In the finished basement where Lupe rarely went anymore, her girl toys and art projects mostly forgotten, Zochi could spread things out, be they photos, documents, or objects, and get a feel for each piece. More than that, she got a feel for how they fit together, and not just in some linear, puzzle-like way. Her dark eyes moved between the things laid out, rearranging them from time to time. This went before that—maybe in time, maybe in prominence, maybe in relevance.
In the case of Joe’s memory box, she wasn’t getting much in terms of a coordinated vibe. The photographs were typical, vaguely sad ’70s prints of people forcing smiles during a time that valued a happy pose more than an honest feeling. Beyond them were the faded keepsakes, the graduation cap and tassel, the two baby rattles, a coffee mug with the Monsignor Farrell High School logo on the side. They spoke nothing to her outside of what they were: the keepsakes of an average man, nothing more, nothing less. Then there was that literary journal. She kept coming back to it, and to Joe’s heart-wrenching poem.
The title and year—LIT, 1979—were spelled out in smoke curls from a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Wow, is that not something you’ll see anymore, she thought, just as she had when she first beheld the thing. She chuckled, thumbing through the yellowing pages again. Two staples held them together where the fold was. A group of nerdy kids had hand-pressed them, hot off whatever machine was used to produce them.
A few pages before Joe’s poem, there was a tribute to a teacher who had died the previous school year. There was no photo of her, just one of a tree with the sun behind it. The inscription read, To Mrs. Friedan: the students in Section A missed you this year. On the pages after was a two-dimensional drawing of the city skyline, apparently penned by Spencer Clancy, 8th Grade, Mrs. Mobi’s class.
Zochi flipped over to page twelve and beheld Joe’s poem again. The page opposite, page thirteen, was blank. There was no illustration accompanying the poem. It was just the block type: five lonely stanzas on the white page. The title and attribution—“For Lois,” by Joey DeSantos, 6th Grade, Mrs. Benedetto’s class—were no bigger than the text.
This is who he is, it occurred to her. Not big, not small, but deep. It was an odd, almost intrusive thought.
So what’s in here?
Sadness. Betrayal.
Anger?
She read through each stanza again. All five had the same . . . meter? She knew nothing about poetry, but she believed that was the word. The rhythm of the thing—it was the same in each stanza, but the last two were a little different, like a song building to an end. That was odd, though, because the poem didn’t wrap itself up. It ended with the desire to ask its subject—Lois—something.
Lois, that’s what he calls her.
Yeah, but Mama, that’s what she was. The mama who walked away from him on a terrible night in a dead, hot car.
Zochi’s eyes drifted back to the first two stanzas, the ones that seemed more concise, snappy.
There’s that line he repeats.
“For what you did to me . . .”
She blinked, looked up at the old, opaque light fixture on the ceiling, then back down.
Scars.
Mute.
Dull.
Not kissed.
For What You Did To Me.
Zochi felt her heart seize in her chest.
F. W. Y. D. T. M.
At that moment, her cell phone buzzed. She wanted to throw the journal down, expel it from her hands like a snake at first believed to be a toy, but instead she closed it very carefully. The number coming up was Mimi’s.
“DNA’s back,” Mimi said, a little breathless. “Clear as a bell.”
“I know,” Zochi said. “It’s him.”
CHAPTER 42
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Anna M. Kross Center, Rikers Island East River in the Bronx
12:45 p.m.
The week or so between Joe’s arrest—on Tuesday, August 8—and now, as he was led into the attorney visiting area to meet Aideen Bradigan, had been blurry and dim, like something lived underwater. The motions he had gone through on the day of the arrest—from his initial placement in handcuffs at 6:45 a.m., to the long wait at Brooklyn Central Booking on Schermerhorn Street, to the few minutes in the echoing courtroom—had been staid and mechanical.
Aideen had not been there for any of it, as Joe hadn’t retained her. Joe appeared without counsel, and a date was set for him to return with a lawyer. In the meantime, as he expected, no bail was set. He was in custody for the foreseeable future.
It was only when the rear doors of the DOC bus closed that Joe, with his hands cuffed behind him, began to feel his life unraveling like a spool. He was the only white man on the bus; the other guys were all Black or Latino, and he looked to be the oldest by five or six years. One of the Black guys asked Joe if he was an attorney, and if he was, why the hell he was sitting in a DOC bus on its way to Rikers like a regular crackhead. Joe just shrugged and stared straight ahead. Airplanes from LaGuardia passed low overhead as the wheels whined over the bridge connecting the island to Queens.