Better to watch your parent die of cancer, Garrett thought. Like Katie Corrigan’s mother who got breast cancer and died a year later. Then, at least, you could prepare yourself. You could say good-bye. But Garrett’s father had been ripped from their lives suddenly, leaving behind a hole that was ragged and bloody, smoking.
Garrett stayed in his room until the sun sank into the water. His walls turned a shade of dark pink; the urn was a silhouette against the wall. There was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” Only one answer would be acceptable.
“Mom. Can I come in?”
“Okay,” he said.
She stood in the doorway. “We miss you downstairs. I’m about to start dinner. What are you doing up here?”
“Sleeping,” he said. “Thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?” she asked. She glanced at the urn.
I’m a seventeen-year old boy. I need my father. As if there were anything else to think about. “Nothing,” he said.
Chapter 2
T bree days later, Marcus felt like the main character in that Disney movie where the little boy is adopted by wild animals and lives among them in the jungle. Here it was, two o’clock in the afternoon, and he was lying on a beach. There was no one else for miles, except Winnie, who lay in a chaise next to him wearing purple bikini bottoms and her Princeton sweatshirt. She seemed intent on getting a tan-all shiny with baby oil- but she refused to take off the sweatshirt. Except for when she swam, which she and Marcus did whenever they got too warm. This, Marcus thought, was what people meant by “the good life.” Sitting on a deserted beach in the hot sun-no bugs, no trash, no other people kicking sand onto his blanket or blaring Top 40 stations on the boom box like at Jones Beach-and he could swim in the cool water whenever he wanted. Plus, he had a handmaiden. Winnie made lunch for both of them-smoked turkey sandwiches and tall glasses of Coca-Cola that she spiked with Malibu rum. At first, when Marcus tasted the rum in his drink, he balked. Because he did not want to have his summer over before it even began for getting caught drinking. He said so to Winnie and she promised him that they would just have this one cocktail-he loved how she called it a “cocktail”-and that her mother was out doing a two-hour jog and would never know. The Malibu rum had been sitting in the liquor cabinet for a couple of years; she and Garrett dipped into it all the time, even with her father around, she said, and they had never gotten caught.
The mention of Garrett made Marcus uneasy. Garrett was lying up on the deck, presumably because he never swam and didn’t like to get all sandy, but Marcus suspected it was because he wanted to keep his distance. And up on the deck he could watch everything Marcus and Winnie were doing. Like Big Brother. Like God.
Marcus squinted at Winnie. “If you’re so concerned about getting tan, you should take your sweatshirt off.”
“You just want a better look at my body,” Winnie said.
Marcus found that funny enough to laugh, but he didn’t want to piss her off. “Why do you always wear it?”
“It was Daddy’s.”
Immediately, Marcus’s reality kicked back in. Despite the hot day, he felt the chill of humiliation as he recalled the worst personal shame of his life. At the beginning of swim season, he’d come out of the showers to find the locker room abandoned, to find his locker jimmied open, to find all of his clothes missing, even his wet bathing suit. He stood in his towel, shivering, not because he was cold, but because he’d thought the guys on the swim team, at least, would cut him some slack about his mother. But no: they, too, wanted to expose him. Marcus sat for a long while on the wooden bench by his empty locker, too mortified to wander the school’s hallways for help, too ashamed to contact his father, before he thought to call Arch, collect, at his office. Arch came all the way out to Queens with a gym bag and Marcus got dressed in Arch’s sweats. The very same Princeton sweatshirt that Winnie was wearing. If Arch had asked a single question, Marcus probably would have broken down. But Arch just offered him the gym bag and said, Put these on and let’s get you home.
Winnie, it seemed, was trying to get his attention. “Marcus?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Now can I ask you something?”
“What?” he said, warily.
“Why do you lie out in the sun when you’re already black?” She giggled.
Marcus tried to relax. If she was going to wear the damn sweatshirt all summer, there was nothing he could do about it except let it be a reminder of how far he’d come. How he didn’t let other people get to him anymore. How he’d shown the jackasses on the swim team something by placing second in every single meet all season. Placing second on purpose so his name wouldn’t make it into any headlines. “Black people get tans, too, you know. Look.” He lowered the waistband of his shorts a fraction of an inch so that Winnie could see his tan line. “In winter I get kind of ashy. Besides, I like the feel of the sun on my skin.”
“Me, too,” Winnie said. She pushed up her sleeves and rolled up the bottom of her sweatshirt so that her stomach showed. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s better.” She picked up the bottle of baby oil and squirted some on her stomach and rubbed it in with slow, downward strokes that made Marcus think she was trying to be all sexy for him. The poor child, as his mother used to say.
Winnie had a crush on him. Anyone could see it. The past two nights she’d enticed Marcus into playing board games after dinner. Marcus asked if there were anything to do in town, and Beth offered to drive them in for an ice cream or the movies, but there were only two movie theaters showing one movie apiece that all of them had already seen, and Winnie turned down the ice cream without a reason. Not going into town left them with what Marcus’s mother used to call Nothing to Do but Stand on Your Head and Spit in Your Shoe Syndrome. So Winnie pulled a stack of board games out of a closet. The boxes of the games were disintegrating and some games were missing pieces and dice, and the bank in Monopoly only had three one-dollar bills but Winnie cut some more out of blank typing paper. They made do. Marcus and Winnie spent two long evenings building pretend real estate fortunes and getting out of jail free.
It was as different from his life in Queens as anything could be. Winnie kept apologizing because There’s practically nothing to do here at night, not until I get my license, anyway. She had some notion that Marcus went out every night at home, clubbing, or hanging out on the streets. But in fact, at home, Marcus stayed off the streets. He couldn’t afford to get into any trouble, and the best way to stay out of it was to stay home. Last summer, he’d worked all day on the maintenance crew at Queens College-mowing lawns, trimming hedges, recindering the running track-and by the time he got home, his ass was kicked. He ate dinner with his family and then either watched TV or went over to Vanessa Lydecker’s apartment and drank a beer with Vanessa’s brother and fooled around with Vanessa in her bedroom.
Before the murders, Marcus’s family was nothing special. His father worked at the printing press for the New York Times as a supervisor, and his mother, with one year of Ivy League education and three years of city college, was a reading specialist who split her time between I.S. 224 and P.S. 136. She tutored kids on weekends for extra money, which she tucked into Marcus’s college account. And then, on October seventh, Constance murdered her sister-in-law Angela Bennett and Angela’s nine-year-old daughter, Candy Cohut. Constance stabbed Angela to death, and in the process fatally wounded Candy. Even now, when Marcus thought about the murders, it seemed so incredible it was as if it had happened to somebody else.