I head inside, get a bottle from the built-in shelving, and drink without looking to see what’s in it.
Gin.
I met Anton a few times in Elena’s kitchen. She was making macaroni and government cheese, ground beef round and Hamburger Helper, chicken thighs. He was just this side of sullen, talking to me but not making eye contact.
I try to imagine where Anton has gone. If he might see my parents and pass on a message.
He let Darnique go to school without breakfast most days. Once he slammed her head against a washing machine.
So fuck drug-dealing movie-making shit-for-brains Anton.
The message I would give my parents is this: Please come back.
And this: I know you were both drunk off your asses when you crashed the car.
I add some Snapple Lemonade to the gin.
I call Nick.
My mother used to read me stories. They ended happily, but before that there was usually sadness or difficulty. I never understood why they ended just when the good part was starting.
Elena tried to kill herself at least once that I know of. She had a baby back in Tennessee. The baby was born crack-addicted, and died.
I learned this from Darnique.
I tried to kill myself at least twice. There might have been a third time, or I might have just been drunk and taken more pills than I realized.
This was always after Nick had sex with someone else.
I love Nick with all my heart and soul, and he’s a complete asshole.
He comes right over when I call.
“I’m scared, Nick,” I say. “What if they come back? What if they know I saw their car? What about Elena? She’s going to come outside with her coffee in the morning, come over here to bum a cigarette, and see her dead son lying there. Should I call the cops?”
“I’m sorry about the money,” Nick says.
“You’re such a dick,” I say. Then he kisses me and we go to bed.
Afterward I lie awake. Nick is snoring a little. I can hear cars on the street.
I imagine that my heart looks like the moon, the surface all fucked up from space rocks.
The moon has no atmosphere.
Red lights swirl around the bedroom.
Elena mourns Anton with a houseful of people and a lot of potato salad and ribs.
I bring her a grocery bag from the Alameda Food Bank. Tangerines. Chocolate fudge Jell-O. Cans of tuna and vegetables.
At her church they play tambourines and talk about Jesus’s love.
There is no God.
Nick and I bought a grill.
Which means he’s moved back in.
“Next time I’ll bring you a barbequed turkey,” I tell Elena.
“I ain’t had no barbequed turkey ever,” Elena says. “Ain’t you got to defrost it first?”
“We’re getting a fresh one.”
“Fresh? Where you get that at?”
“Andronico’s, in Berkeley.”
Which means in a galaxy far, far away.
Darnique comes to live with Elena. They get out the glue and glitter and colored markers. Elena cornrows Darnique’s hair. She makes her Eggo Cinnamon Toast waffles for breakfast.
Everything works out fine, except in the end it doesn’t.
Elena will get diabetes. Darnique will be pregnant by fourteen.
I’m nobody’s fucking fairy godmother.
This is the part where the gun goes off. I was drunk, and mad at Nick again after he’d been back a couple of months.
It turns out he had another girlfriend.
Everyone leaves me sooner or later.
I kind of waved the gun around and screamed at him. Then I aimed it at my head, but I changed my mind and turned it toward him instead.
Years before, when Elena tried to kill herself, the recoil of the gun jerked her hand away from her temple. The bullet only grazed her neck, leaving a little scar.
So I knew to hold the gun steady.
There is no recovery.
When I was little, my parents used to take me to bars with them.
Shit works out for other people sometimes, but not for me.
And not for the other women in here.
In here we’re all doomed, and we know it.
My parents’ favorite bar when we lived in San Francisco was the Wishing Well.
It’s gone now.
I sat on a stool and drank Shirley Temples.
In my glass, three bright-as-neon cherries were impaled on a plastic sword.
I pulled it from the melting ice.
They were cold, and delicious.
A Murder of Saviors
by Keenan Norris
Toler Heights
I remember hearing about the incident in the news, and considering it with all the sentimentality of a seven a.m. BART train crowd, battered black briefcases and visionless stares. I’m a real romantic, you can tell. Perfect for reporting on Oakland’s death spirals — not so much for San Francisco, but this story doesn’t have shit to do with San Francisco.
The kid was found in the commercial truck bay of the plaza that divides East Oakland from the suburbs just beyond. A gravel ramp runs up from the bay to the upper level of the plaza, where there is a police station. Someone had tracked the victim’s blood up the black ramp, right past the police. Granted, it was a rough section of town, but even by tough-town standards, this seemed impetuous. Not only were the police stationed there, there were also a children’s dance studio, a decent-quality supermarket, and a Wells Fargo bank in the plaza. A murder committed so close to so much innocence and authority was rash, even if it happened in the early morning, before business hours.
Nobody knew what to make of it, least of all the local media and police. The press gave the boy’s name — Shaun Sobrante — his age — sixteen — and his surprisingly strong grade-point average — 3.3. The local gumshoes, going light on the investigative aspect of their work, redundantly noted the manner of his murder and the fact that there was no known culprit, nor motive, nor any witnesses. This was a prediction and justification of what came next: nothing.
The police offered only the unhelpful fact that Shaun was apparently unaffiliated with street gangs and had a marijuana possession charge on his record. The intent-to-distribute case was still pending at the time he was murdered. I recall wishing that I was a police investigator, or a paid reporter on the crime beat, so I could put in some real work on the case. That’s assuming there was still such a thing as a “crime beat” when it came to local news. It sure didn’t seem like it.
Where Shaun’s murder barely registered with the media or the law, it resonated deeply along the blocks surrounding the plaza — his community. Shaun’s elaborate graffiti visage went up on the wall of a handball court at the nearby middle school. His funeral brought out several hundred mourners. A basketball tournament was staged at the courts on Seminary Avenue, to mark his passing and the deaths of the many other young people who’d lost their lives to East Oakland violence. Underground rap music blared his name in deafening tribute down the boulevards.
And an Oakland-born businessman with friends in high places came home and founded a school in his honor: Sobrante Preparatory Academy.
The charter schools had swooped in like a black murder of crows over Oakland, resectioning the city’s schools and recalibrating its civics. No Child Left Behind money was flowing to a few select men and women handpicked to recode the curriculum. It was only later, after Principal Hill at Sobrante Prep excited my investigative streak, that I learned of this trend, but I might as well set the stage with it now so that what happened, the whole mystery at the heart of things, will come clear to you faster than it did to me.