City Dark(24)

A scrape I got once on my knee

Not kissed, for what you did to me

At night I think of your embrace

Through a flame’s light I see your face

At the river’s edge I made my case

But then you left, without a trace.

And so I go on, silently

A new life I’ve found separately

Happy for those who care for me

But still I wish . . . and I ask thee

Will you ever light the way for me?

Set out a lamp, so I can see

Chase away the night’s eternity

For once, for what you did to me?

“Joe, you wrote this when you were what—eleven?” He took the magazine from her and held it at middle-aged distance to read without glasses.

“Well . . . yeah, I did.”

“That’s impressive. I mean, really.”

“It was an assignment from a counselor,” Joe said. “Not a guidance counselor but a therapist. My uncle had connections in the mental health community on Staten Island. He got me in to see, for a time, a guy who suggested I write something. I worked on it for a while. I think I had, like, thirty stanzas at one point. I had to narrow it down. I was never happy with that ending, but . . . that was it.”

“Takes guts to put that out there when you’re that age,” she said.

“I didn’t put it out there.” There was a wistful smile on his face. “Uncle Mike did. It’s the only thing he ever did that really made me angry. He showed the final product to my teacher, the Mrs. Benedetto you see up top. She went crazy over it and wanted to put it in the yearly magazine.”

“They printed it without you knowing?”

“No. She was very nice. She gave me a choice on whether to publish it or not. My uncle and I had it out, though. I was pissed. Couldn’t believe he showed it to her.”

“So you showed it to him?”

“Yeah, I was proud of it. And it was the only thing that came close, you know, in terms of how I felt about it all. You can’t say things like that, right? I couldn’t, anyway. Not then.”

“I couldn’t now,” Zochi said, looking the poem over again. “So your uncle couldn’t help himself.”

“I guess not. It all worked out. He and Mrs. B left it up to me ultimately, which was good. Empowering, I guess. I let it go forward. I was a little worried about how the other kids would see it, but most of them knew I was living with an extended family member and not my parents. I don’t remember if they called me an orphan or not. I guess not, because no one knew where Lois was. Anyway, I got compliments on it. That was nice.”

“Lois,” Zochi said at low volume. “It must have seemed odd, referring to your mother by her first name.”

“By that time,” he said with a shrug, “Lois was all she was to me.” They were silent for a moment. Zochi continued through the box until she reached two light-blue baby rattles at the bottom. Three inches long and made of plastic, they sounded like little castanets when shaken.

“These are cute,” she said, holding one up.

“Oh, yeah, the rattles,” Joe said. “There was one for each of us, Robbie and me. I didn’t know they existed until after Uncle Mike died. I found a few things he had kept. I have a feeling he was going to . . . I don’t know . . . present all that stuff to me, when he could. After he died, I found some of this stuff laid out in his bedroom closet.”

“When you say ‘present,’ you mean . . . ?”

“Well, you had to know my uncle. He was uniformly cheerful, like everything was a breeze. And no serious talk, you know? Like everything just had to be peachy. He wasn’t unkind, not a bit. He just . . . never got real.” Zochi nodded. She could relate. “He started getting really sick around Christmas in 1984. It was AIDS, but I didn’t know that until later. Robbie was long gone—we hadn’t seen him in a year or more. So Mike ordered in Christmas dinner, just for the two of us. He was shivering a lot by then and couldn’t get out of bed much. He made a big thing about Christmas dinner, though, and bought me a bunch of presents he probably couldn’t afford. And he said we had to have this talk but that it could wait until I was eighteen.”

“Which was a few months later, right?” Zochi asked, letting her eyes find his. Joe looked wistful, almost surrendered to some lulling memory. He was opening up. The part of Zochi that couldn’t help but be a detective perked up. She listened closely.

“Yes, in April. I was on a senior trip overseas. My birthday was the eleventh. I was scheduled to get back on the seventeenth, but Mike went into a coma, and the tour company sent me back early. I got to the hospital in time to see him before he died, but he was out of it. We never spoke. I watched him die and then packed up what I could. Like I said, it seemed like he had laid some stuff out that he wanted me to have, I guess. I think he wanted to explain it, but . . . that didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“I am too,” he said, with feeling. “He was getting sicker, that whole winter. I shouldn’t have gone, but he wanted me to go. You know how when you’re a kid you don’t think bad things will really happen? Or if they do, somehow they’ll be on your timeline?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that was me.”