The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (12 page)

That was the last time, it turned out. Not the last time I saw him, but the last time we had sex. The last time I saw him was two Saturdays after that, when I was starting to wonder whether I was going to have to go to work on him again with the Frye boots and the service calls. My closet wasn’t closing right. I was going to call and complain on Sunday. But he showed up Saturday with Jessamina again. She was sulky but you could tell that she wasn’t mad, and as soon as she took off her jacket— that same thin grimy jacket, polyester with lousy fill—she was reaching for
Alice
.

Jesus looked bad, like he hadn’t slept and hadn’t showered, and I wondered for a minute if he was doing one of the other girls in the dorm. It wasn’t like him to be unkempt. He was the kind of guy who treated his mustache as though it was a house pet. “Just keep an eye out for her,” he said, running his hand through his hair, and for once I couldn’t think of some smart-ass thing to say. His cell phone, which he kept clipped to his belt, started chirping, and he sighed. “The machine thing’ll get it,” he said.

“Popi, answer it. You know how bad she’ll get.”

“She can’t get any badder. Any worse. Goddamn it.” The phone stopped, then started ringing, stopped, then rang again. Thank God he didn’t have some stupid song, “Pomp and Circumstance” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ring four and he flipped it open. “What?” he said, and you could hear screaming coming from the phone all the way across the room.

“Ay yi yi,” said Jessamina, tears running down her face and dropping onto my good copy of
Alice,
turning the faded red cloth cover vermilion again.

“Listen to me,” Jesus said, but whoever was screaming wasn’t listening. “Listen. Listen. All right. All right. Yeah.”

He hung up and looked from Jessamina to me, then back again. “I guess she told you,” I said.

“Shut up. Just keep an eye out for her. Stop crying, Jessie. Stop right now. Everything is okay.” He said something in Spanish and the girl jumped up and held on to him around the waist, moving her head from side to side until the front of his shirt was wet with tears.

Then in English he said, “I’ll be back to get you later.”

After he was gone she started to cry again so I just shut up and did the reading for my Econ class. She started on
Alice,
but after a while I heard the book fall to the floor and when I looked over she was asleep, sitting on my bed with her back against the wall. I nudged her over with the flat of my hand and she fell onto the bed on a perfect diagonal, like a small tree. I covered her with my duvet. She snored evenly, even when late afternoon came and the light disappeared and I had to put my desk lamp on. Just before six o’clock she said “maybe” very loudly, and then “sometimes,” and went back to sleep for a few more minutes. When I turned around again she was in the same position but her eyes were open and she was looking at my back.

“Is it nighttime?” she said.

“Not yet.”

What it was was at least an hour past the end of Jesus’ shift, but I didn’t say anything. Part of me was pissed that I was stuck with this kid, that I didn’t know where she lived or how to get her there. Part of me figured that something bad was happening and that I’d better cut her and Jesus a little slack. The voice that had come freight-training out of that cell phone had sounded a little bit like my mother’s voice when the cops in Hilton Head called, only instead of “All right” she’d said “Are you certain? Are you certain?” over and over again until I’d wanted to scream. But she’d screamed enough for us both.

“Do you like Chinese food?” I said.

“Egg rolls,” she said.

“They’re full of fat,” I said, but I got them anyhow and had some myself. I got her to eat lo mein, too, but she wouldn’t touch the Szechuan prawns.

“I can’t believe I’m spending Saturday night eating Chinese food in my room and studying like all these other losers,” I said, and when she started to sniffle I added, “Okay, okay, it’s fine. It’s all good. He probably just had to take care of business.”

“He probably had to take my mom to the hospital. That takes all night sometimes. Sometimes there are people who are shot and their heads are all messed up and there’s all this blood and they have to take them first.”

“Yeah, okay, too much information. So you’ll just have a sleepover here.”

“I had a sleepover with my friend Jasmine over Christmas vacation. We went to the movies and to Chuck E. Cheese.”

“I’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese.”

“It’s like a restaurant and an arcade, so you can eat and like play video games.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. And Jasmine has a brother who won high scorer on Blast ’Em and we got a free pizza. It was kind of a gyp because we’d already had pizza so we didn’t want another one and they said we couldn’t have a coupon for it so we had to order it then. We took half of it home in a box to Jasmine’s other brother. He’s in a wheelchair ’cause when he was born something went wrong and he’s all hunched up on one side. You have to cut his food up in little pieces or he chokes on it.”

“Where is this?”

“Chuck E. Cheese?”

“No, where you live?”

“The Bronx,” she said. “Pelham Parkway.”

At least I had a clue.

I let her have the bed that night and although she was all nervous during dinner she slept soundly. I was the one who kept waking up, trying to figure out why I was on the floor. When it was morning I wanted to go out to the diner to have a hot breakfast but she said no, no, we had to be there when Jesus came back or he’d be angry. I tried to tell her the guy could let himself in with his passkey (smoke a doobie, take a nap) but she wouldn’t listen. Another corn muffin, another hot chocolate. I just had coffee and a cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window while she wiped her delicate hands very carefully and looked at me like I was practicing Satanism instead of ripping through the first Newport of the day. Love that menthol, especially with a latte. You get that dark numb patch at the back of your tongue that reminds you you’re alive.

It’s weird how I can’t remember that much about the rest of the day. It was a kind of black hole, quiet and still, maybe what Sunday is like for people who observe the Sabbath. I think the sun set at some ungodly hour, although since it was early March I was probably wrong about that. Jessamina knew Jesus’s cell number and we called but we got no answer, not even a machine. We called every hour, and then every half hour after lunch. Around six it started snowing, and I went out and got sandwiches. What kind of weird kid wants an American cheese sandwich with nothing on it?
That
I remember. “Mustard?” I asked. “Lettuce?” But she just shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned way down. She finished
Alice
and I gave her
Through the Looking Glass
. We were both reading in the dark and when I got up to turn on the overhead light she was bent over the dictionary, squinting at the small print.

“You need glasses?” I said.

“What’s a jabberwocky?” she said, turning the thin onion-skin pages of the OED.

“No one knows.”

“What?”

“He made it up. The word, the thing. It’s whatever you think it is.”

“That’s stupid. Are people allowed to do that, just put words in books even if they don’t know what they mean?”

“If they want.”

“I don’t think that’s fair. It’s, it’s, it’s confusing. And it makes you mad. Like what if I’d been alone and I hadn’t been able to ask anyone and all this time I thought it was a word that meant something and I was just too stupid to know the word?”

I shrugged.

“I’m not reading this anymore,” she said, and when I looked over she’d fallen asleep again, her mouth open and her eyes skittering back and forth beneath the thin veiny skin of her eyelids.

Jesus, I was tired of sleeping on the floor.

“I gotta go to school,” she said when she woke up the next morning, dull-eyed. “I got to go home.”

“Do you know which stop you are on the subway?”

“I’m not a baby, you know. Of course I know what stop on the subway. I’ve taken the train home a million times.”

“I’m going to get coffee. You want the same thing as before? Then I’ll take you on the train.”

“I can go by myself.”

“My ass,” I said.

It’s hard for me to remember now, but in college I never paid any attention to what was going on out in the world. I didn’t have a TV in my room and I never read the papers. Now it’s like, if I miss one issue of
People
magazine I have to go have a manicure just so I can catch up. We all say we have to watch
Access Hollywood
for work because if the editor-in-chief says she wants, say, a Gwyneth layout we’d all better know what the Gwyneth thing is at the moment, because one shot that’s so last-year’s-Gwyneth and you’ll be working for a suburban shopping sheet. But we just watch
Access Hollywood
because we want to. If any of us were in serious relationships maybe we wouldn’t watch so much. One of the young assistants had a boyfriend who loved to watch
Access,
and she was so shocked when it turned out he was gay. Duh. Duh. Duh.

The closest thing to following the news I did in college was to look at the tabs as I walked past the newsstand near Café No, which was a good thing because there’s no telling what would have happened if I hadn’t seen Jessamina’s picture on the front of the
Daily News,
almost life sized, with the headline WHERE IS SHE? It was the first time I’d bought a newspaper in three years, since the Michael Jackson trial. I took it into Café No, ordered a no-foam latte, and sat at a table with my insides bubbling up so that I thought I might have to use their skanky restroom.

Jessamina’s mother’s picture was on page three. She looked like Jessamina, only smaller all over. A picture of Jesus was next to her. It wasn’t flattering. I think it was at the beach; his shirt was off and there was a horizontal line mid-photo that might have been the line between the sand and the water. His hair was all over the place, which would have made him crazy if he hadn’t been dead of twenty-three stab wounds that Jessamina’s mother had inflicted, the cops said, before she turned the knife on herself, which is a pretty gentle way of saying that she stabbed herself right through the heart. Sometimes I think about that now and I still can’t get my mind around it.

The papers said Jessamina’s mom had been in and out of the hospital for psychiatric treatment and that her own mother, Jessamina’s grandmother, said she’d even had electroshock and some sort of water therapy that sounded pretty sketchy to me, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s therapy. The papers said that there had been a domestic dispute on Saturday because Jessamina’s mom—her name was Mercedes, of all things— thought that Jesus was cheating on her. And now they were testing all the blood in the house to see if she’d killed Jessamina, too, because Jessamina had just disappeared into thin air. Maybe she was dead, maybe she was kidnapped by drug lords, maybe she was wandering around with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Jessamina’s grandmother said she was an honor student at St. Martin de Porres and that she read all the time.

I stayed an hour at the table, had another latte, ordered Jessamina’s hot chocolate, and read my horoscope. (I’m a Gemini, the astrological sign of the bipolar. Which, by the way, was what Mercedes happened to be. Bipolar, not a Gemini. In and out of the hospital, on and off the meds. Mercedes, we could have hung out. I wonder when your birthday was.) My bottom line was pretty simple: I sure as hell didn’t want to be involved. COED CAUSED MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, right. I finished my coffee, went to the corner, and called the TIPS line number at the bottom of the newspaper story. I’m a decisive person when I need to be. I was the one who made all the arrangements when my mother went catatonic on me after the accident. I took care of business even though I was just a kid, really. Until she married El Shrinko II. The sequel is never as good.

“The kid you want in that murder case is standing by this phone,” I said. I didn’t want to make it too easy for them, figured it would take at least a few minutes to do whatever they do to trace a phone number and to get somebody there. And when I bundled Jessamina into her coat and took her down the freight elevator, I didn’t go outside, just stood there shivering in the delivery entrance and pointed across the street. “Your grandmother is coming to get you,” I said.

“You called my grandmother?” She was half-asleep and so confused, blinking in the sunlight for the first time in two days.

“Sort of,” I said. “She’s coming. Just stand over there. But do me a favor. Do Jesus a favor. Don’t tell them where you were.”

“Don’t tell who?”

“Whoever,” I said.

She sort of tottered across the street like an old person, her arms wrapped around her midsection. I’m not totally inhuman. I stood in the doorway watching until a black-and-white rolled up and the cops put her in the back. The next morning the paper said she’d been wandering the campus for two days, hiding in the library. I didn’t read it until nearly nighttime because I took two Ambien and slept for eighteen hours. I had terrible dreams about playing tennis with a guy who kept firing aces past me but wouldn’t let me give up. When I finally went outside there was a foot of snow on the ground. It looked like I had dreamt it while I was sleeping.

It snowed a couple of weeks ago, and that probably made me remember, too, and then I was on the treadmill at the Health and Racket Club and I looked up at the TV and there she was, talking to the newswoman from Channel Four, the Korean one who talks with her hands and has really bad Chiclet teeth. It was one of those lame anniversary pieces local news loves, ten years since blah blah blah. The newswoman said it was a story of tragedy and triumph, and she asked Jessamina what she did during those terrible days when she walked the streets without knowing that her mother had committed this senseless crime. (Apparently no one really believed Jesus had been unfaithful.)

“I read mostly,” she said quietly. “I’ve always loved reading.”

And with one of those TV aha smiles the newswoman said that that must be true because Jessamina had graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English from a prestigious college, where her tuition was paid by a childless millionaire garmento who had been touched by her story at the time and had paid for Choate as well. And now she was studying for a master’s degree and teaching first graders to read. Cut to Jessamina reading aloud with a bunch of kids in uniforms around her in a circle, only one or two staring shamelessly at the camera, and what is she reading but
Alice in Wonderland
? This stupid newswoman doesn’t even know how perfectly the whole deal turned out!