Brighton (6 page)

“Nothing, Finn. How you doing?”

Finn lifted up his shirt and pulled at a quarter inch of skin at his waist. “Look at this.”

“What?” Kevin’s eyes searched for a scar or a bruise or something.

“Love handles. I’m seventeen years old and I have love handles.”

Kevin had never heard of love handles and didn’t know what to say. Turns out he didn’t have to say anything because Finn wasn’t half done.

“Five hundred serves a day. That’s what I do, Bobby. Just like Borg.” Finn looked over to see if Bobby was listening, which was impossible to tell. “See this board I got?” Finn went over to his cart and pulled out a long piece of plywood about one-third the height of a hockey net. “I tie this to the fence down at the park.”

“Why?” Kevin said.

“When I serve, the ball bounces right back. And see here.”

Finn pointed to a couple of squares marked on the board in black Magic Marker. “I read about this in
SI
. These are my hot zones. I hit them and know the serve will be good when I get on the court.”

“So you can practice your serve anywhere,” Kevin said.

“With this board, I’m golden. Course I’m still down here every morning. Pounding the brick. That’s the only way I get to Florida.”

“Florida?” Kevin said.

“I’ll be down there for six months of training next winter and then on to the pro circuit. Right, Bobby?”

“Right, Finn.”

“You gonna come down with me?”

“I told you I’d visit.”

“Two years, we’ll be sipping champagne and eating strawberries at Wimbledon. That’s what they serve at Wimbledon. Strawberries and cream. Right, Bobby?”

“Right, Finn.”

“Gotta be in shape. Eat good. See that?” Finn pointed his racket at the shopping cart. In the compartment where they put the kids was a carton of milk and a box of powdered doughnuts. “Quart of milk for breakfast. No fucking around. Meanwhile, they’re back there. Who drinks a six-pack at eight in the morning?”

Kevin shrugged. “The Coreys do.”

Finn took out the doughnuts and offered them around. Bobby and Kevin passed. Finn ate two in four bites, then washed the powdered sugar off his lips with some milk. After that, he began to pick up tennis balls and put them in the bucket.

“Where you going?” Bobby said.

“Cunt from the YMCA has classes at the park on Saturdays. Takes all the courts unless I get there early.”

“Why don’t you play her for the court?” Bobby said, a gentle needle in his voice. Finn was oblivious.

“Wouldn’t waste my time on the bitch. See you boys around.” He scarfed the last doughnut and threw the box in a barrel. Then he pushed his overloaded cart across the lot, back left wheel in a steady wobble as he went.

“Soft as puppy shit,” Bobby said.

“You think he’ll make it to Florida?”

“He’ll be lucky if he makes it to the park.”

“He’s a pretty good tennis player.”

“Pretty good ain’t gonna cut it.”

“He’s out here practicing every morning.”

“Hitting balls off a brick wall. And in between eating a box of doughnuts. Finn’s going nowhere and he knows it. We all know it.”

“We?”

“The Coreys, Shuks, your old man. Me. We were all born here and we’ll all die here. Scares the fuck out of us even though no one will admit it. Why do you think everyone’s always strutting around, looking for a beef?” Bobby flicked his wrist, stinging Kevin in the arm with a jab. “Cheer up, fuckhead. I told you, you’re not one of us.”

“I live here.”

“And you’re getting out.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Cuz your grandmother says so. And she’s not a person to mess with. Come on, you gotta get back and I have a fare to pick up.”

They climbed into cab number four. Bobby slammed the stick into first and rumbled out of the lot. They listened to the radio on the way back and talked about the Red Sox and whether they’d win the pennant.

BRIDGET WATCHED
her little sister walk over to the ladder and climb down off the roof. She listened for Colleen’s footsteps on the back steps and, finally, the slam of the door to their apartment. Then she was alone. Bridget crept over to a low parapet wall that ran along the back and sides of the roof, dangling her legs over the drop and staring hard at the cab office. Her grandmother was silhouetted at her desk, talking on the phone and rolling back and forth in her chair. Bridget watched for a while, then padded along the roofline to the far end of the building. She moved a couple of loose bricks and pulled out a notebook. It was dirty brown and had “Saint Andrew’s Grammar School” written in Old English script across the cover. Bridget sat up against the chipped facing of the chimney and read through the last few pages. Then she took out a pen she kept clipped to the front cover and wrote down everything that happened at breakfast, followed by her conversation on the roof with Colleen. When she was done, she sealed up the notebook again behind the bricks and walked over to the ladder. She lay flat on her stomach, staring down the hole at the third-floor landing and the back door to her grandmother’s apartment. The wind was still up and the building
smelled like wood and coal and soot. Bridget picked herself up, slung her book bag over her shoulder, and started to climb down.

It had been nearly an hour since he’d seen the outline of the old lady, standing on the back porch like an inky scarecrow, then making her way across the yard and disappearing inside the office. Earlier, the kid had sloped out of the same door with the other one. Older, taller, lean and strong, skin sculpted white in a bloom of random light. Even safe in his hide, the cat had felt the older one’s eyes as he scanned the tree line, stopped, then scanned again. They’d climbed into one of the black cabs, engine roaring to life, and left. Now, it was quiet. The air felt wet and gray and hugged the big cat’s skin. He pulled out a knife and ran a finger along its edge. She was sitting at her desk, a cardboard cutout hanging in the window, smoking a cigarette like a scene out of a painting about a diner he’d seen once in a book.
Nighthawks.
Back in the day his teacher had gone on about it, but he’d never bothered to listen. At least not to his teacher. The painting was another story. It spoke to him, more like a movie than a painting, and he wondered, in the remaining hours he had left on this earth, as he sat in the bushes and waited until the time was right, if there would be other things that would speak to him. He hoped so but didn’t count on it. The cutout tipped her chin up and blew a soft line of smoke toward light that collected near the ceiling. And then the cat moved. His name was Curtis Jordan. He was a part-time thief and full-time drug dealer. One profession fed the other, clients providing him with information on easy marks in return for an extra bit of blow or bag of weed. That was how Curtis knew
the old lady lived alone. Worked Saturday mornings in the office. And kept a strongbox full of cash in her apartment. He flattened himself against the side of the three-decker. All it took was one white face peering out a window. And finding a black one looking back. Jordan flared his nostrils and filled his lungs. Then he ran up the first flight of stairs, turned on the landing, and bounded up the next.

KEVIN WALKED
up the short, sharp hill with his head down. Bobby hadn’t wanted to talk anymore about Brighton, about getting out. If it had been anyone else, there’d have been more talk. But that was Bobby. And so his future cut its own throat. And no one was there to raise a hand in protest. Or even an eyebrow to record its passing. A breeze brushed past, prickling the skin on Kevin’s scalp and causing him to lift his eyes off the pavement. Thirty feet up the road, a blurry sketch of arms and legs was crouched at the corner of his grandmother’s building. The sketch turned, head on a swivel, eyes locking on Kevin’s. Then he scuttled away, flitting across Champney Street and ducking into the backyard of a two-family the thirteen Santoro kids lived in with their mother.

Kevin rocked hard in his tracks, staring at the spot where the black man had disappeared, feeling the urge to chase while wondering where that lust came from and if he wasn’t destined to be a racist like all the others. Then he heard the scream, high and pure, chilling his blood and stopping his heart in midbeat. Kevin’s legs carried him down the alley and into the yard behind his house. He could see lights in his grandmother’s cab
office, bright smudges against a smoky pall that suddenly hung in the air. Fresh light flared as the office door swung open and a small, dark figure wavered on the threshold. Another scream, long and winding, ribboning through the trees, coming from his grandmother’s apartment. The figure on the threshold began to move across the yard. Short, clumsy strides. Kevin turned and took the back steps, up and around one landing, then a second. Somewhere below he heard people yelling and windows slamming open. A third corner and Bridget was there, lying on the steps, legs splayed, one hand clutching her side as blood wept between her fingers.

“Bridget.”

Kevin fell to his knees and put a hand to her wound. She pushed him away and pointed. In the fine grain of light, he could see a trail of blood running up the stairs. Behind him, he heard footsteps, heavy breathing, a muttered prayer doubling as a curse. Kevin turned and found his mother at his elbow, pale eyes on stalks, staring at her children, both of them smeared and torn. Bridget clawed at his arm and dragged him close.

“Upstairs, go.” His sister’s eyes were as full and rich as any he’d ever seen, glittering with the same light he remembered in his father’s, late at night when he was filled with drink and doubt and fury and regret.

Kevin’s mother dropped to her knees beside him. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She pressed her hands into Bridget’s side, trying to stop the flow of blood and only making it worse.

“I’m fine,” Bridget whispered, never letting her brother look away. “Go.”

He found her in the narrow hallway that led to the living room. She was curled over on her side, legs pulled toward her body like she was trying to hug herself, face floating in a perfect pool of light. Years later, Kevin would wonder where the light had come from. At the time, all he could wonder about were her features, peaceful and unmarked. For a wild moment, he thought she was sleeping, perhaps hit her head and merely unconscious. He touched her shoulder and whispered
Gram
for the last time in his life. On cue, she rolled onto her back so he could see the belly laid open, a coil of something wet and grayish-blue leaking onto the floor. Kevin ran for the back door and vomited on the scarred boards of the porch. His mother was halfway up the stairs. She saw death cast in his eyes and howled. Then she ran past him and fell to the floor beside the body. Kevin got sick again as his mother screamed and wept and cried and called out for a divine presence she’d never know nor understand. She screamed until the sirens drowned her out and they took her away. The last thing Kevin saw was his baseball glove. Someone had picked it up off the landing where he’d found Bridget. It was sticky with blood.

ONE NIGHT
when he was nine, Kevin asked about his grandfather and she started talking about McNamara’s. Everyone in Brighton got their turn at McNamara’s, his grandmother told him, the big white funeral home perched up on a hill. “What does that have to do with my grandfather?” Kevin said. She glared across the table and asked if he wanted to hear the story. Kevin shut up and she continued. His grandfather had worked at McNamara’s when he was a kid. Back then they didn’t embalm bodies like they do now. “What’s embalming?” Kevin said and got another baleful blue eye for his trouble. One of his grandfather’s jobs involved “tying down the body.” This usually occurred when someone died sitting up in a chair. If rigor mortis set in before they could straighten out the limbs, the folks at McNamara’s would have to stretch the body flat and tie it to the table for the wake. So it happened one day that Kevin’s grandfather had finished tying down one of McNamara’s clients when he took it in his head to remain under the table as the family was led in for the final viewing. It was at the height of the proceedings that he pulled out a knife and cut the ropes, allowing the recently deceased to sit up and give his loved ones a final,
unforgettable good-bye. “Everyone was screaming and fainting,” Kevin’s grandmother said between teary gasps of laughter. “Your grandfather was no older than you. He ran like hell and didn’t set foot inside McNamara’s again until the day they laid him out. And, to their credit, they did a lovely job.”

Kevin remembered thinking his grandfather must have been a heck of a guy. His grandmother let him think it until he didn’t. And now she was here. Her turn in the basement at McNamara’s. And his turn to mourn. Except he didn’t know how. And didn’t have anyone to teach him. She’d been his world, his beginning and end, his sense of who he was and who he might become. And no one had ever told him it could end so soon.

He forced himself to look at her face. It was all wrong. Lips stretched tight, cheeks too red and sunk into pockets of bone. He waited for her to open her stitched eyes and tell him it was a bad dream. They’d laugh at the job the hacks had done, cancel the wake, and head home for a cup of Barry’s and toast. He noticed the way they’d arranged her hands on her chest. When he was eleven, he’d saved up money and gotten her a Madonna pendant made from mother of pearl and matching earrings. They’d ripped the pendant off her neck when they killed her. Taken it along with the cash in the strongbox. But they didn’t get the earrings. Now she’d wear them for eternity and Kevin couldn’t fathom it. There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs that wound down from the public areas of the funeral home, then, a voice.

“How the fuck did you get in here?”

Kevin looked up at Bobby filling the doorway.

“I told them it was my grandmother. They made me sit upstairs for a while, then let me down.”

Bobby moved closer before circling away. Kevin hadn’t talked
to him since that morning, another face lost in the blurred rush of images—cops and neighbors standing on the sidewalk in front of the house in small circles; his father sitting in the hushed darkness of their living room, phlegmatic eyes shining white and watching him as he crept in, then pushing him back down the hallway; his mother collapsed on the bed, weeping uncontrollably and caving in on herself until there was nothing left but rubble and tears and dust; Colleen in the kitchen, holding his left hand with her fingers and asking if she could have cereal for dinner; Bridget, alone in her room with a wound in her side and the door closed tight. Bobby took a seat on the other side of the body and picked up the cold, stiff fingers. Something passed there that was alive and breathing and Kevin felt his soul move in its too young, too hard shell. Then Bobby released the hand, and the corpse again became a corpse. He looked at Kevin with eyes gone soft around the edges.

“I’m sorry, pal.”

And then the dam burst and Kevin started to cry for what felt like the first time in his life, wrenching sobs that came from a place he never knew existed, a place that had no bottom and no dimension other than pain and pity and the insatiable greed of loathing. Bobby pulled his chair around and held him in his arms and Kevin told him about the apartment, her face in the awful God-light, silent eyes and thin line of lips, the blood and vomit and dripping blue gray of the entrails, and all the rest. Bobby held him until he’d finished. And then he held him some more.

“I don’t know what to do,” Kevin said, his head buried in the thick knot of Bobby’s shoulder, words all blurred and messy.

“You don’t have to do nothing, bud. Don’t have to do nothing at all.” Bobby spoke in a hushed, even cadence, like the hum
of a prayer in church. Kevin pulled back, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Bobby gave him some space, and they sat with her in the basement.

“How’s everyone?” Bobby finally said, turning toward Kevin and at an angle to the body.

“What do you think? Fucked up as usual.”

“Your old man bothering you?”

“He’s fine.”

“Your mom?”

Kevin just shook his head. Bobby leaned in.

“You gotta step up, Kev. Be there for her and your sisters. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Listen, the fucking old man is what he is. Nothing you can do and there’s no point getting into it. But your mom and your sisters, they’re gonna need you to be there. Nothing heroic or anything like that. Just be there.”

“I got it, Bobby.”

“Do you?”

Kevin glanced past him to a small window set at ground level and looking out at an alley that ran alongside McNamara’s. A clock ticked somewhere, and there was the murmur of movement upstairs. McNamara’s ghouls pushing around wax flowers and frozen corpses.

“She thought the world of you, Kev. Talked about your future all the time, the things you were gonna do. None of that’s changed. Not a fucking bit.”

Kevin studied the flat, white wall that ran underneath the window and felt himself nod.

“All right, bud. You wanna get out of here?”

“Think I’m gonna hang for a bit.”

There was the scrape of wood as Bobby stood, his presence looming over Kevin and the body on the table. “Don’t stay too long.” He squeezed Kevin’s shoulder, then leaned in and touched her powdered cheek with the back of his hand, whispering something close before disappearing back upstairs.

Kevin waited until the footsteps had died off and he was alone again. He stared at a twist of plastic rosary beads they’d wound between his grandmother’s fingers and thought about her prediction. There’d be a void, she’d said. And it was human nature to want to fill it. Kevin traced the hard outline of the gun in his pocket and conjured up the face he’d seen running from the three-decker, the person who’d killed his grandmother. He touched the trigger and began to mumble a Hail Mary. The words tasted like ash in his mouth and his tongue was cast into stone.