Bang Page 14

  Mari blinks, heart filling with love and terror simultaneously—my friend Jackson, oh. She knows for a fact that last week Sonya asked Andre if he was coming to Halloween and received a gentle no. “We can ask him,” she answers with caution, reaching for the Minnie Mouse washcloth hanging over the faucet. “Come here, baby girl, let me do your back.”

  Sonya doesn’t mention it again before bed but Mari can’t stop thinking about it, flipping through a year-old New Yorker in bed an hour later while her daughter snores quietly beside her. God in heaven, how selfish has she been?

  Three times, she almost calls Andre, her thumb hovering over the speed dial for his cell. It feels like the worst, most dishonest brand of parenting, insinuating her new…whatever Jackson is, into her kid’s life without so much as a discussion. In the end she just flops back onto the mattress and reads through the political comics that were topical twelve months ago, too tired to commit to an article.

  “Am I a good mom?” she asks Patricia after breakfast in the morning, feeling needy. Sonya is in the TV room watching Dora teach American children Spanish, which is probably the most culture she’s been exposed to since she started pre-K. “¡Cuidado!” she shouts delightedly before Dora even gives the prompt. “¡Swiper, no robes!”

  “That’s right! Swiper, no swiping!” Dora says in stubborn English.

  Patricia looks unmoved by Mari’s worrying. “What kind of question is that, am I a good mother?” She tsks, shaking out her newspaper.

  “Just asking.” Mari loads the breakfast plates into the dishwasher sulkily. Today was Sunday pancakes, a tradition that Andre started when Sone was a baby and Mari has made a good faith effort to keep alive. She read a Divorce and Your Child book back at the beginning of the summer that said maintaining routine helps. “It’s just Halloween. It’s the first holiday since Andre and I broke up.”

  That makes Patricia glance up. “You need me to make a costume or something?”

  “No. Maybe.” She shrugs. “But Andre won’t be there.”

  “Andre won’t be—” Patricia folds up her newspaper and switches to Spanish. “Marisol, the past two Halloweens I’ve taken that child trick-or-treating while Andre and you worked. It’s not as if this is some sudden change. Cálmate, mi vida, my goodness.”

  Mari blows out a breath. “I am calm,” she insists. Then, “Okay. You’re right.”

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Patricia says, going back to her paper. “It’s a holiday about candy, for God’s sakes. Come back and talk to me at Christmas.”

  That afternoon she drives out to the big costume warehouse in Pittsfield with Sonya, who is still weighing the relative merits of each costume from her car seat. A cat has a tail and ears, she tells Mari, but Iron Man has a mask. And princesses, apparently, have wands.

  “Do you mean a fairy?” Mari asks, turning onto the highway. But Sonya says no, because fairies have no dragons.

  This is the first year she’s been old enough to state a preference. Last year Andre and Mari turned her into a hastily constructed bunny via a glue gun and a pair of too-small sweatpants, then sent her off with a pillowcase and the instructions to be polite and compliment everyone’s decorations. According to Patricia, she cried when Mrs. Blackmun up the street asked her to waggle her tail.

  “We only have a few minutes,” Mari warns her as they pull up. “So choose fast.”

  “Maybe a fox,” Sonya says, then proceeds to fall in love with a midriff-baring Princess Jasmine outfit that Mari thinks is both too cold and too racist. The girl modeling it on the box is a conspicuously tanned white girl wearing a bindi.

  “If that’s what the kid wants,” Andre says when she calls for his opinion. He’s at work, preparing an operating room for a double mastectomy. He tells Mari stuff like that now, chatty, congenial details about his life. It makes her feel even guiltier about bringing Jackson around on the sly. “One little brown girl dressing up as another isn’t the end of the world.”

  “None of the white Disney princesses ever had to seduce the bad guy,” Mari says and hangs up the phone. Then she buys a flesh-colored shirt to go underneath the costume. Predictably, they only come in beige.

  She waits until work to broach the subject with Jackson, dithering up until the last minute over whether she should extend the offer at all. Finally she blurts it out over paperwork, “Sonyaaskedifyouwanttocometrickortreatingwithus,” followed by a giant slug of her coffee. It feels like she’s asking him on a four-course date.

  “She did?” Jackson asks once he’s translated her mumble, putting down the file folder he’s been flipping through, an eviction on Oak Crescent that turned nasty. He looks surprised, and a little skeptical. “Really? Sonya asked?”

  “What do you think, I’m making it up?” Mari laughs at him across the desktop, calming down immediately. “You think I’d throw my four-year-old child under the bus for the chance to walk around the neighborhood with you for an hour? I walk around the neighborhood with you for a living, Jackson.”

  “Well, sure,” Jackson says, smirking back. “But this would be at night.”

  “Oh, I see.” Mari makes a face, trying to ignore the way her whole body’s pricking up underneath her uniform. God, he makes her act ridiculous. “You’re a nerd, you know that?”

  “You’re a nerd,” Jackson counters, but now he’s grinning and oh, Mari’s heart does a funny thing inside her chest. “So do I need a costume?”

  Which is how Jackson winds up at the de la Espadas a little after sundown on Halloween night, wearing an old running jersey along with his jeans and sneakers. Mari snorts when she opens the door. “You really went all out there, huh, Ford?” she asks.

  “Oh, like yours is a full getup.” She’s wearing a clingy black turtleneck and a pair of furry cat ears which, weirdly, kind of works for him. The tip of her nose is drawn on eyeliner-black. “Anyway, wait,” he says, pulling a bright red sweatband out of his pocket and snapping it in place on his forehead. “There, now it’s complete.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Mari’s grinning, her straight white teeth and how smooth and pretty her skin is. Jackson leans down and plants a kiss on her mouth. “Hi.”

  In the living room Sonya is dolled up in full Disney regalia. Patty is watching Rear Window on TV. “Make sure you get Milk Duds,” she tells them before they go, kissing Sonya on her ponytailed head and walking them to the front door, where a giant bowl of fun-size M&M packets sits awaiting other trick-or-treaters. “Milk Duds are what I like.”

  “Thanks for inviting me, Sone,” Jackson tells her as they head down the front walkway. There are jack-o-lanterns grinning on front stoops all up and down the block. The house across the street has set up a Styrofoam graveyard on their lawn, cotton batting stretched through the trees to look like spiderwebs. He guesses when it comes to raising children, Mari’s block isn’t so bad. “I like your costume.”

  “Mama says Jasmine would have saved herself if Aladdin hadn’t gotten his act together,” Sonya reports solemnly, pumpkin-shaped bucket banging against her tiny knees as she walks. Then, before Jackson can answer, “We watched Aladdin when I puked.”

  Jackson nods. “Yeah we did,” he says, like they’re recounting some great adventure they had together. “You’re not gonna puke tonight, are you? Too much candy?”

  Sonya finds that hysterical. “Noooooo,” she says, giggling with a ferocity that makes Jackson feel like a million bucks. He had no idea the comedic approval of the Nick Jr. set could be so gratifying.

  “Good,” he says. They walk a few more steps before he decides to try his luck again. “So does that mean I get to eat all your candy?”

  “Nooooooo.” Sonya laughs, running ahead of them along the crooked sidewalk. Then she whirls dramatically around on one foot to look at him. “Only the kind with nuts!”

  “She’s showing off,” Mari notes as they stop in front of a tidy little craftsman
set back from the road a ways, wide porch and sloping roof. There’s smoke coming out to the chimney and everything, like something out of a storybook.

  “Well,” Jackson points out, “so am I.”

  Mari looks like she’s about to reply, but Sonya’s demanding their undivided attention. “Jackson,” she orders, hands planted on her little-girl hips, “come with me!”

  Jackson snorts. “I see I’m at the beck and call of all the de la Espada women,” he murmurs to Mari, who only smirks.

  “We both like to flirt with you, is all.”

  “Oh, is that it?” Jack grins at her, at how hot she looks in her dumb costume and how much he likes being out here with her in the chilly autumn air. “Come on, small fry,” he tells Sonya, holding out his hand.

  “I’m not a fry,” Sonya informs him, but she takes it and they make it up the walkway, which is studded with paper-bag luminarias with cutouts of witches and ghosts. Sonya gamely rings the doorbell, but when a short redheaded woman answers it with an equally redheaded baby in one arm and a basket full of Twix bars in the other, Sonya only stares at her mutely, eyes wide. According to Mari, this is her first big-girl Halloween.

  “What do you say, hm?” Jack prompts her quietly after a moment—she’s not a shy kid, as a general rule. She takes after her mother that way. “Sonya?”

  “I love Princess Jasmine,” the redhead puts in when Sonya still doesn’t answer, bouncing the baby a little. A dog barks somewhere inside the house. “That’s a great costume.”

  Nothing out of Sonya. Jack tries again. “Hey, Sone?” he asks, acutely aware of Mari watching from a little ways down the walk, taking it all in. “Can you say trick-or-treat?”

  “I…” Sonya trails off, looking terrified.

  “Should we try together?” he asks, and Sonya nods. “On three?”

  Another head bob. Jackson counts them off and then they say it, a refrain that makes him feel equal parts stupid and pleased. He and Terry and Meredith all used to go out together as kids. Once, when they were real small, they went as Alvin and the Chipmunks. “Please,” Sonya adds primly at the end.

  The redhead grins and deposits what seems like an especially large handful of chocolate into Sonya’s bucket just as the dog Jack heard comes careening into the foyer from a side room. “Atlas!” is the last thing the redhead says before she closes the door with a wave goodnight. “Easy!”

  “Nice work, ma’am,” Jack tells Sonya as they rejoin Mari on the sidewalk. It’s possible he could get used to this, he thinks. They’re making for the next house when he feels his phone vibrate inside his jeans, insistent. He figures it’s his brother and he means to send it to voice mail and call back in the morning, but when he pulls it out of his pocket he feels his eyebrows shoot up in the dark.

  “It’s work,” he says to Mari.

  Then Mari’s phone rings too.

  Mari frowns. “Sonya, baby,” she says as she looks at it, but Jack doesn’t hear the rest because he’s already sliding to answer, thumb moving of its own accord and mouth opening to say hello, and that’s when Leo tells him that Brandon Carlson was shot dead by Sara Piper’s rookie near the slide at the Webb Park playground about an hour ago.

  An hour ago, Jack was putting on his fucking Halloween costume. He doesn’t know why that’s what he thinks of first.

  He can feel his mouth filling with saliva, and his second thought is how Sonya laughed at his barf joke. By now she’s trotted up the front walk of the tidy colonial they’re standing in front of, screaming “Trick or treat!” when an old man answers the door. Jack guesses the shyness was a one-time thing.

  “—thought he had a gun, turns out it was a Taser,” Leo is saying. From the stricken expression on Mari’s painted face somebody on the other end of her phone is telling her the exact same thing. “It’s a fucking cluster, honestly, the rookie’s a fucking mess, but that’s not your problem. We’ll handle it. I just wanted to be sure to tell you myself. I’m sorry as hell, Jack, I know I promised you we’d get him. It’s a hell of a thing.”

  “Okay,” he hears himself saying, in a voice that doesn’t sound like his regular voice at all. “I—okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

  He hangs up and slips his phone back in his pocket without really telling his hands to do it. There’s a noise like a locomotive inside his head. Jack always tells people—he tells himself—that he doesn’t remember the day of the shooting, but in reality that’s not how it is at all. The truth is he can call up all three separate moments of impact whether he wants to or not, the burn of the bullets ripping through his skin and organs and the sick certainty that he was about to die.

  He kind of thinks he might be about to die right now.

  Jack glances around, trying to calm the kettle drum in his chest, the sweat that’s prickling along his back and shoulders inside his ridiculous shirt. Down the street is a kid dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog and another like the Joker, his face painted bright, gruesome red. Jack’s vision is getting blurry at the edges. The whole scene feels like a bad trip.

  “Jack,” Mari is saying, and something about the way she’s looking at him makes him wonder if it’s not the first time she’s called his name. It sounds like she’s calling to him at the bottom of a well. Down the walk, Sonya’s turned back to face them, trotting along the slate looking pleased with herself.

  “I gotta go.”

  Mari shakes her head, reaching her arm out. “Jack, wait—”

  Jackson pulls away. “Tell Sonya to save me a Mounds bar,” he says vaguely and heads down the road toward his car.

  Fuck.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Mari shepherds Sonya around the neighborhood in what seems like a poisonous fog, so green and noxious she’s honestly baffled by the idea that nobody else can see or feel it. Her heart is pumping double speed. Other parents smile at her as they pass and she forces herself to smile back. It feels like she’s just baring her teeth.

  Finally the bucket is full and they head back home, where Patricia is waiting in the family room with the empty M&M bowl by her feet. She shut off the front lights, the international sign for no more candy. “Where’s Jackson?” she asks, looking back and forth between the two of them.

  “He got sick!” Sonya reports, parroting the pitiful lie Mari told her. “Just like me!”

  Patricia raises her eyebrows. Mari shakes her head.

  Once Sonya’s stuffed full of fun-size chocolate bars and the resulting sugar high has worn off, Mari shuts her sleeping daughter’s bedroom door and gets a baby wipe from underneath the sink, scrubbing the stupid eyeliner off her nose.

  Then she gets into her car and drives to Jackson’s.

  He gave her a key back when he bought the place years and years ago, for lockouts or emergencies. His parents lived too far for it to be convenient, he said, but Mari teased him anyway, does this mean we’re going steady? “Shut your mouth before I take it back,” Jack warned her, and she did because she wanted to keep it in a fierce, awful way that she never let herself examine too closely. He had a girlfriend at the time because he always did, a girl named Emily who lasted over a year, but Mari was the one who got the key. She’s never actually used it until tonight.

  Tonight, she lets herself in.

  “It’s me,” she calls, making her way down the hallway and trying not to feel like a total interloper. “You here?”

  “Yeah.” He sounds far away.

  She finds him in the darkened kitchen, sitting at the table with an ashtray and a lit cigarette. There are already two butts in the tray, no matches in sight. Mari wonders if he’s been using them to light each other.

  “Thought we quit,” she says quietly, flipping on the overhead light and sliding into the chair next to him.

  “We didn’t do anything,” Jackson snaps, but he passes over the pack when she holds out a hand for it. Pall Mall Lights
, his old standby. Mari starts to get to her feet, intending to throw them out, but she changes her mind halfway through and lights one off the end of Jack’s instead. Together they puff into the silence. Mari has always hated Pall Malls.

  “Sorry,” Jackson says finally. “I just…had to not be there anymore. Is Sone okay?”

  Mari shrugs. “She’s fine. I told her you had the flu.” She reaches into her jacket pocket and sets a full-sized Mounds bar on the table. “No one was giving these out, as it happens,” she says at Jackson’s look. “I stopped at CVS.”

  Jack sighs. “Candy was better when we were kids.”

  “Yeah.” Mari looks out the window where she can see a few costumed teenagers still going from house to house across the street, collecting any leftover goodies in big garbage bags from tired parents.

  “He was their age,” Jack says, following her gaze.

  “Jack, no,” Mari says right away. “No, he wasn’t. Those kids are fourteen. Brandon Carlson was twenty-two.” She rubs at the bridge of her nose. Her skull hurts where the cat ears were sitting. “Fitzgerald is still in heaps of shit, though.”

  Jack is silent for a minute. “Think it’ll hit the news?”

  Mari shrugs again. “Probably. Maybe not for a few days.” She gets up to open the window, leery of the smoke detector in here. Already the two of them are turning the air blue. “Listen, though, talk to me. How are you feeling?”

  Jackson laughs. “I feel fucking fantastic, Mari,” he says, which she guesses she should have expected. “Never better.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she tells him. “We weren’t even there.”

  “You think I feel guilty?” Jack looks absolutely incredulous. “Seriously? You think I feel sorry for this kid?”

  “I—” Mari blinks. She certainly feels guilty as all hell, Brandon Carlson and his good-boy school picture, how she has to keep reminding herself he really was a grown-up no matter what she told Jackson. She feels horrible about Fitzgerald too. Four weeks Mari rode with that kid, and she doesn’t think she contributed to the girl’s training one bit. “Sorry, I just— Sorry.”