The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (12 page)

I
HAVE NEVER
told anyone and maybe I should have. That day there was a man. And if only I had told, then Mor wouldn’t be all to blame.

Nella

Day 751. I am stupid. He was drinking with his friend when he knows alcohol is not allowed in the house. Like Roger he wants to be fun. Having fun all the time. He says this isn’t fun. It is not fun. Waking up in the middle of the night to the baby. Three hours sleeping. Going to work. Seeing Rachel and Robbie sad. Children should play outside in the summer but here is not safe. They do not know the place. They say they are bored. I take them to the park Saturday and Sunday. I have taken home from the library books for the kids to read. Doug says he will not be in the house drinking again. He says he will stop. Was it a mistake coming here? There was no where else to go. I couldn’t go home. Doug said he would help. Now he goes out all night sometimes. Not coming home. Oh, no, the babys crying.

Brick

Brick was transfixed by the scar above Laronne’s son’s left eye. Maybe he was cut by pirates, but then he was saved. Maybe he fought some scary monster who scraped him with a giant claw. He knew the scar was the result of neither of these things or anything like it—but to have a scar so big and survive seemed incredible to Brick. Laronne’s son, Greg, must have done something heroic, he thought. Even if it was just not being too scared.

Brick was no hero. He was too scared to go back to the hospital; too scared to play outside if the pigeon man found him; too scared even to go back home since the night the policemen came by.

He hid beneath his bed when he realized they had come for him and not for one of his mother’s new friends.
What
did he know about the accident,
they asked. His mother was in a deep haze when she opened the door. When she said her boy wasn’t home—even though it was dark and after nine p.m.—she really thought he wasn’t.

Brick had spent every night since then at Laronne’s. His mom didn’t seem to mind. Laronne sent him to school with a lunch packed the same as her boy’s. And they walked to the city bus together every day.

Greg was good at playing big brother. He was, one, bigger than Brick. Two, he had lots of jokes, knock-knocks and booger jokes that he liked to share with Brick. Three, he was quick with his hands, so quick with the tap-on-the-shoulder trick he’d get Brick every time. And four, he knew dozens of ghost stories and monster stories that he told Brick each night in a whisper in the dark of the room that they shared.

Brick took Greg’s ribbing in stride. In fact, he liked it. Not the monster stories so much, but he had scarier things in his dreams already.

“That guy in Atlanta snatched up another kid yesterday,” Greg said.

“Enough of that talk at the dinner table,” Laronne’s husband, David, said.

Brick made a note to himself: Be careful of the pigeon man and of the child snatcher.

Laronne’s son snatched at Brick with a monster sound. “Arrghhhh.”

Brick jumped and coughed as milk caught in his throat.

“I said that’s enough,” David yelled. “You’re not gonna stop until your roughhousing chokes the boy to death. And no
more talk of that evilness. He’s not just a child snatcher. He’s a child killer.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dinner continued in silence until there was a knock at the door.

Laronne went to answer it. When Brick heard Laronne call the visitor “sir” and then “officer,” he fled the table.

“My stomach hurts,” he said and ran to the bathroom. He could hear the police officer introduce himself. “We understood you might be able to help with the investigation of Nella Fløe and her children. I want to go over some information with you.”

“Have you found the boyfriend yet? He’s been missing since it happened.”

“We’re checking into it. We haven’t found him.”

“You know,” Laronne said. “Brick is the one you should be talking to. He lives a couple of floors below Nella and the kids. He said he saw a man up there that day. Brick?” Laronne shouted. “Brick?” she called again. “He’s here—he’s visiting.”

“That the boy said something in the newspaper?”

“That’s him,” she said. “Sweet boy.”

“Can’t imagine what it’s doing to him to have seen that,” the officer said. “It took a bit to find him cause of the different name. We went to talk to him a few days ago. His mama said he wasn’t home, but sure didn’t seem like she could figure out what was up or down the way she looked.”

Laronne knocked on the bathroom door. “Brick, you okay?”

Brick opened the door slowly. “Yes?”

“Baby can you come tell the police officer what you saw?”

Laronne had not asked him about the accident since the day in the stairwell. He considered it their secret, a special bond—what he knew, what he didn’t tell.

“You can tell him,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid of that man.” Brick was thinking of the pigeon man and how easy it would be for the pigeon man to find him. He was thinking of what the pigeon man told him to say. He was thinking of Roger’s confession: But he couldn’t imagine Roger’s hands like that—pushing a boy, a woman, or a girl—just to see how they’d fly. But he had said: “
Maybe I did it.
” Thinking of all these things, he wasn’t sure who to blame.

“You saw a man on the roof? How tall was he, son? Was he black? White? What?” the policeman asked.

Brick shrugged.

“Well, how is he going to know that—when the man wasn’t but a speck standing so high up?” David said watching Brick.

“Sir, these are standard questions. We’re trying to get an idea of who we’re looking for. Son, do you know?”

“Yes,” Brick said and then tried to describe a man he’d never seen. “About six feet tall . . . orange hair.” He stopped. But that was someone he did see, he thought. That was the man at the bottom of the stairs the day after the accident. It was funny how imagination worked. He could make up the description of a man only by thinking of men he’d seen. “I mean maybe it was an orange hat. A ski cap. And a blue shirt. He looked like maybe he was mean,” Brick said. The officer wrote down every word he said. It was easy this imagining thing.

“What else can you remember? Any other details?”

Brick thought of what else he could say. “Big ring on his finger. Tall. White?”

“Sounds like a punk we talked to last week,” the officer said.

“The pigeon man?” Brick asked.

“He the guy you saw?”

“Doug,” Laronne interrupted. “He must mean the boyfriend. He had red hair,” Laronne says.

“Anything else son?”

“No sir.”

“Is that all? Can you tell us what happens next?” Laronne asked as the officer put his notebook away.

“Look, ma’am,” he said, “We don’t have much to go on here. And nobody wants to be right about this any way you cut it.”

“But we have to still try to find out,” Laronne said. “Don’t we have to find out why?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
when Brick saw the school bus coming, he said to Laronne’s boy, “I forgot my homework. I gotta go back.”

As the bus sped away, Brick ran. He ran the ten blocks to his building’s courtyard and looked up toward the window that was his own.

He was certain he saw his mother’s hand drag the curtain closed. He kept looking up at that closed window until he heard the voices of boys behind him, running to catch the bus like he should have been. He had been looking up all this time. Nothing fell from this sky.

Laronne

When Laronne went to the hospital again, she saw a heavyset black woman rocking in the chair next to the girl’s bed.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Laronne said touching the woman’s shoulder.

The woman looked up at her blankly.

“I packed up the apartment,” Laronne said. “I’d be happy to send the boxes to you if you want.”

The woman stared at her.

“Those boxes have Rachel’s things,” Laronne said, pointing at the two boxes she had brought a few days earlier. “I thought she might . . . well.” Laronne paused. “The rest of the things—they’re boxed up and ready to go. I hope that’s okay. I wanted to help. I was her mother’s boss.”

“Her mother . . . That don’t describe what that woman was. Nothing describes her. I don’t want nothing of that woman’s. You keep it. You can throw it out.”

The woman went back to rocking and stroked the girl’s hair. “You gonna be alright. Doris is gonna make it all right now.”

Brick

At the bus station two nights later, with the money he found and the money he stole from his mother’s coat, purse, and coin jar, Brick had enough to buy his ticket out of town.

“Kansas City, huh?” said the bus driver as he took his ticket.

“Yes, sir.” It was as far as his money could get him.

He had looked at the map in the school library like Roger would, seeing targets and enemy territory. At first he’d picked the largest dot on the map that he could find farthest away from Chicago—Los Angeles.

But then Laronne told him that the fuzzy-haired girl with the blue blue eyes was going to a hospital in Portland, Oregon, soon. Did he know where that was?

Brick sat in a seat close to the front. He had packed a toothbrush, a T-shirt, and Roger’s harmonica. He’d saved the cookies and apples from his free lunch the last couple of days and bought the biggest bag of sunflower seeds in the corner grocery store.

Sitting there on the bus, Brick felt heroic. Wouldn’t the girl with the fuzzy hair and the blue blue eyes be surprised when she saw him? It would go like this: Hi, my name’s Brick. I used to live downstairs. I met your dad, and he said tell you this. And Brick would launch into the story that Roger told him and then play her the song. Hum. Mmmm. Hum.

T
O
-K
ANSAS
-C
ITY WAS A
long bus ride, and Brick was happy to get off. For the next week he hunted for lost coins and empty soda bottles to find a way to buy the ticket the rest of the way. He hid the first couple of nights behind the stairs at the Y and then in an old boxing gym near the bus station. He had learned the art of invisibility. Stay quiet. Nod yes. Speak only when spoken to.

He wasn’t used to this city’s sounds. The drunks—who in the day were students or bankers or clerks in the stores—came home when the streets were empty and slammed the bike storage door loud enough to wake him most nights. Sometimes he’d wake to the sounds of the small scenes that spilled out onto the street in front of the massage parlor when one of the regular old men didn’t get his regular girl, or the sounds of barking dogs when the young men finally exited the bar down the street.

The sounds from the street alarmed him less than those of his dreams. He was happy when he could wake up before
screaming. This night he didn’t. His scream attracted the attention of a young woman and man—who had taken refuge in the gym too.

“Damn kid, you nearly made me pee myself,” the man said.

“You thought it was a monster! Ha ha,” the young woman laughed mocking him. “He’s a kid. He’s just a kid.”

“What you doing here, kid? Go away.”

Brick was paralyzed.

“If you got something to pay us with, you can stay.”

“What?” Brick asked.

“Rent. This is our spot. You can stay if you got some rent money.”

Brick figured he was only a day or so away from having enough coins to buy another bus ticket. He’d exchanged the money he’d collected for bills and stuffed it into his sock—a trick he once saw one of his mother’s friends do with a knife. Please, please, he thought. He couldn’t spend any more time looking for a place to sleep. And he didn’t have money to spare.

“Leave him alone,” the woman said. Brick could see she came from money. She had straight teeth, and around her neck she wore a gold chain with a pearl. But she was dressed the same as other runaways he’d seen hanging out by the bus station and downtown. Her youth looked rubbed down—smudged like her black eyeliner. He knew they were junkies and meant no harm. Like his mother, they just needed their fix to go on.

“I don’t have any money,” Brick said.

When the young man started toward him, Brick cowered instead of running. He made himself a heavy weight, but not heavy enough for the young man not to lift him upside
down and shake him the way the older neighborhood kids did for sport and for change. Everything in Brick’s pockets—a marble, the newspaper story, and his harmonica—fell to the ground. The stash in his sock didn’t shake free. The man set him down.

Brick hiked his jeans up. He straightened his sweat jacket on his small shoulders. “That’s all you got?” the man said examining the marble, the newspaper clipping, and the harmonica.

Brick nodded.

Turning to the girl, holding the harmonica high, the man said, “What you think we could get for this?”

“You can’t get shit for that. But if we had a monkey could play it, we’d be rich and high and happy.” She laughed at her own joke.

“Hey, monkey.” Brick knew the young man meant him. “You play.”

Was it a question or an order?

The young man hit Brick on the head hard enough for Brick to stumble.

“Play.” It was no question. The young man handed Brick the harmonica.

Brick played the tune that Roger taught him, slowly. He played the soul of who he was. It was as if the harmonica could sound without his breath. It breathed without lungs.

“Nice job, monkey. I’m gonna let you stay here tonight, and tomorrow you go with us up to by the highway. Bet you’ll score us something good.”

“He’s so cute.” The young woman chuckled each time she spoke.

“You see it?” the young man said turning to her. “It puts on a sad monkey face and plays that thing. Girl, we’re gonna be set. People gotta help us if we have a kid.” They kissed then, a long nasty kiss that made the young woman press herself against the young man.

Brick wasn’t a monkey or an it, but he felt like one until the woman looked directly at him that moment and said, “It looks scared. Are you scared?”

“Yes, ma’am.”