The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  Then they both look up, and Aislyn is caught staring. Her father immediately beams and beckons her into the room. “Hey, yeah, Apple, come on in. I want you to meet a friend.”

  Aislyn comes in, trying not to frown so that she can be polite, but… her father does not have friends. He has “guys from work,” who are cops as well—and to judge by his comments about them, her father regards most of those as rivals for the rank of detective, which he has been striving to achieve for most of Aislyn’s life. He goes drinking and occasionally to ball games with them, however, and this apparently serves as enough of a substitute for friends that he’s never sought anything else. And yet here is her father, grinning as he says, “This is Conall McGuiness—” And then he laughs, as Aislyn cannot help widening her eyes at the name. “Good Irish name, right? Always liked that one.”

  Conall laughs, too. “Blame my father.” Matthew chuckles and slaps him on the back, while Conall regards Aislyn. “Very nice to meet you, Aislyn. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Um, hopefully all good,” Aislyn banters by rote, trying not to squirm. She’s gotten better at this since she was a child, when she would simply stand before strangers without speaking, having frozen up—but she’s still not good at it. Usually, her father knows this and gives her plenty of warning before he brings a stranger home, for her sake. “Nicetomeetyoutoo, thanks.” And to her father, just because the curiosity is killing her, she adds, “Is this, ah, somebody else from work?”

  “Work? Eh, no.” Her father’s still smiling, but all at once Aislyn knows that he’s lying. But what is the lie? Conall doesn’t look like a cop. He doesn’t feel like a cop, although Aislyn’s cop-dar is understandably limited in its scope. But maybe Conall is a friend of cops, in general. “We’re just working on a thing together, kiddo.”

  “A hobby,” Conall adds, and then he and Aislyn’s father dissolve into boyish snickering again. Aislyn has no idea what’s so funny.

  When they recover, Conall is the picture of pleasantry. “Apple, huh? That’s cute. I figured you’d have a nickname based on Aislyn. Dreams, dreamer, dreamy, you know.”

  That’s the meaning of Aislyn’s Gaelic name, which Aislyn looked up in a book once when she was a child. “You really are a true son of Ireland, huh.”

  Conall grins. Aislyn’s father nods approvingly and adds, “Apple ’cause she’s my little apple, here in the Big Apple. I started calling her that when she was little and she loved it.”

  Aislyn has always loathed this nickname. “Do you, uh, need anything to eat or drink, Conall? Dad?”

  “We’re good, kid. Hey, but, Conall, Aislyn’s a great cook. Even better than her mother. Kendra!” It’s a sudden bellow that makes Aislyn jump, but for once, her father isn’t angry. Kendra appears immediately, and Matthew gestures vaguely toward the back of the house. “Make up the guest room, babe, Conall’s going to stay with us for a couple of days.”

  Kendra nods, nodding again to Conall in lieu of a greeting. Then she hesitates. “Lyn and I already ate, though.” And the leftovers are already put up for the night, if Conall’s hungry. It’s also a commentary on the fact that Matthew came home later than usual tonight.

  Matthew’s smile vanishes almost instantly, and Aislyn’s belly clenches almost as fast. “Did I ask when you ate?”

  She is relieved when Conall straightens a little, drawing both her parents’ attention back to himself. “Thank you for looking after me,” he says to Kendra, and flashes a charming smile. “Wow, Matt didn’t lie, Mrs. Houlihan, you really are beautiful.”

  Kendra blinks in surprise. And Aislyn’s father—who normally hates being called Matt—laughs and companionably whacks Conall again. “Trying to sweet-talk my wife, huh? What the hell, you.” Just like that, everything’s laughs again.

  Aislyn looks at Kendra, without quite intending to. She’s learned over the years that she and her mother cannot appear to be allied, even if they are. But Kendra seems just as puzzled by the whole situation. She goes off to make up the guest bed, and Aislyn decides to beat a retreat as well.

  Just before Aislyn completes her turn away, however, a flicker of movement snags her attention. She jumps and looks back sharply, frowning. Conall and her father have returned their attention to whatever’s on the tablet, and they’ve dropped their voices to continue talking. Just like best friends. All very abnormally normal. What was that movement, though?

  There. On the back of Conall’s neck. Something long and thin and white sticks up from somewhere around the sixth or seventh cervical vertebra, and just above his crisp shirt collar. One of those weird little tendrils that the Woman in White kept putting on people and objects.

  Conall glances up again, and raises his eyebrows at her stare. “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Aislyn blurts, and then she nods something farewell-like before hurrying upstairs to her room.

  By 3:00 a.m. it’s clear to Aislyn that she’s not going to get any sleep. As she’s done with previous bouts of insomnia, she gets up and heads into the backyard. There’s nothing here but the family pool, which her father installed ten years ago, and which Aislyn’s swum in maybe twice. (It isn’t that she doesn’t like swimming. It’s that she can’t stand the fear that someone might be ogling her in her swimsuit—even though there’s a twelve-foot wooden privacy fence around the entire backyard. It’s not rational, but neither is her fear of the Staten Island Ferry.)

  But even though the pool is useless for swimming, it’s not bad for meditating—if moping beside a pool while clad in jammies and her favorite Danny the Dolphin plush slippers qualifies as meditation. This time, however, she’s been out there for about five minutes, mournfully contemplating the distant, increasingly desperate call of the city, when something shifts beside her. She jumps and whirls to find her father’s houseguest Conall sitting in a poolside lounger not five feet away.

  He’s been there the whole time, Aislyn realizes with some chagrin; she was just so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice. He’s muzzy-faced as he yawns now and blinks at her, and there are lines from the lounger’s straps on one cheek; he must have been asleep. There’s dried drool on one side of his mouth. Aislyn doesn’t laugh at this because she’s also a little appalled to see that he’s wearing nothing but a pair of her father’s old pajama pants. He’s double-tied them, but they’re still tentlike on him. As he’s without a shirt, she sees now that he also sports a farmer’s tan and a series of additional tattoos across his chest and belly that are a lot less ambiguous than the ones on his arms. One’s an older, nicely done Irish trinity knot over which the number 14, and a separate 88, have been etched in jagged, more amateurish lines. She remembers reading something about those numbers, and though she can’t recall what they’re supposed to mean exactly, she doesn’t think it’s anything good. A couple of the tats are semi-comprehensible outlines of what look like Norse gods? They’re very muscular. Part of Aislyn is mildly offended by the conflation of Nordic stuff with Celtic, because the Vikings were invaders—but it is the tattoo on his left pectoral that makes her tense up. There, right over his heart, is a thickly etched swastika. So maybe this isn’t really the time to quibble over mixed mythological metaphors.

  Conall chuckles. “Well, you haven’t run screaming. Your dad did say you were a true daughter of the isle.”

  “What’s Ireland got to do with…” Aislyn gestures at the swastika.

  “Just that there aren’t enough girls like you out there making the right choices.” He reaches down, and belatedly Aislyn sees the bottles next to the lounger. Her father’s favorite beer brand. In addition to this, there’s a metal flask surrounded by several airplane-sized bottles of harder liquor. All appear empty. Aislyn cannot see the white tendril on his neck from here. Can the Woman in White watch her through it? Is she part of him, somehow? Aislyn is groping for a way to ask, Did she tell you her name, too? when Conall sets the bottle down and says, “Ever fucked a Black guy?”

  “Wh—” Her
thoughts freeze. The question doesn’t make sense on any level—that he would ask such a thing of a stranger, that he would ask it of her of all people, that he would ask it of a supposed friend’s daughter, that he would put that string of words together in that order. “What?”

  “You know. Ever took a swing on the old jungle gym? Or made the beast with a wet back?” Then he laughs at her face. As if it’s the funniest thing in the world.

  “I’m just saying,” he continues, “if your father’s trying so hard to set you up with me—which he is—I should know what kind of goods I’m buying, right? I mean, you’re a pretty girl, but you’re from Staten Island.” He grins as if this is supposed to mean something in particular. “I’m just asking who’s, uh, stretched you out. Broken you in.”

  His eyes rove her body while he talks. Aislyn suddenly feels that her worn, oversized T-shirt and faded dolphin pajama pants are the height of indecency. She should have put on a robe. That’s why he’s talking to her like this, because she’s dressed like a whore. She should have—

  He laughs again, and this time it’s lazy and friendly. “Calm down, calm down, I’m just fucking with you. I tried to tell your dad that you weren’t really my type, buuuuut…” He picks up the flask, which is open, and swigs from it, then grimaces as if its contents have burned his throat going down.

  She needs to leave. He’s gross, and drunk. But the words are actually starting to anger her, now that her shock has given way to comprehension. She is here in her own home, he is a guest, and he speaks to her like this? “I’m definitely not your type,” she says. Then she turns her back on him—but does not leave, because she refuses to look like she’s fleeing from him, even if she wants to.

  He snickers. It’s infuriating. “Aww, hey, hey, Aise, I’m sorry. Friends, okay? Let’s be friends. Hey, I wanna show you something.” When she deliberately does not turn, he shifts a little, making the lounger scrape the concrete. At this, she jumps and whirls because some part of her is abruptly afraid that he’s going to get up and… What? Now she’s being irrational. Her father is a cop, and a shout away; Conall wouldn’t dare. But Conall is still in the lounger. He’s sprawled out more, in fact, spreading his legs and planting his feet on the pool deck, and… and that isn’t a bottle tenting his pants. Aislyn flinches and starts walking away, hotfaced and disgusted.

  Conall catches her hand as she goes past, to her astonishment. “Sure you wanna go?”

  “Let go of me,” she snarls.

  “Look, Aise,” he says. He’s dropped his voice into something low and persuasive. “We both know you’ll die in this house if some guy doesn’t marry you away.”

  That. Aislyn freezes. That’s.

  He reads the horrified acknowledgment of reality in her shock, and grins. “And we both know you’ve never done anything with any guy, let alone any big fat jungledicks. I’ve seen your type. Good Catholic girls, too scared to do shit. Wanna know a secret? Nobody likes virgins, Aise. It doesn’t make you pure or special, just a shitty lay whenever somebody finally gets around to you.” His hand, already tight enough that she’s going to have to struggle to break his grip, pulls her down a little. “Daddy’s Girl, still living at home. Never had a boyfriend. But you want to leave, don’t you? You dream about having a real life. You want to get away from this shitty island. Be somebody. Right?”

  “Let go of me,” Aislyn says again, but this time it’s weak because some of what he’s said has struck entirely too close to home. She’s shaking, too, and she hates it, because he can feel that. But she is surprised to realize, in a sudden epiphany, that she isn’t shaking out of fear. He’s said a lot of things that are accurate, but—

  this shitty island?

  Her hand twitches in his, and he tightens his grip in response. He thinks she’s trying to get away. She isn’t.

  Shitty?

  “So here’s your ticket,” he says, bumping his hips up so that his erection bounces in obscene suggestion. “Your dad just looooves me. But you don’t want to be his anymore, do you? Be your own woman; suck my dick. Or we can even get started on grandkids for him, if you want. I got a fat creampie all ready up in here.” He grins and then fumbles at the drawstring of his pants, trying to tug them down. “Or if you’re really committed to the virginity thing, anal’s good, too. Doesn’t hurt at all.” He laughs.

  He’s revolting. Aislyn cannot understand why her father has befriended this creature, brought him home, put him up in their house. Or, rather, a part of her is especially shaken because she does understand why: because on some level, her father is this man. She cannot imagine Matthew Houlihan being this crass with her mother, or else her maternal grandparents would never have let Kendra marry him—but beneath her father’s veneer of traditional respectability, he is also a beer-swilling, controlling boor. Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

  Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

  The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

  “I told you,” she says to Conall, finally jerking her hand free, “to let. Go.”

  On the last word, a sphere of pure force balloons outward from Aislyn’s skin. It presses Conall into the lounger and then—as he inhales in shock—bodily lifts both him and the lounger, then flings them all the way across the pool deck. Man and furniture smash through the wooden fence amid a clatter of splinters and the snap of boards and one strangled, belated, “What the fuuuuuck?”

  Aislyn straightens at once, her eyes going to the cameras edging the pool area. “‘Everything that happens everywhere else happens here, too,’” she murmurs quickly. It is her father’s favorite saying. “‘But at least here people try to be decent. Try to be decent.’”

  Something ripples around her. An edit of perception. The recording-lights on the cameras flicker a bit. And as Conall struggles to his feet, covered in leaves from the neighbors’ euonymus hedge and bits of shattered wood from the fence, staring at Aislyn in something like terror, she glares at him. “I wasn’t here,” she snaps. Then she steps over his mess and walks out of the yard.

  She doesn’t know where she’s going. It doesn’t matter where she’s going. She’s got no money and no ID, and can’t go far anyway because she’s walking in puffy slippers shaped like dolphins. But as she walks, her limbs moving with tight, brisk efficiency, her jaw full of tension, she feels the island, her island, editing perception around her. No one notices or pays attention to a lone young woman walking down the middle of the street (because her street has no sidewalks). It’s not that they don’t see her, the drivers of the cars that pass, or the neighbors who chance to look outside after hearing a loud noise from the Houlihan house. It’s just that, as they notice her, something else catches their attention. A movement in the trees, a car rolling past with speakers blaring, a bus in the distance stopping on screechy brakes. The front door of the house opening as Matthew Houlihan comes out with a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, heading around to the side of the house where the fence has been shattered. He doesn’t see Aislyn, either, even though she’s only maybe twenty feet away in that moment. He sees what she wants him to see. Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

  And at least Aislyn is not at this very moment being raped by a man in whom her father sees himself. This, and the fact that she’s heard her father make fun of rape victims, is why she doesn’t bother to tell her
father what Conall did. This is why, if her father checks the video feed from the cameras, he’ll see an indistinct figure—not Aislyn—standing by the pool, who then gets into a struggle with Conall, and runs away after bodily throwing Conall through the fence. Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

  This is why she stops on the corner with her head down and her fists clenched and her shoulders tight. She’s sucking in breaths to try to get a hold of herself, and trying not to cry. It’s late enough that the street that winds past her neighborhood is quiet. A car passed a moment ago, and the next one coming is at least a mile behind it. Here, in this liminal silence, Aislyn can be afraid and angry and bitter about all the forces that have conspired to make her what she is. She can wish for better. She can—

  The car that’s been coming along the road for the past minute or so reaches her. It’s going slowly, and as it gets closer, it slows more. Finally it stops right before her, the driver leaning over to roll down the passenger-side window. Aislyn tenses, bracing herself for the catcall or solicitation.

  The man inside is ferociously lean, dark-haired, and something other than white. He’s got a lit cigarette held tightly between his lips as he stares at her for a moment. Then he says, “Staten Island?”