Richard Price - The Whites

So why, Milton just had to ask his killers that day in the empty apartment, did you go to 4F?

That’s when they talked about the sulky girl on the stoop, Miss Information.

Describe her, Edgar said.

And they did, after which the Ramos brothers stared at each other in astonishment.

That girl on three? Milton said to Edgar. Then, turning to their prisoners, hog-tied and belly-down on the floor, She said your guy lived in 4F? You’re sure?

Arching up to offer their gleaming faces, backs bowed, they swore to all the angels in heaven. How were they to know? They were sent out without the apartment.

And you told her the dealer’s name? He still couldn’t believe it.

We swear on our mothers’ eyes…

And she said 4F…

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Now they’re crying, Edgar grunted, tapping his bat against his calf.

Well, you know who else lives in 4F? Milton asked, lifting his own bat from behind his ear, the tip making small, not quite lazy circles. Us. His brothers.

Sofia walked down to the third-floor landing, Milton behind her, absently rapping the walls on his way down.

3D. Who lived here.

I don’t know.

3E. Who lived here.

I don’t know.

3F. Who lived here.

Breathe…

The gay kid.

Victor? Who else.

His mother.

What was her name.

Dolores.

Who else.

Breathe…

His sister.

What was her name.

I can’t remember.

Did you like her?

Later, after long showers, he and Edgar knocked on 3F and came face-to-face with Carmen’s mother.

Where’s she at.

The answer — Atlanta — put Milton off his game for twenty-three years. The same might have been true for Edgar, but the dead hitters had friends and his big brother lived only another week.

His mother, heart-stunned, only a week after that.

Did you want to marry her?

Unconsciously humming, Milton rested the knob of the bat against the 3F peephole: Guess who.

Dad!

What.

Did you want to marry her.

Marry who. Then: I don’t remember. Then: You know what? You’re right, it stinks in here, let’s go home.

As they started back down to the vestibule, Milton imagined his immense, huffing mother passing Carmen on the stairs at some point back then, the skinny girl with the martyred eyes most likely having to backtrack to the nearest landing in order for Mrs. Ramos to have enough room to pass, the two of them with self-conscious smiles, his mother’s tinged with humiliation.

“What’s with calling me ‘Dad,’” Milton asked as he unlocked the car door. “What happened to ‘Daddy’?”

“It’s a baby word. The kids make fun of you if you say it.”

“You got to learn to stand up for yourself, Sofia,” he snapped, “otherwise those kids are never going to stop, and that kick-me kind of mentality of yours is going to make you miserable until the day you die, you understand me?”

No response — well, what the hell was she supposed to say?

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.”

“It’s OK,” Sofia saying it in that resigned way of hers that made him feel like tearing out his heart and feeding it to the birds.

An hour later, after dropping his kid off at her school, he sat in his car halfway down the block from the house in Yonkers, far enough away not to draw anyone’s attention but close enough to observe.

They had a house; he had a house. They had kids; he had a kid. Graves had a gold shield; well, so did he.

He was a widower, but no one here had any hand in that. So why on top of everything else, everything he had a right to feel, did he also feel, in this moment, envious? Where the hell did she get off having a normal life. What kind of ice-cold freak was she to just sail on like this, to make a go of it like anyone else.

Even before he and his brother had beaten two men to death at an age when all they should have been thinking about was sports, music, and ass, his sense of being “normal” was a tough sell in the mirror. He had always felt himself to be something of a miracle beast, trained to walk upright and mimic human speech. But after that day, a day launched by her, he never gave a moment’s thought about belonging to any species but his own.

He saw the old man come out and slowly bend to retrieve a rolled-up newspaper from the lawn, Milton gut-reading him, despite his frailty, as an old school boss, still carrying an air of sober authority. Then, an hour later, a middle-aged Indian woman, most likely his caregiver, stepped out on the porch to have a smoke. There was no sign of Carmen (probably at work), the kids (probably at school), or her husband. Knowing Graves to be in Night Watch, Milton assumed he was either in the house catching up on his sleep or — more likely, given that the sole car in the driveway was a piece-of-shit Civic definitely belonging to the caregiver — he’d gotten stuck with an early morning run.

The thing was, now that he’d finally found her after all these years, found her as sure as he’d found that Palmetto State cracker that snatched away his wife, where did he, where did they, go from here. In the past, no matter what actions he had taken on behalf of his dead, the suffering he had inflicted in return had always been of limited duration, whereas his suffering only intensified, leaving him afterward feeling more alone, more heartbroken, more subhuman than ever. For him, balancing the books had always been like bare-handedly punching to death a man whose face and body were studded with nails. And right now, at this point in his life, the thought of going through that again was unbearable, the cost, mentally if not physically, unsurvivable.

So let it go.

Can’t.

Then find another way.

Find another way .

It should have been funny, Billy thought, but it wasn’t. Anytime you get called in to see the school therapist about your child, funny is the last thing on your mind. But still…

The day before, Declan had apparently pushed a kid who had been taunting him, knocking him face-first into the edge of an open locker door. The injury was minimal — they were eight-year-olds, after all — but there was a little blood and a broken pair of glasses. And so now, he and Carmen were seated in an empty classroom talking to a young man who couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of school himself, asking whether Declan’s birth had been a difficult one, whether they “employed” any physical form of discipline at home, whether there was any history, on either side of the family, of…

“How about we just get Declan to apologize to the kid and we pay for the glasses?” Billy amiably cutting him off.

“Those would be appropriate gestures, no doubt, but I think…”

“ No! ” the word flying out of Carmen’s mouth like a command to a wolf as she thrust herself forward in her chair. “Where the hell do you get off asking me about giving birth to him, and how dare you ask us if we smack our kids around, if we have crazies in our family. I am a nurse, I am a healer; my husband is a New York City detective, he protects people. This is who we are and this is what we can’t do today, because were stuck having this time suck of a talk with you .”

“Carm,” Billy said uselessly.

“And no, my son isn’t going to apologize to that little shit, and no, we’re not going pay for those glasses. But you know who should? You and this whole goddamn school, because what happened yesterday is all your fault. You put on this stupid, boring show about the planets, all these poor kids dressed up like silver-foil meatballs, ‘Hello! I am Mercury! Hello! I am Saturn!’ And you know, you know, one poor kid has to come out and say, ‘Hello! I am Uranus!’ Jesus Christ, you’re a shrink, do you know how humiliating that is? And of course he’s going to get teased and teased, and if he’s got any heart to him, like my son has, at some point he is going to push back.”