Lucretia and the Kroons (5 page)

But for all this, somehow, the worst part of this was that the woman wouldn’t even turn her head and look into Loochie’s window. She just kept staring down at the street, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to stoop in front of a stranger’s fourth-floor kitchen window. It was this, the calm of the woman, that unnerved Loochie. The fear was like an itch, running up her scalp. What to do? What to do?

“My mother’s in the other room!” Loochie finally shouted through the grille.

The woman didn’t move. She stood in profile, only inches from the window, and the longer she stayed there, immobile, impassive, the more Loochie wanted to reach out and push her off the fire escape. Better she fall to the ground and break her back than just keep squatting there scaring the life out of Loochie.

“And my brother is here,” Loochie added, less forcefully.

Loochie had been watching the woman long enough to see the faint rise and fall of the woman’s head as she breathed. Loochie went quiet again and now she could hear the woman breathing, too, even through the gate and the closed window. It was a strained sound. Like Sunny’s breathing had been earlier. But there was something more to it. It was wet, like gurgling, each time the woman exhaled. When Loochie had a cold and her nose was clogged up and she had to breath through her mouth she sounded like that. So maybe the woman was just sick. Maybe she needed help. Not that Loochie was about to open the gate and start offering assistance. She was twelve but she wasn’t a dummy. Still, the thought that she might just be a sick woman made Loochie feel a little less scared of her. Loochie hadn’t realized she had one hand balled into a tight fist until she looked down at it. She relaxed it.

Then she heard the rattling sound again. It kept on for ten seconds. Wood moving and glass shaking. Then a little squeak. And that’s when Loochie finally understood what was happening. The kitchen window was rising.

The woman was
opening
Loochie’s window.

These old buildings weren’t always in the best shape. After decades many of their windows were loose in their frames. Loochie had seen Louis slip back into the apartment this way more than once when she was young. His hands putting pressure on the edges of the glass, then just jiggling the window until it began to lift. It was one of the main reasons buildings like this needed security gates. But even the security gate didn’t make Loochie feel very safe right now. If this woman could so blatantly climb to her window, then pull the window up, who knew what else she could do? Maybe even the security gate wouldn’t be much of a hurdle. Loochie would be defenseless.

Loochie heard the window squeaking as it moved up an inch, two inches. But then it stopped. Now there was another sound. The woman out there grunted. A moment later Loochie thought she saw a mouse pop out from the bottom of the security gate. She hopped back and gasped. She almost peed herself. But it wasn’t a mouse. It was worse than that. Something was
wiggling right between one of the gaps in the gate.

One long pointer finger poked its way into the kitchen.

Loochie hissed at it as if it were a rat. She stood straight and stiffened. The long finger, as cadaverously gray as the woman’s face, wriggled and poked as if it were clearing a clog in a drain. Loochie couldn’t understand what the woman had planned. She couldn’t squeeze her whole body through that hole, could she? This couldn’t really be happening! But then Louis’s voice played in her ears, an unwelcome bit of wisdom.
Being young doesn’t protect you. Horrors come for kids, too
.

Loochie didn’t waste time. She could grab a knife from the drawer by the kitchen sink. She could try to chop off this woman’s finger if she kept sticking it through. If that didn’t work she could lock herself in the bathroom and call her mother. Then the police. Then the army. Loochie was so busy forming a plan that she didn’t pay attention to the security gate. So it took a moment before she realized the finger had disappeared, pulled back out, and now something blue was being stuffed through one of the small gaps in the gate’s grillwork.

It was a blue knit cap.

Sunny’s
blue knit cap.

Sunny’s cap, with the blue pompoms. The whole thing was crammed through the small space. Finally it fell to the kitchen floor with a faint plop. Loochie stared at it. It almost felt like she was staring at one of Sunny’s organs, lying on the floor.

My friend
, Loochie thought.
What did you do to my friend?

Forget fear, Loochie couldn’t control herself. She shook the gate with rage. But she lost her voice when she looked through the grillwork again. The woman had turned her head to look directly into the window. The woman locked eyes with Loochie.

Now that she had Loochie’s attention the woman scooched backward on the fire escape. Loochie could see her more clearly, from shoulders up. Loochie now understood why the woman’s breathing had sounded so strained, so strange. The woman’s lower jaw was missing. She had a scalp and a forehead, two ears, two eyes, a nose and cheeks, an upper lip, and her top
row of teeth. But the bottom of her face was
gone
. No lower jaw. No tongue. As if all that had just rotted off. Loochie felt the urge to vomit again. Her own mouth hurt suddenly. It was because Loochie was clenching her jaw tightly with disgust.

The woman stayed still on the fire escape, watching Loochie intently. Each time she exhaled her throat pulsed and a faint wave of spit spilled from the gap between her neck and the roof of her mouth. The spit splattered down onto the dingy floral white nightdress she wore. The fabric on her chest showed so many spots that had been wet and dried. It looked like this woman had been wearing those clothes for decades. Since the eighties, maybe.

“Kroons,” Loochie said quietly.

Now Loochie even tasted the vomit in her mouth, her nasal passage burned, too, but she swallowed the vomit back down. Which was disgusting. The woman out there didn’t shift her gaze and Loochie felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. Was there a challenge or a threat in the stare?

But there was the cap on the floor. Don’t forget Sunny’s cap. Her friend’s cap.

Her friend. Her friend. Her friend.

“Where’s Sunny?” Loochie said, her face pressed up to the security gate. She wished she didn’t sound so scared.

The woman raised her hand, pointing up.

Loochie knew what this meant: “6-D,” she whispered.

With that the woman stood. Loochie could see even more of her. The nightdress came down to the woman’s knees. It looked so old that it was a wonder it had remained intact. As ragged as a mummy’s wrappings. She wore cheap, very worn flip-flops.

The woman, the
Kroon
, walked up the fire escape stairs slowly. Her slippers clapped against the bottoms of her feet as she climbed up to the fifth-floor landing. In a few moments Loochie couldn’t see her anymore. Loochie listened to the sound of the slippers as the woman kept climbing, back up to the sixth floor. Loochie didn’t move, couldn’t move, until the sound of the slippers was gone.

Finally she pulled the blue cap off the floor. She cradled it as if it were Sunny’s head. But Loochie didn’t waste much time with that. She set the cap down on the kitchen table gently. Louis said nobody ever left 6D, but she wasn’t going to give up on Sunny just like that. She had to at least try to save her best friend.

Loochie unlatched the security gate and rolled it back. She opened the window and climbed out. She didn’t even notice that she’d left Sunny’s piece of still half-frozen cake—the Carvel Flying Saucer—sitting out on a plate. She was outside, on the fire escape again, moving so quickly that she didn’t even realize she still had on her mother’s wig until she was on the fifth floor and happened to see herself reflected in the kitchen window of Sunny’s apartment. She saw herself and almost gasped. She looked crazy, but she didn’t care. Then she realized that the security gate had been opened and she could see inside. Sunny’s grandmother sat in the kitchen. In the seat Sunny had been using not even an hour before.

Sunny’s grandmother had no other name that Loochie was aware of. She was, simply, “Sunny’s grandmother.” That’s how Loochie addressed the woman whenever they met on the elevator or walking down Colden Street. And Sunny’s grandmother seemed to recognize Loochie about half the time, maybe a little less. It was hard to say because the woman only ever seemed to wear one expression. The same expression whether morning or night, cloudy or sunny days. Sunny’s grandmother always looked as though she was about to spit.

The old woman’s mouth was always closed, lips pursed tight, a slight frown always on her lips, as if she had considered any and all things known to the world and found every single one of them wanting. She was a small woman with wide shoulders and an even wider back, though her legs were short and fantastically skinny. Was there any other way to say this? The woman looked very much, in her face and her figure, like a toad. And to Loochie she seemed as unknowable.

Loochie saw this woman now, sitting in the kitchen, in the chair right by the window—in Sunny’s chair—but the old woman hadn’t noticed her. This was because Sunny’s grandmother was bent forward, her small, wide hands on her knees, and she was crying.

At least she seemed to be crying. The posture was correct. Sunny’s grandmother leaned so far forward that her head almost touched her thighs. Her head trembled and her shoulders
shook. It was worse than crying. It was like the old woman’s body was breaking down. Loochie didn’t see any tears, but the old woman’s whole face sagged with grief. The old woman sat alone, in a chair that was still warm, and she was coming close to shattering.

This, just as much as the evidence of the blue knit cap, was how Loochie truly came to believe that Sunny had been snatched by the Kroons. Maybe Sunny’s grandmother had heard, and believed, the same rule as Louis: Nobody leaves 6D. Maybe Loochie was seeing the old woman giving up all hope. Her granddaughter was gone. Loochie wanted to tap the glass now and explain. Sunny wasn’t lost. Not yet.

But such a thing would be impossible to explain. For starters, Sunny’s grandmother didn’t speak English and Loochie couldn’t speak Cantonese. The only solution to the grandmother’s grief would be to bring her granddaughter back safe. And that’s exactly what Loochie Gardner planned to do. She climbed again.

As she scurried from the fifth floor to the sixth she figured her first problem would be how to get the kitchen window of 6D open from the outside. But if the Kroon could do it to her then she could return the favor. No problem. As Loochie reached the sixth floor she felt fired up. She felt sure. So she wasn’t prepared to find 6D’s window already open.

And one of the Kroons standing right inside.

It was a man. He grunted, almost seemed to bark like an angry dog as soon as Loochie appeared before him. She saw him in silhouette as the sunlight filtered into the apartment. He was thin and tall and his head had a funny shape. The top left side of his head seemed to be
missing
. But a second later she realized it was just caved in.

 … and half his skull was just gone. It was like a pit …

He was standing there, as if he’d been looking out at the neighborhood and she happened to stumble into his view. Her shock acted like a spray of cold water on her. She shivered and froze, but the man in the window didn’t.

The man grabbed the front of her sweater.

The man pulled her inside.

Her shins scraped the windowsill, but she was too shocked to feel the pain.

She was inside and he held her up with two hands and she didn’t know what to do.

His hands were under her armpits. She weighed seventy-three pounds but he held her up like she was a puppy. Before she could do anything he yanked at her sneakers. Her pulled off the right one, then the left. The sneakers thumped on the floor. He held her up with one hand now and the other hand dug into her back pockets. He grabbed her belt buckle and tugged at it. Then her belt came off. He dropped it to the floor, too. What was he going to do to her?

A new fear, a deeper fear, thundered in her belly, her thighs, and she whipped her body like a feral cat. She hissed and she spat and finally the man seemed to be having trouble keeping hold of her. She bucked and swung her arms wildly and finally broke free from the man’s grip. She dropped to the dirty floor just like her sneakers and belt.

She scrambled backward in the kitchen. The floor was filthy. Bits of paper—newspaper, torn envelopes, old tissue and toilet paper—and bottle caps, old soda cans, straws and candy wrappers, dirt and the husks of dead roaches, crumbly opaque roach eggs. The room smelled terrible, like the parts of Flushing Meadows Park where boys pissed when they couldn’t bother to use a bathroom. A smell that made her nose sting. Her palms felt bitten when they came down against the ridges of bottle caps. Soda cans rattled as her flailing legs kicked them away. She looked up at the man who’d pulled her in.

For the first time in her life Loochie thought she might faint. The feeling was so new to her that she didn’t even understand what was happening. Her head felt like it was filled with bees. Her chest, her lungs, were getting tighter. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. To see this man, this thing, above her. It wasn’t even like the one she’d seen through the security gate in the kitchen. At least then there’d been a window, a gate, between them. Now they were both in the same room. Nothing between her and him. Between her and Pit. He’d tried to get Louis in a stairwell two decades earlier and now here he was, coming for her. Nothing could deter him.

But then he stopped for a moment, as if the thought of catching Loochie had been interrupted by another, more powerful, urge. He stood still and scanned the ground, like he was
looking for something he’d dropped and for a moment it was as if Loochie wasn’t even there. Then the impulse seemed to pass and he looked up, focused on Loochie again. Coming for her again.

But he wasn’t the only one.

Pit lumbered toward her, moving across the bombed-out kitchen, and then Loochie heard a second round of grunting and another figure rushed out of the room to her right, the one that corresponded to her mother’s bedroom. It barreled out and smashed right into Pit, sending both to the floor. It was another male. The pair yelped and growled at each other, as if they’d lost the power of human speech long ago.