Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

In all the pictures, she had the same smile. It was nice, but there was something in it, this hint of vulnerability that caught me. She had been this girl who just wanted to love and be loved back, even though she only found men who thought of love as a strictly one-way, strictly physical thing. It made her ripe for exploitation and there were all too many people around her who did just that.

I could feel this lump rising in my throat. Up until that moment-for all my bluster about wanting to know Wanda as a person-she hadn’t really been human to me. She had just been a story. Her death was this abstraction, a piece of a narrative I was forming in my head.

She was real now. And I could see her life all over these walls. Wanda as a baby. Wanda at her baptism. Wanda in dance classes. Wanda at an eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Wanda heading off to the prom. Wanda with her own babies.

“I told you she was too pretty,” Tynesha said in a low voice.

“I see what you mean.”

“Damn,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied, still battling the lump. “How did she get into dancing, anyway?”

“She used to talk about how she had wanted to be a Rockette. She had the legs for it. Then she got knocked up when she was just a kid and it changed everything. The Rockettes don’t want no pregnant high school dropout from Newark.”

“I guess not.”

“Anyway, the baby’s father was just some no-good punk who talked about how he was going to support his child-and then he took off. So she started dancing go-go. I always told her she would have made a lot more money in Manhattan dancing for white guys. She was too skinny for guys here. They want a little junk in the trunk, you know?”

Tynesha clearly was not lacking in the trunk junk department.

“But she wanted to stay close to her baby,” she continued. “And when she got knocked up again, there was no way she was going anywhere else. Then she got knocked up again. Then she started dealing. Then she got caught. Then. . I don’t know, she just got caught.”

Miss B dragged herself back into the living room with that lopsided gait, somehow managing to walk with her cane and carry two slices of pie at the same time.

“C’mon, eat something,” she said, setting the pie down on the coffee table and gesturing toward the couch. “You’re both too skinny. Sit yourself down.”

I took a seat, took the pie, and suddenly realized I had entered the voracious phase of hangover recovery.

“That crust is made with real lard, Mr. Ross,” Miss B said, parking herself in an easy chair. “Don’t let any old fool Betty Crocker recipe mess with your head. The only way to make a crust is to make it with lard.”

I took a bite, then three more. It was dynamite. I shoveled in most of the piece before I realized I should probably, y’know, chew once or twice.

“You make a great pie, Miss B,” I said, having reduced a generous wedge to a smattering of crumbs. “And I must say, you keep a lovely home.”

“I just wish the building weren’t so awful,” she said. “It used to be a real nice building, with nice families who cared about how things looked. You should have seen it back in the day.”

“So maybe it’s a dumb question, but why do you stay?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s home, I guess. My husband died right in that bedroom,” she said, pointing behind her. “He was thirty-nine. Heart attack. Just like that. Wanda was maybe eight or nine. After that, I just felt like if I left, I’d be leaving him. So I stayed for a little while. And then a little while turned into a long while.”

I looked at Miss B, trying to guess her age. Wanda had been twenty-five. That put Miss B in her mid-fifties, assuming she had been roughly the same age as her husband. She looked older. I suppose losing your husband and your daughter would do that.

“How did Wanda handle her father’s death?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Miss B said, sighing. “Wanda was such a daddy’s girl. Sometimes I can’t help but think maybe if her daddy had stayed around, things would have turned out different. Maybe all those boys she had babies with would have been more respectful.”

Or maybe, the amateur shrink in me thought, Wanda wouldn’t have been so desperate for male approval if her father were still in her life.

“Tynesha was telling me Wanda wanted to be a Rockette,” I said. “Did she dance a lot as a little girl?”

Miss B sighed again, this time more forcefully. She shifted her weight, folding and unfolding her hands across her lap.

“Mr. Ross,” she said finally. “I appreciate you showing an interest in Wanda. But I, I know what she was. I know what she did for men-”

“I told you, Miss B, she never turned no tricks!” Tynesha interrupted, but Miss B held up her hand.

“And I know she sold drugs. She didn’t tell me, but I knew. A mother knows.”

“That still doesn’t mean whoever killed her should get away with it,” I said.

“I know that. But, I don’t know, Wanda wasn’t real happy. She was a sweet girl, real sweet. Oh, honey, if you could have seen her with her babies”-Miss B paused to collect herself-“she just had a big heart.

“But she kept thinking that having these babies with these men was the answer. What ghetto girl thinks that way? That Prince Charming is waiting for her on the corner? And by the time she had two or three, you tell me, is Daddy Number Four really going to stick around and support another man’s kids? And every time her baby daddy would run off and crush her dreams, it just made her that much more empty.”

Miss B started dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

“Wanda was a Christian,” she continued. “I know you think that sounds strange, doing what she did. And maybe I’m a fool but, I don’t know, I just think she’s in a better place now.”

“You know she is, Miss B,” Tynesha said. She reached out across the arm of the easy chair and grabbed one of Miss B’s hands. Miss B had stopped dabbing and was just letting her tears flow. She exhaled loudly.

“I’m sorry, I have got to stop carrying on like this,” she said in a broken voice.

“Oh, no, it’s really okay. I understand,” I said, feeling like a jackass, because, let’s face it, I didn’t have the slightest clue what it felt like to have a daughter die facedown in a vacant lot. Miss B straightened herself and fixed her red-rimmed eyes on me.

“Mr. Ross, let me just take you to what you came for,” she said. She stood and wobbled into one of the bedrooms. I followed.

“This was Wanda’s room,” Miss B said. “The baby’s crib was in my room. The three kids were in the other bedroom. Wanda had this room to herself.”

The shades were drawn, making the room darker than the others. It was also messier. There were clothes and dance costumes strewn about the floor, panty hose draped on the lampshade, a small Macy’s worth of makeup piled next to the vanity. The bed hadn’t been made. The air smelled stale. No one had been in here since Wanda’s death.

“I wanted her to have her own bedroom because, well, I knew what she was doing in here and I didn’t want the children to see it,” Miss B said, heading toward the closet. “She thought I didn’t know about this.”

“Did you ever ask her to stop?” I said, and it came off sounding more judgmental than I wanted.

“I don’t think she would have,” Miss B said. “Maybe it sounds odd to you, but I didn’t think it was my place. A single mother trying to do for her children, that’s a powerful thing, Mr. Ross. She always talked about how badly she wanted these kids to have opportunities like suburban kids and I think that’s what she was trying to provide-in her own way. She would have died for those kids.”