Give Me Your Heart (17 page)

As if reading Zwilich’s wayward thoughts, César bared his yellow teeth in a taunting smile. “Hey, man? You be cool? I goin’ home. Mama come? Mama sorry now?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Mama sorry. Yes.”

The boy spoke with such vehemence, Zwilich didn’t doubt that yes, Mama was very sorry.

The wan, stale odor of sorrow blew through air vents in the old State Street building. Some smells, in the first-floor men’s lavatories, were feculent, sulfurous, a prefiguring of the
farthest-from-daylight pit of hell.

Six years on the staff at Family Services, Zwilich would have been promoted to supervisor by now except for budget cuts through festering New Jersey, and departmental resentments. Inevitable
that he’d provoke resentment, being overqualified for his job and inclined, beneath his courteous manner, to exasperated patience, irony. Most days he wore black jeans and a white cotton
dress shirt and sometimes a necktie—sometimes a lead-colored necktie. He wore expensive silver-threaded Nikes, in cool weather a black leather bomber jacket to align himself with, not his
colleagues, still less his superiors, but his clients. His bristly sand-colored whiskers were trimmed into a goatee; his still-thick hair, receding at his temples, was trimmed in a crew cut that
gave him, in these uncertain years approaching forty, an air of youthful vitality and waywardness that at times Zwilich still felt. He hadn’t quit his job as Sofia had quit hers, in disgust,
dismay. He had plans still. EnvironmPh. D. law, a Ph.D. in social psychology. He wasn’t old. He wasn’t broken. Maybe inclined to sarcasm—can’t be helped. He didn’t
want to think that without a clear future, a vision of some sort of happiness, the present becomes unendurable in a very short time.

He asked César, How’d you like some pizza? A Coke? and César shrugged okay cautiously, as if suspecting a trick; it’s a world in which, if you’re eleven years
old, some older guy, or could be a girl, holds out a pizza slice for you, a can of Coke, and when you reach for it slaps your hand away, laughs in your face. Zwilich made a quick call on his cell
phone, the pizzeria across the street where sometimes he ordered takeouts. Poor kid was probably starving. The least Zwilich could do, feed him.

It was Zwilich’s task to interview the detained juvenile and make a recommendation to his supervisor, who, in the flurry of late Friday, and in his trust in Zwilich’s judgment, would
do no more than glance at the report and pass it on: whether to release César Diaz into an adult relative’s custody or keep him overnight, or longer, in the juvenile detention
facility. Zwilich disapproved of keeping kids as young as César Diaz even overnight in detention, where the oldest boys were sixteen. Inmates were segregated according to age and size, but
still, a boy like César would be abused.

Probably something like that had already happened to César. Not once but many times.

On Monday, a Family Court judge would rule on César’s case. Probation and outpatient therapy were most likely, unless, if Family Services recommended it, he were incarcerated in a
juvenile facility. A kid’s life in Zwilich’s hands, like dice to be tossed. A wild thought came to him: take César Diaz home.

A call to Sofia to come back, see what I’ve done.

Except Sofia wasn’t answering his phone messages to her. Where was she staying, with whom, in Trenton or possibly in Philadelphia: Zwilich had suspicions but no clear knowledge.

. . .
love you but frankly I’m afraid of you, terrified of going under with you, drowning

He’d been shocked: Drown? With him?

As if Zwilich were a depressed man, was that it? Sofia was fearful of the contagion?

He’d hated her in that moment. He’d wanted to slap her beautiful, selfish face.

If they’d had a child. By now, children. When two adults cohabiting fail to have children, they remain perpetual children themselves.

“Well, César. See you’ve been busy.”

Zwilich whistled through his teeth looking through the boy’s file. He’d been taken into police custody five times, twice within the past three months. Vandalism, petty thefts,
disturbances at school and at home, glue sniffing. A previous caseworker had noted that one of the vandalism episodes included “desecration of a cemetery” and another the torture of a
stray dog. It was noted that an older neighborhood boy had tied a rope around César’s neck and yanked him around, causing him to faint, when he’d been nine; another time,
César had fashioned a noose and stuck his own head into it; yet another time, more recently, he’d forced a noose over his six-year-old brother’s head. He’d been picked up
with two older boys for stealing from a 7-Eleven store, and not long afterward he’d been arrested for vandalism in the rear lot of the 7-Eleven store. He’d been several times suspended
from school. Following these incidents he’d been assessed by Family Services psychologists and counselors and given sentences of “supervised probation” with required therapy from
Family Court judges who hadn’t wanted to incarcerate so young a child. But Zwilich thought the next judge wasn’t going to look kindly on all this.

The prosecutor for the case had told Zwilich that he intended to ask the judge to incarcerate the boy in juvenile detention for thirty days minimum. César Diaz required psychiatric
observation as well as treatment for the glue sniffing, and it was “high time” for the boy to learn that the law is serious. Sour, prim as a TV scold, Zwilich’s colleague said,
How’re kids going to respect the law if there aren’t any consequences to their behavior?

Zwilich sneered: Who respects the law? Whose behavior has consequences? Politicians, mega-corporations?

He’d said, “Hell, this is a child who’s been arrested. Look at him, he’s so small.”

Now, in the counseling room, Zwilich wasn’t so sure. Fury quivered in César’s tightly coiled little body; halfway you expected him to spring up at you, like a snake baring its
fangs.

“. . . want to hurt your mother, César? Your little brother? You love them, don’t you? Tell me.”

“Din’t hurt nobody! Shit what Mama says.”

“I think you love them. Sure you do. Why’d you want to scare them, César? Tell me.”

César shrugged, sniggered.
You tell me.

In César’s file it was noted that his father, Hector Diaz, was deceased. Zwilich said, in a confiding voice, “My father died when I was a little boy, César. I was just
six. I know what it’s like.”

César looked interested, briefly. His eyes shifted with caution, a kind of adult shyness, wariness. As if, like the offer of pizza, this might be some sort of trick.

Zwilich said, “I still miss my father, César. But I talk to him, in a way. Every day I talk with him.” Zwilich paused, wondering if this might be true. He certainly talked
with someone, in a continuous tape loop of improvised, pleading speech; but that someone seemed not to be listening. “Do you talk with your father too?”

César shrugged, evasive now, down-looking, wiping at his leaking nose. Zwilich had several times offered him tissues, but the boy disdained them, preferring to wipe bloody snot on his
fingers and his fingers on the table. Zwilich tried another father question, but the boy wasn’t responding. You had to suppose that this was a misguided tactic: probably the kid hadn’t
even known his father, or, if he’d been told that somewhere he had a father, he’d been told that the father was dead.

Father
deceased.
One problem out of the way.

When Zwilich proceeded to ask César about the thefts from the 7-Eleven store, the boy become animated, agitated. Now he began to chatter incoherently in an aggrieved voice. The 7-Eleven
clerk must have been an Indian; César muttered a racist slur. There was indignation in his little body, and he eyed Zwilich insolently, as if to say,
So what, man?

The boy was mimicking older boys he admired, neighborhood punks, dope dealers, the slatted rat-eyes, jeering laugh, junior macho swagger. In a boy so young the effect was as comical as a cartoon
that, upon closer inspection, is pornographic.

Zwilich knew these kids. Some were “juvies,” others were adolescents, “youths.” Their souls’ deepest utterances were rap lyrics.

He pitied them. He was sympathetic with them. He detested them. He feared them. He was grateful for them: they were his “work.”

You would wish to think that César Diaz, so young, could be saved from them. Removed from his neighborhood, which was poisoning his soul, and placed—where? In a juvenile facility?
But the youth facilities were overcrowded, understaffed. Zwilich admired some of the administrators of these facilities, for he knew of their idealism—their initial idealism, at
least—but these places were in effect urban slum streets with walls around them.

César continued to chatter, agitated and aggrieved. Zwilich glanced at his watch, worn with the dim digital clock face on the inside of his wrist as if the exact time were a secret
Zwilich didn’t wish to share: 6:55
P.M.
The date was June 30, 2006.

Each day, each hour. Equal to all others. If God is in one of these, God is in all of these.

He believed this! He wanted to believe.

Yet:
If God is absent from just one of these, God is absent from all of these.

The pizza would be arriving soon, the Cokes; these would help. One of the guards would rap on the door: “Mr. Zwilich? Delivery.” César would observe the counselor paying for
the meal, bills removed from Zwilich’s wallet in a gesture of easy generosity. Sharing a meal with a client, in these cramped quarters, was a technique of Zwilich’s, a friendly
maneuver, intimate yet not overly familiar. You felt the urge to feed, to nurture, a kid like César, who had to be famished.

At the thought of pizza, Zwilich felt a mild stirring of nausea. Beer fat, whiskey fat, in flaccid flesh at his waist, a secret fat, for Zwilich was a lean, lanky, still-young-looking man, five
feet ten inches, one hundred seventy pounds, given to small gestures of vanity—smoothing the bristly hairs of his beard, running his fingers through his brushlike hair, checking to see
if—yes? was it evident?—the deep bruised indentations beneath his eyes suggested insomniac nights, or late-drinking nights, restlessly surfing TV. The first mouthful of gummy pizza
cheese, greasy Italian sausage, and scorched but doughy bread would repel him, and his thirst wasn’t for syrupy-sweet Coke.

She loved him, she’d said. But didn’t want to go down with him, and he’d said, But I thought you loved me, in the most piteous voice, and she’d said, backing away so he
couldn’t touch her, pull her off-balance toward him as in a clumsy dance, I love you! But I goddamn don’t intend to drown with you. Alcohol—addictions of any kind, including
nicotine, the most common painkillers—were more difficult for women to overcome than for men; it must be biochemical, genetic. Zwilich hated it, that his wife feared him, when first time
he’d met her, at a bar in New Brunswick, in a gathering of medical students, Sofia had been drinking whiskey, straight. He’d been stunned by her beauty, her strong sensual mouth and
vivid physical presence. The sight of a woman drinking whiskey aroused Zwilich, for it was rare in his experience and often the prelude to a sexual encounter, as it would prove with this woman
after she’d become his wife.

Nine years! Since he’d first met her. Of these nine years, they’d been married seven.

If they’d had a baby. Babies. What then? Zwilich had no idea but couldn’t think that having babies was the solution to a riddle that taunted you every time you looked into a mirror:
You?
Why?

Here was César Diaz, a young woman’s baby. It had to have seemed that little César was someone’s answer, a temporary answer, to the riddle
Why?

Freely César was speaking, boasting of his friends. Lots of friends, César’s friends, to look out for him. If he went “inside”— if he was “kept
here.” No clear transition then to a story about someone who’d fired a gun into the air, they be drinkin’ this guy brother home from Ee-rock he in the army he have this gun shoot
this gun, bullet go high in the air then fall, hit some old guy, poor old guy next-door back yard he hit, poor old guy he have bad luck the bullet hit him neck, he don’t get to the hospital
he die in ambulance you see on TV? Everybody talkin’ about it but nobody know who shoot the gun. César grinned, laughed. He’d been tapping his neck to indicate a bullet entering,
shaking his head, laughing. Nobody know.

Zwilich was listening now. He knew of this incident, which had been widely reported in the Trenton area: a random bullet fired into the air that had fallen and killed an elderly man in the
Straube Street project back in April, and the shooter had never been identified. Zwilich tried to interrupt the chattering boy to ask who the shooter was—an Iraqi war veteran?—but
César laughed, saying it wouldna happen if God din’t want it that way, nobody damn fault how the gun go off, how you blame it?

“César, did you tell your mother about this?”

César sniggered, vastly amused. Had to be Mr. Zwilich was a real asshole to ask that.

“An elderly man dies, nobody cares? What if this man was your grandfather, César?”

“Hey man, he
not.”

Zwilich felt a throb of dislike for the boy. The mimicry of older boys, men, in his voice, his vocabulary, his mannerisms, the contortions of his small body. Zwilich would be meeting with
César’s mother, not the next day, nor the next, but sometime on Monday, at which time César would appear before a Family Court judge, in the company of a court-appointed public
defender. He saw in César’s file that Gladys Diaz, twenty-eight, had moved to Trenton four years before from Camden, New Jersey; she was a diabetic who received Mercer County welfare
payments for her sons and for herself; in Camden she’d been arrested for trying to cash forged checks and had been sentenced to two years’ probation. At 3:30
P.M.
on June 30, 2006, Mrs.
Diaz had called 911 to report that her son César was “threatening” her with a fork—not an eating fork but a long, two-pronged fork like you use for turning
meat—screaming he was going to kill her and his six-year-old brother. He’d been sniffing glue; Mrs. Diaz couldn’t control him. But when Trenton police officers arrived at the
Straube Street apartment and César ran away, panicked, crawling to hide beneath a bed, Mrs. Diaz relented, saying maybe they shouldn’t take her son away, then she’d relented
again, saying yes! they should! this time she wasn’t going to come with him to the precinct, César is on his own this time, though again changing her mind as the officers hauled the
boy, shrieking and stumbling, to the street, to the waiting patrol car, wrists cuffed behind his back, and the officers would note on their reports a strong smell of red wine on Mrs. Diaz’s
breath. César was speaking excitedly of Mama as if Zwilich must know her. César was furious with Mama but César was desperate for Mama. César was saying Mama been
wantin’ to scarce him, now Mama sorry. Callin’ the damn police, Mama done that before, sayin’ she gonna call them to scare him, and his brother too, lots of times, to scare them.
Mama afraid to beat him now, he too big, damn police come for him at school too but he’d never been “kept in” this place; he’d be let go now, Mama comin’ to take him
home. Why this was funny, Zwilich didn’t know. The boy’s laughter was sharp like shattering glass and getting on his nerves. If the boy was made to spend a single night in the juvenile
facility, he’d be punished for that shriek of a laugh. He’d be punished for his runny nose, and for his smell, and for being a runt, a loser.