Carlin Romano - Philadelphia Noir

“You ready to go?” he asked. I examined him. He didn’t seem jittery and he wasn’t sweating. This was what I knew of smoking crack from the movies.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

I glanced back at the pool, where Adam, laughing, held Jess under the water. Aja sat forlornly on the shoulders of a round boy with flame-colored hair waiting for the fight to start. “I’m ready to go,” I said.

When Roger closed the gate the pool disappeared, and though “Looking at the Front Door” sounded raucous bouncing off the water, I couldn’t hear anything at all.

“Are you smoking crack?” I blurted.

Dahani came to a full stop and looked at me. “This is the last time I think I’m going to answer that dumb-ass question. No.”

“Are you selling it?”

He sighed in annoyance. “Nzingha. No.”

“But something isn’t right.”

“No, nothing is right,” Dahani said. “But this is where I get off.” We had reached my mother’s house. He kept walking up the dark street.

It wasn’t until a couple of nights later that Dahani didn’t show up for dinner. My mother, who barely touched the pizza I ordered, kept walking to the front window and peering out.

When it began getting dark, I slapped my forehead. “Oh my God!” I said.

My mother looked at me with wild round eyes. “What?”

Without biting the inside of my cheek, I said, “I totally forgot. He said to tell you he wouldn’t be home until really late.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

My mother folded her arms. “Thanks for almost letting me have a heart attack.”

“Mom, he’s a grown man.”

“Nzingha,” she said, “what is this thing with you and your brother?”

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t seem to realize that he’s having a really hard time. I mean I’m the one stuck with loans from his year at college. I’m the one supporting his grown-ass now and I’m the one who’s going to have to take out more loans to send him back. So what’s your issue?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Can I go upstairs?”

“You really need to change your attitude. And not just about this.”

“Can I go upstairs?” I said again.

My mother and I sometimes had strained conversations. It was she and Dahani who had fireworks. But now she looked so angry she almost shook. “Go ahead and get the hell out of my sight!” And I did, hating this.

That night I wasn’t sure if I was sleeping or not. I kept imagining the nightmare bright scene at the pool, those girls kissing, my brother disappearing into the back. Night logic urged me that I had to go back there. After my mother was in bed with her TV timer on, I climbed out of bed and dressed. Then excruciatingly, silently, I closed the front door. I plunged into darkness and walked the three blocks as fast as I could.

“Roger,” I called at the gate, trying to imitate my brother’s masculine whisper. I tapped the wood. There was a pause and then the tall gate wrenched open.

“Where’s Dahani?” Roger said, waving me inside. His clothes were soaked and he was in stocking feet. “Oh God. You didn’t bring Dahani?”

I felt my legs buckle, and only because Roger’s sweaty hand clamped over my mouth was I able to swallow a scream. I had seen only one dead body in real life, at my great-grandmother’s wake. Though with her papery skin and tiny doll’s limbs, she’d never seemed quite alive. I’d never seen a dead body floating in water, but I knew what I was seeing when I saw Jess’s naked corpse bob up and down peacefully. I ran to the water’s edge near the diving board. There was a wet spot of something on the edge of the pool that looked black in the light.

Roger began pacing a tiny circle, moaning.

“Did you call 911?” I asked him.

“It was an accident. They’re gonna think-”

“What if she’s alive?” I said.

Roger suddenly loomed in front of me with clenched fists. “No cops! And she’s not alive! Why didn’t you bring Dahani?”

In the same way I knew things in dreams, I knew he hadn’t done it. Not even in a Lenny in Of Mice and Men way. But I needed to get away from his panic. I spoke slowly. “It’s okay. I’ll go get him.”

“You’ll bring him here?”

Before I let myself out through the tall gate, I watched Roger slump to the side of the pool and sit Indian style with his head in his hands. I took one last look at Jess. Later I wished that I hadn’t.

I found myself at Aja’s house. It was after midnight, but I rang the bell, hoping somehow that she might answer the door instead of her parents. I heard the dog barking and clicking his long nails excitedly on the floor.

Aja’s dad, a short yellow man with a mustache and no beard, answered the door. “Zingha? Now you know it’s too late. Does your mom know-”

“Mr. Bell, I really need to see Aja.”

“Are you serious, girl?” Then he started pushing the door shut. The dog was going crazy.

“Aja!” I screamed.

Her mother appeared. She grabbed Subwoofer’s collar with one hand and pulled him up short. He whimpered and I felt bad for him. All I’d ever known him to attack with was his huge floppy tongue.

“Shut up and get in here,” she said.

Aja’s father moved off to the side but he wasn’t happy about it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.

“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.

“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”

I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a-”

“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”

Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.

I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.

But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.

By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.

It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.

Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.

Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.

“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”