New to Tricks and Stones? Start from the beginning!
The neighborhood isn’t familiar. I pick a direction and start walking in search of the nearest bus stop. Kids are running around with backpacks. I can’t believe that summer has slipped away so fast. A teenage girl, around my age, chubby cheeks with freckles, sits down beside me and pulls a sparkly pink notebook out of her backpack. She places it on her lap, yanks a pen, also pink, out of her ponytail, and starts scribbling fiercely. I glance over at her page, slowly but surely filling up with indecipherable pinkness. She looks up at me, then back down at her notebook, and begins shielding it with her right arm.
The weather is perfect. Crisp and fairly clean this early in the morning, until the buses triple up on routes and the commuters start making their way to jobs they hate, or jobs they love, but that they’ll never get ahead in. Life is, indeed, a depressing scene almost everywhere you look around this city; more homeless people making beds under park benches or busy overpasses, more kids diving into drugs than books, more cars than flowers, more cold than warmth. What did Lucy ever see in this place? I longed at that moment to be sprawled out in a field of wild flowers, breathing in fresh blue skies and rays of sunshine instead of the heavy fumes from the buses and the heavy cologne of businessmen who didn’t know that less was more.
I’m falling out of love with this place, falling out of love with humanity, with myself.
When I meet up with Juney for lunch at Mrs. Lee’s, I think, out of spite, about spilling Rex’s secret. I think about telling her what had happened, and telling her what he had said, then take a long, reflective trip down memory lane in search of any signs of homosexuality that we’d obviously missed; the flick of a wrist or a wandering eye on some guy’s package, but I’m too upset to vent. I’m too confused to be angry or vengeful. So I sit next to her and sip my tea in silence.
A few weeks pass. I waited for Rex at Navy Pier both Tuesdays, the other days I waited for calls from Gil that never came. I’m hoping that he’s gone and snagged a European mail-order bride, or that he’s slipped and fallen in the bath tub, but it isn’t until later during the week that I find out it was neither.
We are all sitting at the kitchen table one morning when Boss swoops in, angrier than usual, ready to explode.
“You tricks cain’t do shit right,” he says, popping his knuckles, pacing around the table. His Gators click loudly against the hardwood floors. I try to avoid eye contact, but I can’t help but stare. He has such a fascinating eye color that I’ve never seen on a black man before. They are an olive green shade—ridiculously gorgeous and terribly intimidating.
Kitty tries to explain. “It’s not her fault—”
“Shut up, bitch!” he yells. “I’m getting sick a hearin’ yo mouth. You fucked it all up, bottom line.”
Boss slams a photo down on the dining room table. Everyone jumps in their seats. Poppy looks like she is about to pee her pants.
We all look down at the photo.
Tam reaches across the table and picks it up. She stares at it, then up at me. “Elena?”
My heart skips a beat.
Tam slides the photo down to Juney, who looks at it and passes it down to me.
Boss stands erect. “Somebody’s lookin’ for you, bitch. You ain’t ‘bout to fuck up my business. Stitch, Candy,” Boss pops his neck, “go pack ya shit, y’all comin’ wit’ me.”
“Wait, what?” Kitty contests.
Boss backhands Kitty across the jaw. “I told you,” he grunts. He shoves his hands into his suit pockets. “See, I’m a nice guy, but you—Kitty, you just push me. That’s why I ain’t takin’ y’all nowhere. Y’all young hoes, don’t know shit, and you, yo old ass think you know everything.”
Candy and Stitch quietly get up from the table. They run upstairs to pack their bags.
I hold the picture in my hand. Missing. It’s a blown-up picture from Lucy’s wall, the one from my sixteenth birthday last year. Someone’s looking for me. My eyes scroll down to the number at the bottom of the page. Lucy’s home phone number.
“They’ve been looking for me,” I whisper.
“Who?” Juney asks.
“It don’t matter who!” Boss yells. “All I know is, if my name ends up in anything, ya dead.”
“Where’d you find this?” Tam asks.
“The fuckin’ paper, then uptown at the bar.”
“Do you know who this is, Cookie?” Juney asks.
I nod.
“You gonna call?” Kitty asks.
“No,” I say. “Why would I?”
“If it’s uptown, that means somebody found you,” Tam says. “Somebody saw you, knows you’re here.”
“And if somebody knows you’re here, they’re gonna come get you and take you back,” Juney says.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her.
“Actually,” Boss says, “you all are.”
“Qué quieres decir?”
“I sold the house. You bitches need to be outta here in two weeks.”
“Why?”
“Gil,” he says. “Gil saw this picture when he was in Ohio. He calls me, faxes it to me, and he tells me he called ‘em. Told the people she was here. This ho really pissed him off.” Boss glares at me.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say.
“Yeah, but you about to do something, now,” he says. Boss walks over and picks up the cordless phone. “Call ‘em off.”
“What?”
“You deaf? Call ‘em off. Call ‘em and tell ‘em you’re fine. The last thing I need is the police crawling around here.” He forces the phone into my hand, turns, and yells up the stairs, “Stitch, Candy, hurry the hell up!” Boss turns back to me. “Well don’t just sit there, bitch. Call.”
My hand shakes as I dial the numbers, but slowly, each button is pressed, and my heart aches with each ring.
“Gulliver residence,” Frank, Lucy’s dad answers.
“Mr. Gulliver.”
He pauses. “Ele?”
“Yes.”
“Oh god, Ele. Are you okay, sweetheart? Where are you? Are you—”
“I’m fine, Mr. Gulliver,” I whisper. “I’m fine.”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he says. “It’s so good to hear your voice. We thought for sure you’d show up. At the funeral—”
“I just wanted to tell you I’m okay.”
“Ray’s on his way up there.”
“What?”
“Pearl told him about the call from the man the other day. He just wants to make sure you are okay. He wants to bring you home.”
“I have to go.”
“Ele, please.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Gulliver.”
I hang up.
Half an hour later, Candy and Stitch come downstairs with their suitcases packed and ready to go. We line up in the hallway and say our goodbyes. It’s rushed and impersonal. No one cries. There’s no time. It’s business. We learn that. In this house, you live, you laugh, and then you let go.
Trips to the pawn shops, trading all of the gifts of appreciation in for a down payment, are made multiple times a day. I happily get rid of all of my sparkly reminders of the hell I’d just escaped. Kitty’s knowledge of the city works in our favor, as she’s able to snag another fixer-upper townhouse about five minutes from German Village in no time. Within the first hours of our eviction notice, we are already packing.
The vomiting starts on moving day. That morning while I’m unpacking the dishwasher, my stomach decides to unpack breakfast. I haven’t even started drinking yet. My insides are in a massive knot, like all those watermelon seeds I had swallowed as a child were doing exactly what my mother said they would do. I’m sitting on the floor in the bathroom with a glass of water and pack of Big Red when Poppy walks in. She always knows where to find me.
She comes and sits down on the base of the tub, leans forward, flashing her enormous breast over the top of her tank top, and brushes my hair out of my face with her thin brown fingers. “How much are you?”
“What?” I inhale deeply, trying to calm the churning in my stomach.
“You pregnant, no? How much?”
I laugh and wipe the sweat from my top lip. “I am not pregnant.”
Poppy sighs. “Back home, en Columbia, yo tengo mi hijo, Gustavo.”
The look in her eyes broke my heart. She’s been living with us for over a month now and this is the first I’ve ever heard about a two-year-old son. She lifts a locket from in between her breasts, peels it open, then gazes at it lovingly for a few seconds before showing me. I stare at the tiny photo, into the eyes of a beautiful little boy.
“He’s happy boy,” she says.
“He has your eyes,” I say.
“Eso crees?”
“Sí, he’s gorgeous.”
She nods and tucks the gold trinket back into her bosom. Poppy sits up straight and irons out her blue tank top with her fingers. She looks over at me and smiles, “Su bebé también. And so will yours be.”
Poppy leaves me alone in the bathroom that day, but her words are etched in the back of my mind for good. I can’t be pregnant. I use the pills that Hoss bought for me. I pee right after, an urban legend, but I do it because Kitty told me to. I hadn’t been with Gil in weeks, so I ignore Poppy and try to go on with my normal routines, but the feelings resurface after my first skipped period and the idea is inevitable a few weeks later when putting on my bra makes me flinch with pain. I came down to the kitchen in tears one Saturday morning, Poppy is more than happy to walk to the corner store with me. She picks out the box, she pays for the box, and she holds my hand on the way home. She does everything but pee on the stick.
But there it is—clear, blue, easy—I’m pregnant.
While Poppy gathers the girls downstairs in the living room, I’m in the bathroom trying to muster up the courage, trying to find the words to tell them. Every time I go to stand, to go downstairs to face them, I feel nauseous. After splashing a few handfuls of cold water on my face, I make my way down the narrow hallway, down the creaky staircase, and into the living room.
They are all sitting around laughing at Tam, who is sitting on the huge brown leather sofa, deep in the middle of a story we’ve probably all heard before. I smile, looking around the room at my family. Juney’s laugh rises up to the fan above us, and Tam snorts through her words. Poppy sits cross-legged in the La-Z-Boy, still struggling to follow the English rapidly escaping Tam’s mouth. I sit on the couch next to Juney. She grabs my arm, squeezing tightly, breathless from laughing. It’s so loud, and after only a few seconds, their laughter begins grating my eardrums.
“I’m pregnant!” I shout.
The room falls quiet, the laughter dying off abruptly, like my childhood.
“You’re what?” Juney asks, still with a slight grin on her face, proof that the story I had just interrupted is a lot funnier than anything I have to say.
I stare down at the area rug, drowning in the silence.
“Es veridad,” Poppy says. “She go this morning, to the clinic. Dos meses.”
“Eight weeks,” Kitty says, “aún puede abortar.” She jumps out of her seat and walks over to the cordless phone. “I know a place that’ll getcha in rapido, okay.”
“I’m not killing it!” I tell her.
Kitty shrugs and keeps dialing. “It’s not even a ‘it’ yet, so it’s not killin’.”
“No,” I say. “Hang up the phone.”
We all sit quietly for a moment, everyone carefully contemplating their next move. I lean back into the sofa, letting the large pillows engulf me. I stare down at my belly, down at the pea sized being growing inside me, waiting for someone to say something. Waiting for one of the women I looked up to tell me that I’ll be okay, or that we’ll figure it all out together.
“I’m gonna give it up for adoption,” I say.
“No you’re not,” Tam interjects.
“What the hell am I gonna do with a baby?”
“Take care of it!” Tam says.
“How?”
“The hell if I know, you’re the mom,” Tam yells.
“Givin’ it away is stupid,” Kitty says.
“Oh, but killing it isn’t?”
Kitty sits back down on the arm of the sofa and runs her skinny hand through her hair, “Con mí familia adoptiva, I was always wondering cuando mi madre, my real mom.”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Todas las noches! Every night!” she says.
“I don’t have the money—”
“It’s not even about the money,”
“It’s all about the money.”
“It would be better bein’ poor con tu madre than rich and always wondering donde estaba. Wondering why she gave you away. If she ever thinks about you, or if she forgot you, that you are morto para elle.”
“It’s giving the kid a chance at a better life,” I explain, convinced that what was written in the pamphlet at the clinic was the only possible truth.
“Says who?” Tam asks. She’s beginning to get upset, her big blue eyes growing glassy, her voice breaking off at the end of every word.
“Tam—”
“Who’s to say that some other family, or whoever adopts it, won’t fuck it up? Who’s to say they won’t hurt it? Some piece of paper and a few signatures?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Just wait it out,” Juney tells me.
“Yeah,” Poppy adds.
Kitty agrees, “Y mientras tanto vamos calculate what this hijo de puta debe in child support.”
Gil. I’ve forgotten all about him. I cringe at the thought of having something that’s half him still inside me, but I cringe even more at the thought of killing the parts of it that are me. “I’m not telling him,” I say, opening my eyes to see Kitty kneeling over the coffee table, punching numbers in furiously.
“Que?” Kitty says.
“He’s not worth it.”
“Actually, mija, he’s worth a lot!”
“I don’t care,” I tell her. “He’ll take her away from me. All he does is take.”
Juney smiles. “So your baby is a girl, now?”
I look up at her and place my hand over my belly. “I don’t know, maybe.”
That afternoon Juney and I walk down to Navy Pier, a Tuesday. I need moral support. I’m going to tell Rex. And even though it has been months since we’ve spoken, I hope that he will at least agree to talk to me. I hope that he will be able to look at my face and not feel regret, or disgust, whatever it is that he felt when he looked at me these days.
The same little blond girl is there, wrapped up in her coat, shielding her thin frame from the winds off the lake. “Hey, long time no see,” she says, having grown familiar with my face appearing weekly.
“I know,” I say. I look up at the wheel, rotating smoothly. “He here?”
“Not yet,” she says.
I look down at my watch. “What’s keepin’ him?”
“I gotta pee,” Juney says.
I watch Juney dancing side to side, amused for a moment. “You’re such an infant.”
“You need the practice,” she smarts off, not missing a beat.
I turn back to the girl, now letting a group of tourists out of their cage. “When he comes,” I begin, “can you just tell him to meet me at our normal spot, please? Regular time.”
“Sure,” she says.
“It’s very important. Can you tell him that?”
“Of course.”
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