What a woman would do for a man like Anis, Ednetta would do, and had done. And would keep doing, as long as she could.
What the first wife Tana might’ve done was betray. In no way did you betray Anis Schutt and not be hurt bad for doing it.
Ednetta wasn’t always sure she loved the girl. So much of herself she saw in Sybilla, the almond-shaped eyes, the gat-toothed smile—it was like herself and how could you “love” yourself?
My baby, she myself. Why I feel so bad for her, and blame her.
Soon the sons-of-bitches intruding upon Ednetta’s life returned to the brownstone at 939 Third. Ednetta saw the God-damn vehicles pulling up to the curb like her place was some kind of drive-in bank teller or fast-food restaurant. Now these were senior staff workers from Juvenile Aid, Child Protective Services, Pascayne County Family Services, and Save-Our-Children which was a white-folks’ church volunteer organization with a storefront office in Red Rock. And Sergeant Iglesias. All looking for your daughter Sybilla Frye, and with warrants. And Ednetta said, pressing the heel of her hand against her bosom, eyes brimming with hurt and indignation Ain’t I told you! My baby s’quest’d where you can’t find her.
Because they had warrants, Ednetta couldn’t keep them out. Let the sons-of-bitches search the house upstairs and down, the kids’ bedroom, her and Anis’s bedroom, Sybilla’s closet-sized bedroom with picture-posters on the wall—Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Prince, LL Cool J, Public Enemy. The fact was, Sybilla wasn’t there.
Girl-Cousins
Where’s S’b’lla?”
“They sayin S’b’lla in some hospital.”
“They sayin S’b’lla in ‘custody.’”
“S’b’lla in Juvie.”
“Nah S’b’lla ain’t in Juvie—she the one got hurt.”
Sybilla’s girl-cousin Martine and several of her friends from the neighborhood went to her house looking for her and each time Mrs. Frye sent them away—S’b’lla ain’t here. Y’all get on home.
Martine was Sybilla’s age and in Sybilla’s class at Pascayne South. Some of the rumors she’d been hearing about her cousin were so nasty, she’d had to press the palms of her hands over her ears and run away.
Through back-alleys she came to the rear of the brownstone row house in which her aunt Ednetta Frye lived with that man Anis Schutt. Thinking she would peek in the windows and see if she could see Sybilla inside, but Ednetta had drawn all the blinds down to the sills.
Martine thought, if her cousin Sybilla was dead, she would know it. That shuddery sensation like when someone walks over your grave-to-be.
All of Sybilla’s girlfriends were talking about her, wondering where she was. Sybilla was starting to hang out with older guys but it had to be in secret—Ednetta couldn’t know. (For sure, the stepfather Anis couldn’t know. That man would whip her hard with his belt and give Ednetta a few swipes, too.) Her friends wondered if this disappearance, all these rumors, had to do with that.
Or maybe there was no connection. Sybilla was just grabbed in some alley, dragged into a car or a van and driven away, kept for three days and three nights and God knows what done to her.
“They sayin she in the hospital now, in some ‘special care’ ward. She on ‘life support.’”
“Nah. They sayin she run away with that Jaycee.”
It wasn’t uncommon for a girl like Sybilla who didn’t get along well with her mother to be sent away—somewhere. Martine wondered if this was the explanation.
Where’s S’b’lla?—Martine nagged her mother who’d told her a dozen times she didn’t know. There was something evasive in her mother’s voice that suggested to Martine that she did know. (Martine’s mother Cheryl was Ednetta’s younger sister. Bullshit Ednetta hadn’t confided in her.)
The last time Martine went to Third Street to knock on her aunt’s door Ednetta cursed her with a choking sob God damn girl ain’t I told you! S’b’lla not here! Just go.
For sure something had happened to Sybilla, you could tell by Ednetta’s behavior. That guilty-ravaged look in Ednetta’s face. How quick Ednetta flared up in a nasty temper.
Whatever it was, Ednetta knew. She just wasn’t telling.
Martine hated it when people’s mothers changed from who they were to somebody else, the look in their faces and in their eyes like they were strangers and didn’t care for you like they’d always done. A man was different, it was never surprising a man might change, and a man might change back to who he’d been, or a man might just depart and you’d never see him again. But a woman like Ednetta who was Martine’s aunt, her mother’s older sister, who’d taken care of Martine a thousand times, and had always babied and kissed her like Martine was her own daughter, and (maybe) nicer than Sybilla in fact—if a mother like Ednetta could change, that made Martine want to cry.
“S’B’LLA?”—SOFTLY MARTINE CALLED CUPPING HER HANDS TO her mouth.
Standing on tiptoe in the alley outside her great-grandmother’s ground-floor apartment on Eleventh Street. It was a wild chance Martine was taking but you had to figure if Sybilla had been sent away, likely it was here. Martine had been sent away to Grandma Tice’s place herself more than once, when her mother didn’t have time for her or was in the women’s shelter and Martine didn’t want to live there with her and the other pitiful beat-up women and kids.
“S’b’lla? Hey? It’s me.”
From where she stood in the alley, she couldn’t see into the room behind the window. But this would be Sybilla’s window if Sybilla was staying here.
Somewhere close by a dog was barking furiously, God damn thing she’d have liked to murder. If Grandma Tice came to the window instead of Sybilla and saw her, she’d send Martine away with a scolding.
Like a cooing pigeon Martine called gently, stubbornly—“S’b’lla! It’s Martine.”
Suddenly the window was tugged up. And there was Sybilla leaning out to Martine looking surprised and happy—like a little girl surprised and happy.
“M’tine! Jesus! Hi.”
“S’b’lla! Jesus.”
This was a shock: her girl-cousin beat-up.
Almost, Martine might not have recognized Sybilla.
Both Sybilla’s eyes were puffy and discolored, her upper lip was puffy and scabby, one of her eyebrows was shaved and stitched like a weird horror doll, and her hair was cut jagged like a weird horror wig. It was like Sybilla had been dragged from the rear of a vehicle like they told of black people being dragged in the terrible old days in the South or some nasty place like Texas.
Sybilla tugged the window a few inches higher so that she could lean out, to pull Martine up and inside. Gave a little gasp of pain, blood rushing into her face must’ve been hot and heavy, and just leaning down the way she was seemed to be hurting her back. Martine grabbed hold of the window ledge and swung her legs up like a monkey, crawled through the window and fell into the room giggling into Sybilla’s arms.
“Oh M’tine! It’s you.”
“Yah I been missin you, S’b’lla. Why’re you here?”
“Mama made me come here.”
The girl-cousins were the same age. Same height and same size except Martine registered shock, hugging Sybilla tight and feeling that Sybilla was skinny.
“Fuck baby, who hurt you so bad?”
“Jesus, M’tine! Shh.”
Sybilla wriggled out of Martine’s arms. Had to pull down the damn window quietly so Grandma wouldn’t hear and bust in on them.
Pearline Tice was some ancient age but sharp-eared and sharp-eyed. People said admiringly of Pearline you can’t put anything over on that lady. She’d had seven children, twenty-one grandchildren, more great-grandchildren than anyone could count scattered through the State of New Jersey and beyond.
“You OK, S’b’lla?”
“Yah. Aint gonna die, I guess.”
Sybilla climbed up onto the big bed which took up most of the room. Only a few inches so the door could be opened, and a few feet for a batter
ed old chest of drawers and an ugly old radiator. Martine climbed up beside her breathless and dazed.
“Worst thing is, I been lonely.”
Sybilla wiped at her eyes. It looked as if she’d been in the swayback bed sleeping or trying to sleep: she was wearing a flannel nightgown faded with many washings and over this a coarse-knit sweater of Ednetta’s, and on her feet woolen socks. Hadn’t gotten dressed for days she told Martine. (Smelling of her underarms without knowing it, Martine thought.) Taking “painkiller pills” her Mama had left with her grandmother to give to her, no more than three a day.
It made Martine feel sad, to think of her girl-cousin in pain.
Martine winced seeing the swollen bruised eyes, bruised cheeks and disfigured-looking mouth close up. Her cousin’s familiar face made unfamiliar like her own face in a mirror, she couldn’t recognize.
“Who hurt you, S’b’lla?”
“Ednetta said, I aint supposed to say.”
“Why not?”
“They say they gon murder us all, that’s why.”
“S’b’lla you can tell me.”
“Then they gon murder you, M’tine.”
The girls shuddered together. Martine drew a forefinger gently over Sybilla’s bruised face. She touched the swollen lip that felt burning-hot.
“There’s stitchin in my lip, and my eyebrow, that comes out by itself the doctor said. You don’t have to go back to the damn hospital.” Sybilla spoke with a faint surge of pride.
“Jesus, S’b’lla! Why’d anybody hurt you so bad?”
Sybilla shuddered again, and laughed.
“Why’d anybody hurt anybody? Ask ’em.”
“Some people sayin you’re in the hospital, or worse. Sayin all kinds of things.”
“Yah? What they sayin?”
So many terrible things Martine had heard, maybe she shouldn’t tell Sybilla. It was the worst part of something happening to you, that everybody knew about it. And if it hadn’t happened to you, or not in exactly that way, and people were saying it had, that was worse. You would just want to die if—certain things were said for instance at school.
Any kind of sex-thing. Sex-hurt, humiliation.
Girls felt pity for you but something else—a feeling you deserved whatever it was.
Guys would not want to touch you. Or, they’d want to touch you real bad.
“M’tine? What the fuck they sayin?”
Martine noticed that her cousin’s breathing was thick and audible as if her head was stuffed with mucus. Her skin was fever-hot and she seemed short of breath as if she’d been running and not lying sprawled on this bed cooped up in an airless box of a room.
“Well—an ambulance took you to St. Anne’s. Somebody found you on Sunday morning where you were ‘bleedin to death’—you been stabbed and left to die in the fish-food factory in the cellar. But I guess that didn’t happen?”
“Nah I aint been stabbed. At least not that.”
Sybilla laughed, and winced. Her fingers sprang to her jaw, that seemed to hurt her when she laughed. Martine wondered if Sybilla’s jaw was dislocated, her face was so swollen. Martine’s jaw had been dislocated when she’d been a little girl, in some shoving accident on the stairs where they’d lived at the time.
“People sayin you were in the ER at St. Anne’s.”
Sybilla shrugged yes, she guessed that was so.
“They brought you there in one of them ambulances with a siren?”
Sybilla shrugged yes. Guess so.
“That must’ve been scary.”
Sybilla giggled. Nah! It wasn’t.
“Wasn’t?”
Sybilla shrugged like she wasn’t remembering too clearly. Like whatever it was had happened in a kind of cloud, a haze-cloud that made you cough and choke at the time but then just drifted away and you forgot about it.
“See, you tryin to stay alive, like. When you hurt bad you concentratin on getting the breath in, an the breath out, an back in again—just that, an that’s enough. You thinkin Jesus get me through this! No time for ‘scary’ or shit like that.”
Sybilla snuggled close to Martine, and Martine hugged her like a little baby might be hugged. Sybilla wasn’t smelling too fresh—not just underarms but (maybe) stale-dried blood as well. Probably Martine wasn’t smelling too fresh either.
Sybilla asked what people were saying about her at school and Martine hesitated before saying just that people were wondering where she was, and feeling bad for her.
“What the teachers sayin?”
“They askin us. We just sayin we ain’t seen you and don’t know nothing.”
“Any cops come around?”
Martine thought so, yes. But Martine didn’t want to tell Sybilla, for fear of worrying her worse.
“There’s people over at your house, knocking on the door. Ednetta don’t let them in.”
“What kind of people?”
“I don’t know. White people . . . Not all white people but like that, like from the county or the city, ‘family services’ shit. You know.”
“‘Social worker’ shit?”
“Yah like that.”
“Some female cop, ‘detective’—she been there?”
Martine didn’t know. She hadn’t seen any uniform-cops at the house but then, she hadn’t been at Sybilla’s house every minute.
Sybilla was breathing in that harsh labored way. Every so often she made a snuffling-choking noise like trying to clear her sinuses.
“Jesus! Your nose ain’t broke, S’b’lla, is it?”
“Nah. My nose OK.”
“You sure?”
“Ain’t fuckin sure of anything.” Sybilla laughed, and winced. “Guess whose ol’ nightie this is!”
“Grandma’s.”
“Yah! Her socks, too.”
“Why’d Ednetta bring you here?”
“Ask her.”
“Can’t ask Ednetta anything, she in a rotten mood. Like she fuckin scared of somethin.”
“Yah my mama scared. She got reason for it.”
Abruptly Sybilla sat up, opened her sweater, tugged the nightgown off her shoulder to show her cousin the bruises and welts on her chest. It was a shock for Martine to see Sybilla part-naked like this—and to see how bruised and battered she was. Her small soft breasts looked like they would register hurt if you touched them.
“Ohh S’b’lla! What the hell . . .”
Sybilla squirmed to lift the nightgown, pulling it up over her hips. The way she was lying, her little taffy-brown belly button was so pinched it was nearly invisible. She was wearing white cotton panties she pried down with awkward fingers to show Martine more bruises and welts on her belly, abdomen, the soft flesh of her inner thighs.
“Oh hon. He hurt you—there?”
“Yah pretty bad. Not his nasty old thing, he didn’t stick that in, but something else, like his fingers I guess—like grabbin up inside me, and his damn fingernails was sharp, I just screamed and screamed so loud, he punched me on the jaw and knocked me out. I guess.”
“Who?”
A sullen pouty look came into Sybilla’s battered face.
“Told you, M’tine—I can’t tell.”
“You can tell me.”
“Nah that’s stupid. I aint gon ’danger you. Anyway there was more’n one of them—there was five of them.”
“Five!”
“Five I counted but maybe more. Comin and goin, there was three days an three nights they had me in the van. Fuck anybody could keep track how many fuckers there were.”
Sybilla spoke in a strange mocking voice. Martine could not recognize that voice.
“Some guys in the neighborhood? Some gang?”
“Nah! Nobody in the neighborhood.”
“Herc’les an them?”
(Hercules Johnston was a boy with whom they’d gone to school who was several years older than the girl-cousins but kept back often so he’d spent most of his time in the class just ahead of theirs. Hercules had dropped out of sch
ool at sixteen and now he and his friends were errand-boys for the drug-dealer bosses in Red Rock.)
“I said no. Not Herc’les or anybody you know.”
“Who, then?”
“I told you, M’tine—I can’t tell you. They threatened me they would murder me if I did. And my mother, and anybody in my house or my family and that includes you.” Sybilla spoke with a kind of exasperation, as if there was something here, plain-faced and obvious, that Martine wasn’t getting.
Martine tried to think. What Sybilla was saying wasn’t irrational but made total sense to her. You did not tell—if telling meant naming an individual or individuals who could punish you worse than you’d been punished. Even if it was an open secret who’d done what to who—which usually in Red Rock it was—you did not tell.
“’Nother thing they sayin, there was ‘writin’ on you. Like ‘nigger’—‘slut’—‘Ku Kux Klann.’ Like, in dog shit.”
Martine giggled, this was so weird and so awful! But Sybilla only just made the snuffling-snorting sound like this was some old boring news.
“They sayin you talked to cops. You told cops—somethin.”
“I did not talk to fuckin cops. There was that female ‘detective’—I told you—Puerto Rican tryin to jive my mama an me, she was a ‘sister’—fuckin bullshit!—came to see me in the ER when I wasn’t halfway conscious, an Mama was there, an she got me to say some things. Mama said we had to do that—but no more than that. Nobody ‘filed charges’—that’s what they want me to do, Mama says. You have to go to the police station and report that a crime was perp’trated on you and make that charge. And they write it down, and you can’t erase it. They ask you a thousand stupid questions and take ‘evidence’ like from the hospital—take pictures of you and you look at pictures in the police station—they never let up, once it starts. So they aint gonna get me. And I aint goin back to any white doctor, either. They could give me some kind of ‘truth serum’ without Mama or me knowing, Mama says.” Sybilla spoke hotly, squirming in distress.
Ednetta had taken her to a doctor on Trenton Avenue before bringing her to Eleventh Street, Sybilla said. Ednetta didn’t trust “white” doctors. (To Ednetta, any Asian-looking professional person was “white”—or worse than “white.” Looking at you with that pissy-polite face so you know they’re thinking how pitiful you are.) This “Dr. Cleveland” had a diploma on the wall certifying him as a chiropractor but he had painkiller pills he could dispense in his office, chalky-white pills so large you had to cut them in two with a knife-edge.