“Good luck.”
“Oh. Thank you. I mean, gracias.”
He sprinted off the train car before the doors could close again.
As he vaulted up the stairs to the street, two at a time, he wondered how the woman knew he needed luck. She had no idea what Raymond was about to do. Did he really look that scared?
Probably, he figured.
He came up onto the street and looked around.
He was in a part of town he’d never seen before. At least, not as far as he could remember. He wasn’t comforted by what he saw. Even compared to his own neighborhood, it did not feel good. A young man stood on a street corner, glancing around nervously. Possibly selling. Raymond, who had never dared to try drugs, wasn’t sure he knew the sale of them when he saw it. One in every three or four buildings had its windows boarded up. Kids played in a vacant corner lot overflowing with old cars, couches . . . seas of garbage. Elderly men and women leaned out of open second-and third-floor windows, yelling at the kids in the street, or just watching the world from a safe vantage point.
Raymond almost turned around and headed back down into the subway. But he wasn’t sure how he would live with himself if he didn’t even try. If he didn’t even go to the first address.
Heart hammering—fearful of people under the most familiar of circumstances—he walked along the sidewalk. He kept his head down, his eyes averted. From what, he wasn’t sure. Everybody and everything. He tried to convey that he meant no trouble to anyone, and wanted no trouble. He did his best to disappear.
He compulsively glanced again and again at his list until he found the building that matched the first address—as though he could not be trusted to hold four numbers in his head for a few seconds.
He climbed the ten concrete stairs to the front door of the apartment building. Of course, it was locked.
He scanned the directory for 3A. It said “Luis A. Velez.” Just like it was supposed to say.
Raymond breathed a sigh of relief and pressed the buzzer.
“Hola,” a voice said. It was the same woman he had spoken to on the phone, in what he still hoped was a local call. Raymond would never hear the end of his stepfather’s annoyance if it was not.
“Luis Velez, estaquí?” he asked, running the words together the way the woman on the train had.
“Sí,” she said.
She buzzed him in.
Raymond stepped into the dim, grimy hallway and smelled something that made his head throb. That made him feel a little dizzy. He started up the stairs slowly, his heart battering around in his chest, and climbed to the third floor.
He stood in front of the door at 3A, poised to knock.
Then, as he had done at the top of the subway stairs, he almost turned and ran away again. But an image of the old woman flooded in behind his eyes. Mrs. G, he had taken to calling her in his head, because he could never be sure he was remembering her last name correctly. In his mind, he saw her wring her hands the way she always did when she was thinking of Luis. When she was wondering what had happened to him.
Which would be worse? Raymond wondered. If something terrible really had happened to Luis? Or if it turned out Mrs. G wasn’t as important to Luis as she thought she was?
He knocked on the door.
A man answered.
He was huge, but not really tall. In fact, Raymond was a couple of inches taller. But the man was stocky and strong looking, wearing only jeans and a white short-sleeved tee, showing off bulging chest and arm muscles. His feet were bare. He had pockmarks on his face, as if pitted by teenage acne, or some disease that scars the skin. He looked to be about forty.
“Luis Velez?” Raymond asked, his voice too high with fright.
“Who wants to know?”
The man spoke with just a trace of a Spanish accent. Raymond shifted on his feet and pressed the dictionary against his thigh so the man could not read its cover. He was embarrassed now that he had carried it here.
“Just me. I mean, I’m not . . . I don’t mean any . . . I’m just . . .” He took a deep breath and started over, forcing himself to focus. “My name is Raymond. Raymond Jaffe. And I’m looking for a Luis Velez, but you might not be the right one. I’m looking for the one who used to help an old woman named Mildred. Millie. She’s blind, and he used to come help her get to the market and the bank.”
Silence. As if this Luis Velez expected him to say more. As if the man needed more information before he could decide if he were the right Luis Velez or not.
Behind this big man, in his apartment, Raymond watched two boys of about ten or twelve chase each other through the living room, the bigger one trying to get the smaller one in a headlock. The TV was on, the volume up loud, and Raymond could hear cartoons blaring.