“Don’t,” she said.
“What?”
She wished she knew. “Tell your friend to stop rocking my car.”
“He’s not my friend, he’s my nephew.”
“That’s a fact,” the other one said, still bouncing with an almost autistic rhythm. Close up, she could see their eyes were bloodshot, their pupils dilated. Mean and high, a great combination.
“I got a sister sixteen years older ’n me. She and my mom had us the same weekend. We’re closer than some brothers I know. Gee-gee is my grandma, his great-grandma. She calls us Pete and Repete. Pretty cool, huh?”
“It’s practically ‘The Brady Bunch,’ right here in Sowebo.”
He squeezed her wrist harder, bringing her hand up to his face as if it were a small animal he had caught by the scruff of the neck. Tess tried to figure out if she could use the keys clutched in her fist to scratch him, or gouge his eyes. But that would address only half her problem.
Repete got off her car, came and stood behind her. She was now pressed between these two not-quite-men, no-longer-boys. They could have been anywhere between seventeen and twenty-two. Tess hoped they were on the older side. The younger they were, the more dangerous they would be. Their clothes were slightly rank, as if they had been worn a few days running. But their skin gave off a sweet, sticky smell, suggesting a teenager’s diet. Mountain Dew, rubbery sweet tubes of strawberry licorice, pink Hostess snowballs.
“He’s older, by a day,” the nephew, Repete, said in her ear. “But I’m bigger.”
He ground his crotch into her backside. Not much happening there, not as much as he seemed to think. Tess tried to tell herself they wouldn’t dare to do anything, not here. It was light out, she was on a busy street, cars were going by. All she had to do was scream, run into the traffic, find a way to grab her cell phone from her knapsack and punch in 911.
She saw a woman walking her dog and their eyes met. Tess let the woman see her fear, tried to put the shared history of their gender into that one look. She said nothing, yet it was the loudest plea she had ever made in her life.
The woman crossed to the other side of the street and turned her back to her.
“I don’t think you should come back here,” Pete said.
Her mouth was dry. “I agree.”
“If you come back here, you’re ours. You know what I mean?” He pressed a thumbnail into the side of her throat. “Gee-gee said we could.”
The nephew held her by the hipbones and the uncle humped her leg the way a dog might. Tess felt something at her back, something much too hard to be part of anyone’s anatomy. A knife.
The uncle released her hand, and the two stepped away from her so quickly she almost fell. She wished her hand wasn’t shaking as she unlocked her door, but her fear made them happy, so perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing.
Uncle Pete blocked her car door with his body, placed his grubby hand on the side of her neck, as if to caress her. “I usually let him do the girls,” he said, jerking his head toward Repete. “He likes it better. But I’m willing to make an exception in your case.”
Tess nodded, past caring. Pete stepped back and she turned the key, but nothing happened. She didn’t have her foot on the clutch. She tried again, the car started and she began to drive, mindlessly following the one-way streets, until she realized she was on Frederick Road, headed away from the city, toward her parents’ house in Ten Hills. She turned around, but lost her way, caught by the neighborhood’s triangles and diagonals. Funny, she knew Southwest Baltimore well, or thought she did. She got her bearings by pointing her car toward the ballpark and the purple accents of Ravens Stadium. Harbor Court, she reminded herself, I have to go to Harbor Court. Her legs were shaking so hard that she had trouble with the play on her clutch, and the car kept stalling out.
Once downtown, she pulled into the first parking garage she saw, although she was several blocks shy of the hotel. She ran across Pratt Street and through Harbor-place, where children waited in line at Santa’s candy cane house. The child on Santa’s lap was crying, of course. The child on Santa’s lap always cried. Only the nonbelievers got through the meeting with any nonchalance, using the tradition to manipulate parents toward the right purchases. Santa Claus and clowns-why couldn’t adults remember their own terror at these suspicious characters, why did they allow these red-nosed men to thrust their faces at children, who grew up and repeated the mistake? Repeated all the same mistakes, straight down the line, generation after generation.
Tess was shaking so hard now that she had to sit down, if only for a minute. She’d still make Harbor Court, she told herself. Tea was not a rushed affair, they’d still be there. She sat on a bench facing the water, hugged her knees, and began sobbing so recklessly and unself-consciously that the children in Santa’s line turned to watch with something akin to admiration.
chapter 21
HER FACE WAS STILL RED AND BLOTCHY WHEN TESS banged through the front doors of Women and Children First almost an hour later, but she could blame the December wind if anyone noticed. Luckily, the store was thronged with customers, so Kitty and Crow could barely afford to call out a greeting, much less indulge in a prolonged interrogation about how she had spent her day.
But observant Crow did say, even as he worked the cash register with his deceptively laid-back efficiency: “You okay? Your eyes look kind of swollen, and your face is puffy.”
“Really? Must be something in the Chinese carryout I had for lunch. Is Tyner coming for dinner tonight?” Her question was for Kitty, who was ringing up a set of out-of-print Oz books. Not the truly rare ones, just the white cover editions of the 1960s. But Kitty had found out that self-referential boomers would pay astronomical prices to reclaim the artifacts of their childhoods, even if the books weren’t rare by strict collectible standards. Her only problem was staying ahead of eBay and other online auction sites, which were cannibalizing so much of the children’s books market.
“He’s already here,” Kitty said, nodding toward the rear of the store. “We’re so swamped he volunteered to assemble gift packages.”
“Tyner is putting together your Christmas gift baskets? This I gotta see.” Tess pushed through the swinging doors, into the small storeroom that separated Kitty’s living quarters from her business.
Tyner was seated at the round oak table in the kitchen’s center, mangling sheets of red and green cellophane in his hands. A stack of empty wicker baskets sat next to his wheelchair, while the table held the piles of books and tchotchkes Kitty used for her largely Charm City-centric themes. Tess recognized the basket in front of Tyner as a “sampler” of Kitty’s favorite living fiction writers-Anne Tyler, Stephen Dixon, Ralph Pickle, Dan Ellenham, Sue Roland-as well as a small box of Konstant Kandy peanut brittle and a snow globe with an Inner Harbor scene inside. The paperbacks had been tied together with gold string, and arrayed in shredded green-and-red confetti. Theoretically, all Tyner had to do was bring the cellophane to a point at the top, tying it off with a gold ribbon, then place the finished basket in one of the preassembled cardboard boxes, surrounded by bubble wrap.
But the cellophane was too slippery for him, slithering to the floor. In the process of reclaiming it, Tyner rolled back and forth, leaving a few tire tracks. All in all, he looked about as helpless as Tess had ever seen him.
She loved it.
“Let me,” she said at last, taking the basket from him.
“Damn cellophane,” he said. “How can anyone work with this stuff?”
“You’re welcome. Why would you offer to do something for which you’re so ill-equipped?”