Leaving: A Novel (2 page)

He turned the cab off Seventh Street and headed away from the Southern Pacific train yards. “Then they went and built this monster-ugly contraption.” He pointed up toward a freeway overpass. “Who can blame them wealthier folk for leaving, the way things are getting.”

They turned one block north of the freeway. “This here is your street, man, Cranston Avenue—still a nice street. Lots of these blocks were wiped out for the housing project. I know a woman who, to this day, still comes back and stares through the fence to where her house used to be.” The cabby stopped and helped them unload. “They didn’t touch certain streets, but even the ones spared can’t never be the same. Lost that sense of security.”

The cabby left Ruby and Easton staring at the house from the sidewalk, their green trunk in front of them. It was a Victorian, two stories high, with a cellar level below the stairs and a dark red coat of paint, like the Palmers’ barn in Norma. Burgundy lace curtains hung in all the windows, and an American flag stuck out from the side of the black mailbox. Ruby looked down at the address on the paper and then up and down the block. The rest of the houses on the street were just as pretty and brilliant, each one painted its own colorful personality—bright pink, yellow, turquoise.

An older White man dressed in all black with a black hat and long curly black hair streaming down his cheeks nodded to them, then walked up the steps to the house. He ate fleshy purple grapes and spit the seeds out onto the lawn as he opened the door and went inside.

“It looks like your father doesn’t live here anymore,” Easton said.

“Maybe he be de lanlord.”

“Maybe we should go over to the army base.”

“How we gonna get a cab here?”

“You can stay with the trunk and I’ll run to that main street.”

“Maybe dis ain’t de right block.”

The front door opened again and out stepped a thin, middle-aged man with mahogany-brown skin. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a brown derby cap and smoked a pipe.

“May I help you?”

“We jus lookin at your pretty house,” said Ruby. Her heart pounded so fast that she rested her hand on her brother’s shoulder to steady herself.

The man turned and looked up at his home. “Yep. This here’s a GI Bill.”

Easton considered the house carefully, as if he were going to draw it: the front two windows of the second story looked like square eyes facing the street and the bottom bay window like a mouth with the stairs as a tongue hanging out of the left side.

“How come you named your house Bill?” he asked.

“Well that’s a good question. You hear that, Saul?” He turned and looked back into the house. “He asks why I named this house GI Bill.”

“Well,” a voice came from inside, “it’s because the government gives you the house and then they send you a bill for it.” The man with the pipe laughed.

“Well, he is a pretty house, sir,” Ruby said. “Thank you for lettin us look at him.”

“He’s even prettier on the inside,” the man said. “You come take a look.”

Ruby and Easton didn’t move. The man took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his arm.

“Entrez vous, mes enfants,”
he said. He turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door open. “And bring your trunk on in with you. We can’t have your mama’s trunk gettin all left out in the weather.”

CHAPTER 1B

SEPTEMBER 1973

LIDA DIDN’T USE
an alarm clock on the first day of seventh grade. Too loud. She woke up on her own, from a little pocket of fear that kept something alert in her at all times.

“Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,” she whispered, as she did every morning before moving a muscle, then crawled under her sheets and came out at the bottom end. She sat up and saw the new dress that Ruby, her mother, had sewn for her—canary yellow with a white lace collar, lying across the dark green trunk at the foot of her bed. She stayed in her nightgown, folded the dress over her arm, and tiptoed down the hallway. Ruby had already gone to work and Lida crept past her uncle Easton’s door.

“Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,” she prayed silently. There were days when he woke up at the sound of a cough and days he slept through a car crash. The uncertainty kept her perpetually on edge.

So as not to wake him, she had everything she needed in the first-floor bathroom. For weeks now she’d transferred her toiletries downstairs one by one—toothbrush, hairbrush, Vaseline—pretending to have just absentmindedly left them there.

She walked gently down the stairs, pausing after each step. At the bottom of the staircase, she turned to the wooden ball atop the handrail. She bent down and, taking the deep mahogany sphere in both hands as if it were a baby’s head, licked the wood twice, from middle to top. It tasted waxy and bitter, but the more bitter and tormenting, the better. She let out her breath, and although she’d made it downstairs, she held her arms close to her body. She went into the bathroom, closed the door, and washed her face with lavender soap, beginning in a circular motion on her forehead and then moving counterclockwise. She showered only in the evenings, when her mother was home and Easton was out. She finished soaping, then rinsed and looked in the mirror at all the ways her face had failed her: hundreds of little bumps on her stone-black forehead, her nose too wide, her lashes too long. He was right—she was too dark and ugly. She pulled the kerchief off her head and applied a coat of Vaseline to her hair.

When she was done fixing up, Lida poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and ate alone at the dining room table, taking special care to lay out the red cloth place mat so the dish wouldn’t knock loudly against the table. She let the flakes soak in the milk until they were soggy and didn’t crunch; then she ate slowly—listening.

As she chewed, she looked at the sepia photographs on the living room wall: Grandma Elise, whom she’d never met, and Grandpa Corbet, whom she couldn’t remember meeting, in his army uniform, half smiling, half looking at something in the background. He’d died when Lida was only five, and he was young in that picture, so when Lida imagined her father, Ronald, she mostly imagined that picture of Corbet.

She cleared her dish, washed it, and put the place mat back in the drawer; she erased all signs of herself, nothing to make him think of her, nothing to make it her fault if he did.

She took the quarter for the bus off the shiny oak vanity and hopped to the doormat on one socked foot as quietly as possible, though she couldn’t help but make a hollow thudding. This last test was obligatory now that she was nearly out, to prove that she deserved to make it.

Her shoes sat by the front door. She had come to putting them there so she didn’t have to make any more noise upstairs, but she told Ruby it was out of respect for the wooden floors. Ruby liked the idea so much that she insisted everyone do it. But if Lida saw Easton’s hard, scuffed black loafers touching her shoes, she picked hers up and moved them to the other side of the entrance.

It was not yet six-thirty in the morning when she stepped outside. Cranston Avenue was still silent and dark. She walked with her head down, careful to step over the cracks in the sidewalk. Other children came out of their houses now. So loud—slamming their doors, running across the street, calling to each other. The recklessness of it made her heart freeze. She didn’t talk to anyone, and no one talked to her. Except for Marcus LeRoy.

She recognized Marcus from behind by the sky-blue pick in his hair. In elementary school they used to play kickball together on the street. Then he started to come over after school, and sometimes they danced to Easton’s James Brown records in the living room if nobody was home. But over the last summer, Marcus’s father had made him help out at the health food store, so she hadn’t hardly seen him at all.

Marcus sat on the bus bench at San Pablo and turned around to wave to her as she approached. He smiled. He looked different. His shoulders were just starting to fill out and he seemed taller. She hugged her purple notebook to her chest, held the sides of her bare arms, and whispered without moving her lips, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

CHAPTER 1C

FEBRUARY 1993

“FUCK YOUR MAMA!”

Love, Lida’s eldest child, clenched his long fingers into fists; his bony knuckles sharpened, and his manicured nails cut into the palms of his hands. His arms stiffened at the sides of his thin body, and he glared at the White attendant, his eyes squinting and venomous.

The attendant didn’t challenge Love by looking directly back at him, which he feared would just escalate the child’s behavior. Instead, he looked away, at the floor, at the ceiling, out toward the courtyard of the school. But Love had an acute sense of fear; on the streets, fear in others was not only a sign of their inability to defend themselves, it was a sign that they could not control a situation, could not keep
you
safe. It was the same with the attendants here, on the inside, at Los Aspirantes. The fearful attendants were the ones who didn’t keep the other kids from kicking you under the table, from punching you in line, from sneaking into your room with a nail.

Los Aspirantes School for Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children had two blocks of classrooms. The lower block served day-treatment children, those who still lived with their parents, grandparents, aunts, or in foster care but had been kicked out of the public schools, or assessed under AB 3632 as needing more intensive mental health provisions. The upper block schooled kids from the residential program, the group homes, each of which housed six children, staffed 24-7 in three shifts. Some of these kids had been removed from their homes under the Child Welfare Protection Act, then failed in their foster placement due to violent or destructive behavior. Others had been released to Los Aspirantes after serving time in Juvi and had become 601s, criminal wards of the court. In cases like Love’s, they were released from Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital after a 5150, a forty-eight-hour hold for being a danger to self or others, then placed in the group home with the agreement of their legal guardians. For Love, this was his grandmother, Ruby.

“Take your time-out in the quiet-room to refocus, Love.” The attendant pointed out the back door to a small carpeted room, a padded cell with a rope attached to the outside door handle. Each upper-block classroom had a quiet-room outside to contain the children when they blew up.

“Fuck you, dog! You better stand back!” Love walked into the courtyard and the attendant followed closely. At thirteen, Love was tall enough to reach up and smack the top of the door frame. He kicked the plastic chair in front of the guinea-pig cage, stopped, and turned back.

“Take your time-out in the quiet-room, Love.” They stood facing each other, the boy rigid, his jaw clenched and bulging below his high, sculptured cheekbones. The attendant continued to look away; he pointed to the corner of the darkened cell where he expected Love to walk.

Love swung, twisting his body from his hips. His fist struck the left lens of the man’s glasses, cutting his cheek in a semicircle and breaking the bridge of his nose. The glasses skidded across the courtyard, and the attendant covered his face with both hands.

Love ran back into the classroom. Tom, a tall Irish man with a shaved head, grabbed him in the doorway. Love hit him in the forehead, but Tom looked straight at Love and caught the boy’s flailing arms. He held his wrist and reeled him in, turned him around, and bear-hugged him from behind. He wrapped Love’s arms across his chest, locking one elbow under the other like a straitjacket, then turned to his side and pushed the boy into the quiet-room with his hip and held him face forward in the corner.

When Tom was sure that Love was completely immobilized, his arms trapped between his own body and the wall, he let go of the boy’s wrists and pushed with one hand on the center of his back. With the other hand, Tom reached down and picked up the tail end of the rope to the door, then ran out of the room, pulling the door behind him. Love had only enough time to turn and yell before the door shut flush with the inside wall.

“White-Ass Nigger Mother Fucker!” He kicked the handleless door. “Bitch, Mother Fucker, Faggot-Ass Bitch. I’ll cap your fucking punk ass.” He kicked the door again. He couldn’t do damage from inside the quiet-room, yet he struck out even more recklessly, hitting all the walls in a helicopter-like torrent. “Fuck your mother, dog! I’ll bust her face and stuff her in a garbage can.” He punched the small, square, reinforced-plastic window in the upper center of the door. “Your mama sucks dick for a baggy. Your mama’s a crack-ho fiend!”

He walked to the back wall and kicked it with his red Air Jordan sneakers, a Christmas present from the residential house manager. He hit the wall again, listlessly this time, his fingers in a loose fist, half grazing the carpet. He then walked to the far corner where he had been instructed to stand.

“I’m taking my t-i-m-e-o-u-t.” He spelled “time-out,” as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the word. He stood unmoving, arms at his sides, his face five inches from the wall. There was no response from Tom, and he didn’t expect any. Love stayed that way, frozen, for three minutes.

As he waited, he watched a line of ants crawl up to the ceiling. He chose one black ant and blew on it with a quick, solid burst. The ant changed direction and ran back toward the bottom of the wall, antennae flapping in panic. He blew at it again and let it run for a while. With each blow, the ant changed direction, frantically running from the invisible force attacking him.

There was no real time inside the quiet-room, only one long extended series of moments. A minute never ended or began until the attendant on the outside said that it did, so there was no way to measure how close or far you were from getting out, and this complete lack of control and the sense that you’d been forgotten was what tested you the most, more than being trapped inside. He’d swear it had been an hour, that the veins in his neck were about to burst from frustration, that he couldn’t stop himself from yelling even if it meant getting more time in the room; only the ants moving in their determined trails kept him distracted enough to stay calm.