she had Dora the Explorer parties where Papi twisted balloons for the kids. A whole story detonated itself minutes after I walked into his house three years ago. And I’m still picking out the bits from my innards. That counts for something, doesn’t it?

  “It’s a wake,” I tell him.

  “What’s the matter, they don’t have other hours?”

  “No.”

  Actually I’m not sure. I got the notice off Facebook. Some friend of a friend who posted. R.I.P. Kevin. Come pay your respects at Eternal Rest Funeral Home. I don’t care. No way Fish Gut is telling me when or where I have to be.

  “You get back here—”

  Fat chance, I think, edging down the hall, nearly knocking over the flower arrangement that’s sheathed in crackling plastic. This whole house billows with Alicia’s confirmation. Pink streamers draped in the front entrance, platters lined up on the counters. I go into the bathroom, and there’s some satin and silk confection hanging on the shower rod, and my stepmother is telling me not to touch it because the dress has to “air.”

  Now the door swings open and my stepmother steps into the hall, shopping bags tilted on her wrists. Alicia is right behind her. Her hair has just been done at the hairdresser’s, and it swings in a shiny wave at her shoulders. Her face is buffed smooth with makeup—no betraying rot of acne today.

  “Got yourself dolled up,” I comment.

  “Yes,” she whimper-smiles.

  “What’d they do? Sandpaper your cheeks?”

  Her mouth wobbles.

  “Must you?” my stepmother pleads. I can hear my father cursing in the kitchen.

  It’s all I can do to push past the two of them.

  Guilt’s a heavy pivot between me and my stepmother, and I crank it on her bad. Every time I step into a room, I see her mouth collapse and her eyes draw down like shades of mourning. She acts stupid and clumsy around me—and she is: too young to be my mother, too afraid to take it out on Papi for never hauling out the truth. And so I never take out the trash or wipe the mirror after a hefty shower. I finish up Alicia’s last Diet Coke and put the empty bottle back in the refrigerator door. I ask for a five here, a ten there for pocket money, even though Papi told her, “Let that lazy ass get himself a job.”

  I made her buy me this suit. Told her I needed it because I was a business major. That I had interviews, lots of interviews. And it was Kevin who made me do it.

  This suit is fine, with thin lapels and tailored pants that drape just right over my loafers. Very GQ sly, Kevin would say. It’s not like anything I’ve ever owned. But I needed her to do this for me—to watch her swipe her plastic card, bang it by the register, and rack up tens, hundreds of dollars I know she can’t afford. A mean and sour fog settles in my chest when I think of my stepmother.

  That’s how me and Kevin first got together—he had a way of knowing what I wanted, before even I knew.

  In accounting class we were supposed to break up into pairs and go over our homework. When the professor paused for a bathroom break, Kevin gave me a nod, and I gathered my backpack and slipped outside with him.

  “You want a cigarette?” he asked.

  “That’s okay. I don’t smoke.”

  He looked hurt for some reason. I could tell right away, he was one of those guys who just wanted to give stuff away, as if it embarrassed him to have anything. We sat on a low wall, our heels bouncing against the brick, and he dug out his cigarette and drew on it for a while.

  “I didn’t do the assignment,” he explained. “And I didn’t want that girl next to me giving me a hard time.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “I know.” He offered a loose, sloppy grin.

  “I don’t even have the textbook,” I added.

  Here his head bobbed up. I saw the pupils of his eyes contract. They made a weird purple color, almost fluorescent. “How come?”

  I shrugged. “Spent it on a new phone.”

  I pulled the phone out of my pocket. I’d already put on a blue rubber skin, loaded it up with all kinds of stuff—Temple Run, iFunny, Flashlight. Showed my little brother, but no one else since they’d all know how I bought it.

  Kevin admired it for a long time. He tested its sleek heft in his palm, checked out a few of the apps, sweeping his fingers on the screen. All the while he asked me questions: “How long you been here?” “Where you live?” “With who?” “They know you don’t go to class?” I told him everything. About coming up here three years ago. How nothing I do ever adds up the way it was supposed to. I said nothing about my stepmother, swallowed her down like a dark potion. I don’t know why I told Kev so much. He seemed to get it, though. He took in each notch of my story as if he had heard it before. When he handed me back the phone, I noticed how our wrists were the same tawny color, same width.

  Then he said, “I know how to get your textbook.”

  By the time I get to the bus stop, I can hardly breathe. I’ve run the whole way there, and it’s only when I scramble up onto my seat that I notice I still have a tag stitched to the cuff of my suit sleeve. “Don’t rip it,” I can hear my stepmother say. “Let me use the needle.”

  Of course I stepped away from her. “I can take care of it,” I mumbled.

  Now I’m staring at this cheesy bit of cardboard by my wrist. I don’t even know what I’m wearing this sucker for anyway.

  A few days ago, Papi told Alicia that no boys could come to the party tonight, not even from catechism class, and she hurled a hairbrush at the wall, nicking the wallpaper. I thought for sure he was going to explode, slide the belt out, but instead he shook his head, laughing, and walked away. “Women’s nerves,” he muttered.

  That’s what gets me.

  I could never throw a brush. Kick up a scene. I’m walking a fine line between boarder and street kid they’ve let in on probation. Papi’s patience with me burns short and harsh as a cigarette stub. But give him Alicia and he’s soft and jolly. He even goes to her teacher conferences, shyly palming his hair down before heading out in the Nissan. My stepmother, she was born here, just a few blocks away in Queens Village. She was the one with money for the down payment for this house. So Papi is always working hard to show her he’s level with her. No slippage marrying the Costa Rican who never got past eighth grade.

  I know all this. But it doesn’t make it any easier, I think, as I start to gnaw away at the threads with my teeth. Doesn’t get rid of the scooped-out hole in my chest. The hurt, down deep in my marrow somewhere, that Mami is some kind of a shadow, a fearful smudge on an X-ray he wishes would go away.

  That day after accounting class, when Kevin and I walked into the college bookstore, a girl behind the counter grinned at him and came hurrying out. “Kev! How are you? We miss you.”

  She had a body like a low-necked bottle, heavy at the bottom. The clipboard made her a little more efficient-official, not just your run-of-the mill work-study cashier. She had to stand on her toes to hug him, ’cause Kevin was one big guy—thick, meaty shoulders; a slightly dopey, bashed-in mug; and fierce, pained eyes. Kind of like a dog who’d been trashed and let go on the streets.

  Kevin chatted her up good. Natalie, her name was. I watched their hips bumping, just so, as they talked. Tiny flush marks, like sleep puckers, showed on her cheekbones.

  “You miss me so much,” he teased, “why not give me Friday shifts again?”

  She looked at him sharply. “You know I can’t.” She glanced around, suddenly nervous. “You better go now. George will be back from his lunch break.”

  “Nat—” His big hand rested on her side, just by her ribs. Something told me that wasn’t the first time his hand had made it there.

  “This is my buddy here . . .”
He tilted his head toward me. Then he managed to edge her toward the back room. The cashier, the real one, rolled her eyes at me.

  A few minutes later, the two of them emerged. Natalie’s flush had spread up over her ears around pale almond skin. Then we headed right past the scowling cashier, through the front door, with a brand-new accounting textbook, still in its plastic skin, setting off no alarms.

  “What was that about?” I asked, as we reached the street. “You used to work there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Lots.”

  It was always the same with Kevin. A nod, a lift of his chin, that fierce poison swimming up from behind his eyes. We sprang out of York College like hungry, roving street dogs. I couldn’t figure him out. He seemed to know everyone—greeting guys in the halls, the food court, the library, with high fives, slaps, and intricate finger signals, but he was always alone. Never stopped moving with that big, loping body of his, never explained himself.

  Usually we stopped off to see someone, almost always a girl—got ourselves a freebie, a Coke, a sub. Once we took the subway to a corner outside FIT, where a friend sold shawls and scarves to the pretty fashionistas that wiggled by. Kev made his friend hand me a scarf—a gold-russet one with silky fringes. “Give it to your stepmom,” he said. “Put it between you.”

  I folded the scarf into my bureau drawer that night. Never did give it to her.

  I don’t know why he picked me. Maybe the Papi connection. Told me his dad came from Puerto Rico, married a white lady, disappeared a long time ago.

  “She even changed our last name,” he said once, laughing. “That’s why I’m Nicholas.”

  “Ooh, that hurts,” I said.

  “Damn right it does.”

  Beyond that I didn’t know much more. He didn’t live at home anymore, though I wasn’t sure where he parked himself. Had a sister, a year younger. Kev always wore long-sleeved shirts—I can say that, buttoned up to his neck and wrists.

  That’s what he was wearing on a sweltering October day when we were in—of all places—Roosevelt Field, the shopping mall. Kev looked terrible. I hadn’t seen him for weeks and weeks, and he looked drawn down, wasted. His skin was the color of water-stained Sheetrock. He gave off a stale smell—something crumbling dustily inside. In the men’s department, he kept browsing, fingers tapping thin strips of shiny belts, ribbed socks, shoes—not like the kind anyone I knew would wear. “Nice stuff, no?” He grinned. “You ever know someone get in a suit like this? Go to work that way?” I noticed rims of dirt under his nails.