Boy Still Missing (10 page)

Truman.

The thought that I was actually going to meet my half brother face-to-face after all this time was too much to think about. I could have let my mind hunker down on a million different questions: What if he wanted to come back to Holedo with me? What if he was retarded or crippled and that’s why my mother didn’t like to talk about him? Instead of sailing off into one of those scenarios, I told myself not to focus on it too much in order to avoid jinxing anything.

I peeled my banana and practiced my conversation with Donald in my head. I decided I would tell him exactly what had happened.

Direct. Honest for a change.

In Hartford a gaggle of giggling girls boarded, all of them dressed in University of Connecticut sweatshirts. Ponytails. Twisted braids. Fruity perfume. Mint gum. Without any coaxing from Claude, they bunched up front and whipped up a conversation with him in no time. He played Mr. Innocent pretty damn well, too. All flattery and laughter. Little did they know one of the last things he had said before they boarded was “Nothing like some good pussy.”

I kept waiting for him to warn them about dead people in motel
rooms, but he never said a word on the subject. They were traveling in a pack. I guess he thought I needed to be warned.

“Cool!” one of the girls said to Claude, and the whole crew shrieked with laughter.

I had missed the punch line but was really sick of their flirt-with-the-bus-driver routine anyway. Out my window the miles of forest gave way to clusters of neighborhoods. An aboveground pool left uncovered in somebody’s backyard. A lawn with patches of frozen mud and snow. As the scenery flashed by, I made promises to myself. The first had to do with my mother. Before I went into the bath last night, the final thing she had said to me was “Dominick, I’m just so tired. Things have got to get easier for me.” I didn’t have an answer for her then, but when I got home tonight, I was going to make sure she got the rest she needed. I had been a bigger prick than my father, and I was going to make it up to her. First with the money. Then by being the kind of son she wanted. Like one of those changed people in a fairy tale.

Poof.

Clean bedroom.

Grade-A student.

No girlfriends over the age of seventeen.

That would be me.

The second promise I made was about Edie. I vowed to myself that I would get even with her, squared away. Somewhere, somehow, she was going to pay. I didn’t have a specific plan, but I knew one would come to me.

By the time the bus pulled into Port Authority, I had pretty much stitched up my entire life, complete with Edie begging my forgiveness, a tropical vacation with my mother, every last penny paid back to Donald from a part-time job, and even a girlfriend my own age. In my head it was perfect.

Now I just had to make it come true.

Claude slapped me five, and I hopped off the bus behind the girls, trying to look like I knew how to get where I was headed. The truth was,
I didn’t have a fucking clue. On the way here, the bus had driven through a stretch of burned-out brick buildings and sidewalks crowded with scowling faces. We almost sideswiped two taxis, and the bus stalled at an intersection, instigating a honking chorus from the parade of cars behind us. The whole experience left me feeling more than unstrung about my New York adventure.

Thank God for the I-for-Information sign at the top of an escalator. I waited in a line that looked more like one at a soup kitchen than a bus station, folding and refolding Uncle Donald’s address in my hands. Around me the dirty station was a hive of activity. People darted past one another, racing out to the street or down to the buses. Whenever I breathed in, I got a good whiff of a pissy, ammonia smell, so I tried to hold out for as long as possible before taking in more air.

In. Out. In. Out. I felt like a woman in labor.

“What’s the best way to get to Ninety-seven Bleecker Street?” I asked the lipsticked black woman on the other side of the glass when it was my turn. She hooked me up with two sets of directions. One for the subway and one for the bus. But when she saw the lost look on my face, she told me my best bet was to take a cab.

I made my way out of the station into the silvery winter daylight. The air felt cold and windy, but nothing compared to the arctic freeze I had survived last night. I had seen enough New York movies that making my way along the sidewalk felt pretty much like I had imagined. Gritty. Massive. Holedo times a thousand. It reminded me of a carnival ride or a movie that ran endlessly. All anyone had to do was take a breath and jump on in, which is exactly what I did.

A pink neon sign flashed
WET! HOT! NASTY
! Another buzzed
LIVE GIRLS
! If I were here for any other reason, I might have walked by those buildings, maybe tried to sneak inside even though I was underage. But I had to keep my mind on my mission.

The money.

My brother.

A taxi zoomed down the street. I waved my hand in the air, but the
driver whizzed on by. Another taxi was right behind. Again I waved, and again the driver blew past me. I stood on the street a moment, wondering what the hell I was doing wrong. Looking lost was a direct invite for a wacko to brush up against me. “Plan A: You give me a quarter,” he said. His breath pure decay. “Plan B: You give me fifty cents.”

I clutched my duffel bag against my chest like I was protecting something precious in there. A baby. A bundle of money. In my head I heard Claude’s warning:
muggers, beggars, murderers…kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room
. I made my way down the sidewalk away from the creep. And when a cab wheeled down the block, I waved both my arms in the air like someone drowning, calling for help.

“They’re full!” another man who looked enough like Claude to be his brother shouted from a slumped position on the sidewalk. “Look for one with the roof light on.”

I couldn’t even hail a cab without a how-to lesson from a bum. I thought about thanking him but heard Claude’s warning again, so I scoped out an available taxi and threw my hand in the air. When the driver actually stopped, I leaped inside and told him to take me to 97 Bleecker Street, Apartment 3B.

“Should I drop you in the living room or the kitchen?” he asked.

I knew he was making a joke, but I didn’t get it. I was too busy rationing breaths again, since the cab smelled worse than the bus station. In. Hold. Out. Hold. Repeat. “Huh?” I managed on an exhale.

“I don’t need the apartment,” he said in a tongue-clucking accent. “Just the building number or the cross street.”

Taxi lesson number two. “Oh,” I said, cranking the window open to make breathing a bit easier, only to find exhaust blowing back at me. “Sorry.”

As we drove downtown, the tall steel buildings and straight-arrow streets slowly vanished. Before I knew it, we were bumping along a crooked road lined with trees and brick houses only five or six stories tall. It was a part of the city I had never seen in movies, like something straight out of a storybook, one of Edie’s fairy tales.

The driver stopped in front of 97. I gave him five bucks and hopped out. My uncle’s building was a wide, brick-faced job with only six floors and dead ivy vines stretching across its face. I couldn’t bring myself to buzz right away, so I stood there a moment looking up and down the block. Not far down the street a playground was deserted, probably too cold out for little kids. One of the swings—left twisted and tangled into a noose by some long-gone brat—moved back and forth in the wind. A man with a braid walked the perimeter of the park, a bouncy white poodle on his leash. I watched his ropy knot of hair drum against his back as he moved. I watched his dog press its gummy nose to the ground.

When I gazed up at the building again, I thought about my uncle and brother inside, living their lives. Making lunch. Watching television. Reading books. Whatever an abandoned brother and a kooky uncle do on a cold Saturday afternoon in January.

“It’s just one little visit,” I said out loud, trying to unjumble my insides, to stop the somersaulting feeling. I unfolded the address one final time and checked the apartment number. Before I lifted my finger to the buzzer, I thought about turning around, getting back on the bus to Holedo. But what was waiting for me there?

My sad, angry mother who thought my father had ripped her off.

Edie, who had fucked me over.

I couldn’t go back now. And it seemed too late anyway.

My hand was reaching up.

My finger was pressing the button.

My shoulders were tightening against the cold as I waited for Uncle Donald’s thick voice to answer. Or Truman’s.

“Who is it?” a woman asked instead.

So my uncle had a girlfriend after all. The sound of her singsong voice made me feel better. Maybe she would take a liking to me and help Donald understand my need for the money. Maybe she would understand how nervous I was about meeting Truman. “I’m looking for Donald Biadogiano,” I told her, trying my best to sound calm, mature. “I’m his nephew, Dominick.”

The intercom went shhhhhhh, then chirped. “Dominick?” She said my name like a question. Obviously my uncle had never mentioned his dear old nephew from Massachusetts before. “Sorry. Donald’s not at home.”

“Will he be back soon?” I asked, praying for a yes. What had I been thinking? Just because he answered the phone at the crack of dawn did not mean he would be here in the middle of the day.

“I don’t know when he’ll be home. Try back later.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Yes?”

I took a deep breath. My throat tightened. “Is Truman here?”

This is it,
a voice said.
You are going to find out about your brother.

Shhhhh. Chirp. “Truman?” the woman said after what felt like forever. “Truman who?”

I had never really thought about my brother’s last name before. It certainly wasn’t Pindle. But did he use Biadogiano? Or the last name of the man in the photo beneath my mother’s bed? “I don’t know his last name exactly, but he lives here with Donald.”

“Donald lives alone,” the woman said. “And that’s more information than I should be giving out over the intercom. Like I said, you’ll have to stop back later.”

The speaker went lifeless, and I stood on the street staring at the playground. The man and his poodle were gone. The noose was swaying in the breeze. The New York sky was the same dismal gray as the feathers of the pigeons on the sidewalk. A shitload of wet winter snow was bound to drop sometime soon. The thought of wandering the streets, waiting, hoping for Donald to show, made me lay my finger on the buzzer again.

“Who is it?” the woman asked as if she really expected it to be someone else.

This time her singsong had a little less song to it. The wishful image of her as my accomplice went splat in my brain. “Me again. Listen. I came all the way from Massachusetts to see my uncle. Can you at least let me up so I can leave him a note?”

A long pause that I took as a no. Then the door buzzed. Before she could change her mind, I pushed myself into the cramped lobby. The place had the flat, chalky smell of chemicals. Rife with powdery poison, like our apartment back in Holedo after the exterminator sprayed for roaches and set traps for mice and rats. For the third time that day I found myself rationing breaths. I was becoming an expert at barely breathing. I treaded up the ancient wooden staircase in the winter work boots my mother had given me Christmas morning. I hadn’t worn them before today, and they were heavier than my sneakers, heavier than Edie’s black shoes. I hated all that weight on my feet. It made walking work, especially upstairs.

Before I could knock, the woman called from inside the apartment, “Leave your message on the landing and I’ll get it later.”

She had an Irish accent, a squeaky leprechaun sort of deal that I had thought was merely singsonginess through the intercom. I wondered if my uncle had met her on one of his trips overseas.

“I don’t have a pen and paper,” I told her. “Besides, I’m his nephew. Can’t I at least come inside? Who are you anyway?”

“I clean for Mr. B,” she said.

The friggin’ cleaning lady. No wonder she didn’t know anything about me or my brother. “Well, I’m sure Mr. B told you to expect me,” I said.

“He told me nothing.”

Plan A: You open the fucking door. Plan B: I trick you into opening it. “Could you slide a piece of paper and a pen under the door?” I asked, staring down at the fluffy hallway carpet, flush against the door. I knew it would never fit and she’d have to open up. After that, I wasn’t sure what I had in mind.

My Irish enemy shuffled around on the other side of the door. After a couple of tries she actually managed to slide out a piece of paper, crinkled and torn. Lucky for me, the pen wouldn’t fit. Right on schedule, two locks twisted and clicked. The door creaked open. The woman behind the voice was too tall, with a white, papery face and white hair pulled
back in a kerchief. A ghost with big ears, a ringed neck, and a billboard forehead.

“Thanks for opening up,” I said, trying to put her at ease. “I really appreciate it.”

She smiled—her teeth yellow against the rest of her backdrop—and handed me the pen. She kept guarding the door, though, like I was going to make a break for it. “Sorry I can’t let you inside. But this is New York.”

“I understand,” I told her, still waiting for step two of my plan to come to me.

“I’ll clean while you write,” she said. “Knock when you’re ready.”

Before I could stop her, the door was closed again. I stood in the hallway a moment, clenching the pen and paper. Part of me wanted to slam my fists against the door until she let me in. But I doubted that would work, and not knowing what else to do, I wrote:

Uncle Donald,

Surprise! I’m in the city! But don’t tell my mother. I’ll walk around your neighborhood for a while, then stop back. If you come home, please stay put. I really need to see you. Remember,
please
don’t tell my mother I’m here.

Love, Dominick