Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [21]
“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.
“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”
I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a—”
“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”
Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.
I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.
But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.
By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.
It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.
Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.
Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”
“I know,” I said.
“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.
“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”
I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.
“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking—”
“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.
“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so—” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.
“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.
My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.
Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition—a second nightly beer—and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”
The scandal