Lucretia and the Kroons

4

The story of the Kroons seemed to float in the living room like a great gray cloud. So Loochie left the living room. She walked into her mother’s bedroom and stopped before the two wig-wearing mannequins. She had another idea, along with the bike ride, of what to do with Sunny when she arrived. Two wigs for two girls who might enjoy a little dress-up. Loochie would save the nicer one, the date wig, for Sunny. She slipped the work wig off its foam head and placed it gently on her scalp. She knew she should’ve waited for Sunny to do all this, and normally she would have, but Louis’s story had her feeling jumpy. She needed to do something just so she wouldn’t be sitting around having nightmares about apartment 6D.

She tucked one braid under the wig, as best she could, then the other. Did she look older now? Loochie turned to her right profile and her left. She dipped one shoulder and looked into the mirror with her most mature expression. The wig looked nice. And wouldn’t it be even better with a little lipstick?

Loochie found the small bag in the top dresser drawer where her mother kept her cosmetics. Unopened lipsticks, eyeliner, foundation, a jar of cold cream. Loochie decided to be bold and she uncapped one lipstick, a red that wasn’t too red, and she applied it lightly like she’d often seen her mother do. Now she looked at herself in the mirror again, delighted at the sight. Forget the fact that she was twelve years old: She practically looked fifteen. Maybe even sixteen. She stepped backward from the dresser mirror and the farther she moved the older she seemed to get. She found a pair of her mother’s socks on the floor, rolled each into a ball, and tucked them into her sweater. Now she even had boobs!

Her hand moved toward her pants pocket without her even willing it to do so. She had one of Sunny’s cigarettes pinched between two fingers and almost didn’t realize how it had gotten there. She was becoming someone else. Not Loochie but Lucretia. Lucretia put the cigarette between her lips and made a loud sucking sound, treating the cigarette more like a straw. The sound was embarrassing but in the mirror across the room the moves looked so elegant to her.

Lucretia swiveled, her hips turning before her feet did. Lucretia sashayed out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Lucretia spun the dial on the front burner of the oven and the flames whooshed when they rose. Lucretia batted her head from side to side as if a breeze were playing through her hair. Lucretia bent forward delicately and brought the tip of the cigarette to the flame. When it lit Lucretia pulled on the other end more gently this time and the rolling paper flared. Suddenly Lucretia thought she heard the front door unlock. Her mother was back! She turned off the burner and listened.

“Mom?”

Loochie waited. She held the lit cigarette behind her back.

“Louis?”

If it had been Sunny and her grandmother they would’ve rung the bell.

Still nothing. She shut her eyes and held her breath. No sounds. They weren’t back. Maybe just the door of another apartment nearby being opened. She walked back into the bedroom. Where was Sunny though?

Lucretia stood in the same place, a few feet from the dresser mirror, and watched herself take a pull so deep, so expert. The smoke filled her mouth and her cheeks expanded. Then some of the smoke snuck down her throat and boy did it burn. Her eyes watered quickly, suddenly, and her mouth fell open and she hacked inelegantly once, twice, three times.

The cigarette fell out of Loochie’s fingers and landed in the bedroom carpet but she hardly noticed. She stooped forward and coughed violently. She was crying now and her mouth filled with spit that tasted vile. She opened her mouth and choked out all the spit right into the carpet. Then she kept heaving and something came up from deeper in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, too excited, so she vomited bile. Right there in her mother’s bedroom. A puddle in the carpet.

Nice.

At least the vomit doused the lit cigarette, though.

Loochie stepped back from the puddle and stood straight. When she looked at herself in the dresser mirror she no longer looked sixteen, just twelve again. Her face was flushed and the lipstick had smeared down onto her chin. Her mother’s wig had slipped so far forward that it almost covered her eyes.

Loochie squatted and fished the rest of the cigarette out of the carpet. It would have to be flushed. She went to the bathroom and when she was in there she heard the wail of a siren coming down her block. It was loud. Not the police. Not a fire truck. It was an ambulance. This wasn’t so strange. Ambulances came down her block from time to time. There were a bunch of old people who lived in her building and the one across the street. Sometimes the ambulance was just passing through, headed toward an emergency on another block.

But the siren only got louder. The ambulance wasn’t passing by. It had stopped outside. The sound was so loud now that Loochie shut the bathroom door as if that would keep it out. But it didn’t. She flushed the cigarette to drown out the siren. She tried to think of which old person in her building might’ve called 911. Mrs. Kirikou? Mr. Dodgson? Who else might’ve called for it? The siren continued to wail so loudly it was as if it had parked right in front of her window. Loochie flushed the toilet a second time, but nothing would shut that ambulance out. She stood in the bathroom wishing for something, anything, that might distract her.

It was right about then that she heard a new sound. Something rattling. Earlier she’d hoping for Sunny’s knock at the front door, but this sound came from the kitchen window by the fire escape.

Loochie walked into the kitchen to the sound of more rattling. Sunlight filtered in through the grille of the security gate. The gate had a waffled pattern, steel bars crisscrossing so tightly that an adult would have a hard time slipping more than two fingers through any of the spaces. This was a good design, meant to keep a burglar from getting his hand inside, but the close-set grille also made it hard to see through, to see out. So it wasn’t until Loochie was standing right up to the security gate that she realized there was someone out on the fire escape. The person was much bigger than Sunny.

It was a woman. At least that was Loochie’s best guess. But no one she recognized and she knew most of her neighbors in the building on sight. Loochie pressed one eye to the grille and looked through. The woman was crouched there by Loochie’s window, pressing so close that Loochie could only make out the upper half her face. The woman wasn’t even looking into Loochie’s apartment. She crouched out there, right in front of Loochie’s window, but her face was in profile. Looking away, maybe down at the ambulance still on the street. It was just then that Loochie realized the siren had stopped ringing but she could still hear the heavy chugging engine of the thing, double-parked on the street below.

Loochie closed her mouth and quieted her breathing. She kept her eye to the grille but didn’t know what else to do. Who was this woman? Loochie could see one ear, one eye, the curve of her bulbous nose. The woman’s hair was short and dry looking. It was pulled back into a small ponytail. Her hair was almost the same color as her skin. Both a deep gray, like the color of the cigarette ashes that had fallen to the carpet in Loochie’s mother’s room. The woman’s ear looked tiny, misshapen. It took a moment before Loochie realized it was just that the woman’s earlobe had been torn off (or fallen off?) long ago. The white of the woman’s eye looked pink.

But for all this, somehow, the worst part of this was that the woman wouldn’t even turn her head and look into Loochie’s window. She just kept staring down at the street, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to stoop in front of a stranger’s fourth-floor kitchen window. It was this, the calm of the woman, that unnerved Loochie. The fear was like an itch, running up her scalp. What to do? What to do?

“My mother’s in the other room!” Loochie finally shouted through the grille.

The woman didn’t move. She stood in profile, only inches from the window, and the longer she stayed there, immobile, impassive, the more Loochie wanted to reach out and push her off the fire escape. Better she fall to the ground and break her back than just keep squatting there scaring the life out of Loochie.

“And my brother is here,” Loochie added, less forcefully.

Loochie had been watching the woman long enough to see the faint rise and fall of the woman’s head as she breathed. Loochie went quiet again and now she could hear the woman breathing, too, even through the gate and the closed window. It was a strained sound. Like Sunny’s breathing had been earlier. But there was something more to it. It was wet, like gurgling, each time the woman exhaled. When Loochie had a cold and her nose was clogged up and she had to breath through her mouth she sounded like that. So maybe the woman was just sick. Maybe she needed help. Not that Loochie was about to open the gate and start offering assistance. She was twelve but she wasn’t a dummy. Still, the thought that she might just be a sick woman made Loochie feel a little less scared of her. Loochie hadn’t realized she had one hand balled into a tight fist until she looked down at it. She relaxed it.

Then she heard the rattling sound again. It kept on for ten seconds. Wood moving and glass shaking. Then a little squeak. And that’s when Loochie finally understood what was happening. The kitchen window was rising.

The woman was opening Loochie’s window.

These old buildings weren’t always in the best shape. After decades many of their windows were loose in their frames. Loochie had seen Louis slip back into the apartment this way more than once when she was young. His hands putting pressure on the edges of the glass, then just jiggling the window until it began to lift. It was one of the main reasons buildings like this needed security gates. But even the security gate didn’t make Loochie feel very safe right now. If this woman could so blatantly climb to her window, then pull the window up, who knew what else she could do? Maybe even the security gate wouldn’t be much of a hurdle. Loochie would be defenseless.

Loochie heard the window squeaking as it moved up an inch, two inches. But then it stopped. Now there was another sound. The woman out there grunted. A moment later Loochie thought she saw a mouse pop out from the bottom of the security gate. She hopped back and gasped. She almost peed herself. But it wasn’t a mouse. It was worse than that. Something was wiggling right between one of the gaps in the gate.

One long pointer finger poked its way into the kitchen.

Loochie hissed at it as if it were a rat. She stood straight and stiffened. The long finger, as cadaverously gray as the woman’s face, wriggled and poked as if it were clearing a clog in a drain. Loochie couldn’t understand what the woman had planned. She couldn’t squeeze her whole body through that hole, could she? This couldn’t really be happening! But then Louis’s voice played in her ears, an unwelcome bit of wisdom. Being young doesn’t protect you. Horrors come for kids, too.

Loochie didn’t waste time. She could grab a knife from the drawer by the kitchen sink. She could try to chop off this woman’s finger if she kept sticking it through. If that didn’t work she could lock herself in the bathroom and call her mother. Then the police. Then the army. Loochie was so busy forming a plan that she didn’t pay attention to the security gate. So it took a moment before she realized the finger had disappeared, pulled back out, and now something blue was being stuffed through one of the small gaps in the gate’s grillwork.

It was a blue knit cap.

Sunny’s blue knit cap.

Sunny’s cap, with the blue pompoms. The whole thing was crammed through the small space. Finally it fell to the kitchen floor with a faint plop. Loochie stared at it. It almost felt like she was staring at one of Sunny’s organs, lying on the floor.

My friend, Loochie thought. What did you do to my friend?

Forget fear, Loochie couldn’t control herself. She shook the gate with rage. But she lost her voice when she looked through the grillwork again. The woman had turned her head to look directly into the window. The woman locked eyes with Loochie.

Now that she had Loochie’s attention the woman scooched backward on the fire escape. Loochie could see her more clearly, from shoulders up. Loochie now understood why the woman’s breathing had sounded so strained, so strange. The woman’s lower jaw was missing. She had a scalp and a forehead, two ears, two eyes, a nose and cheeks, an upper lip, and her top row of teeth. But the bottom of her face was gone. No lower jaw. No tongue. As if all that had just rotted off. Loochie felt the urge to vomit again. Her own mouth hurt suddenly. It was because Loochie was clenching her jaw tightly with disgust.

The woman stayed still on the fire escape, watching Loochie intently. Each time she exhaled her throat pulsed and a faint wave of spit spilled from the gap between her neck and the roof of her mouth. The spit splattered down onto the dingy floral white nightdress she wore. The fabric on her chest showed so many spots that had been wet and dried. It looked like this woman had been wearing those clothes for decades. Since the eighties, maybe.

“Kroons,” Loochie said quietly.

Now Loochie even tasted the vomit in her mouth, her nasal passage burned, too, but she swallowed the vomit back down. Which was disgusting. The woman out there didn’t shift her gaze and Loochie felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. Was there a challenge or a threat in the stare?

But there was the cap on the floor. Don’t forget Sunny’s cap. Her friend’s cap.

Her friend. Her friend. Her friend.

“Where’s Sunny?” Loochie said, her face pressed up to the security gate. She wished she didn’t sound so scared.

The woman raised her hand, pointing up.

Loochie knew what this meant: “6-D,” she whispered.

With that the woman stood. Loochie could see even more of her. The nightdress came down to the woman’s knees. It looked so old that it was a wonder it had remained intact. As ragged as a mummy’s wrappings. She wore cheap, very worn flip-flops.

The woman, the Kroon, walked up the fire escape stairs slowly. Her slippers clapped against the bottoms of her feet as she climbed up to the fifth-floor landing. In a few moments Loochie couldn’t see her anymore. Loochie listened to the sound of the slippers as the woman kept climbing, back up to the sixth floor. Loochie didn’t move, couldn’t move, until the sound of the slippers was gone.

Finally she pulled the blue cap off the floor. She cradled it as if it were Sunny’s head. But Loochie didn’t waste much time with that. She set the cap down on the kitchen table gently. Louis said nobody ever left 6D, but she wasn’t going to give up on Sunny just like that. She had to at least try to save her best friend.