Visitation Street Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Justin Ames Nowell

  MAP

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Summer is everybody else’s party. It belongs to the recently arrived hipsters in their beat-up sneakers and paint-splattered jeans spilling out of the bar down the block. It belongs to Puerto Rican families with foil trays of meat, sending charcoal smoke signals into the air, even to the old men in front of the VFW, sitting out, watching the neighborhood pass them by.

  Val and June lie on Val’s bed on the second floor of her parents’ house on Visitation. The girls are waiting for the night to take shape, watching the facing row of neat three-story brick houses.

  Although June has the phone numbers of twenty boys in her cell, ten she’d willingly kiss and ten she swears are dying to kiss her, the girls are alone. June’s been scrolling through her phonebook looking for someone she’s missed, her polished nail clicking against the screen. If she keeps this up, the battery will be dead by midnight, which is what Val’s hoping for.

  The girls spent another day working at Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary day care, watching the summer escape while they tended a bunch of babies. They missed the community pool and the open fire hydrants. They missed sitting on the stoop in their bikinis. They missed the shift from afternoon to evening, the gradual migration from hanging out to going out. Still, they made a little cash for when they are old enough to spend it on something interesting. But at fifteen, all the interesting stuff seems beyond their grasp.

  This is one of the nice streets in Red Hook, tree lined and residential, on the predominantly white waterside of the neighborhood. Cut off by the expressway from the stately brownstone-lined streets of Carroll Gardens, Red Hook is a mile-long spit stranded at the southern point of Brooklyn where the East River opens into the bay. In the middle of the neighborhood sits Coffey Park, which splits the “front” with its decaying waterfront from the fortress of housing projects and low-cost supermarkets at the “back.”

  All around the girls the night is heating up. The stoops are filling, some with newcomers dressed in secondhand clothes, others with grizzled men sucking air through their teeth as if this might cool things down. It’s a hot night in a calendar of hot weeks. The community pool has been packed, its surrounding concrete a mosaic of bright towels. The local firehouses, the Red Hook Raiders and the Happy Hookers, have been clocking overtime, circling the neighborhood to shut off illegally opened hydrants, telling kids to go cool off elsewhere. People have been doing their best to stay out of each other’s way. By this point in the summer everyone’s developed a beat-the-heat routine—a soaked do-rag tied around a scalp, a tiny fan held inches from a nose, a cold beer cracked before lunch.

  In the backyard, Val’s sister, Rita, and her crowd have taken over the aboveground pool, still celebrating their high school graduation two months on. The paved yard is littered with cans of Coors Light and rolling bottles of high-proof lemonade. Val and June stood at the edge of the party for a while. But the talk turned to things they weren’t supposed to know about. Eventually, Rita sent them indoors.

  “That boy in the lawn chair?” June said, as the girls climbed the stairs. “He grabbed my ass. He totally grabbed it.” She’s glowing beneath her outrage.

  “Your butt fell into his hand is all,” Val said.

  June’s curves are everywhere these days, especially where they don’t belong, bursting through the buttons of her school uniform or falling out of her too-short shorts. The girls, once a matched set, now seem to be fashioned from different material. Val, whose pale skin repels the sun, is made of reeds and twigs—like the sad saplings planted in the park that shoot up but never seem to leaf out. June, blessed with an olive complexion even in winter, is formed from something soft and pliant, clay, maybe, or cookie dough.

  Somewhere, Val suspects, there may be boys who admire her bamboo limbs but out in Red Hook everyone goes for June’s generous shape, her elastic breasts and rear that she seems to resculpt every night, giving the neighborhood something fresh to look at. Even her wavy brown hair appears mischievous in the way it curls and bounces. Val’s hair, an unremarkable straw color, strikes her as lacking in enthusiasm.

  Val knows that time is short for kids’ stuff. When school starts, they’ll be expected to turn up at parties, looking on-point, made up and polished. But sometimes Val can’t restrain her silliness. After being cooped up in that day care, she wants to be naughty. Not that in-your-face naughtiness of scoring a bottle of something sweet and alcoholic or sneaking a cigarette. What she’s after is a prankish secret the girls can share someday when they are on some guy’s couch tipsy or even high.

  The window is open wide. June’s positioned herself near it and hops to her feet each time she hears footsteps. She stretches out her arms, grasping either side of the window frame.

  “I’m gonna get my groove on tonight,” she says loud enough for anyone passing to hear. “I’m gonna turn it up.” She rotates her hips and thrusts her chest forward. Her shorts strain at the seams. Val worries that if June arches her back another inch, the whole package is going to burst. “I’m going to show them how it’s done,” she says.

  Something about June’s posture reminds Val of a bag of microwave popcorn. She falls back on her bed, her laughter pouring out into the street.

  “Baby,” June says. “You laugh like a baby.” She leaves the window, flops down on the bed, but keeps her distance from Val. She checks her nails and pulls out her phone. “Let’s do something.”

  “We could camp out on the roof,” Val says.

  June does not look up.

  “Or watch a movie.”

  “You want the world thinking we’re babies forever.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with movies.”

  June stands up. “I’m getting us a drink.”

  Five minutes later June returns with a half-empty bottle of alcoholic lemonade. “Did you pick up someone’s empty?” Val says.

  “I drank half on my way up.”

  “We could take the raft out,” Val says. “It’s something.”

  June finishes the drink. “You have some stupid ideas.”

  “Your only idea was stealing a half-empty bottle from my sister.”

  “Just get the goddamned raft,” June says. She tilts her head upward, tosses her hair, exhales an invisible cigarette.

  “Don’t be such a bitch,” Val says.

  The rubber raft was a gift from a crew of older guys who’d taunted and teased them, and finally made a play for the girls at the pool last weekend. What they wanted with a hot pink rubber raft Val and June didn’t know but they took their prize. Tonight, hot and stir-crazy, Val decides what the raft is for. Take a float in the bay, cool off, see what’s what from the water.

  The girls hit the street, the raft bumping awkwardly against the
ir legs as they walk. “It’s your raft. You carry it,” June says, dropping her end.

  Late summer smells hang in the air—ripe sewers, cookouts, and the scent of stagnant water that lingers in Red Hook no matter the season. The night echoes with other people’s noise, laughter falling from windows and the call-and-response of competing boom boxes. The girls approach Coffey Park at the edge of the Red Hook housing project. June’s walking a few steps ahead, putting a couple of feet between her and Val and the raft. Val lets her go on, not quite sure about the sway of June’s hips and the way she’s shaking her hair like a show pony. At one end of the park is the old luggage factory, now converted into lofts, at the other, the first of the project high-rises, and in between a battleground of basketball and barbecues.

  The park benches are filled, many of them turned into soundstages for newbie rappers whose rhymes are muffled now and then by the bass of passing cars. Girls in fluorescent clothes, wrapped tight like gifts, are clustered around the benches, bumping and dipping to the beats. June and Val envy their doorknocker earrings, their careless voices, the grip of their halter tops, and the cling of their short shorts. The way they hang out late and loud.

  Sometimes on Sundays, when the service at Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary has ended, June and Val slip away from their parents. Fearless in the daylight, they cross Coffey Park and pass through the heart of the projects, until they arrive at the Red Hook Gospel Tabernacle—a small storefront church on a side street where they’re not certain they’re welcome. In spring and summer, the doors are propped open and they can see into the small, fluorescent-lit room, with linoleum tiles and folding chairs. The girls know some of the singers from their old elementary school, before Val and June were sent across the expressway to Catholic school.

  It’s nighttime now and the girls aren’t bold enough to enter Coffey Park. They walk along its periphery. Val watches as June rolls the waistband of her shorts so they ride higher.

  “You can wear anything. A paper bag would look hot on you,” June told Val the other day. “Me, I’ve got all this to worry about,” she added, cupping her breasts. “You know, my burdens.”

  June’s body doesn’t seem to be burdening her too much at the moment. She dawdles in front of each bench, untangling her hair from her silver hoop earrings, adjusting her bikini top beneath her shirt. Val hovers a few steps back, half in, half out of a streetlamp’s yellow glow, her lanky shadow stretching out in front of her.

  There’s a girl in one of the groups June knows from their early years in public school. She’s sitting on the back of a bench not far from the park’s entrance. Back then, Monique would hang with them in the Marinos’ basement, helping make broken furniture into castles, spacecrafts, and ships. The three of them dressed up in Rita’s clothes, clomping around the basement in her heels and smearing her makeup on their faces. Once in a while they went to June’s place, for her grandmother’s homemade orange Popsicles or to spit cherry pits from the second-story window. They never went to Monique’s apartment in the projects.

  “Hey, Monique,” June calls. “Monique.”

  “Someone out for you, Mo,” one of the guys says. He’s rocking a sweaty forty in his palms. He wipes his hand on his baggy basketball shorts. Monique checks June and Val. “You asking your friends to join us?” the guy says, nudging the bottle toward Monique.

  “Nah,” she says, turning away.

  June stays put, but Val moves on, bumping her with the raft.

  “Watch it,” June says.

  The guy holds out the bottle. “Thirsty?”

  June hesitates, shifts her weight from one foot to another. Val knows she’s trying to catch Monique’s eye to see if this is cool. But Monique’s still looking away, laughing with a group of older girls.

  “Thirsty?” the guy repeats, swigging from the bottle and holding it out once more. He licks his lips then shows Val and June his teeth, two of them capped in gold with diamond chips. The gems catch the light, giving him a jack-o’-lantern smile. He shakes his head. “Yeah. Didn’t think so.” He drops the empty in the grass.

  “You didn’t save me some?” Monique says, swatting his leg.

  “Didn’t know you wanted it.” He and Monique stare at Val and June.

  “Let’s go,” Val says.

  “What’s your hurry?” June says.

  Val grabs June’s wrist. She knows Monique and her crew are about to explode with laughter. She pulls June away from the park.

  “You saw how he was looking at us?” June says.

  Val links her arm through June’s. “Totally.”

  As they move along they try on the streetwise rhythms of Monique and her crew. Trying out words they’d be afraid to use at home or school. Calling each other “ho.” Feeling the nervous release of each curse. Waiting for repercussions that don’t come. Because they are alone on the streets now. They’re skirting the edges of the projects and approaching the water along dark, cobblestone streets with only the burned-out streetlights and abandoned warehouses for company.

  The moon is riding high and full. The last lights of the projects are at the girls’ backs. The summer noises and chatter from the park have faded so they talk louder now, raising their voices against the silence. They wave their arms, gesture large, beating back the shadows that stretch from abandoned doorways and broken windows. They know the rumors, but they try to ignore them—the stray dogs, rabid and feral, that breed in the abandoned sugar refinery, the haunted junkies, the homeless, the insane.

  A couple of blocks from the water there’s an abandoned lot strewn with trash and knee-high weeds. In the middle of this lot a dilapidated fishing boat is moored in the rubble. The weeds rustle as the girls pass. They pick up the pace. There’s a whistle from somewhere near the boat. The girls turn and see Cree James, a kid from the projects who used to hang with Rita before Val’s parents put an end to their friendship. He’s good-looking—round face and wide eyes, high cheekbones. He keeps his head shaved in the hot months.

  Cree is sitting on the boat’s prow, legs dangling toward the dirty ground.

  “Where you girls off to?”

  “Somewhere,” June says.

  “How come you’re all alone?” Val asks.

  “I got things to do.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” the girls say in unison.

  “What you two know about it?”

  “We know stuff,” Val says.

  “Like what?”

  “More than you think,” June says.

  “Yeah?” Cree drums his feet on the hull.

  “Yeah,” June says, wrapping her fingers through the chain-link fence that blocks the lot from the street. “So why don’t you come find out?”

  Val digs a finger into her side.

  “Big words for a fourteen-year-old,” Cree says.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Big words all the same.”

  “So, you won’t be kicking it with us?” June says.

  Cree shakes his head. “I got somewhere to be.”

  “Shame. We know where the party is,” Val says. Normally Val would be nervous flirting, even in jest, with an eighteen-year-old. But out here on unfamiliar territory, she feels bold.

  “Sure you do,” Cree says.

  “We got it going on,” June says.

  The girls begin to walk away. June’s voice has lost its saucy edge. Val feels her relax, as she falls into step with their adventure.

  “We know where it’s at,” Val says.

  “We know how it’s done.”

  “We know how to do it.”

  Cree watches the girls disappear up the dark street, carrying that pink raft between them. They used to hang with his cousin Monique when they were little, back when he and Rita were tight, before her parents taught her that kids from the Houses were off-limits to waterside girls. He’d never expect Val and June to turn up in this part of Red Hook, especially so late. He usually has this corner to himself at night. Even people from the projec
ts keep away from these streets after dark. And no one takes much notice of a boat moored in the weeds, just another sliver of old Red Hook lore, the vanished world of dockworkers and longshoremen.

  But this decaying fishing boat never belonged to any of the guys who cluster in the VFW or in the last waterfront bar. It belonged to Cree’s father, Marcus, who bought it from a salvage yard in Jersey. The boat was beached after Marcus, a corrections officer, caught a bullet meant for no one in particular—collateral damage in the now dormant drug wars. Cree guesses the boat is his now.

  Cree’s mom, Gloria, believes that Marcus’s spirit lingers at the spot in the courtyards where he fell. Gloria’s often out there with a thermos of iced tea. But Cree knows better. No ghost, especially not his father’s, would bother haunting a bench. But a captain always returns to his ship. One day Cree hopes to get the boat back in the channel and take Marcus farther out on the water than he’d ever been in his lifetime.

  On certain nights Cree tricks himself into seeing his father’s shadow moving through the weeds and climbing aboard. He imagines him sliding into the tiny cabin and taking the wheel. Then Cree pretends that he and Marcus are crossing the Upper Bay to New Jersey where they’d once visited another desolate cobblestone waterfront. There was the same smell of silt and water and the same sound of wind slapping empty buildings. But there were no projects near the Jersey waterfront, and no one over there gave Cree and Marcus a glance that told them they didn’t belong.

  On that trip back to Red Hook, Cree had found himself staring across the Upper Bay trying to pick out his project from the distant mass of Brooklyn gray. Odd, how only a short ride away turned his hometown unrecognizable. Like it had nothing to do with him.

  Cree can’t focus enough to summon Marcus. Maybe the girls scared him off. Cree vaults off the prow and lands in the dust and grass. He picks up a bucket and fishing rod from beside the boat and hits the street, his footfalls replacing the echoes left behind by Val and June.

  His pace is slow. His shoulders slump as if gravity is too much. He reaches the end of Columbia Street and catches a whiff of the water, a brew of fuel and fish. He heads out on the pier that juts into Erie Basin at an obtuse angle. He skirts the impounded cars in the police lot and walks until the pier starts to double back on itself. He sits and dangles his legs over the water, looking past the docked tugboats at the abandoned shipyard and the remains of the sugar refinery that burned before he was born.