Nothing to Lose

  I tightened my grip. He wasn’t fighting back. Why hadn’t I seen it before? He was old. He was old, and I was strong. There was nothing he could do to me. I was in charge.

  I looked into his eyes, at the crow’s feet around them. I loosened my grip just a little.

  He said, “Why don’t you do it now?”

  “What?”

  “You want to beat the hell out of me? Do it. I won’t even put up a fight.”

  I stared at him. I realized then that I was only holding him because he was letting me.

  “Really,” he said. “It’s the quickest way I can think of to get rid of you. Building security will call the cops. They’ll stick you in juvenile with a bunch of guys just waiting for a piece of your pretty, white ass.”

  He slipped out of my grip and stood straight.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I’d tell them. I’d tell them what you do. Everyone would know.”

  “Think they’d believe you? You think anyone would believe you over me? I’m a respected attorney. You—you’re a punk.”

  I stared.

  “You still going to hit me?” He smiled. “Don’t let me stop you, tough guy.”

  When I didn’t move, he said, “Didn’t think so.”

  His fist was like a blade to my stomach. I fell into black redness. Then he was gone.

  The next day I took Mom’s beeper with a sort of awful relief. Relief because I knew nothing would happen. Walker’s hang time always extended at least twenty-four hours. He’d hit something in the past day, so she was safe. But awful because it was a lie. She wouldn’t beep me if something happened. I couldn’t do anything anyway. I was weak. I hated being weak almost as much as I hated Walker.

  I brought Karpe with me to the fair that night. “Do you mind?” I asked Kirstie.

  “Nah—he’s a sweet guy.”

  I shrugged. It was a weird thing to say.

  “I’ll get him a date,” Kirstie said. “It’ll be fun.”

  The date turned out to be Ni-Jin, the contortionist. We sat at tables by the food tent, except Ni-Jin (whose real name, it turned out, was Tiffany), who sat on the ground in the lotus position, smoking a cigarette, while Karpe, obviously starstruck, quizzed her about her career.

  “Did you always want to be in show biz?” he asked. “How long have you done this? Is it hard? What’s your favorite position? I mean … you know what I mean.”

  And Ni-Jin explained that her family were circus performers for generations. She’d hoped for Ringling Brothers, “but those assholes don’t know a great act when they see one.”

  “Maybe Cirque du Soleil,” Karpe suggested.

  The girl brightened. “I was thinking about that, too. Hey, I’ll show you something cool.”

  “What?”

  “Get me another cigarette first.”

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” Karpe said. “My dad’s an oncologist, a cancer doctor. If you saw the photos I’ve seen of people’s lungs after they’ve smoked for years, you’d never do it.”

  I nudged him. “Yeah, Karpe, that’s a turn-on. Talk about diseased lungs on a date.”

  “’S okay.” Tiffany crushed out her cigarette, then lifted first one leg, then the other over her head. While Karpe’s eyes popped, she said, “My dad says that too. He worries about me, says it’ll stunt my growth.”

  She was maybe four foot nine. She crossed her legs behind her neck. Gross. I looked away.

  “How about you?” I asked Kirstie a second later. “Anyone worrying about you?”

  She shook her head. “No one but me cares whether I live or die.”

  “I care.” I leaned to kiss her.

  “Ouch!”

  We looked over. Tiffany had Karpe on the floor now. She held his leg, trying to bring it over his head.

  “Looks like they’re having fun,” Kirstie said. “What if we went someplace else?”

  I nodded. “I know the perfect place.”

  THIS YEAR

  “Are you okay?” Angela asks in the parking lot of the Miami-Dade Detention Center.

  “Fine.” I try not to look at the barbed wire. I’m thinking, instead, that in a few minutes maybe I’ll have my answer. Maybe my mother will tell me what to do.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Angela says, minutes later. We’ve gone through the metal detector and a guard is frisking me, even under my clothes.

  “Hey, watch it, buddy!”

  The guard doesn’t stop. “You at the jail now.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I tell Angela. Though I don’t know exactly what I’m saying I’m sure about. I think about leaving. All I have to do is turn around. No one made me come here, and no one will ever make me come back.

  But I know I can’t go on like this anymore, with this falling feeling, like I stepped off a moving skyride and there’s nowhere to go but down or darkness.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I tell Angela.

  “You’re done.” The guard brings us to the door, unlocks it, then opens it. The door leads to a hallway with another locked door at the end.

  “I can’t believe she’s here,” I tell Angela. “I mean, it smells.” It smells like nothing I’ve ever smelled before, sweet sourness, like years of sweat.

  The first door clangs shut. The sound is hard and permanent. The guard unlocks first one lock, then the other, on the second door. He brings us into another room, which is full of people, mostly women, but there are even little kids and a baby being carried by an old lady. So many people it’s almost hard to breathe. They’re all on phones, talking to people on the other side of a piece of thick, dirt plastic. Angela grabs my wrist, and we take an empty chair in front of the window. She keeps touching my hand after we sit.

  I nod toward the wall phone. “God, there are really phones,” I say. “Like on TV. I thought maybe I could just … talk to her.”

  The words are still in the stinking air when Mom walks in.

  She has on a blue jumpsuit and stares straight ahead. She’s lost weight, even though she was always thin. Now she looks barely real. Her hair is shoulder length and brownish. The guard turns her toward us, directing her to a chair. That’s when her eyes meet mine.

  Her eyes are the same, but she doesn’t blink. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t recognize. I feel myself reach for her, but I know it’s dumb, so I sit on my hand.

  “Can she see us?” I ask Angela. I’m thinking maybe it’s a two-way mirror or something because she doesn’t look at me. But on the other side of the glass, a woman prisoner reaches out to the baby, so I know they can see.

  Angela wipes the wall phone on her skirt, then hands it to me. The guard pushes my mother into her chair, not roughly, but like a parent with a little kid. He hands my mother the phone.

  She is so thin. When she starts to speak, I can’t hear. Everyone’s shouting around me. I yell, “I can’t hear you!”

  “Please go,” her whispery voice says in my ear. “Please, Michael. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “I can’t leave,” I shout. But part of me is thinking, Why not?

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t do this anymore. It’s not fair. I can’t stand—”

  “Go! Don’t you see? This…” She gestures around her. “This is what I want, what I deserve. I was a bad mother. I failed you. This is the only way I can make it up to you … please, Michael. I don’t want this. I don’t want them even to know you were there when it happened. I don’t want…”

  Beside me, the baby is screaming. I look around, trying to see if anyone else heard my mother’s words. I don’t want them to know you were there when it happened. No one did, and I don’t know whether I’ve dodged a bullet. Part of me wants to repeat the words loud and long so Angela and everyone can hear. To tell the truth: I was there when Walker died.

  “I want to tell them,” I say into the phone. “This was a bad idea. I can’t pretend anymore.”

  “Please go,” she says again. “Please let me do this for you
.”

  “But—”

  She hangs up the phone. I see her speak to the guard, then rise. She walks ahead of him to the door. He unlocks it. Then she’s gone.

  Angela stares at me, and I want to tell her, but I still can’t form the words.

  “She told me to leave,” I say.

  “And will you?”

  “No.”

  LAST YEAR

  “That’s where I threw my first touchdown pass,” I told Kirstie later that night. “First time I played quarterback.”

  I pointed. We were at the football field at the park near the fairgrounds. It was empty except for Kirstie and me. Football season was long over. It was three A.M., and Kirstie lay in my arms in the cool grass. I’d decided this was going to be our night, the night I made my move with her. It had been a week since I met her, but I felt like I’d known her a hundred years. In some ways, maybe I had. So sleeping with her seemed inevitable. I wanted sleeping with her to be enough.

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Twelve. I begged my mom to let me play—my friend Tristan already did. But she was afraid I’d get hurt. She always protected me. Even when she finally gave in, I think she told Coach Fernandez not to play me, because he didn’t put me in until there were about thirty seconds left.”

  “Lots of pressure for a kid.”

  “The score was 3-10, them, and the other side had possession, so our defense was in. Then they fumbled. I was already taking off my pads, and Coach put me in. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Just telling Kirstie about it, I could feel the roughness of the ball against my hands. The grass and dirt beneath me smelled the same as that day, and the scent brought memories like some smells do.

  I sat up, pointing. “We’re lined up on the twenty. There’s time for two plays, no more. The first, running, we gain maybe two yards. With nine seconds left, I knew I’d have to pass.

  “But when we start again, I freeze. I’d thrown, like, a million passes in my head, memorized the passing tree like it was the multiplication table. But now this big kid’s bearing down on me, and I can’t move, can’t throw. I’m thinking about going home and having my mom make me a bowl of chicken-and-stars soup and telling her she was right.

  “Then, the ball’s flying away over everyone’s head. I still don’t remember throwing it, but then everyone’s screaming, crushing into me.” I looked at Kirstie. “It was like nothing bad ever happened, and I knew the only thing I wanted to do—ever—was play ball.”

  I was grinning. I still heard the cheers.

  “Do you still play?” she asked.

  “N-no… I…”

  “Quit?”

  I nodded, though she couldn’t see me in the dark.

  Still, she said, “Stupid.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. My mother—”

  “You always have a choice.”

  “Look, can we just…?” Can we just make out? Can we just not talk about this? I wanted to say. But I couldn’t, so I changed the subject. “You never told me about your family. I don’t know anything about you before here.”

  “Maybe there isn’t anything before here.” She tilted her head back, looking at the sky. “Maybe I was born here. Sometimes I feel like I was.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “No. No, I wasn’t.”

  I sensed she was going to say more, so I waited.

  We sat there until I thought maybe I was wrong. I started thinking maybe I should go home. I was okay as long as it was noisy with the lights and music and people. But when it got quiet, I’d start thinking about home.

  Finally, I began to stand, but she reached out, tugged on my arm. When I looked at her, she said, “You want to know about me?”

  “You don’t have to,” I said, backing off.

  “You want to know?”

  I nodded and sat back down. The ground was cold and a little wet. I started to pull her closer again, but she was busy, fumbling with the leather bracelets she wore. She unsnapped one, then held up her arm, turning it over so I could see it in the moonlight.

  “That’s me,” she said.

  I didn’t see what she meant at first. Then I saw the mottled skin and faded reddish scars on her wrist. She undid the second bracelet so I could see that it matched.

  “Who did it to you?” I said, though I knew.

  “I did. I did it the year my mother died.”

  “Did it hurt?” I reached to take her arm. She pulled away at first, then she let me grasp and hold it. I felt the little ridges where the scars were, criss-crossing with the blue hills of her veins. “I mean … when you did it?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about whether it hurt at the time. But later—after they found me—later it hurt.”

  “Does it still?”

  “No. Scars don’t hurt. They’re just … there.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

  “But, I mean—”

  “Because I’d failed. I wasn’t supposed to fail. It’s not how I was raised.”

  I looked closer at her arm. “What’d you fail at, Kirstie?”

  She pulled her arm away and stood, walked closer to the goalpost.

  “When I was six, my father was vice president of the bank in town. He went to New York for a business trip and brought me back this parasol from Chinatown—a paper one, like they put in a drink, only life-size. I loved it. I carried it so much, the kids in the neighborhood used to make fun of me. But I was so proud, I didn’t care. My dad had bought it.

  “Then, a month later, this man came over to visit—the president of the bank, I guess. He had a little girl, and I was supposed to play with her. But she scared my cat and broke my dolls, and when they were on the way out, she saw my parasol and said, ‘Daddy, I want it.’

  “My father said, ‘I’m sure Kirsten would be happy to let you have it,’ all the time giving me a look that wouldn’t let me refuse. And, next thing I knew, that mean little girl was leaving with my Chinese parasol.

  “I started to cry, watching them go. And my father slapped me and said, ‘Think of someone else for a change.’ He didn’t offer to buy me a new parasol next time he went. I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway, because it wouldn’t have been mine. Not really.”

  “What an asshole,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he was my father. He said I needed to think of others more, and I bought it.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “How long was that touchdown pass anyway?”

  “Eleven yards,” I said.

  “That’s really good for a little kid.”

  I nodded. If I concentrated, I could still see the ball, spiraling over and over, like a nautilus shell.

  “Really, really good.”

  I said, “The thing with the parasol—where was your mother when it happened?”

  Kirstie shrugged. “Could have been in the kitchen, hand-washing the dishes. Could have been out back, composting the strawberries to feed the roses. Or she could have been in bed, crying.”

  “Crying?”

  “My mother had … mood swings. One day she’d be great—baking five hundred sugar cookies for kids to decorate at the Police Benevolent Association Christmas party. The next day she’d be on the kitchen floor, crying, because the meat loaf didn’t turn out right. Or she’d go weeks without brushing her hair.”

  “Did someone take care of her?” I asked.

  “I took care of her. My father said we couldn’t tell anyone. They’d use it to hurt us, use it to hurt him. My sister and I, we were already hurting. So he took her to this doctor out of town.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “But the doctor couldn’t get her medication right. It’s like when you’re trying to tune an old radio. You go one way and get country-western, the other way and get shock talk—when really, you’re trying to land on the Top 40 station. That’s how it was, first one extreme, then the other, and I had to stand over he
r to make sure she took her meds—then watch them not work. By the time I was eight, I was doing all the cooking, most of the cleaning, helping my little sister, Erica, with her homework, you name it. I had no friends, my grades were for shit, and every once in a while my mother had an episode when she’d think the house was on fire and run outside into the night. Or once, she got in the car and drove downtown, then sat perfectly still at a stop sign until the police called Daddy to take her home.”

  “That must have been tough.”

  She shrugged. “I always got in trouble when that happened. ‘Just don’t let anything upset her,’ my father said, like that was possible. So I was really careful what I said. I didn’t tell her if anyone was sick, stuff like that, even bad stuff on the news. ‘You’re in control,’ he told me.”

  “Talk about pressure.”

  “Yeah. Well, when I was fifteen, I gave in to pressure. I met this guy, Clay. He paid attention to me, and he told me I didn’t need to sit home with Mom all the time. And I believed him. I fell in love. We started partying together—smoking, having sex. It was amazing how after I took the pills he gave me I could just forget about home. We were together all the time, and for the first time I was thinking about myself. I told myself Erica should handle Mom for a change, but Erica was only eleven. She didn’t know all the things I knew. She wasn’t me.”

  Kirstie leaned against the goalpost, burying her head in one hand. In the distance I could hear the swoosh-swoosh of traffic on Eighth Street, but I was listening for Kirstie’s voice.

  When she didn’t speak, I walked toward her.

  “You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want,” I said. But I wanted her to.

  She raised her head. “We don’t talk about our pasts here. Everyone has one, and they’re all more or less horrible. But I want to tell you, Michael. You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to tell.”

  I touched her elbow, then thought better of it and drew away. She continued.

  “The day before my sixteenth birthday. I had a fight with Mom. I’d been pretty good that day. At least, I’d done a load of laundry and cleaned up the kitchen a little bit. But later, I was on my way out, and Mom didn’t want me to go.