Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

One long pointer finger poked its way into the kitchen.

Loochie hissed at it as if it were a rat. She stood straight and stiffened. The long finger, as cadaverously gray as the woman’s face, wriggled and poked as if it were clearing a clog in a drain. Loochie couldn’t understand what the woman had planned. She couldn’t squeeze her whole body through that hole, could she? This couldn’t really be happening! But then Louis’s voice played in her ears, an unwelcome bit of wisdom. Being young doesn’t protect you. Horrors come for kids, too .

Loochie didn’t waste time. She could grab a knife from the drawer by the kitchen sink. She could try to chop off this woman’s finger if she kept sticking it through. If that didn’t work she could lock herself in the bathroom and call her mother. Then the police. Then the army. Loochie was so busy forming a plan that she didn’t pay attention to the security gate. So it took a moment before she realized the finger had disappeared, pulled back out, and now something blue was being stuffed through one of the small gaps in the gate’s grillwork.

It was a blue knit cap.

Sunny’s blue knit cap.

Sunny’s cap, with the blue pompoms. The whole thing was crammed through the small space. Finally it fell to the kitchen floor with a faint plop. Loochie stared at it. It almost felt like she was staring at one of Sunny’s organs, lying on the floor.

My friend , Loochie thought. What did you do to my friend?

Forget fear, Loochie couldn’t control herself. She shook the gate with rage. But she lost her voice when she looked through the grillwork again. The woman had turned her head to look directly into the window. The woman locked eyes with Loochie.

Now that she had Loochie’s attention the woman scooched backward on the fire escape. Loochie could see her more clearly, from shoulders up. Loochie now understood why the woman’s breathing had sounded so strained, so strange. The woman’s lower jaw was missing. She had a scalp and a forehead, two ears, two eyes, a nose and cheeks, an upper lip, and her top row of teeth. But the bottom of her face was gone . No lower jaw. No tongue. As if all that had just rotted off. Loochie felt the urge to vomit again. Her own mouth hurt suddenly. It was because Loochie was clenching her jaw tightly with disgust.

The woman stayed still on the fire escape, watching Loochie intently. Each time she exhaled her throat pulsed and a faint wave of spit spilled from the gap between her neck and the roof of her mouth. The spit splattered down onto the dingy floral white nightdress she wore. The fabric on her chest showed so many spots that had been wet and dried. It looked like this woman had been wearing those clothes for decades. Since the eighties, maybe.

“Kroons,” Loochie said quietly.

Now Loochie even tasted the vomit in her mouth, her nasal passage burned, too, but she swallowed the vomit back down. Which was disgusting. The woman out there didn’t shift her gaze and Loochie felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. Was there a challenge or a threat in the stare?

But there was the cap on the floor. Don’t forget Sunny’s cap. Her friend’s cap.

Her friend. Her friend. Her friend.

“Where’s Sunny?” Loochie said, her face pressed up to the security gate. She wished she didn’t sound so scared.

The woman raised her hand, pointing up.

Loochie knew what this meant: “6-D,” she whispered.

With that the woman stood. Loochie could see even more of her. The nightdress came down to the woman’s knees. It looked so old that it was a wonder it had remained intact. As ragged as a mummy’s wrappings. She wore cheap, very worn flip-flops.

The woman, the Kroon , walked up the fire escape stairs slowly. Her slippers clapped against the bottoms of her feet as she climbed up to the fifth-floor landing. In a few moments Loochie couldn’t see her anymore. Loochie listened to the sound of the slippers as the woman kept climbing, back up to the sixth floor. Loochie didn’t move, couldn’t move, until the sound of the slippers was gone.

Finally she pulled the blue cap off the floor. She cradled it as if it were Sunny’s head. But Loochie didn’t waste much time with that. She set the cap down on the kitchen table gently. Louis said nobody ever left 6D, but she wasn’t going to give up on Sunny just like that. She had to at least try to save her best friend.

Loochie unlatched the security gate and rolled it back. She opened the window and climbed out. She didn’t even notice that she’d left Sunny’s piece of still half-frozen cake — the Carvel Flying Saucer — sitting out on a plate. She was outside, on the fire escape again, moving so quickly that she didn’t even realize she still had on her mother’s wig until she was on the fifth floor and happened to see herself reflected in the kitchen window of Sunny’s apartment. She saw herself and almost gasped. She looked crazy, but she didn’t care. Then she realized that the security gate had been opened and she could see inside. Sunny’s grandmother sat in the kitchen. In the seat Sunny had been using not even an hour before.

Sunny’s grandmother had no other name that Loochie was aware of. She was, simply, “Sunny’s grandmother.” That’s how Loochie addressed the woman whenever they met on the elevator or walking down Colden Street. And Sunny’s grandmother seemed to recognize Loochie about half the time, maybe a little less. It was hard to say because the woman only ever seemed to wear one expression. The same expression whether morning or night, cloudy or sunny days. Sunny’s grandmother always looked as though she was about to spit.

The old woman’s mouth was always closed, lips pursed tight, a slight frown always on her lips, as if she had considered any and all things known to the world and found every single one of them wanting. She was a small woman with wide shoulders and an even wider back, though her legs were short and fantastically skinny. Was there any other way to say this? The woman looked very much, in her face and her figure, like a toad. And to Loochie she seemed as unknowable.

Loochie saw this woman now, sitting in the kitchen, in the chair right by the window — in Sunny’s chair — but the old woman hadn’t noticed her. This was because Sunny’s grandmother was bent forward, her small, wide hands on her knees, and she was crying.

At least she seemed to be crying. The posture was correct. Sunny’s grandmother leaned so far forward that her head almost touched her thighs. Her head trembled and her shoulders shook. It was worse than crying. It was like the old woman’s body was breaking down. Loochie didn’t see any tears, but the old woman’s whole face sagged with grief. The old woman sat alone, in a chair that was still warm, and she was coming close to shattering.

This, just as much as the evidence of the blue knit cap, was how Loochie truly came to believe that Sunny had been snatched by the Kroons. Maybe Sunny’s grandmother had heard, and believed, the same rule as Louis: Nobody leaves 6D. Maybe Loochie was seeing the old woman giving up all hope. Her granddaughter was gone. Loochie wanted to tap the glass now and explain. Sunny wasn’t lost. Not yet.

But such a thing would be impossible to explain. For starters, Sunny’s grandmother didn’t speak English and Loochie couldn’t speak Cantonese. The only solution to the grandmother’s grief would be to bring her granddaughter back safe. And that’s exactly what Loochie Gardner planned to do. She climbed again.

As she scurried from the fifth floor to the sixth she figured her first problem would be how to get the kitchen window of 6D open from the outside. But if the Kroon could do it to her then she could return the favor. No problem. As Loochie reached the sixth floor she felt fired up. She felt sure. So she wasn’t prepared to find 6D’s window already open.