Leaving: A Novel (21 page)

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THE NEXT DAY,
Love rode the train from Oakland to the San Leandro BART station, then walked the rest of the way up into the hills to Los Aspirantes. Once they took him back, he’d get them to take Li’l Pit since he couldn’t stay at Cranston alone. They had said that they cared about him—Tom had said it out loud—and they would be able to tell he was in trouble, out of school during the day, on his own.

He crossed the bridge over the freeway and walked slowly up the incline of the suburban street. He knew these homes and lawns well, these cars and mailboxes and porches, from driving past them to school every morning from the residential house, from taking walks with Tom to get a Slurpee on special outings. There was a peacefulness about knowing a place well, even if you hated it—no surprises: the steep driveway to the school, the chain-link fence around the playground, the long rectangular buildings of the upper and lower blocks.

When he reached the top of the driveway, he stopped and looked at the administrative bungalow with vines of jasmine creeping up its sides. The front door was open, and he knew Krista would be sitting behind the front desk, her jar of lollipops and candy always open. It occurred to him for the first time that he might not be allowed to leave once they saw him. Krista would recognize him and from there, even if he ran away, they would contact Ruby to find him. Had it really been all that bad at Cranston, bad enough to go back to all the rules and restraints, not being allowed to yell fuck you without having to take a time-out, not being allowed to wear a Raiders hat, not being allowed to listen to Public Enemy? All those times he’d been wrestled to the ground and tossed in the quiet-room for throwing a bowl on the floor. Watched all the time, not able to leave on his own, to have to go to therapy, to have to go to school and sit through those boring classes, to have to go to sleep and wake up when they told you. Was it really worth it?

He could hear the kids playing kickball in the yard: no pushing or cutting, no cursing or hitting. They screamed and clapped for Nita, a girl he knew vaguely from another class. Love walked slowly to the front door and stood by Krista’s desk. She was on the phone, but her face lit up when she saw him. He smiled back. She was the most cheerful person in the whole school, if not the whole world, and for on-campus rewards, kids would always ask to go visit her and get candy. She hung up the phone and shook her head.

“Ronald Love LeRoy, what took you so long to come see us?”

Love looked down and smiled.

“How you doing? How’s it going at home? You want me to call up to Room 7 and see if they can have a visitor?”

“Naw.” Love shook his head.

“Well, have a seat then. You want some candy?”

Love took a piece of butterscotch and sat down on one of the chairs in the waiting area. He unwrapped his candy and pushed it into his cheek with his tongue.

“Who you here to see?” Krista asked.

“I just thought I’d come by.”

The phone rang and she pressed a button. “Hold on, honey.”

While she spoke on the phone, Love stood up and peered around the cubicle to see if someone in charge was around to talk to. A few of the counselors were waiting around to drive the afternoon buses, but he didn’t see anyone he trusted.

When he came back to Krista’s desk, she was writing a note that she stuck to the stapler.

“So you just came by to see me, huh?”

“Is Tom around?” he asked. Sometimes Tom worked in Room 7 and sometimes he stayed at the house, so there was a chance he’d be at the campus.

“Tom?” Krista shook her head and took a piece of candy for herself. “Tom Riley? I don’t think he’s here anymore, Love. You want to talk to him?”

“That’s okay. I’ll stop by the house.”

“No, I mean I don’t think he works here anymore is what I mean. I think he quit.” Love stood frozen, a stream of cold rushed down the inside of his chest to his stomach. She must have seen it in his eyes, for the smile on her face faded and she picked up the phone.

“Let me just call Lonnie and check.” Lonnie was the head of the day-treatment program.

“It’s Krista,” she said into the receiver. “You know if Tom Riley still works with us? I know. That’s what I thought.” She shook her head to Love. “Lonnie, you remember Love LeRoy. Actually, he’s right here at my desk. By himself.” She held the phone to her shoulder. “Is there something we can pass on to Tom for you?”

“Naw.” Love shook his head. “I was just going to see if I could come back.”

Lonnie must have heard, because all Krista said was “Okay” and then hung up the phone.

“Lonnie is on his way down.”

Lonnie was a nice enough man, Jewish with a messy beard. He was short but willing and able to put you in restraint if he had to. He’d had to only once with Love, for kicking a wall repeatedly, but Love didn’t hold that against him because no one at Los Aspirantes held it against you for getting restrained. It was as normal as going to the bathroom.

“Love,” Lonnie said as he came around the corner. He nodded to him. Lonnie was a no-nonsense guy: he didn’t ever cave in, and he wasn’t afraid of you; he always gave it to you straight. “You want to take a walk?”

Love nodded and they went back into the parking lot and strolled down the long driveway. Love looked at the ground the whole time, crunching the eucalyptus leaves and pods under his feet.

“So you want to come back?”

Love nodded.

“Why’s that?”

Love shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to say, but it didn’t seem that easy to explain. He hoped Lonnie might ask him the right question to get him to figure out how to say what it was.

“Well, we don’t have a place for you right now,” Lonnie said. “And even if we did, we’d have to know the reason you want to come back. Things not working out with your grandmother?”

Love shrugged again. It wasn’t that his grandmother was doing anything wrong, and he couldn’t tell Lonnie he was running for the crew or it might also be used against him to be put in Juvi, which was far worse than Los Aspirantes or the street.

“You know, Tom left after you did. He’s doing something new now, too. But if you want, I could give him a message. He may call you. I can’t promise he would, but he might.”

“Naw.”

“Just because he left, Love, doesn’t mean he forgot about you, you know.”

“I know.” Love spat on the curb. Lonnie didn’t tell him to take a time-out, and he realized that he almost wished he had.

“Things just aren’t going the way I planned,” Love said. “That’s all.”

“You in any danger?”

“Not really.”

“Not really danger, or not really bad danger?”

Love shrugged again. If he said he was in danger, then Ruby might get in trouble.

“Can’t you just let me stay in the living room at my old house?”

Lonnie laughed. “I wish it were that easy. But it’s not. I could have someone come out there, though, and talk to your grandmother, and they might be able to place you somewhere for older kids.”

“You mean here.”

“Like here, but not here. But I have to tell you that it’s a long process and it might take a while, unless there is something immediately dangerous going on.” Lonnie looked at Love through his glasses, one eyebrow raised.

“Naw. It ain’t nothin I can’t handle.”

Lonnie nodded for a while, then said: “Let me just tell you, Love, that a lot of kids who leave come back here to ask the same thing, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But you should know that there’s going to be a period of readjustment that everyone goes through.”

“Yeah. I know.”

They’d walked all the way back down to the freeway overpass, and Lonnie stopped at the corner.

“I can call someone to come out there, but you’ll have to tell me more specifically what’s wrong.”

There were so many cars going by below that Love couldn’t hear himself think. He felt an urge to run to the railing and jump over right in front of Lonnie, just to show him how serious it was. But then Li’l Pit would be stuck on his own with the crew, and that was exactly what Love wanted to avoid.

“I’ll just give it some more time,” Love said.

“All right.” Lonnie held out his hand and Love shook it. “It takes guts to come back here,” Lonnie said. “I know that. I’ve always known you were a strong kid, and I mean inside. If it gets rough, you can always come back and talk, okay?”

Love nodded, watching the cars whiz by below. Lonnie patted him on the shoulder, then turned around and walked back up the hill.

SANTA RITA JAIL

TODAY I READ
from the
Mississippi Law of 1865,
Chapter 1, Section 3:

All freedmen, free Negroes, or mulattoes who do now and have herebefore lived and cohabitated together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes; that it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and on conviction thereof shall be confined in the State penitentiary for life.…

CHAPTER 11

NOVEMBER 1963   •   CORBET 54, RUBY 25, SANDRA 18, EASTON 17, LIDA 3

BY THE FALL,
Sandra had become a regular at Corbet’s home. She helped pass out candy on Halloween, and when Kennedy was shot, she immediately drove over and spent the afternoon with the family. They ate dinner, listened to the radio and watched TV at the same time.

Easton reached in and pinched the last grain of rice from his bowl between his thumb and forefinger. He rolled it back and forth, felt the sticky softness of it, then squished it flat and looked at its pure whiteness on his thumb. He scraped it off with his bottom teeth and swallowed it.

“Maybe it’s a hoax,” he said. Everyone else had retired to the living room. No one responded. Sandra stood by the stereo where she had been from the moment she’d turned it on, her head resting against the side of the bookshelf and tears still in her eyes.

Ruby stood up from the couch and shut off the TV. She shook her head and let out a heavy breath, but she didn’t cry. “If they can kill the president, then Lord only knows what they can do,” she said.

Corbet sat in his chair next to his crutches, his head bowed. He didn’t have anything to drink, and he wasn’t smoking. His hands were in his lap, one folded under the other.

“Every president that gets up for the colored folk gets shot down,” he said.

“You think it’s racial?” Sandra asked, lifting her head for the first time.

“Everything is racial,” Easton said. He looked at her sharply, and they locked eyes for a moment. She looked away and rested her head on the shelf again.

“Nothing is strictly racial,” Corbet said. “It’s all about power and fear. It’s like in the war, we’re all dug into our little trenches shooting at everybody we can’t even see. Takes a kind of blindness to hurt someone.”

Lida bent down and picked up a rubber band off the floor. She toddled toward Easton with her gift outstretched. Ruby saw her and quickly came up from behind, lifting her around the waist before she could bother him.

“I have to call my father,” Sandra said.

“Use our phone here.” Corbet pointed to the phone on the table. Though she’d been coming over to their house for months, she’d never used their phone.

“He lives in Oregon,” she said.

“Sure. We know.” Corbet smiled at her. She shook her head, but everyone encouraged her and she surrendered.

“I’ll pay you back for it.”

“You don’t have to do that. Call your papa, and then Ruby here is going to call her mama. And let me say hello to her myself.”

While Sandra used the phone, Ruby carried Lida outside onto the front stoop. She stood on the porch like she used to do in Norma when Ronald came calling. She could still imagine the dusty steps and the sunlit dirt road, though it had been almost four years since she’d seen them.

“She yours too, Ronal,” she had said to him when she found out she was pregnant. Ronald had large stains of sweat under his arms and in the center of his chest. He had walked two miles in his slacks and shirt sleeves from the West River office of the
Tri-County Free Press,
where he was working as a reporter on the pesticide story.

He did not walk up to the porch, but stopped at the bottom and placed one polished shoe on the first step. She sat on the fir chair that her grandmother had made, the wood creaking as it accepted her full body.

“You don’t wanna chile wid me, Ronal?”

He wiped the sweat from his gray-black face and closed his long eyelashes so they met like the tips of contemplative fingers.

“You know my plans, Ruby. What am I going to do with a baby at college?”

“She yours and mine together.”

“You have always known that I’ve planned to attend Howard. Why don’t you resolve this like last time?”

Ruby looked away from him out across the dirt road to the field, stripped now from too many harvests of cotton. Beyond that, the green fir trees blew gently to the west like giant ancestors bowing and nodding. She was always faintly aware of the steady rush of the river far back in the woods.

“You wanna come in for some ice water?” she asked him.

He looked up the dirt road. “I ought to get back for press. The union is threatening to shut us down. Where is your mother?”

“In town.”

He climbed up two more steps. “Where is Easton?”

“In town.” The breeze stopped, and the thick heat held them in their places.

“You’re going to fix it?” he asked.

“Ice water? It ain’t no trouble.”

“Come on, Ruby. Not the water.”

She rubbed the spot on her rough muslin dress where she’d spilled tuna oil. All the other dresses she’d made went to be sold in town. This was the first one she’d gotten to keep, because of the stain.

“You still want to come in?” she asked.

“I guess now is the safest time there is, anyway,” he said. He started up the stairs again to the door. She blocked the entrance and took his hand.