The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

When They Are Done with Us by Patricia Smith

FROM Staten Island Noir

Port Richmond

MAURY’S EYES WERE crazy wide, staring right into the camera, just like they were on yesterday’s show and the show before that. His hand rested on the shoulder of some blubbering white girl, Keisha or Kiara something, her hair all hard-curled and greased up into those stiff-sprayed rings, smeared black circling her eyes, greening gold Nefertitis swinging from her ears, more faux preciousness twinkling from her left nostril. Seems like K or K’s baby daddy could be any one of the fidgeting young black men and-surprise!-she kinda didn’t know which one.

The contestants were all sloe-eyed, corkscrew braids, double negative, mad for no reason except that they had been identified on national television as fools who didn’t give a damn where their dicks went.

It was time, once again, for the paternity test and Maury’s dramatic slicing open of that manila envelope. For some reason, the prospect of finally knowing whose seed had taken hold reduced Kiara or Keisha to unbridled bawling and a snorting of snot.

Jo had the show on more for background than anything, but she stopped for a closer look at the little nasty who’d opened her legs and been done in. It amazed her how anybody, let alone a white girl, could look at any one of those sad sacks and feel bad enough about herself to fuck him. “I ain’t never been, or ain’t never gonna be, that damned horny,” she said out loud, just as Tyrell, sloe-eyed and corkscrewed, was revealed to be the father of the squirming little bastard in question.

“I’m gon’ take care of my ’sponsibility,” he monotoned, a semiearnest declaration which was greeted by wild hooting and hand-clapping from Maury’s drama-drunk studio audience. Even after receiving the sudden blessing of papahood, Tyrell avoided looking at or touching the mother of his child. Kiara or Keisha stood, shivering in a whorish skirt and halter top, in dire need of at least an orchestrated hug. She continued to keen.

I cannot watch this shit, Jo thought, just after thinking, Where did she find an actual halter top in 2010? Although she made a move to punch the television off, she didn’t do it. Instead she lowered the volume so the string of skewed urban vignettes could still distract her from what she really needed to be doing. Maybe the next segment would feature some tooth-challenged redneck hurling a chair across the stage upon discovering, after a week or so of sweaty carnal acrobatics, that the he he thought was a she was really a he fervently embracing his she-ness.

Jo revisited her mental to-do. Last night’s crusted dishes, still “soaking.” A mountain of undies and towels, waiting to be lugged to the Bright Star laundromat, where the guy who guarded the dollar changers-to make damned sure that no “nonlaunderers” used them-never missed an opportunity to converse with her tits. Oh, and she’d skipped breakfast again. After her last tangle with an oil-slick omelet at the New Dinette, a succession of Dunkin’s dry toasted things, and her own ambitious attempts to get healthy and choke down oatmeal, the idea of a morning meal had lost its appeal. By 3 P.M. she’d be trolling Port Richmond Avenue, inhaling a loaded slice or two at Denino’s or resigning herself to the New’s lunch menu and one of their huge, dizzying burgers.

There wasn’t much in the fridge-various leftover pastas curling in Tupperware and cold cuts she could practically hear expiring. Ravenous, she spotted the pack of Luckies on the edge of the dinette table, and her whole mouth tingled with crave. Although the pack was half empty, she didn’t remember buying it. Just one, she thought. Just one, and maybe a little drinkie to follow. Instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shutting it out, and did what Katie had told her to do. She said the word poem out loud.

That’s it, she thought, scrambling for her wire-bound notebook and new pen. I’m going to write me a poem. From the flickering Panasonic, Maury asked, “When did you first suspect that Aurelio was sleeping with your mother?”

Poetry was Jo’s new medicine. During her last trip to the university hospital’s emergency room, her vague complaint that she had been “sleeping too long and smoking too much and maybe drinking a little harder and my kid is driving me crazy” earned her a useless nicotine patch and the advice of Katie McMahon, a perky community counselor, who suggested she put little bits of her life into lines. Rhyme or not, no matter. About anything she wanted it to be about. “If you call it a poem, then it is,” Katie had said.

Surprisingly, the little scrawlings helped. She’d written more than a few choice lines about Al, the ex-cop who showed up with his monthly hard-on to pound her into the mattress with something he called love. She wasted whole pages on Charlie, who’d inhabited her womb for nine months and now had no patience for her “stupid fuckin’ rules.” He dropped by occasionally to pilfer weed money from her wallet, gobble the contents of the refrigerator, or sleep off an encounter with too many shots of Jäger. On good days-or when she needed to remember that there had actually been good days-she wrote all pretty about a moment when she was full of light, strolling over the Bayonne Bridge like she was walking on water. From up there the island magically shed its dingy and became more than gossip, stench, and regret. The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and make the assholes as small as possible.

Flipping to a fresh page in the notebook, she clicked the top of her pen and licked the point the way she’d seen real writers do before they-

A key rattled in the lock and the front door was flung open with such force that it banged into the wall, knocking more mint-green chips from the plaster. Jo felt her heart go large and stone.

“Hey, what the hell is up, Jo?”

He refused to call her Mom. Or Mother. Sixteen years old, six feet, two inches of swaggering explosive. Her son.

“It’s hot as shit out there. What’s in this place to eat?”

“I think there’s some ham in the-”

“The same ham as last time? That shit’s old. Ain’t nuthin’ cooked in this bitch?”

Jo steeled herself. “Charlie, I told you not to come in here-”

“Cursing? Hungry? And you gon’ do what?”

Jo knew the answer. Nothing. She had never not been terrified of her son. Charlie had ripped her open at birth, glared at her as he bit her breast to demand milk, pinched and pummeled his kindergarten classmates, set fire to wastebaskets in school restrooms, been suspended from sixth grade for showing up plastered on a vile mix of Kool-Aid and vodka, and greeted all attempts to control and educate with a raised middle finger. He strutted and primped in Day-Glo Jordans, a too-big Yankees cap twisted sideways on his head, pants two sizes too wrong pulled down so far the waistband backed his ass. He adopted the lyric swagger of black boys, taking on their nuance and rhythms while hissing about “niggers” in the circle of his crew. While Jo watched in horror, Charlie grew as wide and high as a wall. He arced over her when she dared make mama noises, and huffed in her face with dead breath, which stank of cheap tobacco.

His eyes looked like someone had died behind them.

She wasn’t sure what he did during the day. It wasn’t school. She’d gotten letters and phone calls from Port Richmond High attesting to his continued absence. “He’s a dropout,” she finally blurted to one well-meaning guidance counselor, before hanging up the phone.

There were even rumors that Charlie had managed to father a child. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Jo could see him snarling, fully erect, a gum-cracking girl laid wide and waiting. His lovemaking would be thrust and spit. When she thought of a child built of Charlie and air, a thick shudder ripped through her.

“Did you hear me? Food! I’m fuckin’ hungry! I swear, Jo, don’t make me have to-”

She sprang from her chair and bolted for the kitchen with no idea what she would do once she got there.

He’d only hit her once.

One clouded August night, a week after Charlie turned sixteen, Jo saw him on the street just after finishing her part-time job at Bloomy Rose, a florist in Midland Beach. She’d worked late that night, helping with a huge order for the funeral of a local politician. As she wound her way toward her bus stop, a fierce rain needled her cheeks. Assuming the rain had driven everyone inside, she was surprised to see a dark human huddle on Father Capodanno Boulevard just before Midland Avenue, and even more surprised to see her son at its edges.

But there he was, hanging on yet another corner with Bennie Mahoney, a no-gooder from New Dorp, and two other boys she didn’t know. Their backs were hunched against the downpour, and she saw the orange flare of cigarettes. She wanted and didn’t want to know what they were up to.

The sign on the nearest building on Midland read Q.S.I.N.Y., and she could hear the guttural thump of dance music from inside. The letters made no sense to her until she realized where she’d seen them before. The island’s first openly gay club had launched on the Fourth of July weekend to much fanfare and trepidation. Staten Island wasn’t known for its tolerance, and there were worries that the patrons of the club would become targets for ham-handed haters.

The letters stood for Queer Staten Island New York.

Jo felt an ominous drop in her belly.

Charlie’s views on all things gay were well known and frequently bellowed. While Jo admitted a cringe when she thought about man-on-man, and a starkly uncomfortable curiosity when she considered girl-on-girl, Charlie’s florid vocabulary was peppered with references to “fuckin’ fags,” “cocklickers,” and “turd burglars.” Jo remembered a bespectacled whisperer from their block who had packed up and hightailed it off the island with his family after being on the receiving end of a vicious beatdown. He never identified his attackers, but Jo remembered how he would practically shrivel when he passed Charlie on the street.

The Charlie who now, for no good reason, was in the middle of a meeting outside a gay dance club. Afraid of what he might be planning, and before she thought about the consequences of doing so, Jo shouted his name.

The group stopped its conspiratorial grumbling. All eyes snapped to her, standing across the street from them, the wind crimping her cheap umbrella, her cotton blouse plastered to her breasts and darkening with rain.

Her son’s eyes bored holes into her. He did not move.

Bennie punched Charlie’s shoulder hard and laughed. “Hey, it’s your fuckin’ mommy.” The two other boys joined in the merriment. But Charles Liam Mulroy, his steel-gray eyes locked to his mother’s, did not speak. Jo couldn’t bring herself to utter his name again.

They stood that way, three of the young men snickering, one son motionless and burning, one drenched mother craving the world of ten minutes ago. Finally Jo spotted the approaching bus spewing puddles. She scurried to the stop and boarded, never looking back.

Late that night, she woke from a fitful sleep to an angry wall in her room, a wall dripping rain and hissing through its teeth. After two deep glasses of screw-top wine, gulped to calm her nerves, Jo hadn’t heard Charlie come in.

“Don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again. You wanna be somebody’s mother, get your ass a dog. Don’t you ever admit you even fuckin’ know me. Not in front of my crew. You see me, you don’t say shit. You lucky I didn’t lay your bitch ass flat right there on the street.”

She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until her head began to pound. Charlie was panting, fists clenched, backlit and glowing in the moonwash. She was just beginning to think how oddly beautiful the image was when it grabbed a fistful of pink pajama top, pulled her up from the pillow, and then knocked her back down with a slap that rattled her teeth.

“Don’t. You. Ever. Fuckin’. Embarrass. Me. Again.”

He dropped his body down on the side of the bed, waiting for Jo to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. She lay with her head flattened to the left, the way it had fallen after the slap. She felt his hard gaze. After a wet intake of breath, he slowly lifted the pajama top and clamped her bare right breast with a huge, calloused hand. Jo silently willed her spirit out of the room. Charlie squeezed rough, then pinched the tip of her nipple so hard she whimpered.

He laughed. “This some sick shit. Wow. Man. You done got my cock hard in this bitch.”

He popped up and strutted out of the bedroom, leaving behind the dead green smell of bad weather.

They never talked about it. She never called anyone, never thought about reporting him, never even mentioned it to Al, the ex-cop. From that day on, she never acknowledged him in public, no matter what he was doing, who he was with, where he was. And she stopped remembering the thick smear of blood she’d seen on his skinned knuckles that night. She stopped wondering whose it was.

“I am fuckin’ starvin’ up in this bitch!” Charlie screamed again.

Jo clawed through cabinets and the fridge, searching for something, anything, that wasn’t the same old ham. In the front room, Maury had probably morphed into another screechfest. She wanted to be back in that room, opening her notebook, finding that empty page, picking up her pen…

“Ooooohhhhh, godDAMN! What is this shit?”

Jo bolted for the living room and swallowed hard at the sight of Charlie holding the purple notebook, starkly focused on a particular page.

“Give that to me,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “That’s mine.”

“Oh, hell no. I’m seeing my name, so this shit is my business. I already read the one about you gettin’ naked and fuckin’ that cop. Mama’s a muthafuckin’ freak.”

His eyes scanned the page, and she saw it all take turns in his face-confusion, anger, embarrassment, confusion, realization, anger again. She wondered what poem he’d found. She wondered what she’d pay for writing it.

Charlie started reading, his voice all exaggerated white:

Charlie is not a son, not a boy, not a man

He is the way a day turns toward a storm

He is a star that screams before disappearing

He is night without a bottom

I can’t wake up from him, can’t give

him back, can’t even give him away,

can’t think of anyone who would even want

that kind of exploding. I can’t even say his

name without my heart stopping. I wish I

could remember giving him a home

in my body. I wonder if it would just

be easier to stop stop stop loving him

as easy as it was to stop loving me

Hearing the poem out loud, Jo couldn’t help noticing that she was using the word even too much. Concentrating on that kept her from focusing on the ominous silence that followed Charlie’s booming of the word me.

The silence was broken by a laughter Jo had never heard before. Charlie threw back his head and opened so wide she could see the collapsed gray teeth at the back of his mouth. He laughed so hard he sputtered, and when he could manage it, he spat out snippets of her poem. “Not a son! Give him back! Give him away! Home in your body! Stop, stop, stop!” He laughed until there were tears in his eyes. “Stop!”

Still snorting, he pushed past her into the kitchen, waving the notebook over his head. He slapped it flat on a burner of the gas stove and held Jo at arm’s length while he turned the knob up as far as it would go. Flames leaped up around the notebook and burrowed toward its heart. The smoke alarm started thin, warbled, then blared. Above the din, Charlie laughed maniacally.

As Jo’s poetry flared and sizzled, all those words she had scraped directly from the surface of her skin, Charlie turned the water on full blast in the kitchen sink, where last night’s dinner dishes were still soaking. With a pair of metal salad tongs, he lifted the blazing notebook and tossed it under the running water. Jo could swear she heard it moan.

“You are such a sensitive bitch,” a suddenly solemn Charlie hissed. “Getting in touch with your feeeeeeelings. Grow some fuckin’ balls.”

Jo fell to her knees on the tile and felt the day collapse around her. Before she could scream, she heard the front door squeal on its hinges and bang shut, so hard the smoke alarm hiccupped and died. And the laughter stopped.

No, it didn’t.

That night Jo woke to the sound of shouts and sirens outside her bedroom window. That wasn’t unusual for Port Richmond, but there was something jagged about it this time. For a moment she was disoriented. She had fallen asleep in her clothes, so tangled in her bed sheets that she couldn’t move right away. She smelled liquor somewhere-on her pillow? in her hair?-and remembered swilling Jack Daniel’s after Charlie stormed out, hoping to drop the curtain on one bitch of a day. She felt bleary. Her eyes opened behind a cloud. She peered at her alarm clock. Four-fifteen A.M.

Jo imagined that an acrid whisper of smoke was the dying breath of her poetry, still floating in the kitchen sink. Until now she hadn’t realized how important the pages had become to her, and nothing in the notebook could be salvaged. The heavy thought of beginning again made her head drop to the pillow, to the left, the way it had when her son slapped her. She wanted sleep to pull her under again. But the street noise grew louder and more insistent, the stench more disturbing than the island’s usual garbage-tinged funk.

Jo freed her legs from the sheets and lumbered to her window. Number 302, directly across Nicholas, was burning. Had burned. The two windows on the top floor were soft-sputtering black and orange. Her mouth hung open, torn between awe and panic. She’d slept through a damned fire? Had there been people inside? Were they okay? Why couldn’t she picture the people who lived there? Were they black or white? After all, they were right across the street. She must have seen them hundreds of times. Were there kids?

Where was Charlie?

The weight of the question sickened her. Was she concerned about the safety of her son, or worried that he could somehow be responsible for the blaze?

Jo pulled on her old CSI sweats and a T-shirt, slipped into her sneakers without tying the laces, and ran outside, careful to lock the door behind her.

Nicholas was clogged with fire trucks, firefighters, and people spilling excitedly from two-flats. Jo’s eyes darted wildly, searching the crowd for Charlie’s sneer, his chopped reddish hair. She wanted to cover her ears against the Oh my God, oh Jesus, Dios mío babble of panic. All those upturned faces, the shouting, the questions, that bladed smell.

And the screeching woman, suddenly flailing, throwing her body against a knot of people determined to hold her back. Grim-faced firemen hauling four body bags out of the still-smoking building. More screaming.

Jo squeezed her eyes shut then, and she saw them clearly, the people who lived on the second floor. A smiling black woman holding the hands of a toddler and a little girl. An older girl. A teenage boy trailing behind, lugging those light-blue plastic bags from the Port Richmond market. She saw them stop to climb the stairs at 302 Nicholas.

But the screeching was not that woman.

The screeching woman was the mother of the woman who died, the grandmother of the four children who died.

Jo found that out during breakfast at the New Dinette. Exhausted and shell-shocked, her clothes smelling vaguely of smoke, she gnawed a slice of bacon and slurped peppered eggs while listening to tragedy’s hum. No one could talk about anything but. She half expected to hear her son’s name.

The woman Jo had seen behind her closed eyes was dead. So were the two boys, the two girls. They had all died, but it wasn’t the fire that killed them.

“That boy killed his brother and his sisters and his mama,” Marla, a waitress, said to everyone who would listen, and to a few people who wouldn’t. “Slit they throats, set that fire, then killed hisself.”

Jo hovered over days of congealing breakfasts at the New long enough to hear different versions of the same story, which meant it must be true. Or most of it. Melonie, seven, her throat sliced open, dead. Brittney, ten, throat slit, dead. The mother, Leisa, her throat not slit, smoke exploding her chest. The little one, Jermaine, still whole and unbloodied, clung to a chance but lost his fight at Richmond University Hospital. The fire had loved him so hard that when he first reached the emergency room, no one was sure if he was a girl or a boy.

Then there was C.J., manchild at fourteen, collapsed in a river of blood, an old-fashioned straight razor under his body. His own throat slit. The whisper was that he had a history of setting small fires. His charred note nearby: am sorry.

Jo couldn’t grasp the mathematics of it, the impossibility of killing your family, then sliding a blade across your own throat. She had seen that boy. She had seen him laughing, bouncing his little brother on his shoulders. She had seen him watching his sisters ride their bikes, barking like a big brother when they veered too close to the street. She had…

Charlie setting fires in the boys’ room.

Charlie burning the words that wondered what he was.

But C.J. wasn’t Charlie. Thank God. Her son hadn’t gone that far, hadn’t burned that house down, hadn’t killed anyone.

Then her next thought, before she could stop it: But if he had, someone would come for him. Someone would take him away.

Charlie and Bennie, smelling like men, sat on the couch half watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. The two of them overwhelmed the room. Their flopping arms and spread-eagle. Their vile mouths, open and chewing. Their uproarious stink.

Jo’s son was on full blast: “Man, you hear about that crazy nigger killed his mother? And his sisters? With a razor, then burned them up. Nigga got some balls though. Cut his own throat, too. Gotta give him credit for going out tough like that. Musta not liked his mama. Bitch musta been ridin’ his fuckin’ nerves. He took her out.”

Bennie snorted as Charlie pointedly met his mother’s eyes and grinned. He raised a dirty glass of something clear.

Whenever he was home now, which was less and less, Jo folded herself into the smallest corner of the place, stitched her lips shut, and learned to nod. She fried huge slabs of fatty meat, mashed mounds of potatoes, and became a regular at Mexico Supermarket. (She couldn’t shop at the Port Richmond store anymore because of the light-blue bags.) She crammed her basket with honey buns, jalapeño chips, taquitos, powdered doughnuts, Red Bull, ice cream, cigarettes, pork rinds, and moon pies, then slathered everything with butter and served it up to her ravenous ass of a son.

She wouldn’t give him time or room to want for anything. She didn’t want him to realize that she’d already served her purpose. She wouldn’t give him reason to open her throat, burn her down.

All Charlie did was eat, sleep off highs, and grow taller and wider. His pores leaked poison and stained the walls. Jo cooked and nodded, answered promptly to “Hey, bitch,” and hid her new notebook, a smaller one, behind a row of vases on a high shelf in her room. When she was sure that Charlie was out, she wrote poems to her new dead friend Leisa, who had a son who killed her.

When they are done with us

When they are done with us

When there is no longer a road

From our blood to theirs

All we do is remind them

of need

And it is us who taught them

never to need

anything

Suddenly there is no river deep enough

for us

No fire blue enough to strain for our bone

No love

at all

Jo tried not to imagine what Charlie would do if he found this notebook, if he saw how she held whole conversations with a woman she did not know. She had lived for years just across the street. Jo wished she had spoken to her past the occasional nod, wished she hadn’t assumed they’d have nothing in common because the woman was black and Jo was white.

No. Not the woman. Leisa.

They could have shopped together at the market, waddling home laden with light-blue plastic bags filled with cans of tuna, spongy white bread, brown fruit. And when the moment was right, Jo could have taken Leisa’s hand and said, gently, Describe your son’s eyes.

They could have saved each other.

One morning Jo copied a poem she’d worked on the whole day before, trying to make it perfect.

Leisa, it is hard to admit

the poison that burned through our bodies

and became them

Hard to recite this crooked alphabet

Hard to know we can no longer

circle them with our arms

and contain their whole lives

Their horrible secret is how they

burst like flowers from our bodies

They damn us for remembering

They damn us for wanting

to sing

that story

It still wasn’t perfect, but there was something Jo felt she needed to do.

She pulled the page carefully from the notebook, folded it four times, and wrote Leisa in her best flowing cursive. Then she crossed the street to the makeshift altar, a raggedy explosion of blooms and mildewing stuffed animals in front of 302 Richmond’s scarred shell. There had been people milling around the altar every day, but now there was no one. She studied it for a minute, then tucked the poem beneath a bug-eyed duck. She whispered a run-on sentence that may have been prayer.

Then she walked down to the bodega to pick up coffee and copies of the Advance and the Post. Reading both the Staten Island and NYC papers was her entertainment, akin to watching Maury and Springer in the mornings. Wallowing in the grime and drama, she was reminded that she lived both in and close to a cesspool.

The place was packed with people, which was unusual for the hour. There was that tragic hum again, that sad tangle of different languages in stages of disbelief. Jo wondered if something had happened during the night.

At the newspaper rack, she read the headline and the first graph of the Post’s front-page story before she even picked it up.

IT WAS MOM IN STATEN ISLAND MASSACRE HORROR

The mother did it. The horrific murder-suicide that ended in an arson on Staten Island was committed by the deranged mom, who slit three of her kids’ throats before she killed herself and her baby in the blaze, law enforcement sources said yesterday.

Autopsies showed that C.J., Melonie, and Brittney had pills in their stomachs. They were dead before the fire. They hadn’t just lined up and waited to be killed. They’d been drugged first.

And the note: they’d found Leisa’s diary and compared the handwriting. She had written am sorry. She had left the note close to her son’s body, which was like putting a smoking gun in his hand.

Jo felt a needle traveling in her blood. She picked up the paper and left, without talking to anyone, without paying. She didn’t remember her walk back home, but when she looked up, she was there. And so was Al, the ex-cop, hovering around her door, grinning like a Cheshire and, as always, leading with his zipper.

“Hey, Jo-bean,” he hissed. “Been thinkin’ about you like craaaazzy. Came by as soon as I got a break.” His chapped lips brushed the side of her face, then his tongue touched. Jo thought maybe the heat of another body would burn away the rest of the day. Wordlessly, she let him in. Then, as soon as the door was closed, she blurted her usual fears, the fears a man was supposed to take care of. The fears were Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

“You know, that kid needs a father to keep his ass in line.” That was always Al the ex-cop’s first suggestion, although he never hinted at who that father might be. “You want, I’ll have some of the guys pick him up, scare the shit out of him.”

Al seemed to have forgotten again that he was an ex-cop for a reason. Al seemed to have forgotten that once, sick with drink and aimlessly speeding in his cruiser, he’d scraped a sizable stretch of concrete barrier along the entry ramp from 440 to 278, stopped, and was promptly hit from behind by a grandmother in a Subaru station wagon. Two squad cars showed up to sort through the mess. They secured the silence of the terrified granny, scrubbed the scene clear of Al’s airplane miniatures, and concocted a cover-up tale that would move a hardened judge to tears.

But later, when Al was oh-so-vaguely pressed on the details, he caved and admitted… well, everything. Swilling in his cruiser. Shooting sparks as he hugged the barrier. Getting rammed from behind. And being helped by his pals in blue. Babbling, he even named the pals.

Of course, he was fired. Even cooled his heels in the slammer for a bit.

So none of “the guys” he spoke of so lovingly would be inclined to do any favors for good ol’ Al. Jo didn’t bother reminding him about the circumstances of his ex-ness. He liked playing cop, so she let him.

He even fucked like one. Like he was alone. Everything he said to Jo-at Jo-was addressed to Al, the ex-cop: “Oh, you’re hitting that pussy today, boy.” “She’s gonna remember this.” “She’s gon’ be calling your name for days.”

Jo had hoped that a body against hers would blur the day, dim the smell of fire. But not this body.

When he left, her room smelled like his deluded monologue, his miserable spurt. The newspaper sat on the bedside table. The mother did it. Leisa had killed herself and her children. Tell me why, Jo tried to beg her dead friend. But what came out was Tell me how.

Maybe the smiling C.J. she’d seen playing with his siblings and lugging home groceries was just another kind of Charlie, one who’d learned to paint his snarling face with light. Maybe Leisa was crazy, out of her mind, her head crammed with the kind of wounding Jo was beginning to know.

Jo started to cry. She wept from bone, from memory, from loss. She wept for Leisa, for C.J., for the stranger who’d escaped her body and named her Bitch. She wept from lack of love, unleashed wracking sobs that hung wet in the air. She wept for the shadows that were Staten Island, the prison she lived in. She wept past the pushing open of her bedroom door, the brash boy who suddenly stood there.

“Fuck you cryin’ for?”

Jo’s head drooped as Charlie filled the door, swaying, smelling like he’d drunk something with blades. “It smells like ass in here,” he slurred. “Like your ass mixed with somebody else’s ass.” He laughed then. “Was the dick that good? It made you cry? Hell, if it wasn’t nasty sick, I’d hit that. Make you call my name. Give you some shit to cry about.”

He lumbered off. Jo heard him fall into bed in the other bedroom, still laughing, snorting. Soon he would rock the house with snotty snores. He would sleep deep into the night as poison spilled from his pores. He would wake up hungry, snarling, looking to be fed up in this bitch.

She pulled the notebook down from its hiding place, found her pen, and wrote another poem for Leisa, the mother, the murderer.

Where did it seep into you,

the ghost of the only answer?

How did you pull it in,

breathe it in, own it?

How did you find the teeth

you needed to take back your

own body, to build a revolution

in darkness? And how brave

of you

to take all of them

with you

There was more she wanted to say, but Jo was afraid that writing more would lead her to a road she couldn’t travel. Not the why, but the how. She craved Leisa’s strength (the how), not her weakness (the why).

She went to the kitchen and pulled down a note Charlie had written and taped to the fridge months ago: DAMN GO BY SOME FOOD. Already she could hear his drunken snoring. She took the note back to her room, sat down, and began her work.

Going back and forth between her son’s scrawled note and a page in her notebook, she worked for hours to get it right. The fat O. The swirl of the S. The strangely elegant Y. She felt Leisa gently guiding her hand as she traced the letters, traced the letters, mirrored the letters.

Down the hall, Charlie sang razors. But in Jo’s room, he was writing an apology for what he was about to do. He was saying, I’m sorry, finishing with that strangely elegant Y.

This time the dead boy would sign his name.