Don't I Know You? Read online

  His father was excited. He hadn’t been here for three or four years. He wondered if Harry would remember him. It was the best chicken in the city. You couldn’t get stuff like this in San Diego.

  Like chicken? Steven thought. Then he thought, four years. He’d been eight. He tried to decide how weird he thought it was that his father was thinking about chicken. He remembered his mother saying something about his father being at his best when he was eating or talking about eating. She said it was a thing Jews and Italians had in common. That and fights. And the belief that actions had consequences. And guilt. Those last two, she said, were connected.

  Harry remembered him. Harry wore thick black glasses and white butcher clothes and one of those white paper soda jerk hats. He had grease stains all over his apron. He was missing a lot of teeth. The few he had were crooked. Steven liked him.

  They took the chicken and the sides of cole slaw and potato salad to a park his father knew on the East River. There were trees, but it was mostly concrete, shaped to fit between the buildings and the FDR Drive. It was all fenced in, down at the bottom of a long set of black stone stairs. People were letting their dogs run around without leashes.

  His father picked a bench. Rush hour traffic crawled behind them. There was a thick, hot breeze off the river.

  “God, that feels good,” his father said.

  The dogs were interested in the chicken. Every now and then, his father threw a piece to one of them. It didn’t seem like a smart thing to do.

  His father looked like him. He hadn’t expected that. Their hair was the same straight brown kind. Ringo hair, his mother called it. His father was wearing jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. He didn’t seem like the guy Steven’s mother had sometimes described.

  “Do you have a dog?” Steven asked.

  His father nodded. “Two.” He wiped his hands on a napkin and passed Steven a few. “Brother and sister. We got them when the twins were born.”

  Steven figured that for a while everything he said was going to hurt.

  There was a doorman standing at the wall at the top of the stairs. His uniform was nicer than Manuel’s. Manuel didn’t really have one. Sometimes he wore a shirt with his name on it.

  Manuel liked Steven and his mother. He did stuff for them without their asking. Once he’d helped make Steven’s Halloween costume.

  He rolled his father’s name over in his mind. Benjamin Engel. Benjamin. Ben.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  His father sighed and rubbed his thighs like he was rolling out clay. It was something Steven did too.

  “Well, I talked with the detectives today, and I’ll talk to them again tomorrow. I got to tell you, though, it doesn’t seem like they’ve got much to go on.” He smiled. His front tooth was chipped. “We’re all doing what we can,” he said.

  Steven flashed on the guy running down the street. White T-shirt. Jeans. White socks. Green and white Adidas.

  Most of the dogs were leaving. They climbed the stairs like a parade. The doorman opened the gate at the top with a flourish and a bow. One by one the dogs licked his face.

  “I meant about me,” Steven said. He hated his father for misunderstanding. He hated himself for not being able to just keep quiet.

  His father twisted his wedding ring around his finger. “Of course you did,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Steven said.

  The park smelled of dog poop and car fumes. He couldn’t smell the water. He held his greasy fingers up to his nose.

  “You’ll come live with me and Trish and the twins,” his father said.

  He said the twins would love having an older brother, but he’d taken too long to answer, and he wouldn’t look Steven in the eye, and Steven knew that whatever it was he’d been waiting to hear his father say, this wasn’t it.

  His father reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Do you want to see some pictures?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Steven said.

  His father seemed hurt. “Okay,” he said. He held the wallet in both hands like an egg.

  When Steven got back, Sam was hanging out the doorway of her room, listening to Phil in his bedroom. She saw Steven at the end of the hall and gestured him down, holding a finger to her lips like a kindergarten teacher.

  He stood next to her. Her hair touched his bare arm. She pointed at her father’s partially open door and mimed a phone to her ear. He nodded. She looked at him. “Nice shirt,” she mouthed.

  “I don’t know his name,” Phil was saying.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “She told me about him,” he said.

  “She wasn’t seeing him anymore,” he said. He sounded annoyed.

  Sam was chewing on a strand of her hair. The blond got darker when it got wet. He tried to figure out which boyfriend Phil could be talking about. Kitty appeared, making figure eights around their legs. “Meow,” Sam said to her quietly. “Me. Ow.”

  “Yes, I’m certain,” Phil said. He sounded more annoyed.

  Steven’s head was hot. He leaned it against the door frame. He’d read a murder mystery about a woman who’d been stabbed. At the crime scene, to find out the time of death, they’d stuck a meat thermometer into her liver.

  Sam took him by the shoulders and steered him into her room and onto her beanbag. She closed the door and came back over. She sat on her heels, staring at him.

  He felt folded over. Sometimes his mother used to carry him with his back to her front, holding him under his knees. His knees would be up by his nose. She’d carry him like that until he started to slip. It always felt good and bad to be let go. He closed his eyes and pushed his eyelids around over them.

  “Do you need something?” Sam whispered.

  He nodded.

  She waited.

  He didn’t know what to ask for.

  She put a hand on his knee. He kept his eyes closed and asked her to leave. She only hesitated a minute before she did, closing the door behind her.

  Later, when he asked her what she thought her father had been talking about, she didn’t try to avoid the question, and he was glad for that. She figured they were talking about the guy his mother had been seeing a few months back. She didn’t know anything about him, just that her dad had been upset, and then he hadn’t been anymore, and she’d figured they’d worked it out.

  The thing Steven was most glad about was that she didn’t say a thing about his not knowing. She didn’t say he should’ve known; she didn’t say there was no way he could’ve known.

  “I don’t know anything about anything,” he said.

  She was quiet for a minute and then she snorted. “Grown-ups,” she said. “Who wants to know anything about them?”

  four

  Juan came with him. They used the fire escape and waited until they knew Manuel would be in his apartment at the back of the building eating his lunch and watching his soap operas.

  The metal of the fire escape was so hot he wished he’d brought gloves. He wrapped each ladder rung in the bottom of his T-shirt until Juan looked up from behind him and said, “Dude. What’re you doing?”

  Steven opened the window that had the lock that never worked, and they crawled on their bellies over the flaking paint of the sill, through the orange curtains, into his mother’s bedroom. He couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to remember her diaries.

  They stood up, brushing paint flakes off themselves. Juan asked if this was the window the guy had used.

  “How’d you know about that?” Steven asked.

  He shrugged. “Everyone’s talking,” he said.

  Steven’s surprise was stupid. “What’re they saying?” he asked. He wasn’t even sure who “they” were.

  Juan ran his hand over his short tight hair a few times. “Everything,” he said.

  Steven pictured all their friends at the side entrance of the museum. There were big double-sided stairs going up to a landing where there was supposed to have
been a café, but then something had happened. So there was nothing but a wall that was good for leaning against that hid you from the people down below.

  Summers, they went there almost every night. Steven didn’t hang out with the group as much as Juan did. He wasn’t so good at groups. Juan was the only reason Steven knew the other kids. And Juan was the only reason the other kids paid any attention to Steven.

  Juan surveyed the bedroom. “Where are they?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Steven said. “I could never find them.”

  “You know we can’t, like, hang out here,” Juan said. “I thought this was a more in-and-out kinda thing.”

  Everything was the same. Another forty-eight hours, McGuire had said. It was still a crime scene. Someone had pulled all the curtains. The windows were shut. Outside it was midday; hazy light too bright to look at straight. Inside it was dim and stale.

  “I think in here,” Steven said, looking around vaguely. He didn’t really want to go back out to the hall.

  “You think?” Juan said, but he got on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. “Oh, man,” he said. “Bring on the Electrolux.”

  Mrs. Carpanetti was thumping around upstairs.

  The elevator gears ground to a halt. Each sound made him jump, not out of fear but out of anticipation. Here she comes, he found himself thinking.

  What would he say to her? Hi. I missed you. What happened? What happened?

  He spread out on his belly next to Juan on the floor and looked under the bed. There were her good work shoes, the ones that were still white. Some Legos. Some cigarette butts. She pretended she didn’t smoke. When she didn’t have time to throw them out the window or flush them down the toilet, she crushed them out and threw them under the bed. There were always sticks of incense stuck in their plants. She was always lighting scented candles. He could tell how much she’d been drinking by how many cigarette butts he found the next day.

  “She was good at cleaning the stuff you could see,” he said. She was a single mom, she said. People expected her to let things slide.

  The top of her dresser was always out of a magazine. The bathroom sink was always wiped. She cleaned the kitty litter twice a day. Inside, her drawers were like small explosions. There was a utility drawer in the kitchen that they could open only three inches. Enough to see the jumble of tools and twine and take-out menus. Enough to see the piece of the garlic press that was keeping the thing jammed.

  He’d told Juan they were looking for anything about this other guy Phil had been talking about. Letters maybe, or a photo even. But what he’d really come back for were her journals. She’d kept them for years. She’d tried to get him to keep his own. When he was too young to write, she’d take dictation. “What did you do today?” she’d ask, and she’d write his answers in her tiny, clear handwriting.

  Every year she bought him a new journal, but he’d never been good at it, and he’d quit before filling up one book.

  She talked about hers, and made clear how important they were by never letting him find out where she kept them.

  Even if what was in them didn’t help the detectives at all, he wanted them. He wanted to know what else he’d missed.

  In one of the photos on her dresser he was eating cake on his first birthday. In one she was wearing that silly hat, swinging from a NO PARKING sign like Gene Kelly. They didn’t have many of the two of them together. He was already having trouble remembering her voice. He thought the journals might help.

  The blood in the hallway and the front hall had dried. They stood over the spot. The heat in the living room was like the air under a blanket.

  “Man,” Juan said.

  He looked over. “What’s it like?” he said. “What’s it feel like?”

  Steven was glad he’d asked. “I don’t know,” Steven said. “I really don’t know.”

  But after Juan went in the kitchen, Steven stood there thinking that in a couple of years, maybe even less, people who lived here wouldn’t even know what had happened.

  They found a small stack of letters rubber-banded together in a duffel bag in the hall closet, but no journals. They were checking the bedroom one last time when they heard the front door open. He recognized the jangle of Manuel’s keys. They heard him say, “I shouldn’t be doing this,” and they heard another guy say something like, “I owe you.”

  They slid out the window as quietly as they could, leaving it open. They took the fire escape stairs two at a time, slid down the ladder like firemen, and were running before they hit the ground.

  Even when it was clear no one was following, even when they’d been walking, not running, for blocks, Juan was practically bouncing off the ground. He was walking on his toes. “That was the guy,” he said again. He’d been saying that or something like it since they’d slowed down.

  “We don’t know that,” Steven said.

  He was trying to hear the guy’s voice again. Had he recognized it? He couldn’t tell.

  Juan looked at him. “You know it was him. Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No,” Steven said.

  “Think,” Juan said.

  “I am,” Steven said.

  “Why you think he’s coming back?” he asked. He was more talking to himself.

  Steven had asked himself the same question. Was there something in the apartment he wanted? Needed? Evidence he needed to get rid of? He could just be sick. Steven thought about the panty hose.

  “We should call the police,” Juan said.

  “I know,” Steven said.

  “He could still be there,” Juan said.

  “I know,” Steven said. “He’s probably not there anymore,” he said.

  Juan said, “This is getting major.”

  It was already major, Steven thought. The first thing was the big rock into the pond; everything else was ripples.

  When they got back to Juan’s, his mom looked at them and said, “What’s the matter with you two?”

  “Nothing,” Juan said. “It’s hot,” he said.

  You could see her deciding to let it go.

  Steven caught Juan’s eye. Juan looked down. The guy could still be in the apartment, and they weren’t going to call anyone. Juan wanted to. If it were up to him, they would. Steven understood he was the kind of person who made best friends do the wrong thing.

  Juan’s mother handed Steven an envelope. It was small, like an invitation, and there was no stamp or address, just his name in small block letters.

  “It was in the mailbox,” she said, and then she waited.

  Inside was the picture half of a notecard. The edge had that fuzzy, torn by hand look. The picture was an overhead view of a bamboo steamer bowl of dumplings with a pair of chopsticks next to it. On the back, in the same block letters, it said, “Hope you’re doing okay.”

  Juan and his mom peered over Steven’s shoulder. “No signature?” she said. She was trying to make her voice sound normal. It didn’t.

  Steven shook his head. Even that felt like he was doing it wrong.

  Juan was up on his toes again. “It’s him,” he said, glancing at Steven. “Who knows you’re here?”

  Steven put the card back in the envelope. “Uh, everyone,” he said. Since McGuire had suggested Steven stay here instead of at either Phil or Christine’s, he’d called twice; Steven’s father had called once, and Phil had called four or five times, each time more worked up about McGuire’s decision to make other living arrangements for Steven.

  “It’s from Detective McGuire,” Steven said.

  They both looked at him.

  “We were talking about Chinese food,” Steven said. His mother called him Glass Head because of what a bad liar he was.

  Juan’s mom smiled like she was willing to believe whatever he wanted her to believe, but when she took his head in her hands and kissed him on the forehead, she said into his hair, “I don’t think so, little man. Let’s call the detectives.”

  In Juan’s house, an
imals ran free. There were a lot of them. You watched the floor, checked chairs and sofas, shook out shoes.

  When McGuire rang the doorbell, Juan shooed the guinea pig away from the front door with his foot. Steven put the iguana in the large palm, and Juan’s mom held her arms up for the parakeets. She looked like someone doing a victory lap.

  Steven figured McGuire had seen stranger things.

  He looked pleased to see Steven. He was sweaty. Steven was glad he was there. All Steven had to do was tell him everything he knew and watch him go to work.

  They sat in the living room. Juan’s mom liked plants, and Steven figured she wanted the living room to look like one of her paintings. She’d moved all the furniture away from the walls a couple of feet and surrounded them with plants.

  McGuire sat on the couch, studying the notecard and the envelope. Every now and then the ficas tree dropped a leaf on him. He sighed and fit the card back in the envelope, put all of it into a plastic bag, and slid it into his jacket pocket.

  “We gotta talk,” he said.

  Where should he start? Steven thought. Breaking into a crime scene? Hearing voices? Getting this note?

  When had all this become his responsibility? He remembered his mother standing in his room asking if he wanted to watch TV with her. “No,” he’d said, not looking up.

  Two of the gerbils chased each other around McGuire’s feet and then disappeared under the couch.

  “The results of the autopsy are in,” McGuire said.

  But when McGuire said what he had to say, it was like Steven had known all along, and hearing the words out loud in someone else’s voice made him feel better, not worse, and he could sit up again.

  “There were what we call hilt marks around the wounds,” McGuire said. “Did you and your mom have any kind of thin serrated knife with a kind of hilt on it? Maybe a steak knife?”

  It helped to be concentrating on something specific. “In the basket on the table in the front hall,” Steven said. “She used it to open packages.”

  “Anywhere else she might’ve kept it?” McGuire asked.