55. Before Tomorrow

 

Today. Just today. I just have to get through this day in one piece. It’s the only way anybody’s ever lived on this block and it’s the only mode of life I’ve known since I left.

I can’t say whether anything’ll change after tomorrow. I know that I’ll never come back to this block again. It’s not a choice: I have no choice. Not that I’ve ever wanted to return. But I have no such choice in any event. Never did, probably never will.

Just today. Tomorrow, if it goes the way I foresee it, we bury mother. Hopefully, nothing’ll complicate maters until then. Mrs. Littington and the woman whose name I never knew glance in my direction, but neither speaks to me. Maybe they talk to each other when I’m out of sight, but I don’t recall that they had much, if anything, to say to do with each other when we were on this block. Their only connection was mother, and I’ve no idea of how much they talked about each other to her.

I’m not even sure that Mrs.L. and the lady recognize each other now, although—somehow not surprisingly—Mrs. L. seems not to’ve aged beyond a few gray flecks in her darker-than-chestnut hair. The edges of her hair that frame her forehead, temples and ears have softer, wavier edges than those of the sharper cut she wore when she lived on this block—but somehow even that seems not to’ve changed much, either. For that matter, the lady whose name I never knew doesn’t seem much older than I recall her, either; but her loose and dry skin always made her seem older than mother, or most of the other people on this block. Then again, I’d just barely passed puberty the last time I saw her. All the adults—which is to say the women—on this block seemed like fixtures that’d always been there.

Every once in a while, she catches my gaze. Maybe she won’t ask questions. That’s the unwritten—That goes without saying!—code of this block. Then again, she never needed to ask questions, or so it seemed.

Another code is not to tell, at least not so the person who’s being told about knows. Would she? Could she? Who was it who told me, “Them that know don’t tell; but them who tell don’t know”? What did thatt person know? What does she know? What—who—would she tell? Being on this block, still, she had to’ve heard about the body in the cellar. The one with my name—my former name—on it. And my date of birth. But not my date of death. Surely she had to’ve known better than to believe that version of the end of a life. On this block, who’d’ve remained, by that time, who’d’ve had any reason to kill me? The men—the boys—were all gone by then. Including me.

Who, then, ‘d’ve gone through the trouble of striking him on the head hard enough to knock him to the ground, but not hard enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness. Who’d’ve been anygry, obsessive or whatever enough to tie him by his hands and feet and tape his mouth while his eyes were shut? To peel the too-tight black pants and bikini brief away from his hairy midsection? Or—when he regained consciousness and grunted because he couldn’t beg for mercy—took a sawtoothed switchblade and gnarled at the base of his scrotum and removed an organ which to this day has not been found? And finally pulled—actually, slid and slogged—the briefs and pants back over the bloody crotch, hooked the waist tab and zipped the fly shut just as red heat began to ooze through them?

Could she’ve known t he answers, or enough to question what I –or the man whose body was identified as mine—would’ve been doing anywhere near this block at that time? As far as she knew—or so I thought—I was long gone, and possibly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what mother told her. Or if she said nothing at all, except that I don’t think that lady’d’ve let her.

Hopefully, she won’t ask any more questions—or talk any more—about him or me, or to me—before this day is over, before I can leave for good, like mother, tomorrow.

One more day and mother finally gets to rest. And I’ll be able to continue—and hopefully complete—my transformation.

54. Omerta

 

The official reports called Adam’s death a suicide. Given the circumstances under which he was found, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—‘ve been ruled any other way. The police department, the medical examiner and others involved in the case would therefore not be required to investigate any further. And there wasn’t any reason for them to do so: They found no more physical evidence and after questioning people on the block—including mother and Mrs. Littington—they probably didn’t know any more about Adam, or why he filled his apartment with cooking gas.

The people of this block could stop any questioning or discussion of any incident—such as Adam’s death—even faster than the officials of the city or state ever could. Mother or the nuns—and later, the teachers—always told me I asked too many questions. I hadn’t seen him for several months—an era, at that time in my life—before the police marked off that front stoop with their orange bands.

Mother, who’d had more troubles than I’d realized then, said it’s something she could’ve done, but she could only think of those she’d leave behind. I’m sure other women on this block felt the same way. Sister Elizabeth said that in times of trouble everyone has a patron saint—and God. But what if…She wouldn’t say any more about it and would upbraid my mother for her child’s “morbid curiosity.”

Snow covered the stoop; it cleared away. The stoop, then the house, were painted over, but nobody moved in. Everybody, it seemed, could tell when I was going to ask about Adam, about what happened that night before Christmas Eve, when the wind that carried the snow and whispered its hissing admonition to close one’s eyes and leave the darkness under blankets, under layers of snow.

The sun had already disappeared behind heavy veils of clouds; the full moon—it was so bright I could sit next to the window in my room and read by it—illuminated the last clear sky I could remember seeing for a long time afterward.

During the spring that followed, it seemed that the woman whose name I never knew was taking more care than usual to keep her bushes from growing up over her flowers, or the sidewalk. Sunny days were full of overpowering glare we were used to seeing only on those summer days when people stayed inside their houses or in shade.

Out in the sun on such a day, you could exhale and it would feel like wind from the surface of the sun rushing back at your face. And the clouds, and even the rain, seized the flaking, peeling bricks and stained and tarnished metal sheets of the houses and bound them in a thick gray haze that seemed still only because the people of this block hadn’t noticed—or had forgotten—when it came and went.

Sister Elizabeth lost patience she never had and slapped me across the face for “thinking about evil, selfish deeds” and not keeping my mind on the day’s lesson. What did I care about base six numeral systems—I think that’s what she was teaching—anyway? What did that have to do with Adam or mother or me or anyone else on the block? About as much as patron saints had to do with Adam, I thought. Would he’ve been alive had he known what a polynomial or a declension was? Would any of the stuff they were teaching’ve made my father—whom I didn’t know, or rather, didn’t want to know—care enough to stay with me and mother, or made him able to help us, or at least not to hurt us?

Catechism, mathematics, all those subjects whose names come from languages nobody on this block spoke or would care to speak—What good would those things do him, me, mother, anybody? But mother still insisted I go to school and learn. She responded to my protests that “you never needed that stuff” with the same glancing glare she gave whenever I mentioned Adam or asked about the ones—almost always teenaged boys and men—whom I saw one day and were gone another.

Through that year, the sun glared more blindingly and clouds grew heavier and more impenetrable like secrets. The haze between them draped windows and doors all over this block.

Nobody wanted to hear the stories Adam told me, and after his death mother and Sister Elizabeth and everyone else wanted me to forget them. The cops’d asked mother, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew—everyone, it seemed, except me—what they knew about Adam. At first, I’d thought they skipped me only because of my age: They didn’t ask the few other kids on this block, either.

Then again, the cops were like the adults on this block and the teachers in one way: If you were a kid, they’d ask you questions only if they thought you’d done something wrong, or knew who did. That is to say, they’d ask if they thought you could give the answers they wanted to hear. Certainly, I couldn’t’ve told them any more than they already knew about the circumstances of that night Adam died. By the same token, I’m sure they weren’t ready to hear me recount the stories he told me, any more than they’d have any use for one inescapable fact: The adults of this block were speaking in the same furtive, clipped tones—and were scolding me and other children into silence in the same ways—as they did after any death or other tragedy or mishap the people of this block would deny or try to wash away.

53. Winter

 

Some things I’ll never understand. Others, they won’t—not Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew—understand. Including the one thing I’m still trying to explain to myself.

The way Adam died. The story we all heard, the one that’s listed in the reports, is suicide. Found with head in oven, gas turned on. Still cold in the apartment, cold as it was outside. And clear, with stars as bright as the strings of lights glinting on cables of the bridge you can see across the cemetery from this block.

He’d’ve seen that bridge from his window, as I could from mother’s room, on such a night: the sky even clearer than the glass that separated me—and him—from it. It’s so clear on such a night, whipped by the early winter winds that come before a storm. Two nights before Christmas, eight before the end of the year.

Buried, gone before New Year’s Day. Then the stoop where he sat, where he gave me little bottles of soda as he sighed, coughed and sometimes talked, that stoop disappeared under snow—the heaviest this block had ever seen, according to the weather reports. For days, for weeks, the snow lay stubbornly, not yielding to footprints.

Nobody came or went. Far as anybody knew, nobody—not another person, or even a cat or a dog—lived there. I don’t remember anyone exiting or leaving that house and I’m not sure anyone sat on that stoop when I wasn’t there with Adam.

Haven’t seen anybody on that stoop today, either. From what I’ve heard, people don’t do that anymore—in fact, nobody stops for very long on this block. Most of the time, the sidewalk’s vacant. When anybody walks, she doesn’t stop until she’s inside her house or off this block, headed to wherever else she’s going.

From what I hear, nobody’s sat or stood on that stoop since the last time I saw Adam. After the snow cleared, after the ice melted and the shadows that precede evenings were swept into extra minutes, then hours, of light at the end of the day, the bricks of that stoop and that house crinkled and started to come apart at the cement seams that held them together like stitches of winter coats at the end of the season, when the weather’s still cold enough to wear them but there’s enough light to show how worn they are. Someone came over to look at them, mark them. Then other men accompanied him, chipping, scraping and painting. I don’t know who those men were—nobody said, and Adam didn’t have any relatives anybody knew about—but they were there, it seemed, the first day the weather broke. In almost no time, they smothered the flaking red bricks with a sticky shine in the color of chewing gum.