Before, After, and Somebody In Between (12 page)

My fingers fly up in the pool of light.

“Now turn around! Slow-ly!
”

“That’s my daughter up there, you dumb son-of-a-bitch!”

Momma? Omigod, what is she trying to do, get ‘em to
shoot
me down? Numb with dread, I turn, and something sharp pierces my sock. I hop up with a yelp, losing my balance—and the past fourteen years crawl, not flash, through my brain as I dangle one-handed from the metal rung.
Tick-tock, tick-tock
—and then my fingers slip, and I land in the driveway in a smattering of ice and glass.

Momma grabs my head. “Look what you done,” she snarls at the cop.

Stunned by the fall, astonished to be alive, all I can do is watch my own blood ooze into the snow, distantly wondering where all the glass came from. Not
my
window. Jerome’s?

The cop wanders closer and tries to make nice in one of those calm, funny voices reserved for mad dogs and mental patients. “Ma’am, the paramedics will look at her as soon as they get a chance.”

“She could be dead by then, you son-of-a—”

“Look, lady. We got a dead baby up there. Just get her out of the way, okay?”

Dead baby?

I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

20

Bright lights, poking hands, and disbelieving whispers.

“… drive-by shooting …”

“… drug deal gone bad …”

“… these streets kids, I swear …”

“… about a year old, I think. Right through the chest, poor thing.”

I clap my hands over my ears while people in uniforms finger every inch of my body like they’re searching for fleas instead of wounds. Twelve stitches in the foot, seven in the elbow, and five in the thumb. I scream my head off as they pick out the glass, never mind I’ve already been numbed with needles from head to toe.

Nurses bombard me with questions when they notice Wayne’s belt marks, exchanging looks, making hasty notes on their clipboards. Groggy from the pain shot, I pick at the blood around my nails and refuse to answer. All I want is for this hideous dream to end.

Unless, of course, I’m not really asleep. Maybe I’m dead, too, and stuck in my own personal version of hell.

The knock-out drugs finally do the trick. When I open my
eyes, the first thing I see is Momma dozing in the corner of the exam room. I remember where I am, and once I do, I’m sorry I woke up. “Momma?”

Momma’s eyelids flutter. “Yeah, sugar pie. I’m here.”

“Is Bubby dead?”

“Hush,” she says softly. “You rest.”

“Is he, Momma?” I have to know.

Momma nods. “Gloria’s kid. Some guys came after him and shot up half the house. Lucky thing nobody else got hurt. Lucky thing,” she adds, like she knows that’s where I went, “you weren’t up there when they done it.”

Lucky? Lucky thing Aunt Gloria threw me out, you mean.

Hours pass. Momma’s obnoxious snores keep me awake as I watch the tiny window get brighter and brighter. I do everything in my power to keep my mind a solid blank. I don’t talk to the doctor. I don’t talk to the nurses. I won’t even talk to the policewoman who pops her head in to find out what I know, or if I saw anything at all.

All I can see is Bubby, and I see him just as clearly as if I’d been there when it happened. I mentally follow the trails of the bullets that blew out Jerome’s window and pierced the side of the house. I imagine them ricocheting off the rungs of the fire escape, so close to my own window, and so close to me, sound asleep, trapped in that stupid dream.

I picture the bullets in slow motion, sailing through Jerome’s room and over his sleeping head, spiraling between the bars of the crib, and burrowing deep into Bubby’s chest.

I can see the splatter of blood on the wall next to the crib, a giant red flower with growing petals that drip, drip, drip all the way down to the floor.

I see Bubby’s brown curls, long enough to braid, but nobody
bothers to do it, and I’ve always been glad because I think it’s lame to put braids on a little boy, even if he is black, and black people do it all the time. But now these long brown curls are speckled with red.

Red on the sheets. Red on Oscar the Grouch. Red all over his floppy gray sock monkey.

I make this awful, gasping sound just as a bushy-haired doctor in a black crocheted beanie, I mean yarmulke, appears. My tacky blue hospital gown is drenched, my hands slippery as ice.

“Breathe,” he tells me, and I jump as he jams a cold stethoscope against my bare back.

I haven’t taken a full breath for five minutes. I think I forgot how.

“I can’t,” I rasp, touching my throat to make sure nothing’s choking me there.

“Yes, you can. Deep breath. Good girl.”

He smells like coffee, and has jelly smeared on the sleeve of his white coat. After listening to me force air in and out of my lungs, he turns toward Momma and calls her three times before she finally wakes up. I hope she slept off the beer, that he can’t smell any on her breath.

Momma stretches, cracking her bones. “Good grief. What time is it?”

“It’s after ten, Mrs. Kowalski.”

Momma hefts her bulk out of the chair, reaching for her coat. “You feeling okay now, sugar pie? ‘Bout ready to go?”

Dr. Yarmulke raises a finger. “Just one minute. If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep Martha here for a day or two to make sure she’s all right.”

“She’s fine,” Momma argues. “Little banged up is all.”

I study the rusty stain on my bandaged hand, amazed at the understatement.

“Martha has been through a terrible trauma. She’s obviously distraught, and I think she could benefit from a couple of days in our adolescent ward.”

Momma glowers. “Distraught? She’s just laying there!”

“Still, I’d like her to be evaluated.”

“No,” Momma says flatly. “She’s coming home with me.”

The doctor ignores her. “Martha? Would you like to stay here and talk to somebody about what happened last night?”

A long murderous silence follows while they wait for my answer. I think of all the old movies I’ve seen about wartime interrogators with their bamboo razors and electrical probes. Man, those guys had nothing on these two. No wonder people break down and confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

“I want to go home,” I say at last.

“Good. Let’s go.” Momma throws me my bloody clothes.

But then the doc drops a bomb. “Mrs. Kowalski, I’d reconsider if I were you. We’re all aware of the fact that Martha’s been abused.”

You could hear a feather drop. “What did you say?”

“Abused,” Dr. Yarmulke repeats. “Somebody’s been hitting her, and we’ve documented this clearly in her record. Martha, would you like to show your bruises to your mother?”

What for? She already saw them. Oh, why can’t he shut up and let me go home?

Momma’s face turns eggplant purple. “My daughter tell you that?”

“No. In fact, she wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“See? That’s the problem with you people, you got nothing better to do except stir up trouble, pokin’ your noses into poor people’s business. Who in the sam-hill do you think you are?” And on and on till I want to crawl into the wall. With my dumb
luck, they’ll throw
her
in the psych ward. Then I definitely won’t have a way out of this rat hole.

“Fine. Take her home. But let me tell you something, ma’am. Somebody
will
follow up on this, and if there’s any abuse going on, we’ll find out. Understand?”

“Don’t you threaten me, buddy. What the hell’s wrong with you people? I’m her mother, for Christ’s sake. You think I’d sit back and let anybody beat on her?” As she scrawls her name on a piece of paper, I gingerly pull my clothes on over my damp blue gown. That last shot they gave me is re-eally wearing off.

Wayne picks us up in his truck, and aside from a couple of his brainless wisecracks, nobody speaks on the way home. I see a cop in the yard rolling up miles of yellow tape, but other than that, the house looks oddly the same—flapping shingles, peeling gray paint, sagging porch, broken steps. I don’t look up at the fire escape, or at Jerome’s shattered window. I just walk into the kitchen and stand there, feeling helpless.

“You want me to make you a hot dog or something?” Momma eyes me nervously, like she’s waiting for my head to start spinning around.

“Uh-uh.”

Normally I don’t get headaches—last one I had was my Halloween hangover—but the right side of my brain feels like it’s been stun-gunned (bubbybubbybubbybubby) and little golden crinkles dance at the edge of my vision (bubbybubbybubbybubby) so I head to my room and collapse facedown. Trying so hard not to think
bubbybubbybubby
…and trying not to remember that it was me who took the money.

Me.

I did it. I took the money. And I’m the one who put Bubby in the crib.

Yep, just dropped him in and told him to “go night-night,” and then sprinted the hell out of there before Aunt Gloria could grab another hanger.

I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know what would happen!

But I took the money.

I put Bubby in that crib.

My journal is on the bed right where I left it. I flip through it briefly, twirl my pen, but I can’t write about what happened, not one single word. What do I write besides “Bubby is dead”?

I wham the notebook into the wall, thinking that it’s a mistake, that nothing happened at all. Just another twisted, endless dream, like when Momma lumbered naked through the park, hollering my name.

I mean, Bubby could be up there right now, chewing on his sock monkey. Watching the window. Waiting for Martha to come back.

But if he were, I wouldn’t be hearing those sounds from upstairs. Spurts of grief. Soft, endless wailing. Grandma Daisy doing her “Jesus, Jesus” thing, only quieter now. Like she’s giving up.

So if Bubby doesn’t exist, maybe I don’t, either. How would I know? How does
anyone
know? I jump up and push my face in front of my dresser mirror. Okay, I have a reflection—that must count for something. Long wild hair, raccoon eyes, a scratch on my chin from Bubby’s fingernail, probably.

“Martha,” I whisper.

The face stares back, and her empty look tells me the name means nothing to her at all.

21

I miss four days of school because every time I take a step it’s like jamming my foot into a box of barbed wire. Shavonne keeps calling, but I refuse to come to the phone. I can’t talk to anyone.

Momma wouldn’t let me go to Bubby’s funeral, and now she’s really laid down the law about me going upstairs. “You are forbidden to stick a single toe in that house. It’s too dangerous.” And with Jerome’s window boarded up, I can’t even sneak in.

At first I argue out of general principle. After all, it’s the same house. Are we any safer down here?

But do I want to see that empty crib? The bullet holes in the plaster? Grandma Daisy’s face?

Fact Number One: I took Anthony’s money.

Fact Number Two: If Anthony could’ve paid up, none of this would’ve happened.

Fact Number Three: If Jerome finds out, he’ll hate me forever.

Poor Jerome. No dad, no mom, and now his baby brother is—gone. I’ve never seen him cry, not even when Aunt Gloria bashed him with that hanger. But I bet he’s crying now. Crying out loud, with his mouth open, the way Bubby used to cry.

Momma doesn’t have a clue what I feel like, why I can’t stop crying, and how scared I am about ever facing Jerome. Sober today, she corners me in the john. “Martha, please stop this crying. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care!” I’m already sick. I crouch on the bathroom floor, thumping my head against the wall as Momma tries to pull me up. “I want him back. I just want him back!”

“Martha, c’mon. Have something to eat. You’ll feel better.”

“No!” I may never eat again.

Still, she hovers, and then jolts me to the bone with, “You know what I been thinking? I been thinking about that cello of yours, and …well, maybe soon as I find me another job, we can see about gettin’ you another one. Think you’d like that?”

She’s only being nice because she’s afraid I might hang myself in the shower. I know she doesn’t really want me to have another cello. And the next time she gets drunk, or pissed off, she’ll burn that, too. Like she burned Daddy’s violin.

“No,” I say into my raggedy towel. “I don’t want another cello.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I don’t want one.”

“But why?”

How can I say it out loud, that everything’s my fault? And that she’s right about me, too, how everything’s always about me. Me, me, me! That’s why I stole Anthony’s money, and why Bubby is dead. All because of that fucking cello of mine!

“I hate it! I’m never gonna play again.”

“But why, sugar pie?”

“Stop asking me that! I don’t want to, okay? I don’t want a freakin’ cello, and I don’t want any music lessons.”

“Well, what
do
you want?” As if anything she could give me could make a difference, could make any of this better.

I can’t tell her the truth without hurting her feelings. She already knows how I feel about Wayne, and that I don’t want her to drink. Why waste my breath?

What I want is to start over—but not with her. With me.

I want my whole life to rewind and begin again from scratch. I want to be born another person, in a different part of the world, with different parents.

I’m so sick of Martha Kowalski and her big stupid mouth and bigger, stupider dreams, I could rip my own throat out and not feel a thing.

But out loud, all I can say is: “I want you to go away and leave me alone.”

22

Finally, the next day, I decide to go back to school. I roll out of bed, pull on some clothes, and nibble on a Twinkie, hoping the sugar and chemicals will blast this headache away for good. No such luck, and while I’m scouting around for the Tylenol, I find something else: a whole stash of prescription bottles with other people’s names on them.

Damn. Did Momma really quit her job or did she get fired for swiping drugs? No wonder she’s been so nice to me lately. All mellowed out on some old fart’s Xanax.