Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

“Mom?”

Loochie waited. She held the lit cigarette behind her back.

“Louis?”

If it had been Sunny and her grandmother they would’ve rung the bell.

Still nothing. She shut her eyes and held her breath. No sounds. They weren’t back. Maybe just the door of another apartment nearby being opened. She walked back into the bedroom. Where was Sunny though?

Lucretia stood in the same place, a few feet from the dresser mirror, and watched herself take a pull so deep, so expert. The smoke filled her mouth and her cheeks expanded. Then some of the smoke snuck down her throat and boy did it burn. Her eyes watered quickly, suddenly, and her mouth fell open and she hacked inelegantly once, twice, three times.

The cigarette fell out of Loochie’s fingers and landed in the bedroom carpet but she hardly noticed. She stooped forward and coughed violently. She was crying now and her mouth filled with spit that tasted vile. She opened her mouth and choked out all the spit right into the carpet. Then she kept heaving and something came up from deeper in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, too excited, so she vomited bile. Right there in her mother’s bedroom. A puddle in the carpet.

Nice.

At least the vomit doused the lit cigarette, though.

Loochie stepped back from the puddle and stood straight. When she looked at herself in the dresser mirror she no longer looked sixteen, just twelve again. Her face was flushed and the lipstick had smeared down onto her chin. Her mother’s wig had slipped so far forward that it almost covered her eyes.

Loochie squatted and fished the rest of the cigarette out of the carpet. It would have to be flushed. She went to the bathroom and when she was in there she heard the wail of a siren coming down her block. It was loud. Not the police. Not a fire truck. It was an ambulance. This wasn’t so strange. Ambulances came down her block from time to time. There were a bunch of old people who lived in her building and the one across the street. Sometimes the ambulance was just passing through, headed toward an emergency on another block.

But the siren only got louder. The ambulance wasn’t passing by. It had stopped outside. The sound was so loud now that Loochie shut the bathroom door as if that would keep it out. But it didn’t. She flushed the cigarette to drown out the siren. She tried to think of which old person in her building might’ve called 911. Mrs. Kirikou? Mr. Dodgson? Who else might’ve called for it? The siren continued to wail so loudly it was as if it had parked right in front of her window. Loochie flushed the toilet a second time, but nothing would shut that ambulance out. She stood in the bathroom wishing for something, anything, that might distract her.

It was right about then that she heard a new sound. Something rattling. Earlier she’d hoping for Sunny’s knock at the front door, but this sound came from the kitchen window by the fire escape.

Loochie walked into the kitchen to the sound of more rattling. Sunlight filtered in through the grille of the security gate. The gate had a waffled pattern, steel bars crisscrossing so tightly that an adult would have a hard time slipping more than two fingers through any of the spaces. This was a good design, meant to keep a burglar from getting his hand inside, but the close-set grille also made it hard to see through, to see out. So it wasn’t until Loochie was standing right up to the security gate that she realized there was someone out on the fire escape. The person was much bigger than Sunny.

It was a woman. At least that was Loochie’s best guess. But no one she recognized and she knew most of her neighbors in the building on sight. Loochie pressed one eye to the grille and looked through. The woman was crouched there by Loochie’s window, pressing so close that Loochie could only make out the upper half her face. The woman wasn’t even looking into Loochie’s apartment. She crouched out there, right in front of Loochie’s window, but her face was in profile. Looking away, maybe down at the ambulance still on the street. It was just then that Loochie realized the siren had stopped ringing but she could still hear the heavy chugging engine of the thing, double-parked on the street below.

Loochie closed her mouth and quieted her breathing. She kept her eye to the grille but didn’t know what else to do. Who was this woman? Loochie could see one ear, one eye, the curve of her bulbous nose. The woman’s hair was short and dry looking. It was pulled back into a small ponytail. Her hair was almost the same color as her skin. Both a deep gray, like the color of the cigarette ashes that had fallen to the carpet in Loochie’s mother’s room. The woman’s ear looked tiny, misshapen. It took a moment before Loochie realized it was just that the woman’s earlobe had been torn off (or fallen off?) long ago. The white of the woman’s eye looked pink.

But for all this, somehow, the worst part of this was that the woman wouldn’t even turn her head and look into Loochie’s window. She just kept staring down at the street, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to stoop in front of a stranger’s fourth-floor kitchen window. It was this, the calm of the woman, that unnerved Loochie. The fear was like an itch, running up her scalp. What to do? What to do?

“My mother’s in the other room!” Loochie finally shouted through the grille.

The woman didn’t move. She stood in profile, only inches from the window, and the longer she stayed there, immobile, impassive, the more Loochie wanted to reach out and push her off the fire escape. Better she fall to the ground and break her back than just keep squatting there scaring the life out of Loochie.

“And my brother is here,” Loochie added, less forcefully.

Loochie had been watching the woman long enough to see the faint rise and fall of the woman’s head as she breathed. Loochie went quiet again and now she could hear the woman breathing, too, even through the gate and the closed window. It was a strained sound. Like Sunny’s breathing had been earlier. But there was something more to it. It was wet, like gurgling, each time the woman exhaled. When Loochie had a cold and her nose was clogged up and she had to breath through her mouth she sounded like that. So maybe the woman was just sick. Maybe she needed help. Not that Loochie was about to open the gate and start offering assistance. She was twelve but she wasn’t a dummy. Still, the thought that she might just be a sick woman made Loochie feel a little less scared of her. Loochie hadn’t realized she had one hand balled into a tight fist until she looked down at it. She relaxed it.

Then she heard the rattling sound again. It kept on for ten seconds. Wood moving and glass shaking. Then a little squeak. And that’s when Loochie finally understood what was happening. The kitchen window was rising.

The woman was opening Loochie’s window.

These old buildings weren’t always in the best shape. After decades many of their windows were loose in their frames. Loochie had seen Louis slip back into the apartment this way more than once when she was young. His hands putting pressure on the edges of the glass, then just jiggling the window until it began to lift. It was one of the main reasons buildings like this needed security gates. But even the security gate didn’t make Loochie feel very safe right now. If this woman could so blatantly climb to her window, then pull the window up, who knew what else she could do? Maybe even the security gate wouldn’t be much of a hurdle. Loochie would be defenseless.

Loochie heard the window squeaking as it moved up an inch, two inches. But then it stopped. Now there was another sound. The woman out there grunted. A moment later Loochie thought she saw a mouse pop out from the bottom of the security gate. She hopped back and gasped. She almost peed herself. But it wasn’t a mouse. It was worse than that. Something was wiggling right between one of the gaps in the gate.